Expert: "There's something about being a gun owner that makes many people turn into Republicans"

America loves its guns more than it does its children. We “the Americans” are very sick from gun violence.

The most recent “high profile” mass shooting in America took place several weeks ago at the parade honoring the Kansas City Chiefs for their victory in the Super Bowl. Even the language of “high profile” signals to how common mass murder by guns in America is: in most other countries no such distinguishing adjective would be needed because any such crime would garner public outrage and sustained attention. In the several weeks since the mass shooting in Kansas City, there have been many such crimes all across the United States. Gun violence has killed at least 5,000 people this year in the United States. 

For those Americans who are not part of the gun cult, the solution to mass shootings and other gun violence is obvious. This is a public health crisis that should be met by common sense solutions such as mandatory background checks, waiting periods, mental health screenings, limiting access to certain types of firearms and ammunition, and other practical interventions.

In his new book “What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms”, Dr. Jonathan Metzl, who is the Frederick B. Rentschler II professor of sociology and psychiatry and the director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, argues that these “common sense” solutions are anything but easy and obvious – or always effective.

Moreover, in his widely praised new book and as explained in our conversation, Metzl also makes the controversial suggestion that the failure by Democrats, liberals, progressives, and others who believe in common sense gun solutions to sincerely listen to and understand how “gun rights advocates” view firearms as being central to their identities (in particular as white men and “conservatives”), beliefs about “freedom”, and what it means to be an “American” is limiting our ability to agree upon effective long-term solutions to the country’s plague of gun violence.

In all, Metzl is deeply concerned that what has become a type of script for how Americans talk about and understand gun violence, has made solving the crisis almost impossible.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

There was a mass shooting in Kansas City at the parade celebrating the Chiefs winning the Super Bowl. There have been many more mass shootings since that day a few weeks ago. Will Moloch, the Eater of Children and America's gun god, ever be satisfied with all the human sacrifices to it? All these "thoughts and prayers" are now worship words and incantations to summon Moloch. We are a defeated society and culture in terms of gun violence.

I'm from Kansas City, so this felt very personal— in fact, I was just back in Missouri this week giving a talk and I spoke on the shooting. Sports and parades and celebrations are supposed to be great unifiers. There were a million people at that parade, people of all backgrounds who came together. And then there is a shooting. And – that unity falls away as people are pushed into different ideological camps of pro- or anti- laws or regulations or public health. Shootings like this become what are called "polarizing crises.” Guns, trauma, and fear of mortality – and politicians and social media – turn celebration into division. The joy of common space becomes a multilevel tragedy that radiates outward in so many ways. Our divisions then come to seem existential and immutable. This is, as my new book suggests, What We’ve Become.

What of these "thoughts and prayers" and "hopes" and other such empty passive talk and slogans?

It's a ritual based in emotional responses that are not actual material responses. Thoughts and prayers are now part of the dance we do here in America. One side — and to be clear I am not making any kind of moral equivalent — says "thoughts and prayers, there's nothing we can do about it" or "it's mental illness" or "it's a bad guy with a gun and we can't stop criminals and that is why we to be armed." The mantra on the other side, my side, is that we need background checks and red flag laws. We need common sense gun reform. Gun violence is an epidemic.

Obviously, I agree with that conclusion about gun violence as a public health problem; I am a doctor. But in my book, I show how the discourse itself, both sides, construct a dialogue that goes nowhere by design, if the aim is actual change. Instead, calls for reform usually, for gun sellers, lead to more gun sales almost every time. Liberal calls for reform are used to fuel gun sales, because people are made to believe that "someone is coming to confiscate our guns!" But background checks and red flag laws are also very polarizing politically, as my work shows – they’re not as neutral as many liberals have come to believe. Moreover, critiques of thoughts and prayers have gotten to the point that liberals at times act as if religious responses to loss are inauthentic, which is not a great way start to a conversation. I’m liberal and I believe in science, but I also think and pray about victims and communities after mass shootings.

The people who actually say this "thoughts and prayers" stuff after a gun massacre, do they really believe it?

The problem is that "thoughts and prayers" and "we send our hopes" has become political nonsense talk, or a way of signaling inaction. In my new book, I interview a lot of everyday gun owners—who have come to know that when a politician says, "thoughts and prayers" he or she really means “you are safe, I’m not going to support regulations.” But again, in my new work, I’m also quite critical of my own side for performing our own versions of empty speak. As I show, we fell into the trap of conflating mass shooters with gun owners in our rhetoric, as one example.

