Dear readers,

A version of today’s newsletter was originally published in 2022 after the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas. We are republishing that piece today in light of the mass shooting at Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which killed two children (an eight- and ten-year-old) and injured 18 others. 

The details of the two shootings differ in some places. The attack from this week appears to be a targeted crime against Catholic schoolchildren. The shooter, in this case, was reportedly a transgender woman and former student at the school in question. There are fewer open questions related to the law enforcement response in the shooting in Minnesota than there were in the Uvalde, Texas shooting.

Still, the heart of the stories is the same: A young person with multiple guns shot more than a dozen children. Many of the responses were also similar, the statistics have not changed, and the discussion of possible solutions is stuck in the same partisan mud. Accordingly, since this story evokes the same pain and anguish, and because my response and proposed solutions still feel relevant, we decided to rerun this piece. In places where we thought it was useful, we’ve added a few “Editor’s notes” to pull in more recent data, context, or updates.

Relatedly, I’d like to remind readers about our editorial policy not to name mass shooters due to the well documented contagion effect. Instead, I ask you to consider the names Fletcher Merkel, 8, and Harper Moyski, 10, the two children killed in the Minnesota shooting. “Fletcher loved his family, friends, fishing, cooking and any sport that he was allowed to play,” Jesse Merkel, his father, told the press yesterday. “Please remember Fletcher for the person he was, and not the act that ended his life. Give your kids an extra hug and kiss today.”

We are broken.

Thursday was going to be the last day of class at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

I can still remember what that time of year felt like as a kid. The anxiety for the week to end so summer could start. The week where nobody did any real work, where the teachers were suddenly happy no matter what. A shrill excitement permeated every conversation, school projects were somehow fun, the weather for recess was always perfect, and the air conditioners (if you were lucky) would be blasting inside when recess was over — then we’d tumble in, sweaty and dirty and covered in stories to share with friends. All the talk was about the pool, manhunt, the beach, camp, vacation, and all the video games you were going to play and ice cream you were going to eat and fun you were going to have.

Instead of that summer bliss, on Tuesday, the kids in Uvalde were exposed to something else. Something much worse. Some horrifying thing at the intersection of all the things we do wrong as a society here in the United States.

Some manifestation of our brokenness.

An 18-year-old walked into the school and — well, forget it. You already know the story.

The thing that should probably stick with you is that parents were sent to a civic center as the “reunification point” to find their kids. They sat outside in little groups as police and doctors and school officials tried to help them locate their children. Because of the nature of the crime and the weapons involved and the size of the victims, identification was not easy. Reporters witnessed “audible screams” and eruptions of sobs as DNA matches and descriptions of children were confirmed. It was “good news” if you found out your child was in the hospital still clinging to life.

19 children are dead.

Nineteen.

Elementary school kids. Babies. Two adults, too — both teachers. We're less than 24 hours out from the shooting, so the shooter’s “motives” are still unclear. On the surface, it appears different from the Buffalo shooting, which was a crime motivated by racial animosity. This was a Hispanic teenager, in a predominantly Hispanic town in Texas, killing mostly Hispanic elementary school students. Unlike the Buffalo shooter, he did not survive; he was killed by law enforcement, a Border Patrol agent who responded to the shooting and — thankfully — entered the school without waiting for backup. Somehow the horror could have been worse, if such a thing can even be comprehended.

Screenshot, X | @adamhousley

You know what happened next, too.

Everyone expressed shock and grief and horror. People used words like “unthinkable” and “unimaginable” and “nightmare,” though none of those words really fit. This isn't really unthinkable or unimaginable — it is predictable. It feels nearly guaranteed, like the sun rising and setting. There will be another one. Hopefully not today or tomorrow or next week, but I guarantee you, it will happen again.

