No Quick Solutions to America’s Gun Death Problem

In the novel I am writing, taking place in 1984, that summer in reality witnessed the first of the modern era of mass shootings with the San Ysidro McDonald’s massacre. I have struggled to work out how this should play into a novel of supernatural threats, ghosts, and terrible dark gods beyond the stars. In the end I think I may just wrap up the story before that terrible day in August, though it means I won’t have an in-story salute to my girlfriend at the time who slapped someone for a tasteless joke as a callback during that weekend’s screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Since that day and since Columbine, the pace of mass shootings in this nation has accelerated so horrifically that now not only do we have frequent mass shooting events, they have become background noise in the media maelstrom, sometimes passing unnoticed.

The right will make actionless pleas for “thoughts and prayers,” decry the mental state of the individuals, and lately look for even the slimmest evidence that the murderer came from their political opponents’ camp.

The left will decry that the right will not let them make even the smallest move to control the sale and ownership of firearms, mock the thoughts and prayers even as some offer them sincerely and not in the same cynical move as the elected officials, and also engage in the “it was one of them” hunt now so popular.

In my opinion, both sides are wrong and deluded.

Part of the humor in the horror comedy from New Zealand, Black Sheep (2006), is that in that island nation there are more sheep than people. In the United States there are more guns than people. I think the current estimate is 1.2 firearms for every man, woman, and child, and of course they are not evenly distributed. The guns are out there, compliance with any new laws will be resisted and lax, meaning those guns will be there for any foreseeable future. Prohibition is a legal tactic that never eliminates the forbidden actions or possession. What prohibition does is license the state to use its monopoly on violence to selectively, and it is always selectively—ask any African American in America if the law is applied without favor or bias—as a punishment and message on the subject. If we were starting from a much lower ratio of guns to people, maybe perhaps the supply side could be effectively tempered, but that ship has long since sailed.

Anyway, the gun is not the trouble; the person using it is. Now, this sounds very much like the right’s argument that guns don’t kill people, people kill people, but that’s merely a verbal dodge to change the subject and preserve their beloved hobby. (And it is a hobby. I doubt any of the firearm militia enthusiasts would answer a call from Governor Gavin Newsom to put their bodies on the line for California, which is the duty of the militia in ensuring “the security of a free state.”)

The trouble with the person who easily moves to murder, or to suicide, which accounts for nearly half of all gun deaths, is the culture and society which produced that person.

Suicide and mass shootings I feel are psychological siblings, with most mass shootings acting as vicious, hateful forms of suicide. The psychological forces driving people to despair and or hate so deeply that murder and death become seemingly rational are powerful sociological storms which we cannot change overnight.

The way I see it, two major factors are at play: a sense that the future is hopeless. When someone, particularly young men, sees the future as futile, despair and depression find fertile ground to blossom. Despair and depression can turn inward, becoming entirely self-destructive, or they can turn to hatred, lashing out at perceived victims.

In previous generations, young men moving into productive adulthood could see paths that led to stable lives, good middle-class jobs and incomes, and a social structure that valued white men more than any other category. The destruction of labor unions, the shattering of the social connections between employer and employee, killed the middle-class dream. Economic growth concentrated more and more in classes that the young men perceived as the enemy. Social changes bringing about equality they perceived as “demotions” of their status. Is it any surprise that this turned into epidemics of suicide and murder?

Rebuilding unions, the engine that drove the economic miracle of midcentury America, requires that the conservatives abandon their current policies, and even if they did, the damage which took generations to incur would take generations to heal.

The other clear factor that separates America from the rest of the world on this issue is that when it comes to healthcare, America’s bootstrap system leaves far too many people wallowing in pain, both physical and emotional, without any hope of relief. More despair to transform into hate.

Again, conservatives, intent on transferring economic gains to the upper ends of the bell curve, have no incentive or taste for an expensive universal healthcare system.

With the current political parties and system, we are trapped, and for generations we will see more murder and more pointless deaths.

Yesterday, September 10th, a gunman shot and killed Charlie Kirk, a political activist known for inflammatory rhetoric, a disdain for empathy, and a verbally vicious manner. I will not bother to pretend that Charlie Kirk’s absence from American political life will cause me the slightest element of concern. He struck me as a petty, cruel man that monetized hate, and did little to nothing to actually make life better for people and actively made it worse for the targets of the hate from which he profited so generously.

