After Orlando, We Must Ask How Our Society Got This Way
The details of this weekend’s shootings in Orlando are still coming in, but we know pop singer Christina Grimmie was gunned down after a performance, and then, 28 hours later and 3.5 miles away, the worst massacre in U.S. history occurred at a gay club during its popular Latin night. But we already feel the usual numb horror, the helplessness. The confusion.
In the fog, we search for a motive — and rightly so. It matters that Omar Mateen had reportedly been outraged by two men kissing before he killed 50 people at a gay club, for instance. But the next question we need to ask in the wake of these shootings, after why did they do it, is why did it happen?
Why did they do it varies from shooting to shooting; why did it happen does not.
There’s a photograph (via the Orlando Sentinel) from the aftermath of the gay club shooting that tells us much about why it happened. The grainy image shows a group of men who look like soldiers, in desert camouflage, bulky with Kevlar, sitting against a wall. They look like they could be in Iraq at dawn. Then we see the police cruiser behind them, the crime-scene tape, and we realize, these are not soldiers at all — these are cops. The image is from Orlando, the home of Disney World. It was taken early Sunday morning, outside the Pulse nightclub after Mateen was killed.
There has not been a war on American soil since 1865, but that hasn’t stopped us from acting otherwise. Since the late 19th century, we’ve flooded our nation with weaponry. The result is not so much a gun culture as a war culture. The wars we fight in distant lands, often by remote-controlled drone, have come home, enabled by a flood of artillery that our lawmakers have made widely available — even to suspected terrorists.
In her recent book The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, Pamela Haag makes the case that where we are now is a direct result first of industrialization, then marketing. Before and after the Civil War, gun manufacturers like Colt and Remington could not find an American market for their revolvers and repeating rifles. So, with the help of their marketing executives, they created one, by stoking fear of personal attack, creating narratives of lone heroes surviving close encounters with dangerous “others,” and whipping up an origin myth: that for Americans, guns — and maybe even violence itself — is in our DNA.
America’s gun culture has created what can be thought of as a nationwide gas leak: Disaster can strike with just the lighting of a match. You need no skill or talent to light said match, and your motive for doing so — Islamic extremism, right-wing radicalism, personal grievance, homophobia, misogyny — doesn’t change the outcome. If we’re going to see any real change, we must address the hole in the gas pipe.