Many on the right expressed heartache and grief. Some vaguely called for gun reform or for us to address our mental health crisis. Many gun reform proponents on the left responded in fury, frustrated to watch this cycle run again when the solution seems so obvious to them: Make it harder to get a gun.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), whose state was home to the Sandy Hook shooting in 2012, literally begged for a different reaction. One House representative from Texas accused his Republican colleagues of being “baby killers” and then the right responded in kind. It briefly became an argument about abortion and the media, and then the right's most prominent voices accused the left of “politicizing the tragedy” and then — in a moment, in a flash — it became just another example of partisan warfare [Editor’s note: In Minneapolis this past week, Mayor Jacob Frey’s comments about prayer is what sent the dialogue off the rails.]

Everyone get to your sides. Arm yourselves with stats and talking points and animosity for the opposition. The dead fade into the background, the partisan warriors move to the front lines, and the discourse gets swallowed whole by the monster our modern day politics have become.

In this moment of madness, I saw two reactions to the news that struck me as wholly true and worth sharing with our readers. One was new, and another was a classic sentiment worth reiterating until it really hits home.

The first was from conservative columnist Noam Blum, who said pointedly and concisely something I believe with all my heart: “Nothing is monocausal. There are just parts of our society that are unfathomably broken and they occasionally intersect in unspeakably awful and evil ways.”

The other is from The Onion, the satirical website whose famous headline was rightly being shared again yesterday:

Screenshot, The Onion

I’m drawn to these two ideas because even though they are seemingly contradictory, I subscribe to them both. First, fixing only one thing will not fix the problem of mass shootings and gun violence in America. Second, the regularity of this type of violence — especially mass shootings — is unique to our country. 

By now, many of you know the data.

Over half of all gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides, and most gun violence in the U.S. is committed with handguns. And though they dominate the headlines, mass shootings account for less than 1% of all gun deaths in the United States. 

But mass shootings — defined as incidents where four or more people are shot — are still shockingly common here. There have already been 213 mass shootings in the U.S. this year. There have already been 27 school shootings in which at least one person was injured or killed. And things seem to be headed in the wrong direction. There were 417 mass shootings in 2019, 611 in 2020, and 693 in 2021 — nearly two a day. At our current pace, we'll have far more this year than we did in 2019, but fewer than we did in 2021. We typically expect more violence in the summer, though, so it’s likely the next few months will be worse. [Editor’s note: 2022, the year this piece was written, would total 643 mass shootings. 660 were committed in 2023. In 2024, the total dropped to 503.]

I'd like to reject, from the outset, the notion that these mass shootings are somehow less damaging or less salient because they kill fewer than 1% of all the people who die in gun violence. This seems to be a talking point many people lean on when proposals to address mass shootings are suggested, but it disregards the ripple effects of these tragedies.

Mass shootings have an impact on the psyche of our society writ large that a lot of other gun violence does not. They are, in simple terms, effective acts of terrorism. They terrorize. When you report on these shootings, something quickly becomes very obvious: They don't just irreparably damage the lives of the victims, their families, and their friends; they also traumatize witnesses, responding law enforcement officers, doctors, nurses treating the injured, and the community as a whole. And that trauma spreads outward like a wave.

Last night, I came home to my apartment blissfully unaware of what had happened. I was at a physical therapy appointment when the news broke, and absorbed in a podcast on the drive home, so I had not checked my phone for texts and news alerts. When I walked into my house, my wife was in front of her computer, glossy-eyed and somber, a heartbroken look on her face. I braced myself and asked: “What’s wrong? What happened?”

“They were babies,” she said. “They were just babies.”

I had to ask a few follow-up questions to understand that one of the worst mass shootings in American history had just taken place. We were 2,000 miles from the Texas town where this happened, but the trauma had already spread to us.

When I wrote about the Buffalo shooting, I was careful in how I constructed the “blame pyramid” of what had happened. First was the shooter himself, who made the decision to inflict this horror on a community. Second were the family, friends, and law enforcement who failed to properly act on the warning signs (in that case, the shooter told an entire classroom he planned to commit a murder-suicide). Third were the gun laws (and gun accessibility) that allowed the shooter to so easily act on all the failures that preceded his decision to go on a killing spree. Fourth were the racist online spaces and other mass shooters through which (and whom) he justified his attack. And last was the media, which turns shooters into celebrities and spreads their pathological ideologies far and wide.

This is part of our brokenness.

