by Sarav Desai (’24) | November 17, 2023
On October 25, a gunman in Lewiston, Maine killed 18 people and injured 13 more, resulting in yet another mass shooting in America. After a roughly 48-hour manhunt, the shooter was found dead due to a self-inflicted wound. He is one of the newest in a shockingly long list of lone wolf shooters seeming to possess far-right ideologies, who have unleashed their rage on the innocent, and also had warning signs raised about their mental condition.
The events in Lewiston have once again provoked discussions about the issue of gun control. Maine’s unique, but frankly weak, yellow-flag laws rely on family members alerting authorities about those who may be threats to themselves or others and require a medical professional to confirm the diagnosis. For the Lewiston shooter, both family members and people in the army raised concerns internally and to authorities about his declining mental state, which should have prevented him from keeping his firearms. Yet, no action was taken, and like in many similar cases where the shooter displayed obvious red flags, he was still able to obtain weapons and use them on civilians.
Red flag laws, which are supposed to be comprehensive and more effective at preventing shootings, have simply not been enforced. There are too many guns in circulation in the United States, and red-flag laws have been too underutilized, to actually confiscate guns from those who are not able to safely possess them. Mass shootings frequently outnumber gun confiscations, and many potential shooters slip through the cracks due to no previous evidence of “red flags.”
It is apparent that any previous attempt to disarm those who are both a danger to themselves and others has either fallen short in scope or has been poorly designed to the point where it is completely ineffective. In all honesty, any variation of these “-flag” laws will run into the aforementioned issues.
Gun violence, at least of this scale, is a uniquely American issue. In the aftermath of singular mass shootings, countries such as Norway, New Zealand, and Australia quickly responded with gun buybacks and bans. Yet, there is something special about the American relationship with the firearm. It is not only the gun lobbyists pouring millions into protecting their interests, but it is also the mythos and coverage of it. There is something appealing about the good guy with the gun (which would not need to exist if there were no people with guns) that can be tied back even further to the frontier days where white settlers would use guns to “civilize” the western lands. Guns are so deeply intertwined with the culture of this country that we cannot imagine this country without them; accordingly, we find it too jarring to actually take any effective action.
Similarly, with the way mass shootings have been covered, our resulting perception of them has also hindered progress. Just two days after the Lewiston tragedy, Fox News, a preferred news source for a significant portion of the country, wiped their site clean of any coverage relating to the shooting. Those who use Fox News will not think the murder of thousands of civilians annually is a big deal if any mention of it is quickly whisked away. However, the way that we perceive mass shootings also contributes to the problem. Unlike in other countries, where tragedies are met with quick remedies to the systems that allowed them to occur, there have been so many mass shootings in our country that we have become desensitized. We stir up a conversation, we offer some thoughts and prayers, and the process repeats with the next shooting.
We cannot become complacent with this cycle of violence. If we want to actually stop shootings from occurring, we need to understand that our current ways of dealing with gun violence are ineffective. Although media coverage, cultural perception, and near desensitization will hinder the process, it is imperative to advocate for change and to put an end to this brutality.