I have sympathies for his children. It is never easy to lose a parent, and their tragedy is quite real. The majority of my sympathy is for the United States and the American people. Not because they are deprived of Charlie Kirk’s rancor and rabble rousing, as I have said I do not think in any manner that he was even within the same galaxy as the definition of a ‘good person,’ but the growing politically driven violence in our culture is a terrible infection that may have now grown beyond any quick and decisive treatment.

A few hours after the killing, writer Ezra KlEin posted a list of political violence this nation witnessed over the last few years with victims from both ends of the political spectrum. Political violence is an infection; in the absence of political antibiotics it grows and spreads eventually, if unchecked, becoming gangrenous.

I’m not going to spend time laying the blame to one faction or another. For the most part, persuasion has vanished from the political discourse and examples of hypocrisy or ill intent are only deployed now to burnish one’s own side or to soothe the feelings one might have because deep down they know theIR guilt lies there.

I do not mourn Charlie Kirk, but I do mourn our nation and what will be, I suspect, a long and painful road back to something like normalcy.

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The first rule of being a conspiracist is that you were never wrong. No fact, no evidence, can ever be admitted to have undermined in any way the fantasy you have told. A conspiracy fantasy is forever treated as fact.

The second rule is that having the secret knowledge of the conspiracy makes you special. You are wiser than those naive yokels believing what the system and the man tell them. Your cynicism against the system is proof of your wisdom. This reinforces the first rule because you can never be the naive one, and as such, your adherence to the “truth” is further evidence of your intelligence.

The third rule is that you are always on the side of the angels. The system and the man are lying to everyone for their own terrible and evil purposes. The conspiracy fantasy “exposes” the truth that the powerful are hiding, and your fight to tell this “truth” makes you heroic. You aren’t an idiot who accepted a fantastic tale of space lizards invading the world—you are the archetypal hero freeing your fellow people from that space lizard tyranny.

These three rules have trapped Trump in a snare of his own devising, and one that he may find terribly difficult to escape.

It is an accepted legal fact that wealthy financier Epstein, with the assistance of at least one person, Maxwell, groomed and sexually abused young girls. It is a matter of record that when faced with legal repercussions, he first received suspiciously lenient treatment and, following that, died in prison before a more serious legal hammer fell upon him. It is also a historical fact that Trump and Epstein enjoyed each other’s company for a number of years, as did numerous other wealthy and politically powerful people. These facts are not conspiratorial fantasy but are its foundation.

The fantasy is that there is a vast and organized group of selected powerful people who engaged with Epstein in the sexual and ritual abuse of children. This cabal includes some of the world’s most influential people, who all happen to be opposed to the political posturing of the conspiracists. Epstein’s lenient treatment is taken as evidence of the shadowy cult’s power and not simply the sad fact of life that in modern America, the rich are never held to the same accountable standard as the rest of us.

Trump, and his surrogates, fed this conspiratorial fantasy to energize their base of voters against the Democrats. The more the base believed, the more energized they became, and the more likely that Trump and company would be swept into power. The fact that it is fantasy would be irrelevant.

Except the rules say otherwise.

The conspiracy cannot be untrue, and Trump supporters know this. It has to be true, and he and his squad of righteous people were going to expose all of it.

Only they didn’t.

They tried to sweep it under the rug. The released information fell far short of what they promised. They lied about it, and for the first time, Trump told them lies that they did not want to hear.

The conspiracists are on the side of the angels. They are defending and saving children by exposing the “truth,” and that is why this story will not die like so many other examples of Trump’s blatant corruption. For the base to accept that there is nothing there and move on to something else, they must accept that they were the naive fools and that they never were on the side of the angels. People don’t work that way—hence the trap.

Maybe Trump will still squirm out of it. Like Clinton before him, he’s proved an evolutionary marvel at escaping political pitfalls, but every story comes to an end, and maybe, just maybe, this is his.

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I hate the term ‘Conspiracy Theory’ as it gives far too much credence and plausibility to these insane and utterly batshit fantasies. In science a theory is something well established by test and falsification as being a model accurate to the data observed as to how the world functions. Conspiracists take falsehoods, unsupported preconceived notions, mixed heavily with idiosyncratic worldview to construct elaborate fantasies justifying the thing that they already want to believe. Once let loose and infecting minds conspiracies are undying, immune to facts, logic, and all evidence.