Somewhere in that pyramid, though I’m not sure where, should be another issue: Our gun culture.

Culture shift.

I was 13 the first time I ever shot a gun. I was, coincidentally, in Texas. When they are handled responsibly, moments like this are burned into your memory like a first kiss or a first beer or the first time you drive a car by yourself. My cousin had taken out a .22 rifle, and I sat quietly as I watched him load it. We were sitting atop a hill on his 10-acre tract of land, staring down at a set of hanging spoons about 35 yards away.

Before he taught me to aim and shoot, he taught me to always keep the gun pointed at the ground, under all circumstances, whether I thought it was loaded or not, and no matter how many times I had checked. He taught me to hold it safely with my finger far from the trigger, and he made it as clear as humanly possible that if I ever went near it without him around, the repercussions would be an order of magnitude worse than any momentary fun I might have without him.

There was a reverence in the moment. A solemn rite of passage that accompanied this chance to learn to shoot. It wasn't about letting me run wild or flexing my manhood; it was a test of my responsibility, of my maturity. How would I react? How would I comport myself? Was I old and mature enough to handle — literally handle — something that could take a life?

I do not know what our national gun culture is now, but it isn't that. It isn't what I knew growing up: a world where you often didn't know if someone was a gun owner because they had no interest in advertising it to you. It is unrecognizable to me now. Today we have politicians who take armed family photos in front of Christmas trees. Seven years ago, now-Texas Gov. Greg Abbott tweeted this:

Screenshot, X | @GregAbbott_TX

This morning, self-described “disaffected liberal” Tim Pool tweeted, “I'm going to buy more guns today.” [Editor’s note: Pool tweet has since deleted this tweet.]

I don't know Tim. And I don't know whether he is trying to be funny, or trolling somebody, or being intentionally provocative, or is really delusional enough to think that having more guns than he already does will somehow make him safer. But I do know this: The attitude represented in that tweet, even if it is meant to be a joke, is far too common.

It is a kind of “virtue signaling” but with guns — the same kind Gov. Abbott and Rep. Lauren Boebert and others seem to act on daily: “I have guns and will buy more guns and thus I am free. I am free and armed and thus I am strong. You need to be free and strong too, so go buy more guns!”

The bragging, flaunting, and intentionally provocative behavior around gun ownership today associates it with a false sense of strength and power and liberty. This new culture so obviously stems from and feeds into the kind of commonplace gun violence we witness day in and day out that we should be better able to address by now.

This is part of our brokenness.

As much as I have expressed a fear about the erosion of free speech culture in America, and the inevitability that losing this culture will lead to more restrictive laws on speech, I also fear this shift in our gun culture. I fear it because I know that culture drives attitudes, which in turn drive our laws. If guns make us feel free and strong, then any restriction on the sale or distribution or ownership of those guns makes us feel less free and less strong. So the obvious answer is to resist all restrictions on guns. And the equally obvious result is what we have now.

Americans make up about 4.4% of the global population, but we own 42% of the world's guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31% of mass shooters globally were Americans. When you adjust for population, and include only countries with more than 10 million citizens, only one country in the world had a higher rate of mass shootings during that time than us: Yemen. Yemen also had the second highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.

As of 2017, we had more guns (393 million) than people (326 million) in the United States. In the last four years, gun ownership and manufacturing have continued to skyrocket. This summer, the Supreme Court appears poised to further loosen gun restrictions in New York and across the country, making it harder for legislators to limit when and where someone can carry a concealed handgun in public. In short: The U.S. is already flooded with guns, and you can expect sales and ownership to increase in the coming years.

In Texas specifically, gun laws have recently become much less restrictive. In September, the Unlicensed Carry Law went into place, allowing anyone 21 or older to carry a handgun without a permit or training in most places (some private businesses, schools, and colleges still require permits).

That does not mean these laws allowed this shooting to happen. Details are still emerging, but it is quite clear that laws were broken left and right. You cannot carry a gun onto school grounds or into a school zone (usually about 1,000 feet around a school) in Texas. You cannot carry a handgun in Texas when you are younger than 21, as the alleged shooter was. However, you can legally (and easily) own a long gun, which he reportedly had, and it is not hard to buy body armor and other tactical gear, which he also reportedly donned.

