Right to arms, right to peace? Our writer explored a balance.
With hundreds of mass shootings each year, the United States seems to exhibit armed conflict at the citizen level like no other nation. Beneath a battle over access to high-powered guns, our writer wanted to probe access to something more universal: a desire for public peace.
A headline story one day, out of sight the next – and somehow never far away. The mass shooting is a mostly American phenomenon. Most media coverage falls into a pattern of lament, debate, and repeat.
Patrik Jonsson, a Georgia-based staff writer for the Monitor, often writes on gun culture and gun violence. He was at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, just after the deadly 2012 shooting there.
After the Oct. 25 shootings in Lewiston, Maine, Patrik followed up on reporting by colleague Simon Montlake with a step-back story.
He looked at two counterbalancing forces, Patrik says on the Monitor’s “Why We Wrote This” podcast. “You have the constitutional force of the Second Amendment,” he says, “versus this other, more broad, maybe less defined desire for peace in our communities.”
Issues of who should be allowed to own what kind of weapon, configured in which way, will persist, Patrik says. So will efforts on balanced legislation. In his reporting, Patrik has seen the social erosion – “including kind of a pervasive sense of fear about others,” he says – that fuels the use of powerful guns that can wreak havoc and continue a cycle.
But it’s not just a binary story, a story of absolutism.
“I always acknowledge the ... extreme viewpoints. You have to,” Patrik says. “But, talking to people in the middle, they tend to be the weight of the electoral power, and they tend to be far more moderate and reasonable.”
Episode transcript
Clay Collins: It’s a uniquely American news story, one that eddies until it surges, and then, after it has mostly receded from view, surges again. When it does, it tops the news cycle with a pretty standard series of responses: the sorrow and vigils before healing can begin, a clash over interpretations of rights, and unresolved questions about root causes.
It’s the story of mass shootings, of which there are still hundreds each year in the United States.
Staff writer Patrik Jonsson, based in Georgia for the Monitor, wrote a step-back story not long after the October 25th shootings in Lewiston, Maine. Patrik has covered many U.S. stories that touch on or go right at shootings and at guns and American gun culture, a culture with many forms – including one in which responsible gun ownership can be a rite of passage, a signifier of self-reliance.
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Collins: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Patrik joins us today. Hey, Patrik.
Patrik Jonsson: Hey, how are you doing?
Collins: So first off, you’re one of a small number of staffers with regular exposure to this story as part of your beat. How do you as a reporter and as a human being deal with the relentlessly cyclical nature of the American mass shooting story?
Jonsson: Yeah, sometimes I wonder. You know, I’m a dad, and I’m an outdoors person, and I’m a student of the Constitution. And I try to see it from all different points of view, but at the end of the day, it’s a great American tragedy. I was at Sandy Hook just a day after the terrible shooting there [in] 2012. That was my … the first time I had covered an event like this as a reporter. It was kind of earth-shattering. This was right before Christmas, and I went to a pizza restaurant in Newtown, Connecticut, where it happened. There was a Christmas party there. And, uh, it turned out to be the firefighters who had responded to that shooting, just a couple of days before, that had decided you know, they wanted to do their Christmas party. So, I ended up talking with one of the firefighters. What I’ll never forget was the sadness in his eyes. It’s kind of still with me, still chokes me up, ’cause it was really a lens into the true impact on people when something like that happens.
You know, my own kids had to go through active-shooter drills. So it’s something I definitely struggle to process sometimes, but I’ve been covering this for a long time and I do see, um, progress of its own kind. That’s maybe not what people on either side would like to see, but there’s definitely signs of progress, even though it’s hard to see sometimes with some of the statistics.
Collins: So Patrik, after Lewiston, the Monitor’s first response was a piece on how people were coming together in the wake of the tragedy. But then the discussion turned to how to go deeper, and our attention turned to you. You wrote about a balance between gun rights and the right to public peace. And you pointed out that Maine sees itself walking a kind of middle line on guns. Can you talk a little about how you framed your story?
Jonsson: I used to live in Maine. I know it’s a state of small communities, close-knit communities, with a really strong tradition of hunting and fishing, and dads teaching you know, their kids, and moms too, I’m sure, teaching their kids about responsible weapons use and things like that. But the fact that that violence intruded into even that kind of idyll, almost, was striking. And it just got me thinking about, you know, we have these two counterbalancing forces. You have the constitutional force of the Second Amendment, that’s been enshrined further and further by the Supreme Court. Versus this other, more broad, maybe less defined desire for peace in our communities. And when I went to talk to some experts about it, sure enough, these debates are going on around the country.
That idea of, is there a right to peace? You know, 83 percent of Americans have done something in their lives to safeguard themselves from gun violence. I mean, 83%. You know, in the African American community, for one, I think, three out of every 10 people report knowing someone who’s been shot. And it’s about two out of 10 among white people. So if you look at both sides of this debate, everybody wants peace.