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, antisemitic propaganda invented by the Czars of Imperial Russia has been debunked repeatedly but the popularization of the fantasy of a global plot by the Jews to control the world remains as potent and deadly today as it did 122 years ago when that despicable tract was loosed on the world.

Humanity achieved a technological marvel in 1969 when men walked on the surface of the moon and returned safely but within a few short years, fueled by cynicism propelled by both politics and entertainment Americans began believing in serious numbers that the entire endeavor had been faked. Again, fact and evidence are futile in killing the fantasy and people continue to believe it to this day.

Andrew Wakefield, a British physician, for monetary gain published a falsified study in 1998 linking vaccines to autism, again facts and science were unable to dislodge this destructive meme from the public consciousness and now adherents to his fraud control the levers of America’s medical system.

All this brings me to Trump and Epstein. That Jeffrey Epstein, a New York financier and socialite, rubbed elbows and traveled extensively with celebrities of entertainment, commerce, and government is an accepted fact. It is also a fact that the man was responsible for years of sexual assaults on young girls and women but suffered little criminal punishment for his convicted crimes. It is almost certain that his wealth and connections allowed him to avoid serious consequences for his actions. That others participated either in deed or knowledge of these heinous actions is a reasonable supposition but is not in evidence at this time. His death by suicide propelled more conjecture that others acted to ‘silence’ him but again this is not in evidence at this time.

The lack of evidence has never stopped; in fact, it is a growth medium, for conspiratorial fantasies and those did indeed erupt around Epstein.

Trump and his supporters cultivated these fantasies, fertilized them with their own bullshit, and weaponized, quite effectively, them against their political opponents. The tale grew and grew until to the believers, who accepted with a religious fervor, just knew, even without any actual evidence, that every high democratic person must somehow be entwined in the terrible affair.

Now, with the people who pushed and fed the flames of this firestorm of accusations occupying the very positions that have access to all the ‘hidden evidence’ Trump and his circle want the fantasies to stop. His name is too often correlated with Epstein’s, and it would be best if everyone would just accept the official report and move on to other matters.

But conspiratorial fantasies are forever. They are immune to fact, evidence, and logic surviving no matter the arguments arrayed against them. Those who have held these things about Epstein as ‘truth’ are not going to be dissuaded from their religious convictions by a press release or two.

Will this break Trump’s collation? Will enough followers cease to follow that he loses his ability to the threaten Republicans into submission? I don’t know and neither do you. “Always in motion is the future.” I do know this, he can’t extinguish these flames. Neither those on the right, convinced that Democrats held satanic orgies with these children, or those on the left, certain that Trump raped little girls alongside Epstein, will ever be moved from the convictions that define their worldview.

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On December 4th, 2024, the CEO of United Healthcare, Brian Thompson, while walking out of a hotel in Manhattan was shot and killed. The alleged assassin Luigi Mangione has lain in wait for the corporate executive to depart the hotel and killed him on the sidewalk leaving behind shell casings with the words ‘delay, deny, and depose’ inscribed upon them. Five days later Mangione was arrested and faces charges for the apparently politically motivated murder.

Following the assassination Mangione and his alleged actions became the focus of online activity with ironic supportive memes going viral and people debating the ‘justification’ of the murder due to the nature of the victim’s business. For some, Mangione became a sort of modern folk hero for murdering the ‘right’ sort of people.

I shall not get into a healthcare debate here, UHC is a company I have detested for more than a decade, and I am well-aware of the failings and evils of for-profit healthcare.

In the early morning hours of June 14th, 2025, Democratic state politician John Hoffman and his spouse were shot in their home, the spouse suffering gunshot wounds while shielding their daughter from the assailant. A short time later, the leader of the state’s Democratic Caucus Melissa Hortman and her spouse were assassinated in their home by an assassin posing as a police officer. The next day, Vance Boelter was arrested and charged with the murder. Once again memes began being shared online, dark, ironic and dismissive of the victims, with some coming from Republican Senators.

These two alleged assassins, though from very different ends of the political spectrum, are, in effect, the same. In both cases these people felt that the ‘injustice’ they perceived justified their murderous actions. That they held a moral authority to deal in death and judgment against whom those that they ascertained to be their enemies. If you celebrated one and condemned the other, even in mocking ironic memes, you are part of the problem. You are part of the culture that nurtures, encourages, and provides the justifications for such horrid actions.

Political violence is a terrible beast, never dead and always seeking to escape the chains of civilization do not saw at those links for your side’s benefit; it never pays off well in the end.