It's the Guns, Stupid
I've seen war. Guns in America are more frightening.
I generally avoid writing about domestic politics/policy that I’m not paid to cover because, well, it’s thankless.
But in the couple of weeks, there have been mass shootings in Texas, California, Ohio, Nevada, Pennsylvania,Missouri, Kentucky, and Arkansas, and other states.
In the midst of it, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a ban on bump stocks—devices designed to make semi-automatic weapons fire faster, most famously used by the 2017 Las Vegas shooter who killed 60 and wounded hundreds—was illegal.
So, I’m going to vent as someone who has spent more time around guns than most people.
I’ve said this in countless private conversations: America’s gun culture is a death cult, a perverse religion that worships and advocates the proliferation of an invention with one purpose: killing living beings.
The result is daily gun violence that often takes the lives of innocent people just going about their business, whether they are children in school, people shopping for groceries, or people attending concerts. Nearly 50,000 people die each year from gun-related injuries in the United States—about 55 percent suicides, 40 percent homicides, the rest a mix of accidental, law-enforcement related, and unknown causes. And the majority of deaths result from incidents involving legally obtained firearms.
For context, the number of gun-related deaths each year in the United States is almost as many U.S. troops killed in the entire Vietnam War.
Speaking of war, I spent a lot of time in war zones or unstable countries wracked by militia violence. I have seen the use and the aftermath of the use of guns. It’s horrifying.
And that’s why I feel America’s love of guns is a pathology. This country believes 50,000 lives a year is an acceptable price for the right to own guns, which many equate with “freedom.” That’s not a political or partisan statement, it’s empirical, it’s data.
I remember the first time I saw an assault weapon up close. It was 1993. I was walking down the jetway after arriving at Heathrow Airport. There were two kitted-out police officers with tactical weapons eyeing the arriving passengers. It was during the height of the Troubles and there were frequent bomb threats.
I felt uncomfortable at the sight of the officers. I felt unsafe. Part of it was the message their presence sent—there active threats during my visit to London. But part of it was just the unnerving sight of military hardware in public like that.
Not that I had a problem with guns, per se. I grew up with and around guns. It started as it often does with BB guns at summer camp. Then, in my tween and teen years I graduated to shooting rifles and handguns—and the occasional musket gun. I have an uncle who had guns at a house in the woods and we would target shoot there.
It was all adult supervised, and I was trained in gun safety. I enjoyed shooting.
In my 20s, I obtained a carry permit in Massachusetts. I didn’t really have a compelling reason to carry, but I felt since it was a right, I might as well exercise it.
In Massachusetts, the chief of police in each jurisdiction set the standards for issuing gun licenses under overall state regulations. I first tried to get a carry permit in Boston. I passed the range qualification test, which only two of 10 of us did the day I took the test. But during the interview process, I was told I did not have a compelling reason to need a carry permit, which I didn’t, and I was offered a permit for target practice only.
A couple of years later, I moved to a different town with different regulations. To obtain a carry license, I was required to pass a comprehensive gun safety course that included classwork on gun laws such as use of lethal force, and complete range sessions. After I completed the course and cleared a background check, I was issued a license. I purchased two handguns, which had to be registered with the state, and I felt that was completely reasonable. I felt Massachusetts regulations were a reasonable minimum for gun licensing and ownership.
I concealed carried a handgun maybe a half dozen times in the 12 years I had a license in Massachusetts. I hated the feeling. I felt self-conscious. I was worried someone would notice and it would turn into a “thing.” I also felt hyper-vigilant because I had legal obligations should an incident take place where I might need to use the weapon.
I felt less safe when I carried a gun.
Not everyone has that reaction, obviously, but I didn’t like it because every second I was in public with the gun tucked in my belt, I was thinking about the gun and not being in the moment of whatever I was doing. I felt like I was “on duty.” And legally, I was. I had duties that came with the right to carry my gun. I had the duty to avoid using it unless absolutely necessary. I had the duty to avoid threatening or escalating situations. I had a duty to ensure conditions met legal standards for the use of lethal force should I brandish my weapon.
In the time I had my carry license, I recall only one moment in 1997 when a situation was bordering on a level of danger that I would have been within my rights to draw a gun and protect a friend—I was not carrying at the time. Fortunately, the situation deescalated. I don’t recall feeling the need to or wanting to carry after than episode, and I did not.
In the years after, I periodically took my guns to ranges, and otherwise they remained locked up at home, to the dismay of one partner during that time who said she felt anxious having guns in the apartment.
