School Shootings Are Terrifying. But Let’s Stop Pretending the Solution to Gun Violence Is Simple.

A shooting at a Georgia school draws national attention and calls for reform, but the problems of violence in American society run much deeper.

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Four people — two students and two teachers — tragically lost their lives during a school shooting east of Atlanta on Wednesday. Nine others were injured.

The Apalachee High shooting, which took place in Winder, Georgia, captured national headlines and a flurry of statements from public officials.

“Jill and I are mourning the deaths of those whose lives were cut short due to more senseless gun violence and thinking of all of the survivors whose lives are forever changed,” President Joe Biden said in official remarks. “What should have been a joyous back-to-school season in Winder, Georgia, has now turned into another horrific reminder of how gun violence continues to tear our communities apart.”

While the circumstances that led to the shooting remained unclear, Biden pivoted immediately to his public policy agenda:

After decades of inaction, Republicans in Congress must finally say ‘enough is enough’ and work with Democrats to pass common-sense gun safety legislation. We must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines once again, require safe storage of firearms, enact universal background checks, and end immunity for gun manufacturers. These measures will not bring those who were tragically killed today back, but it will help prevent more tragic gun violence from ripping more families apart.

It’s not clear if any of these policies directly relate to the shooting at Apalachee High, but they’ve all been standard proposals in the Democratic Party’s toolkit for the past couple decades.

Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris echoed Biden’s call for change, but didn’t mention any specific policies she would want to see implemented.

“We’ve got to stop it, and we have to end this epidemic of gun violence in our country once and for all. You know it doesn’t have to be this way,” Harris said at public event in New Hampshire.

While Biden and Harris’s remarks were emblematic of how Democratic elected officials across the country responded, Republicans picked a different tact.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump expressed sympathy for the victims of the attack and condemned the shooter, who was taken alive, as a “sick and deranged monster.” Republicans largely followed Trump’s lead.

By now, these sort of responses to high-profile acts of gun violence are typical. Democrats respond by advocating for their standard toolkit of gun reforms while Republicans express sympathy for the victims without promoting any restrictions on gun access.

Occasionally, the two sides may come together to support a policy that’s politically feasible in this environment.

In the case of school shootings, that means “hardening” schools.

Democrats and Republicans can’t agree about how to regulate guns, but they have succeeded in implementing school safety measures that include putting more law enforcement in schools, implementing measures like metal detectors and reinforced doors, and requiring students in dozens of states to do active shooter drills.

And all of this is being done for a type of shooting that is actually very rare.

That can sound like a callous thing to say after a traumatic incident. But legislating emotionally rarely leads to good outcomes.

The fact is, as I’ve reported before, we typically lose more kids every year in pool drownings than we do school shootings. Yet free swim classes don’t seem to get a fraction of the attention as something like school hardening does.

And it’s not hard to understand why. School shootings have a terroristic quality; they strike fear into the hearts of students, faculty, administrators, parents, lawmakers, and the general public. The very possibility that some deranged person will walk into your child’s school and maim or kill your child is terrifying enough for you to sign up to anything in response.

But this cycle of being terrorized and reacting to that terror can be self-defeating. A few years ago, I reported on a study showing that mass shootings seem to correlate to news coverage of mass shootings — when a big shooting happens and gets a lot of press coverage, we see a cluster of shootings pop up after that. We may be experiencing mass shootings in clusters the same way we see suicide clusters.

Copycats thrive on the media frenzy around these acts of killing, leading us into a spiral of more acts of depravity.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t think hard about what is appropriate to help students who at risk of violence in schools — whether that be from a homicidal mass killer or from bullying or from self-harm.

But when we’re thinking about gun violence in particular, it’s important to not let the Columbine killers of the world dominate our minds.

What America’s gun violence looks like

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Mass shootings in high-profile public places — like concerts, parades, or schools — capture our imagination because they’re both terrifying and we can imagine that violence happening to us. What if our child was in that school? What if my loved one attended that concert?

But most of America’s gun violence comes in two forms: suicides and routine homicides.

Most years, suicides outpace homicides — by a lot. Some years, over 60% of gun deaths are suicides.

Suicides by their nature do not lend themselves to the same media coverage that homicides do. Even in the cases of suicidal mass killers — someone who commits a large-scale shooting with the intent to die — the mass killing is what really makes the headlines, not the suicide. And yet those suicides are making up the bulk of gun deaths.

This creates a problem where anti-suicide interventions, like mental health support, are not usually framed as preventing gun violence. These suicides are also heavily concentrated among certain demographics. Older white men have catastrophically higher rates of firearm suicide than any other group.

Gun homicides, on the other hand, are concentrated elsewhere. I used CDC data from 2022 to compose the following chart of the rate of firearm homicides among demographic categories:

The demographics of firearm homicides may help explain why our attention on the issue tends to gravitate towards high-profile acts of violence in places we don’t associate them with. The possibility of a shooting at a school is terrifying because we think to ourselves, something like that should never happen there.

But the flip side of this is that we have accustomed ourselves to deaths in some places, particularly in low-income minority communities.

A few days before four people were murdered in in Winder, four other people were murdered aboard a train in Chicago. The horrifying killings earned more news coverage than these sorts of events typically get — the fact that they happened on a train probably accounts for that — but the victims did not get a response from the same set of national politicians that the victims in Winder did.

We are accustomed to the kinds of violence that takes place in certain neighborhoods of Chicago. There were 617 homicides in Chicago in 2023, (most of them committed with guns) and that’s a city of just over 2.5 million people. There were about 900 murders in the nation of Japan the same year. Japan has a population of 125 million people.