More fundamental than any specific law or regulation, though, is the basic concept of accessibility. There are nearly 400 million guns in the U.S., and you cannot simply wave that off as unrelated to our unsurpassed rates of gun violence and mass shootings.

To drive this point home, I'd like to tell you a secret about your money.

Friction.

One of the most important things in sales is called “friction.” A huge part of my job at Tangle is trying to think of ways to reduce friction and make it easier for you to become a subscriber. For instance, I could tell you to subscribe to Tangle by clicking here, and you'll be taken to a “membership page” where you read about our plans, pick which one you want, enter your email, click subscribe, then go to a new page where you enter your name, credit card, address, and then check out. That’s a lot of friction. So, instead, sometimes I tell people to click here to subscribe. When you click that link, you're already on a checkout page. Your credit card may autofill depending on your computer settings. Your plan is chosen for you. I've eliminated some friction.

The richest, wealthiest companies in the world also focus on eliminating friction to get your money. It's why Apple has “Apple Pay” and face or fingerprint recognition to use your credit card. It's why Amazon has a “buy now” button to automatically purchase a product.

In our country, we experience very little friction in the process of buying guns. Waiting periods are rare, even though we know they reduce handgun deaths. Red flag laws exist but are mostly inadequate or ineffectively enforced (see Buffalo and Uvalde). To use a gun, you usually do not need to pass a test like you do to legally drive a car. In most states, under most circumstances, buying a gun requires identification, cash, and a background check (though the efficacy of our background check system is up for debate). [Editor’s note: It’s not just cars, either. To rent a boat in Pennsylvania you have to pass an exam that takes several days to complete. Restaurants who give patrons alcohol have to operate with a liquor license and 17 states require servers to undergo training. Someone who handles pesticides needs to undergo state training and exams, and must comply with strict transportation and documentation regulations. Even exercising other basic rights comes with administrative guardrails, like obtaining permits to organize a march or protest, registration to vote, or a license for marriage.]

Simply put: In our society, we regulate the right to own firearms a lot less than we regulate other weighty responsibilities — especially those where safety, life, or death are at hand.

This is part of our brokenness.

In response to this particular shooting, a few solutions besides creating more friction have been brought forward.

The one that got a lot of attention came from Ken Paxton, Texas's attorney general and a man with a lot of power to enact reforms to address gun violence. He suggested arming school teachers.

“We can’t stop bad people from doing bad things,” he said. “We can potentially arm and prepare and train teachers and other administrators to respond quickly. That, in my opinion, is the best answer.”

A lot about this answer frustrates me. “We can't stop bad people from doing bad things” is an argument you could make for not having any laws at all. Why have laws to regulate murder or robbery or rape if there's simply nothing we can do to stop bad people from doing bad things? We punish crimes like these to deter people from committing them; perhaps Paxton believes that arming teachers who can respond quickly will deter future attempts, but there isn’t much evidence for this.  

Indeed, arming teachers is a solution we've tried, and it has so far provided no indication it’s working. Schools have been increasingly armed and fortified in the last decade, and yet school shootings are happening more frequently. There was an armed security guard at the Buffalo grocery store. There were armed officers at Parkland. In fact, there were armed school resource officers at Uvalde Elementary School.

We still don't know how the shooter got into the school, but we do know he drove a pickup truck into the barrier of the south entrance of the school and got out of his car. Then, two police officers and an armed school resource officer fired at him, but could not stop him from entering the building.

Finally, Paxton’s response is frustrating because he is part of a group of conservatives who have warned about the “threat” of public school teachers across the country. He has, for example, accused school districts of “indoctrinating” students with gender ideology and insisted teachers have less discretion about what they can teach and discuss in the classroom. Yet he is also suggesting those same teachers — the ones not worthy of our trust — should be armed in classrooms? It is hard to square that circle.

