“The problem is that we’ve all become numb to gun violence” is a statement that has circulated widely in response to the recent mass shootings at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and Tops grocery store in Buffalo, New York. However, as in medicine, when certain physical maladies cause numbness in a part or whole of the body, numbness to gun violence is a symptom of an underlying disorder.
While an acute instance of shock can produce numbness, numbness is more commonly a response to repeated, unmanageable shocks. Numbness is often accompanied by hopelessness and a feeling of being overwhelmed. This is a concession of sorts to the inevitability of being unable to take the sort of action that might get the shocks to cease. It’s important to mention this isn’t out of guilt. The guilt due to perceived inaction is equivalent to a response to trauma to the effect of: “I should have known. I should have done something.”
So the problem is not that we’ve become numb to violence. Numbness is a symptom of the problem in the same way children being murdered over and over again and families getting phone calls in the middle of the day and racing to the school in the hopes that the news is wrong are also symptoms. Others include parental exhaustion, unnecessary active shooter drills, and unwarranted surveillance of those presumed to be mentally ill.
If numbness is the symptom, what is the disorder?
My theory is the disorder might be misidentified as the shootings themselves. They certainly produce numbness, but it’s not a numbness we associate with cancer fatalities or lightning strikes. Those we see as inevitable, beyond our control, and generally bad events we’re doing something about, in as much as we can.
The science of gun violence prevention is settled science. Other developed countries have deployed interventions that have clear measurable results. Not so in the United States. This suggests that numbness is a symptom not of the violence, but the cruel refusal to apply the medicine that could prevent so much of it. The disease is our lack of political will caused by our dysfunctional democracy.
And so when people say, “This keeps happening because people have become numb,” they’ve got it backward. People have become numb precisely because this keeps happening.
So what’s the remedy?
The remedy isn’t a medical one; it’s political. Just as some diseases require a fairly severe intervention to resolve them such as chemotherapy, radiation, or surgery, our political system needs surgery. Our system of representation is not fully democratic (because of the filibuster-related stalemate in the Senate) and is much too motivated by the influence of money. If we don’t change that, any other outrage will be moot.
Pretending we have power (to stop a shooting) or pretending something that isn’t powerful like outrage is what we call in therapy a “bad solution.” It seems to address the problem. We can even get some real relief, but we haven’t solved anything. Central to this is that those of us with conscience who care about doing what’s needed to stop gun violence don’t actually have the power to do so. At least not as power is currently structured.
We need to gain that power. The disease can only get better if we can tolerate the cure. People need to see this as what it is: Complete organ system failure—a failure of our democracy to be able to resolve the fundamental problem of keeping children safe.
