A few minutes after 6pm on October 1, just before President Obama was to address the nation about the mass shooting in Roseburg, Oregon, Jennifer Conklin received a phone call from her father.
He had been at his wits end since the previous Friday when Jennifer’s mother Patricia, his wife of 35 years, left him for another man. But Jennifer was unprepared for her dad’s confession. He had tracked down her mom at her new boyfriend’s home, and shot and killed them both as well as a neighbor who heard the shots and came to intervene. He was preparing to turn the gun on himself. Jennifer later told reporters through tears, “I told him don’t hurt himself, that I needed him. He said it was too late. Then he said he loved me and he was sorry and that it was goodbye.”
Minutes later in Washington, President Obama spoke movingly about the routine of random mass shootings in America and expressed the depth of the frustration we all feel over and our government’s continuing failure to take any action to stop them. What he did not mention was that the nine slain at Umpqua Community College that morning represented merely a quarter of the daily national average for homicides. By midnight, roughly thirty more Americans would have become victims. Upon closer examination, murder in America looks much less like the Oregon shooter who pushed the president to speak, and much more like Jennifer Conklin’s father.
The president said, “We are the only advanced country in the world that sees these shootings every few months.” But in fact, an analysis of mass shooting data from ten comparable nations reveals the US to be in the top third for mass shooting fatalities, but by no means an outlier. However even as mass shootings in America have become much more common in the past decade, they still account for barely three percent of our murders.
We live in a country that is uniquely violent among its peers—with a murder rate more than quadruple that of England, France, Australia, or Germany. But what sets us apart is not the staggering evil of rampaging madmen. America’s epidemic of violence is unspectacular, quotidian, almost prosaic. It is born of personal grudges and scores settled, domestic disputes and arguments gone wrong.
In America, you are four times more likely to be murdered in an argument than in a robbery. If you are a woman, the person most likely to murder you is your husband or boyfriend, with intimate partner violence accounting for six and one-half times as many deaths as unknown attackers. In fact, if you only take the murders in the US committed by victims’ family members and intimate partners, we would still equal or surpass the total murder rates of Spain, Germany, Indonesia, Denmark, Sweden, Slovenia, and Switzerland. And in an overwhelming majority of these fatal encounters, a firearm is the murder weapon. This should come as no surprise given that American citizens are armed like no others in the world, owning four times more private guns per capita than those in any other wealthy nation.
All these guns bring with them an even greater human cost in the form of suicide. While less than 10% of suicide attempts are completed, 85% of those who use a gun die, accounting for more than half of total suicides. In 2013 alone, 21,175 Americans took their own life with a firearm, 50% more dead than our total homicide count.
When asked if she had anything to say to the families of the other victims of her parents’ murder-suicide, Jennifer Conklin said, "That I'm so sorry. That I know they must hate my father and think that he's a horrible person. But he really isn't, he was just lost." Later she elaborated, "My father was a really amazing guy who just lost it this past week when his wife left him and he didn’t know how to handle it.”
He was a good guy with a gun—until the day he wasn’t.
It has been one month since these twin tragedies on October 1. For a moment conversations about gun control abounded in the news and social media, but the lines of debate were well-worn and pre-drawn. Now having paid the requisite respects and lip service to the victims and the possibility of policy change, America’s attention has moved on. In that month, roughly one thousand more Americans have been murdered, two-thirds of them with guns.
Trotting out the ghouls who perpetrate indiscriminate and unspeakable evil has done little to move us closer to action on regulating firearms. Perhaps we will make some progress when we acknowledge that, as frightening as they are, the killers from whom we most need protection are not those rare wild-eyed psychopaths. When a whole nation is armed, concentrated evil is not needed to produce tragedy. All it takes is a heartbreak too profound, or a couple drinks too many, or being crossed on a bad day in a hard year, or one of a thousand other final straws. Given the right tools for the job, regular, flawed folks do killing just fine. And we do, again and again.
Sources:
http://www.politifact.com/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://www.bjs.gov/...
https://www.fbi.gov/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/...
http://www.baynews9.com/...
http://www.abcactionnews.com/...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/...
http://www.theguardian.com/...
https://www.afsp.org/...
Additional data on intimate partner violence provided by FBI and analyzed by Cody Steele