If one year the nation of Japan were to have Chicago’s murder rate, it would be a national emergency. But in America, we’re just used to this slow grind of killing — except when it pops up somewhere exceptional, like in a school. Then there’s a lot of attention but rarely any action.

Part of what makes action on this topic difficult is political polarization, with Democrats sticking to their well-known toolkit of policies and Republicans typically endorsing no further restrictions on guns at all.

Honor culture plus endless guns equals lots of death

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But the other problem is that America is dealing with a gun violence problem that doesn’t really exist in any developed country and so it’s not clear what policy tools would even work.

Our gun suicide problem is driven by a combination of mental health factors and gun access, but our gun homicide problem is driven by a combination of gun access and cultural factors.

Cultural factors are not something any politician wants to dive headfirst into. There are too many tripwires to touch to where a lot of people just don’t bring up the topic altogether.

But it’s not a coincidence that America’s gun homicide problem is so heavily concentrated in a few places. Maine or Vermont, which have very few gun laws, are some of the safest states in the country.

Everytown for Gun Action, which is one of the main gun control advocacy groups, explains Maine’s low homicide rate like this:

Maine is also a permitless carry state, though it continues to have low gun violence relative to its firearm laws, likely in part because it is protected by the strong laws of other states in the region. 

That’s possible, but what’s more likely is that Maine is dealing with a completely different culture than say, my region of the country — the South.

The South is awash in what is called “honor culture.” Years ago, social psychologist Richard Nisbett named honor culture as the psychological factor driving the South’s extremely high rates of violence.

Nisbett’s theory helped offer an alternative to the old racist theories of American violence — pathologizing black men in particular — and the materialist theories that blame it all on poverty (the prior theory has no luck explaining why say, Ghana, is a remarkably safe country and the latter theory poorly explains why West Virginia has very few gun homicides compared to richer areas).

So what is honor culture? Allow Nisbett to explain, from an interview he gave to Everyday Psych:

Essentially the culture of honor is a socially adaptive response of Southern [U.S.] men to be more protective of their land and their livelihood, which means they get more upset and aggressive in response to threats to their reputation. There’s an expression in North Carolina from the 19^th century or probably earlier: “Every man is sheriff on his own hearth.” Back in the day, Southerners often didn’t have a sheriff around, so they had to be more aggressive in defending themselves and their livelihood. Now, the South is left with this culture that there’s no reason for anymore – the sheriff is usually around – but the culture is still there.

That’s it in a nutshell. Southerners developed a culture, much of it borrowed from Scots-Irish, where your reputation and your property is everything. You have to be willing to defend it with your life. Sometimes it’s all you have, and sometimes you’re the only one who can do it. That’s not the modern world we live in, for the most part, but that culture was passed down throughout the region.

And one of the groups that was immersed in it was southern African Americans, many of whom lived in underdeveloped areas where there was little rule of law after the end of slavery. Either you stand up for yourself or nobody else will. That’s the culture of honor.

Lest you think this is all speculation, the honor culture thesis has been tested many different ways. One of those ways was simply doing experiments on dudes from the South as opposed to dudes from the North. In response to an insult, Southerners were more likely to see an increase in testosterone and cortisol, suggesting more aggression and stress.

By itself, honor culture isn’t necessarily a bad thing. When you don’t have anyone else around to help you, it can be good to have the patriarch of a family standing up for his people’s rights and reputation. Lots of places in the world are dominated by honor cultures.

But it’s a different thing when you mix honor culture with guns, which is what you have not only in the United States but across the Americas. When you have to defend your reputation, it’s one thing. When you can easily access a gun to do it, it’s an entirely different thing.

What might effective action on gun violence look like?

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I realize I sort of made the situation sound hopeless. But it’s not entirely hopeless. From the 1990s through the 2010s, America cut gun murders in half.

How this happened is still debated to this day, but the consensus is that more effective policing played a big role. And this policing happened in an environment where gun restrictions didn’t get all that much tougher. So cracking down on serial violent offenders and more effectively addressing homicides by catching killers to reduce cycles of violence can work. Honor culture is most prevalent in places where people don’t trust the cops. So better policing can also help reduce the cultural factors that drive violence.

Can gun restrictions work? The reality is that tweaking background checks or banning the sale of boutique weapons (what the Democrats call assault weapons) is unlikely to make a big difference. America’s big killer is the handgun — ask any police department in America. And nobody’s proposing banning that (and it’s not clear our current courts would even allow us to).

But there are some gun reforms we can make on the margins that have been proven to work. The nonpartisan RAND Corporation did a review of all the big research and found that laws like safe storage laws that require parents to lock up their weapons properly to keep them away from children and increasing the age of purchase can help reduce accidental gun deaths and gun suicides. Keeping guns out of the hands of domestic abusers also seems to help, as does reducing the prevalence of stand-your-ground laws.

Most of these laws are put into place at the state and local level, meaning that this is where most of our attention should probably be. Notice that the laws Biden and the national Democrats are proposing are really not in RAND’s list. That’s because there isn’t a ton of evidence behind them. (UPDATE: Biden did advocate for safe storage laws and Georgia’s Democrats are doing the same this morning.)

The impulse to do something after horrific shootings like the one at Apalachee High is understandable. But because of our toxic mix of easy access to firearms plus high prevalence of honor culture, our gun homicide problem is a tough nut to crack.

More effective policing and some reforms on the edges can help move us in that direction, though. We just have to stop pretending it’s easy.