I certainly think that plays a role in all of this. I was thinking of it when I was writing about a callous attitude towards other people’s lives. That certainly includes the death penalty and egregious (100+ year) sentences in prisons that are rife with abuse. It makes a lot more sense to get in a shootout to avoid the American justice system than it does to avoid the Swedish justice system.
I don’t think that the extreme part of the culture that is toxic (as in it literally kills people) can be completely divorced from the mainstream part of the culture.
[The math I’m about to reference is purely metaphor, not to be mistaken for actual math]
I imagine we could apply a function to people’s personalities and collapse their tendency to get into shootouts and commit unprovoked shootings in a year into a single number and plot that number onto what would presumably be a normal curve. If America has about a mass shooting a day, that would put mass shooting as an activity about 4.5 standard deviations out. Obviously we blame the individuals for their individual actions, but if we want things to change, we can’t hope to change them by simply suppressing that extreme fringe, we need to move the mean away from it.
Like with attacking rape culture, it takes - in part - men who would never consider committing rape thinking about how their actions promote ways of thinking about sex that, in extremes, justify the violent actions of others.
But I don’t even know how to approach that with US gun culture, to be honest. The deadly fringe is fully immersed in false flag conspiracy theory and sees something like the suggestion that we should have sympathy for families who lost children to gun violence as a personal affront.
Anyway, I’m an outsider. What I see is that the situation now is unbearable and one day it is going to crack. I don’t know what that crack is going to look like, but I imagine it will end up looking a hell of a lot better if gun owners are helping to shape a workable change instead of just opposing everything. Polling suggests the vast majority of Americans, including a vast majority of gun owners, would like to see something done as opposed to nothing, but the politicians who “represent” gun owners keep insisting that nothing can be done.