Another common proposed solution has been to address mental health issues. There is no doubt this solution has merit. At the root of much of our gun violence — especially mass shootings and suicide — are people in crisis. Our country is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness, anxiety, and stress. I’m always grateful to hear people talk about addressing the mental health issues related to this violence, or calls to address the loneliness epidemic, or to expand offerings for people in crisis. 

Yet, this approach is often suggested in place of gun control rather than in concert with it, which is frustrating. Worse, many conservatives who are keen to point to mental health as the root cause of gun violence and mass shootings don't appear to be doing much about it. Democrats in Congress regularly push for measures like expanding Medicare or funding for mental health services but have not found support from the right. We've been having this conversation, in earnest, for a decade. If Republicans believe there is a mental health crisis, what is their solution? Where is the legislation or systematic societal plan to address it?

One promising development is the recent bipartisan negotiations on mental health legislation. Several Republican and Democratic senators were involved in the talks, which were first reported in February. In May, NPR reported that Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) are apparently still making progress on the bill. The details are murky, but this is an opportunity to put some momentum behind actual legislation, rather than just issue sympathetic statements and empty tweets. [Editor’s note: Happily, these negotiations produced the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which landed 15 GOP Senate votes and was signed into law in June of 2022. The bill combined billions of dollars of funding for youth mental health, crisis intervention, the 988 crisis response hotline, and suicide prevention with firearm regulations like an expansion of background checks for individuals under the age of 21.]

The left has its share of obviously flawed or empty solutions, too. “Banning all assault weapons” is a nice talking point, but it’s pretty hard to pin down. For starters, “assault weapons” is basically a made-up term that is impossible to clearly define (yet it is often used by gun control activists), and many legislators who use the term don't seem to be able to define it themselves. We had a 10-year assault-weapons ban that started in 1994 whose impact on violent crime was basically nonexistent, though some researchers contend it reduced the number of fatalities associated with mass shootings.

As I mentioned already, a universal background check bill is also very popular, and one of the most common solutions suggested by Democrats, yet it is very unclear how effective it would be.

According to some popular estimates, about one in five gun transfers (sales or otherwise) happens without a background check, thanks to loopholes for unlicensed dealers who don't have to run background checks to sell a gun. But research on what happens when we make background check systems universal at the state level has been inconclusive at best. Put differently: The background check system we have now does some good, but a universal background check system probably wouldn't move the needle much.

That so many of the most common suggestions for ending gun violence and mass shootings are not being acted upon, might be ineffective, or otherwise make the problem worse is a common theme here.

This, too, is part of our brokenness.

What should we do?

This should go without saying, but nobody in this country — except a very few sick individuals — wants to see children slaughtered at school or people killedby guns. Republicans are not “baby killers” and Democrats are not “communist authoritarians” trying to steal your guns so the government can take over.

I'm one person. I do not have all the answers. But given that I just told you about all our brokenness, I ought to tell you what I think would work.

On an interpersonal level, we all need to have our eyes and ears out for gun violence. This includes everything from suicides to homicides to mass shootings. The Buffalo shooter announced his plan to an entire classroom. The Texas shooter reportedly posted his guns and a threat on Instagram before his violent act. [Editor’s note: There were several threatening and disturbing videos on the Minnesota shooter’s YouTube channel.] There are almost always signs, and in retrospect, they are often quite obvious. Looking for these signs among your friends and family, to the best of your ability, is your responsibility; as a society we need to care for each other and ensure that the people we know and love do not become so isolated and lonely and angry that they commit an act of violence like this.

When we do take action, we need a more engaged law enforcement response. We need clear protocols for what local police and the FBI should do — and we need to make those protocols strict. Far too often, in case after case, we learn that the interpersonal box was checked, that someone did try to get an eventual shooter help, did flag law enforcement, did what they were supposed to do — but the institutions failed.

Relatedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is right about something crucial here: We need to better enforce the laws we have and better utilize the resources that already exist. The background check system, for instance, is riddled with flaws. Local police, the military, federal and state courts, hospitals, and treatment providers regularly fail to send criminal or mental-health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System when they are supposed to. In theory, nobody who has been convicted of a crime, committed to a mental institution, gotten a dishonorable discharge, or had a history of drug addiction should be able to buy a gun with ease. But these failures mean licensed gun dealers regularly run a clean background check on someone who should be caught by the system. 