How did we get to this point in America with gun violence where it is very hard to have these conversations about guns and gun violence and deaths after mass shootings and other tragedies? People feel very vulnerable. What triggers many gun owners I interview is that they feel like the government is tyrannical, and it's going to come get them. They are afraid that the liberals are going to come take their guns and they will be left to criminals. Government background checks and red flag laws are seen as government intervention. And to be clear, a background check is a government database. And a red flag law invites the police into your home to do a welfare check on your relative. So, for the gun owners I talked with, it becomes a self-perpetuating cycle that justifies why they want guns in the first place — and after mass shootings, they go out and buy more of them to protect themselves from the government.

I started to understand how, from this perspective, the approach that I and other liberals have been perpetuating may by itself not be the best way to solve the country's gun violence problem—in as much as gun owners are the very people whose participation we require for many public health interventions. And of course, they’re hearing my message from one side – but that of Trump and the GOP, who say you can keep your guns with no regulation, on the other.

What is the difference between someone who happens to own a gun versus someone who identifies as a "gun owner"?

The idea of who is a gun owner is not static. It is incredibly dynamic, which is why one-size-fits-all all interventions become difficult.

In my new book, I look closely at the messages public health people like me send to gun owners. For a long time, we’ve implied that to be a “common sense” gun owner, is to play by the rules of my side, which are public health, safety, trust in government and expertise, etc. But I show how that language only speaks to the gun owners who are willing to play by my rules. There are many gun owners who respond to very different assumptions about safety and autonomy — and their logic(s) make common sense…to them.  

I also look in depth at how scholars like me assume people will think about guns like they did cigarettes or seatbelts. But guns are incredibly different in so many ways, and you're not speaking to many gun owners if you're trying to convince them that their behavior and relationship with guns is unhealthy when they see it as a sign of power. The NRA and gun sellers have been manipulating the message: “You need a gun because you're not going to be protected, and you need your power.” And it's broadening. 30 years ago, a stereotypical gun owner was some guy down here in Tennessee with a Confederate flag. But courts have dramatically expanded who can own and carry a gun. now the fastest growing groups of gun owners are people of color who have been directly targeted by advertising after the murder or George Floyd, for example, saying the police aren't going to protect you. Jewish Americans now are buying guns, because they're worried about what's happening in the country and world. The real fight over guns is who gets to own one and carry one. Liberals are losing that battle in the domain of public opinion and the courts. We need to change our strategy. 

Guns intersect gender, race, politics, and most other aspects of American society and life. To that point, how do you make sense of the infamous AR-15 ad which presented that rifle as somehow getting "your man card." I showed that ad to a friend who is very experienced with various firearms from his time in the military and being a warfighter and he laughed at it. Why does that “consider your man card reissued" ad and others like it resonate with some audiences (in particular men) and not with others?

After years of interviews for the book, I have seen how owning a gun can make people more conservative, and more concerned that liberals will impose laws that leave them unprotected. I spoke to one man who was an “anti-gun liberal” for the first 35 years of his life. Then he started carrying a gun at work. That then developed into his feeling that he could not go anywhere without a gun. He couldn't get his mail without a gun. He wouldn't leave the house without a gun. When he heard that "the liberals" are coming to take away his guns — which is what Trump said at the NRA convention — that terrified him. He supports whoever lets him keep his weapons and his power, as he sees it now. There's something about being a gun owner that makes many people turn into Republicans.

Then there’s the story I tell in my book, about the Waffle House mass shooting in Nashville in 2018. This is another complex story about white male gun ownership. The man who is at the center of my book is the shooter, Travis Reinking. I show his secret home movies – where he talks about his homosexual desires. He would have all these psychotic dreams and fantasies about having sex with other men—but that was not OK in the conservative world where he lived. The gun became his symbol that assured him that he was still a man. As I show, Reinking was literally sleeping naked with his AR-15. A Bushmaster, just like in that ad. The man card could not be more explicit from a psychoanalytic perspective in the story I tell. The "man card" theme literally reassured him that he was the ideal heterosexual man that he really wasn't.

Then he got arrested and the FBI took his guns away. He basically had a psychotic break, which caused him to move from Illinois where he couldn't carry his gun to Tennessee. He got his guns back and became a mass shooter: Masculinity restored.

What of these pistols and rifles that are adorned with Trump’s image? These are mostly expensive custom jobs. Who would want such a thing? What does Trump on a gun symbolize?

Trump has positioned himself as the defender of a specific pro-gun ideology. Of course, it’s largely an act. Nobody's taking away anybody's guns right now, this is not a serious debate or discussion about the Second Amendment. But it’s politically savvy. Trump is telling his public that you get to keep your guns — which means your power and privilege. And by comparison, President Biden is arguing for regulations and restrictions.

