Helena Meyer-Knapp

This essay, The Politics of Public Suicide is long, detailed and complex. Starting from the notion that many mass killings in the USA end in the killer’s own suicide, it uses suicide as the center of an exploration of the origins and current state of gun violence in the USA. An early version, completed in 2013, was written when it seemed as though momentum in favor of ever increasing gun rights was irreversible.

By December 2015 there were alterations to our collective consciousness about these issues. Ferguson alerted the nation to ongoing gun violence directed by police at African Americans, and Newtown means that many more mass shootings are now publicized beyond the region where they occur. These represent changes in national awareness not changes in total numbers of events. Mass shootings — four or more casualties — have been occurring at a high rate for years. shootingtracker.com gives recent details, but it took until Dec. 3, 2015 for the New York Times to acknowledge the virtually daily nature of mass shooting trauma.

Still, I am hoping that both of these changes mean it will be easier to engage with argument laid out here: that our history of slavery, with its concomitant violence and political structures are embedded in patterns of gun violence today.

The first version of the paper was completed in June 2013. At the time I was describing it simply as an essay.

• The word Michel de Montaigne chose to describe his prose ruminations published in 1580 was “Essais,” which, at the time, meant merely “Attempts,” as no such genre had yet been codified. This etymology is significant, as it points toward the experimental nature of essayistic writing: it involves the nuanced process of trying something out.

These days it makes a formal argument, supported by two years of continuous, careful research, containing current data, references to related sources and policy proposals to reduce gun violence in the USA.

On getting to the end you will find suggestions for mitigating actions that are underway now and suggestions about additional options that might ease our gun-related agonies. They related primarily to issues surrounding the many kinds of suicides we suffer. Some remedies are based on the strategies we already use to curb the impact of other risky aspects of our social interactions, for example driving and smoking. Some are inherently local in their design and implementation.

A critical remedy is national in scope and rests on the clear fact that Second Amendment rights allowing guns into public meetings, and onto college campuses are in direct conflict with First Amendment rights guaranteeing freedom of speech and assembly. Dealing with this kind of conflict is clearly a matter for the courts. It requires no more than committed lawyers, plaintiffs, and a willingness to stand forward in the presence of opponents likely to be carrying guns.

THE OPENING PAGES 

DEATH IN NEWTOWN 2012

In December 2012, most of the news stories about the deaths of children and staff at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were reporting a massacre, a rampage-style shooting with 26 deaths. In fact 27 people died at the school. The one left off some casualty lists was the young man with the gun. He died because he killed himself. A very public suicide. In the USA, among 30 perpetrators, in one survey of rampage-style killings between 2001 and 2012, only 5 survived.^, Almost all died by suicide in public, in the very place they killed the others, a few dying in the immediate aftermath at the hands of the police. Most people writing and reflecting about these events have focused on victims and weapons. The starting point for me, perhaps because my perspective takes its position from my work on the endings of wars, is the suicide, the violent self-annihilation that marks the ending of so many of these civilian catastrophes My purpose in this piece is to bring a new kind of attention to suicide, a largely unexamined element of the USA’s intense, commonplace violence. Our suicides, public and private can only be understood if seen in the context of the nation’s seemingly rock hard commitment to gun rights.

Guns used in murder-suicides, including terror-suicides like Newtown, and guns used in the more ordinary, self-inflicted deaths we all recognize as “suicide” kill about 20,000 Americans every year. This is a phenomenon of our times; a gun story in which killers and their victims (almost always only themselves) are often older, largely male, and mostly white.

I will be arguing that our unique approach to gun rights — associated as it is with individual power, the entitlement to own a gun and the right to respond with violence when protecting property or honor — has deep roots, reaching back to the nation’s founding documents and social systems. Today’s progressive gun politics must include working on these roots, but in new ways. Specifically, we should use rights protected by the First Amendment to set criteria that ensure the right to bear arms, mandated in the Second Amendment, is “well regulated.” I will also propose other remedies which, since they echo existing public health strategies, can be enacted locally and in our personal lives.

Descendants of slaves know deeply that violence was built into the country at its founding, in whippings and lynchings, and families wrenched apart by an unconstrained slave owning class. Many people in the USA today claim for themselves an analogous power, which they cloak in the Second Amendment, asserting a right to own and use any kind of gun, for any reason, in public or in their own homes, at their own individual discretion. No matter how large the majority in favor of gun controls, this minority is trying to craft and protect virtually unconstrained access to guns.

Key features of the origins of all of this lie in the US Constitution, which allocated to the slave states more seats than their share of voters thanks to the 3/5 clause, allowing a fairly small minority disproportionate access to power. The Constitution also made the entire nation complicit in the violence of slavery, via the mandates of the Fugitive Slave clause. Wars against the Indians and the “settling” of the West broadened the original violent tradition, but in the regional differences in current patterns of mass shooter violence, and in regional differences in patterns of suicide today, the USA appears to be experiencing yet another iteration of the legacies of slavery. Both gun suicides and mass shootings in the former Confederacy disproportionately outnumber those in most of the original northern states. Two charts on the next page compare states from the old South with other parts of the USA  in (1) the number of mass shootings over the last three years by census region and (2) rates of suicide per 100,000 population. The selected states present a particularly dramatic contrast.

This is a long essay. Its earliest versions, distributed in 2013 were “trying something out,” the meaning in the original French of the word essay. Now, with two more years of research and two more years of changes in national consciousness, it has become a formal, and rather extended argument.

The remedies I propose have nothing to do with endless debates about listing names in national gun registries. Rather they draw on our extensive experience limiting other risky aspects of our social interactions, including driving and smoking. More profoundly, if the individualist rights now claimed as inherent in the Second Amendment are to be “well regulated,” inspiration to do so can be found in this nation’s passion for freedom of speech and assembly. The First Amendment is being threatened by ever increasing number of ways guns are carried into our public lives. The time has come to rise to its defense.

Each suicide and each terror suicide is the work of one or perhaps two people, but their lives unfold in social structures shaped by politics and by values embedded in the culture. This essay focuses on the structures, where despite regional differences, the national consequences are a part of all of our lives. If we can keep the facts about the 20,000 other deaths from gun suicide at the forefront of our minds, even more prominently than the attention we devote to terror suicides, we genuinely have opportunities to start reducing gun damage right now. We can skirt around our obviously dysfunctional, elected center, to bring about a more tranquil daily life for thousands of Americans and their families.