Additionally, we do almost nothing about the people who lie on background check forms. There were 112,000 “lie-and-try” crimes in 2017 alone; 12 of them were prosecuted. If there was any semblance of a threat that lying to get a gun could get you in trouble, I'd bet a lot fewer people would do it. Yet it’s common knowledge among gun control advocates, the NRA, and criminals that lying on a background check form is a very low-risk activity.

And finally, I believe we should create more friction.

I know that readers are always trying to sniff out my political leanings, so I'll say up front that I have no idea where my next proposal puts me on the political spectrum. As a general, blanket statement, the vast majority of Americans seem to think it should be harder to get a gun. Many of the gun owners I know agree with what I'm about to say, but as I discussed above, today's “gun culture” seems totally divorced from what I used to understand it to be. I think many Republican politicians also believe what I’m about to say, but many of those who matter receive millions of dollars from the gun lobby, making me trust their public positions a little less.

Nevertheless, here’s my proposal: I think we should make gun ownership more like driving a car.

This is something I have proposed in past Tangle newsletters. It is a familiar structure. It’s intuitive. It is something that we know gets results. And it is a system that I do not believe would infringe on Second Amendment rights, which I support.

The same research that has shown universal background checks would do little to address gun violence and mass shootings also shows that a licensing system does both of those things rather well. Several big studies have been done on states that added a permit-to-purchase law for handguns, which usually requires people to obtain a permit from a police department before buying a gun.

In states like Connecticut, where the law was implemented, gun homicides and suicides went down. In states like Missouri, where those laws were repealed, gun homicides and suicides went up.

On top of a permit and licensing system, I believe mandatory classes or training are practical. I know some Americans and the gun lobby won't go for this, but I honestly believe they'd do a great deal of good and should be considered. The reasons for this seem obvious: We don't allow a 15-year-old to get inside a car and drive without training or a supervisor, because we know a car is dangerous and that teenager could kill someone or themselves. We also know people are not born with the ability to drive, so we teach them. This same logic applies to guns.

Now, I've made this point enough to hear the common refrain: “We weren't guaranteed a right to drive a car, we were guaranteed a right to bear arms.” Yes, it's true that we were not granted the right to drive a car in the Constitution. I suspect that is at least partly because cars didn't exist for another 100 years. However, it should be noted that our right to drive has been considered before the Supreme Court — and we all have and intuit a right to have freedom of movement. These things are not as far apart as we’d like to believe.

Regardless, that counterpoint is mostly moot for another reason: When was the last time you really felt that the government was restricting your ability to drive?

The system of permitting driving and requiring classes to do it makes sense to most of us because it is sensible. It's a great way to know that people understand the machines they are operating, ensure they are responsible enough to use them safely, and reduce the odds they will accidentally (or intentionally) kill people.

Is it foolproof? Of course not. Car accidents are still very common, and sometimes people even use their cars as weapons, like the killer in Waukesha, Wisconsin. But that doesn't mean it wouldn't help. The research, and common sense, says it would. The least we could do as a collective society is try it. The least our legislators could do is have an honest debate about it.

In the end, my most fervent wish is that this moment ends differently than all the others.

It is that this shooting, and gun violence more generally, cease to be as predictable as the sun rising and setting. And that maybe this time we can be shocked into action, into change, into a collective will to better look out for each other and a collective movement to shore up our laws and follow the research.

Am I optimistic? I'm not. But we should all say the obvious out loud: This is not about one issue, and this is not a problem we simply can't prevent. The least we can do — for the kids of Uvalde and the shoppers in Buffalo and all the victims before them — is have some hope and join together in refusing to accept this as normal.

I know we are broken, but I hope we are not so broken we can’t do that.

Thanks for reading.

Today’s piece is a rerun of a Friday edition from May, 2022. Still, if you were moved, feel free to share with others by simply forwarding them this email.

Finally, one programming note: We observe federal holidays at Tangle, so we’ll be taking Monday off from the podcast and newsletter for Labor Day.