Gun owners, responsible gun owners, get their guns and use them, for the potential for self-defense because they want peace. You know what I mean? And a lot of Americans buy guns expecting that they may have to serve as kind of citizen protectors to protect the peace. So, in a new way, it just kind of seemed to me like: Wait a minute, everybody kind of wants the same thing. And that’s always a good starting point for progress, it seems to me.
Collins: There’s another view you reference in this story. And that’s that an armed society is a safer society. And armed obviously means different things, as you’re saying. Um, some people believe guns like the AR-15, belong in non-military, non-law enforcement hands. So, when you’re reporting, what do you ask of people who seem to authentically hold that view? How do you achieve a balance in stories without, you know, creating false equivalencies?
Jonsson: I mean, guns are very old technology. It’s gunpowder and lead, with a firing mechanism and a barrel. I mean, it’s been around since muskets and the pirates. And if you go through a through line from those early weapons to the AR-15, it’s a design issue, right? I mean, it’s the same technology, there’s no difference. So when people defend the use or the availability of AR-15s, I get it. The technology is the same.
Collins: Well, I mean, if you’ve got a single shot muzzleloader, as they did in the time of the Founding Fathers, and then you’ve got high-capacity magazines….
Jonsson: Sure. But I guess, you know, automatic weapons are illegal in the United States. An AR-15 a semi-automatic rifle, much like a .223 or a .308 hunting rifle is a deer rifle. But you’re exactly right, high-capacity magazines change the dynamic. And also the AR-15, it was engineered as a weapon of war. It was engineered to kill quickly in small spaces. And that’s what we see, you know, when we see these terrible stories again and again, when people use these, and there’s no space or time for anyone, almost, to respond. Ten states have banned assault weapons or [the] AR-15 [which lacks selective firing unless modified, so is itself not an assault rifle]. So obviously, that is a policy that can be pursued.
There’s a lot more focus too on, you mentioned, high-capacity magazines. How many times can you fire that weapon without reloading? That’s a legitimate issue gun owners too can at least address without being fundamentalist about it, and saying, well, there should be no compromise on it.
So, and when you see polling by Gallup and other polling organizations, not only most Americans want to see just common sense gun policy, but gun owners themselves do. I think there’s a great middle, not just of Americans, but of gun owners too, who struggle with this themselves. They feel like: If I’m a law abiding gun owner, why shouldn’t I be allowed to have this AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that makes me feel safer in my own home, when giving it up would have a negligible impact on safety for others? And that’s a legitimate question. Of course, there’s always a few absolutists. I always acknowledge the kind of extreme viewpoints, you have to. But, talking to people in the middle, they tend to be the weight of the electoral power, and that they tend to be far more moderate and reasonable, on both sides, frankly.
Collins: You mentioned the Gallup poll. I just want to array some other stats and evidence because [it’s] interesting to look at. There was a study this fall from the National Institutes of Health indicating that regulations passed from ’91 to 2016 were associated with substantial reductions in gun mortality. You know, we’ve seen charts from the last assault rifle ban from 1994 that show a drop in gun deaths that correlates. So it sounds as though, from where you sit, there is some hope for action from people that most camps will be able to get behind.
Jonsson: It’s clear that there’s a lot of momentum. Michigan this year, after a shooting there, they put in a red flag law and also a universal background check for rifles as well. And Michigan is another kind of sportsman’s paradise state. It’s also kind of a battleground state. And I think part of that comes from the fact that there is more and more research showing that some of these laws really do matter. I just read a study about red flag laws. This one academic noted that red flag laws saved over 7,000 lives in the United States that one year. That’s amazing.
I also think about, you know, this cannot be solved by policy alone. And I think this kind of mass violence and gun violence is a symptom of other things going on in society, including kind of a pervasive sense of fear about others and, you know, kind of a sense of neighborhoods and communities devolving and tribalizing and things like that. It’s interesting when you look at the most peaceful times in the United States, one great example is after World War II, when the US had one of the lowest murder rates in the world. And the reason is simple. We had come together to fight a world war and people were coming home and there was hope. You know, we had done something together. And people felt like parts of communities. And that’s when violence declines. And I think when we see spikes of violence, that has to do with guns, and has to do with policy, but it also goes deeper than that. I think everyone has a role to play in potentially making that better.
Collins: Well, thank you, Patrik, for recognizing all those perspectives, for being here, and for your careful reporting on this really important issue.
Jonsson: Yeah, you’re welcome.
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Collins: Thanks for listening. To find a transcript and our show notes with links to all of Patrik’s work, and to some of the other source materials cited today, visit CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Jingnan Peng. Mackenzie Farkus is also a producer on this podcast. Our sound engineers were Noel Flatt and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by the Christian Science Monitor. Copyright 2023.