Before I moved to DC in 2007, I sold the two handguns I owned.
In 2007 I started a new career as a foreign/war correspondent. My first reporting trip was to Serbia and Kosovo, which was in a state of cold peace after the hot war of the 1990s. There were still bullet wounds in buildings and streets and there were armed peacekeepers in some of the areas I visited.
Next, I traveled to Sudan, where I was detained at gunpoint in the capital. That was the first time anyone had pointed a gun at me—let alone four men with AKs—and it’s not something you want to experience a second time.
In Colombia I saw armed men roaming rural villages and I couldn’t tell who they were and what “side” they were on. When I was checking in for a flight from the remote Choco region back to Bogota, I saw airport employees inspecting a handgun they had confiscated from a passenger.
In summer 2008, I traveled to Lebanon, where men with AKs were on the streets outside every “significant” building, ranging from government buildings to political party offices to the homes of powerbrokers.
Then, Iraq for an embed with U.S. forces.
Over the next few years, I took reporting trips to Afghanistan, Congo, Pakistan, South Sudan, and Yemen, places where you regularly saw AKs in public. Those places were either in hot conflict or teetering back and forth or otherwise battling terrorists and militias. Seeing guns on the streets was a sign of insecurity, not freedom.
I interviewed countless civilians who lived in terror. They had all lost someone to conflict.
Then, in 2011, the Arab Spring kicked off, and I spent time in Libya during the civil war. I saw more guns and shooting there than anywhere. I spent one day in a hospital behind the front lines watching doctors frantically treating rebels who had been shot in the fighting. At one point, an ambulance brought in a French journalist who had been shot in the leg.
Covering the war in Libya was nerve wracking not just because you were around frequent gunfire and clearly at risk of being shot in hot conflict, but because there were so many amped up young Libyans armed to the teeth and who had little to no military training or weapons discipline. Half the time you feared getting shot accidentally by friendly rebels who loved firing their weapons in the air for the hell of it.
During the final days of the fight for Tripoli, the other journalists and I who were wolf-packing together regularly had to run as bullets whistled by. In one particularly chaotic episode, I watched tracer fire pass 10 or 20 feet over our heads.
And my experiences and stories are nothing compared to other journalists and friends who took direct fire in war zones—let alone friends who are combat veterans.
At one point, the Tripoli hotel where many other journalists and I were staying implemented a gun-check policy at the entrance. The hotel put a giant cardboard box inside the front door, and people deposited their AKs and other machine guns in the box and reclaimed them on the way out. It was like an umbrella check in an American restaurant. It was perversely comical.
In the midst of it all, I saw countless bodies of men and boys killed by gunfire. I recall interviewing a man in a hospitalstanding next his 10-year-old son lying in a hospital bed with his life fading from him. He had been shot in the head by a stray AK bullet while playing outside his home in eastern Libya.
In between stints in war zones, I took work trips and vacations to places like Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Croatia, Hungary, Belgium, the Caribbean—places where I didn’t see or hear guns. When I was in those places, I felt myself un-clenching, so to speak. I wasn’t worried about being shot—intentionally or accidentally.
Then, I spent 2012 through 2014 living in Afghanistan where gunfire was a weekly occurrence in Kabul at least. Fortunately, it was sometimes celebratory or recreational, but often it wasn’t.
The only time I legitimately freaked out was Thanksgiving 2014 when a major attack took place atop one of the hills in Kabul about a mile from my house. Afghan forces shooting down on the attackers were spraying bullets all over the city.
The audio booth was in the rear building of the NPR compound, and at one point I walked out of the house to head into the booth to do a debrief with All Things Considered on the attack. As I crossed the yard, I hear blasts of gunfire—some of which sounded much closer than the gunfire that had been cracking off for hours—and bullets whistled over the compound.
The louder gunfire seemed maybe a block away and I didn’t know if there was another attack in my neighborhood or what was going on, so I ran back into the house and shut off the lights to shelter in place until things cooled down. This is audio of that night I recorded from on the patio of my house.
In my time a conflict-zone journalist, I used to try to put friends and family who worried about my safety at ease by joking that I was probably more likely to get shot in D.C.
And that is the problem.
Gun violence in warzones is expected and “understandable,” even if the reasons for the underlying conflict are not. While it can be unsettling and depressing to see AKs everywhere you look in Baghdad, Beirut, Goma, Kabul, Khartoum, Tripoli (Lebanon or Libya), you expect it, and as a journalist, that’s often why you’re there.
