Gun violence, with thousands of victims annually, is an abnormal American normality

Since 1791, the right to bear arms has been enshrined in the Federal Constitution, together with other fundamental rights, in a vaguely formulated amendment (II), therefore exposed to eternal reinterpretations and de-contextualizations. 45 states have followed the federal lead, constitutionally protecting the ownership and sale of guns. In the natural order, from constitution to trade is but a step, increasing accessibility favoring accumulation at a pace unequaled in the world. The United States today boasts 120.5 guns per percent of civilian population. In a violent and fractured society, guns brought death in statistical crescendo. So frequent are the incidents that classifications and institutions have emerged (such as the Armed Violence Archive–AVA) that keep track. For example, we have the category of “mass murders”, defined as incidents with at least four victims, dead or injured. In the last three decades, about a third of crimes of this type were committed by people suffering from serious mental illnesses. AVA records 13 mass murders last month alone; there were 630 in 2023, 647 in 2022, 690 in 2021, 610 in 2020, 417 in 2019. In 2014 there were “only” 273. Absolute figures–for example 48,830 in 2021–are misleading in a sense because they aggregate a few categories–homicide, suicide, law enforcement shooting, accidental or unexplained death. In that year “only” 20,958 were homicides, 26,328 suicides. Perhaps more significant is the average rate per hundred thousand inhabitants, which was 14.6 in 2021–the highest since the beginning of the 1990s–but “only” 10.6 in 2016. A paradox: the states with the most the high rate–Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama, for example–are the most resistant to any significant legislative or executive countermeasures. Legislation exists at all levels. At the federal level, laws and regulations were enacted in 1937, 1968, 1986, 1990, 1993, 1994 (banning the sale of automatic weapons, repealed a decade later) and 2022. States and localities also have laws to this effect, with hundreds , small laws, with loopholes, often contradictory, diluted or abandoned depending on the alternating political color of the parliamentary majority.

Jonathan Metzl: The book starts from a tragedy that happened in 2018 in the city where I live, Nashville, Tennessee: a white man opened fire in a “fast food” restaurant frequented by young black people, killing four people and seriously injuring four others. The perpetrator was visibly deranged, the committed act had clear racial dimensions. WHAT I HAVE GOT is an attempt to unravel the deed, to answer the question of how it was possible for a white psychopath, carrying only an automatic AR-15 (in other words, an empty rifle), to be in a position to commit a mass murder in a black neighborhood of Nashville. The white killer in Adam’s suit is in many ways a metaphor for the decisions white America has made about firearms and the value of human life–which lives are worth protecting and which aren’t.

Reporter: Nashville’s one-of-a-kind mass murder is typical of endless American violence. What do the statistics tell us about this carnage, what do they tell us about — to use a term in your specialty — America’s “mental condition”?

Jonathan Metzl: Mass murders happen literally every day in America. I examine the incident itself, but also the role that psychopathologies play. The gun craze has a name for me: America, a country that has become accustomed to the ubiquity of guns and has normalized the murders committed with these guns. We’ve ended up with over 50,000 gun deaths annually, but we’re approaching 500 million guns in civilian possession. We have normalized a way of life that in the rest of the world is abnormal.

Reporter: Does this “normalization” also have to do with the racialization of society, more precisely with the ideology of superiority, with the white supremacism openly expressed in recent years?

Jonathan Metzl: It is, I think, an important aspect. In American history, only whites had the right to bear arms in public, guns being, before the founding of the republic, the emblem of racial superiority. I show in the book that more recently, in the last decades and especially in the last five years, a complicating factor intervened, namely the expansion of the market, that is, the accessibility of weapons. That partly explains why gun ownership has spread to other sectors of society, among the African American population, especially the female population, as well as among Hispanic Americans, who are buying with increasing frequency. So it entered a vicious circle: the number of white buyers also increases, for fear that other groups will accumulate more. It’s not about ideology, it’s about trade. I show that the tragedy at the center of the book, mass murder, follows the same logic: I could have been in that restaurant, a potential unarmed victim, so it would be a good idea to arm myself. Each incident causes an increase in purchases, therefore an increase in firearms in the public space.

Reporter: In this alarming context, decision-makers usually limit themselves to “thoughts and prayers”. How do you explain the inaction, the lack of political will to get the country out of the vicious circle?

Jonathan Metzl: As a Tennessean I know that politicians who dare to say it’s time for reasonable gun safety legislation are being kicked out of office with great efficiency. The firearms industry thus has at its disposal loyal politicians and, even more importantly, enslaved judges–who play a central role in the events described in the book. In this context, “thoughts and prayers” are the smoke screen that hides inaction. The left, on the other hand, started from the premise that America had not lost its moral clarity, that it would wake up and treat firearms like cigarettes or automobiles, i.e. regulate them. I think it was a miscalculation.

Reporter: After every tragedy, the ritual is the same: the cliché “psychoses kill” is resurrected but nothing is done on this front either because, as you explain, “America has a long history of distrust in public health”. I know that your view of the causal role of psychopathologies has evolved.

Jonathan Metzl: Invoking psychopathologies is completely illogical. After every mass murder committed by a person with symptoms of mental illness, politicians say that the problem is not the gun but the illness. It is true that the incidence of mental illness is high in the United States, as in many other countries, but there is no evidence that pathology is the sole cause of crime. No mental illness has as a symptom the injury or shooting of a person. It is absolutely clear that treating mental illness is important, as is solving the problem of homelessness, but it is incorrect to say that mental illness causes mass murder. My book proves that it is a stereotype based on an erroneous idea.

Reporter: What would be the solutions? What is the cure for this “national disease”?

Jonathan Metzl: I wish there was a simple solution. The problem is complex, layered. At the end of the book I proposed a rethinking of what needs to be done in the United States: a restructured state intervention, focused on investment in communities and stricter regulation of the possession and carrying of weapons in public spaces. I’m also advocating for what I call a “new entrepreneurialism,” that is, for monetizing initiatives that decrease the circulation and increase the safety of firearms. I also believe that the same structural approach to crime prevention is needed, which is currently lacking in the United States. We must avoid getting bogged down in the old debates about the constitutional right to bear arms enshrined in the Second Amendment, debates that are incredibly polarizing and lead nowhere.