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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37941 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes.

"It's not the thing you are using as a scapegoat" inherently means blaming something else, but it's wrong to describe that as "suddenly concerned about".

If plagues were blamed on Jews poisoning the wells, and Jews said "wait a minute, bad sanitation by Christians is a better explanation", you wouldn't ask "why are Jews suddenly very concerned about Christian sanitation?"

The "suddenly very concerned" part comes from how 98% of the time American conservatives have somewhere between zero and negative interest in treating mental health as a public policy concern and bring it up only when taking a defensive position after a mass shooting (and generally without any actual policy proposals)

I imagine they aren’t too concerned because their solutions to mental health are largely outside the acceptable purview of policy. If enforcing people make culturally Christian choices to live a wholesome mentally stable life free of vice is intolerable to the secular Center left, to a conservative politician their hands are tied.

“Don’t make me pay for your sex drugs and rock and roll if you want them so bad” essentially.

That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US. And virtually unheard of in vastly more secular Western Europe. And also that even in the US, advancing state-enforced Christianity as a remedy to mental health problems is an incredibly fringe position, even on the right.

I think a more likely explanation is that the intellectual paradigm of mainstream American conservatism simply isn't equipped to provide solutions to that kind of problem. It's like asking a progressive to come up with a scheme for regulatory reform.

That proposition is somewhat undermined by school shootings being more common in the more religious, more conservative South than elsewhere in the US.

Do you have a good source for that? I would love to see the data used and how they define 'more religious, more conservative south'.

That's my analysis, based on the Washington Post's database of school shootings and Census Bureau's regional divisions and population data. I do not entirely agree with the CB's regional divisions in a modern context, e.g. I don't agree with putting MD or DE in 'the South' (and I'll be dead before I accept the Dakotas as Midwestern), but it doesn't substantially affect the outcomes - moving them from South to Northeast makes the South look very slightly better and the NE look very slightly worse, but the South still ends up with ~66% more shootings relative to its population compared to the Northeast - and it's the external standard I decided to use beforehand.

Based on census regions and the aforementioned WaPo database, the number of mass shootings from 1999-2023 per 100k population as of 2023* (incidents, not deaths) by region are:

  1. South: 0.135

  2. Midwest: 0.111

  3. West: 0.111

  4. Pacific (meaning AK and HI): 0.093

  5. Northeast: 0.061

The assessment of the South as more conservative and more religious isn't based on any one source, just general knowledge of political outcomes and surveys of American religiosity. (I also want to be clear - my thesis is not that conservatism/religiosity cause mass shootings, merely that there is very little reason to think it is a preventative factor). I can dig up some sources if you like, but the South is consistently found to be more religious than the rest of the country.

*I did not try to adjust incident rate by population at year of incident because that was a lot more work and I doubt it will significantly alter the conclusions.

The problem with these databases of school/mass shootings is that they don't map onto what people think of as the sort of mass shootings we're discussing in this thread. A school resource officer accidentally firing his weapon, or a gang dispute that leads to one student shooting a few of his rivals, or a drug deal gone awry, or an 8 year old accidentally shooting a classmate when showing the cool gun he took from home, etc., - those all make it onto these lists. There's value in that, but it's important to recognize the broad scope of the dataset and not act as if these are lists of people who intended to kill as many people as possible, which is what our culture is almost always talking about when discussing mass shootings.

Yeah, if that data includes gang shootouts, then of course the South is going to be more represented. Are there no datasets of "mass shootings" or school shootings that include only what the layman would think of when they hear those terms?

I think there's literally only been a few dozen school shootings in the Columbine style in US history. Making your own database would not be hard.

Look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000%E2%80%93present) - it lists 80+251+125 incidents since the turn of the century. Of those, 8+17+6 had 3 or more deaths. 7 have 10 or more.

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