But when you come back to the United States, the beacon of light, the city upon a hill, the nation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you want to be able to relax put aside any concerns about being the victim of gun violence.
Unfortunately, I can’t.
While any serious reading of the Federalist Papers shows the American founders did not intend the Second Amendment to be applied as liberally as it has, the fact is guns are woven into the fabric of the nation.
Gun rights advocates have placed unfettered gun ownership at the center of American ideology and life.
For the gun lobby, Americans should be able to purchase high-powered, high-capacity weapons and modify them to shoot at higher rates of speed. Why? Because, freedom, Second Amendment.
There is no public policy or societal upside to America’s gun culture, only downsides according to every statistically valid study. Subsistence hunting aside, which does not require AR-15s or semiautomatic handguns with high-capacity magazines, guns do not serve a “positive” purpose in U.S. life.
Guns are for killing. Full stop. Guns don’t have any other function. They are designed to rip, mangle, and mutilate flesh and cause the injury or death of living things.
Guns don’t kill people; people kill people is the classic dismissive comment. Yes, guns do kill people because people choose to kill people with guns because it’s a lot easier than killing them with knives, bats, arrows, or kindness.
The evidence has been out there for ages. The proliferation of guns means gun violence and gun deaths. Serious studies have shown over and over again that in households with guns, there are far higher rates of spousal murder and suicide. Despite the rare examples of a homeowner fending off an intruder with a gun, data show that having a gun in the house makes residents less safe.
I have many friends and family members who are law abiding gun owners, as most gun owners are, and I was. I don’t see how their lives are quantifiably “better” or they are freer because they own guns. I get that some enjoy hunting, and I don’t have a problem with subsistence or consumption hunting—trophy hunting is a different matter—and I don’t have a problem with people owning reasonable hunting guns, which do not include most handguns or semiautomatic rifles.
I was recently in Poland and Norway for work. I was there covering military exercises and thus was around guns part of the time. But because I wasn’t in war zones and was in countries where gun ownership is not a pathology like America, I was relaxed. I walked around the streets knowing I wasn’t going to get shot. I knew that if people around me had a disagreement over something, none of them would settle it with a spray of bullets as often happens in the United States.
European and other countries have chosen that gun ownership is a net negative and banned it. Not surprisingly, they have exponentially less gun violence. I have yet to run into a European complaining they feel less free because they can’t own guns. More often it’s the opposite, people will say the feel the freedom to not get shot.
Yes, there are criminals in other countries. There is murder and violence in Europe. There are bad people everywhere. But criminals in Europe or other advanced economies/nations do far less damage with knives and cars than criminals in America do with guns.
America has chosen that school shootings like Columbine, Newtown, Parkland, or Uvalde are an acceptable price to pay for the right to own guns.
Americans are OK with bowling, grocery shopping, outdoor concerts, pool parties, and worshiping being life-threatening activities because it’s more important for citizens to have guns.
America has chosen that the freedom to have guns is more important than freedom from being shot. That’s the pathology in this country and people have spent billions getting politicians elected and judges confirmed to ensure that unfettered gun ownership is the law of the land.
It’s disgraceful. It is a stain on this nation that makes America a joke around the world. I can’t tell you how many times I had people in places like Lebanon or Afghanistan—let alone England or Greece—say they couldn’t understand America’s gun culture.
I have seen more guns, gun violence, and the aftermath of it than anyone should. And so much of what I have seen has been the impact of that violence on innocent civilians caught between warring factions or civilians viewed as fair game because they “support the other side.”
It’s sickening. It’s embarrassing as a member of the human race that we have not evolved to the point where we value human life (at least once that life emerges from a woman) enough to take reasonable steps to protect it.
I’m tired of all the excuses and justifications—most gun crimes are committed by people who obtained the gun illegally, that shooter was mentally ill, had the teachers been armed, that shooter wouldn’t have killed all those children.
Stop it. The problem is America decided guns are the second-most important right in society. Today, there are more guns than people in the United States.
At least when the founding fathers resorted to gun violence to settle their disputes, they had the decency to do it in a controlled duel rather than today’s approach of driving by a rival’s home and spraying bullets out the car window and shooting up a neighborhood.
Cut it out with the thoughts and prayers nonsense. Stop pretending that some greater force is responsible for this. America chose guns. With that comes accidental and intentional gun violence.
Stop clutching pearls and hand wringing. Stop rationalizing that the problem is mental health or lack of enforcement of gun laws. Have the balls to say, “Well, I believe the right of gun ownership is more important than anyone’s right to life.”
Because that’s simply what it comes down to in America.
In summer 2021, I was on Cape Cod when my phone rang one night around 11:30 p.m. A neighbor told me a man had been shot and killed behind our condo complex. The police needed access to our surveillance system—I was the condo board president and only one other than management who knew how to access footage. The footage in the linked article is from our system.
The victim was not the target. He was a man my age walking back to his car after having dinner with his wife at a nearby restaurant. He was struck by a stray bullet when two men opened fire at each other on an adjacent street—a street in the middle of an upscale D.C. neighborhood, a street where there is frequent drug activity and periodic gunfire.
To be fair, I’d bet all the guns carried or fired on the block are illegally obtained, but in a country that has decided it should be easier to get a gun than a driver’s license (something else way too easy to obtain), it’s kind of a joke to resort to the claim that better enforcement of gun laws would prevent this activity. It’s even more of a joke when gun rights activists are constantly fighting to make it easier for people in D.C. to obtain guns legally. There’s some magical thinking there that only law-abiding people with no criminal intent would take advantage of laxer gun regulations in D.C.
Don’t think for a second that had the victim of this particular shooting been armed he would be alive today. Carrying a gun would have done nothing for him. He was not a party to the conflict and not threatened. Also, he wasn’t in the “wrong place at the wrong time,” as is so often said to dismiss some of these kinds of episodes.
In the greatest, freest nation, there should be no wrong places or wrong times.
A week later, there was another shooting about a block away that could have gone far worse for people nearby. A gunfight erupted on the street near outdoor dining areas on a Thursday evening. It’s amazing more innocent people weren’t killed.
I’ve walked the stretch of street behind my condo probably thousands of times over the 17 years I have lived in the neighborhood. And every time I do, in the back of my mind I am thinking about the possibility of being shot and am surveilling for potential threats. I have never once felt that carrying a gun would make me safer walking home at night.
Frankly, it’s appalling that the solution so many advocate is that as a law-abiding citizen, I should carry a gun as that would deter crime, and if crime happens, I could defend myself.
You might recall I wrote about being assaulted in summer 2022—it was on the same street where the man was shot in 2021. I have played that incident over and over in my head—as one does with trauma—and I can tell you there is no way that situation would have played out better had I been armed. When you are surrounded and outnumbered like I was, at best you might be able to draw and take out a couple of assailants before the others are on top of you, take your gun, and kill you with it—if one of them hasn’t already shot you with a piece they are carrying.
There is no question in my mind that had I been carrying at that moment, I would be dead. Frankly, that is something I learned from my NRA gun safety course I took before I got my license in Massachusetts. We watched videos showing assailants 20-feet from an armed person run toward the victim and disarm them before they could draw and fire a shot. The lesson was that inside a certain distance from a threat, your gun is useless at best and the instrument of your own death at worst.
As I noted earlier, I say none of this as a partisan, political screed. I’m no anti-gun peacenik. I belong to no political party. My view on guns is entirely empirical. I look at what I have seen and experienced around the world. I look at the data. America is an outlier among advanced economies. America’s take on guns is unique.
Again, the law is the law in the United States. The Second Amendment isn’t going away, neither are the monied interests supporting laws and lawsuits to ensure there are as few restrictions on gun purchases and ownership as possible.
Mass shootings will continue. Innocent people will die. Wives and children will be intimated and killed by husbands and fathers. Criminals will roam the streets with guns they obtained illegally but effortlessly—and if the gun lobby had its way, many criminals would have obtained their guns legally.
There’s no putting it all back in the bottle.
That doesn’t mean give up. That doesn’t mean stop being outraged by every shooting and every political official who utters the pablum “thoughts and prayers.”
That doesn’t mean stop pushing for bans on weapons like AR-15s that mass shooters are so fond of. That doesn’t mean stop pushing for bare-minimum measures that will make it more difficult for people who shouldn’t have guns to get them. At least the Supreme Court got one thing right recently when it upheld restrictions on gun ownership by people under domestic violence restraining orders.
I’ll happily endure the criticism and vitriol of the gun lobby for speaking out at this point. Again, I’ve spent more time downrange and seen more carnage than most American gun fanatics have. I’m perfectly comfortable saying the proliferation of guns in America is a net-negative across the board.
I’m tired of reading stories about people like Callie Weems, the 23-year-old nurse who was killed in the June 21 mass shooting at the grocery store in Arkansas. She was shot while tending to one of the other shooting victims.
She’s now a statistic. But she was a human first, and she deserved better. We all do.