The data tells us that treating gun violence like a public health problem actually works. There is a great deal of evidence, from both the United States and other countries, that these common sense approaches work. Why should those of us with the evidence and science on our side surrender to the feelings and emotions – and disinformation and lies and myths – that are believed in by those people and groups who oppose such policies?

I'm for the facts. I support effective gun laws. And my argument in this book is not that we shouldn't have gun laws. My point is that we lose in terms of the debate and American society by just framing guns and public policy just around the rhetoric of risk and violence. Gun injuries and deaths are horrible. We have about 50,000 a year, that's 50,000, too many. But there are also about 500 million guns and 82 million or so gun owners. One side is talking about what it means to be a victim of this horrible thing that kills 50,000 people. But the other side is talking about what it means to be a gun owner — and this is 82 or so million people.

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For example, with the 500 million guns in this country background checks are not going to work for a very long time. That is a point-of-sale intervention, but we already have more guns than people floating around. Or for red flag laws to work, you must basically call the authorities on your relatives. Many people don't trust the police and they are not going to call them. The risk of inviting law enforcement into their homes is greater than the potential risk from a relative with a gun.

Again, I do believe guns are a public health problem. I'm for the science; I'm a practitioner of the science. But the frame can be limiting – as I write in my essay, Guns Are Not Just a Public Health Problem, they are problems of race, of history, of plurality. The health frame has blinded us to how, when the GOP now talks about guns, they are really talking about power in a much broader sense. The right wing has used the gun issue to take over the court system across red state America, and seed judges all the way up to the Supreme Court, who are then overturning the will of voters in very concrete ways. Ultimately, for the right, guns are a conduit for a much larger governing project, If you just see guns as a public health problem, you don't see this much bigger agenda. If you just focus on public health, you are missing the threat to democracy. It is all part of a larger matrix of power, what Patrick Blanchard calls "gun power."

The title of your new book is “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms.” What have we become?

I first wanted the book to be called "How We Lost." And to my mind the threat is urgent and real, and I meant the book as a provocation and a wake-up call. If Trump wins the 2024 election, having large numbers of non-government actors who are armed and mobilized for him is going to change how people live in this country, and then you add the issue of the NRA’s influence on judges and courts. We will have moved well beyond background checks, and rapidly so.

But the ultimate title feels more right, and speaks to how we have normalized, habituated, and internalized the trauma of mass shootings. Gun violence has become constitutive of who we are.

What of the “living and dying”?

The story I tell in the book is about four young people who were just out celebrating and never thought of themselves in relation to the gun debate and within less than a second, their lives are defined by being victims of mass shooting. They lived as individuals and they died, tragically and way too soon, in a way that comes to be a metonym for the experience of being "American" for a lot of people.

The horrific 2018 mass shooting in the Nashville Waffle House. Why did you choose to focus on that mass shooting and to make it the throughline of the new book?

We have a mass shooting every day. If it did not impact you personally, we move on a few days later. I wanted to tell the story of what happens when we slow it down and really pay attention. Here I do this by focusing on one mass shooting.  The Waffle House shooting took place in my hometown. This was also a shooting where a naked white man with an AR-15 burst into a waffle house that is in Antioch – a largely nonwhite working-class part of town. He was the only naked person, and he was the only white person in the Waffle House and killed four young adults of color and badly injured four more and traumatized the whole community. How did a naked white man from Morton, Illinois with an AR-15 end up in a Waffle House at 2:30 on an early April morning? How did that gun get there? As the story progresses it becomes even more clear about how his naked white body is a metaphor for the bigger racial problems around guns and gun violence in America.

A naked white man walks into a Waffle House with an “assault-style” rifle and proceeds to massacre a bunch of Black people. If someone pitched that story it would likely be thrown in the slush pile as hack work. But in America, race and violence and guns are a surreality. The unreal is real. America is sick in so many ways.

It was an awakening for me—and I’ve been studying guns for a long time. I thought I knew the story and then ended up…with a far deeper awareness of how the terror of gun violence is also the terror of the color line. When I first heard about the Waffle House shooting, I thought it was going to be like the Buffalo mass shooter who was a white supremacist that hated black people. The Waffle House shooter was a lot more terrifying in a banal way. I listened to hundreds of hours of Reinking’s tape and testimony and videos. I never heard him say one racist thing. I make no claims about his interior life and beliefs. But an armed man with a gun — even one bent on murder — is seen as a patriot by the system, someone whose rights are to be respected and not disarmed by the system. Race is omnipresent here: a white man with a gun, even if he's a homicidal white man, is someone whose rights are to be protected until the moment he pulls the trigger. But then the other part of the story is after the murders happened, the state of Tennessee had a decision to make. Would we pass laws to make sure this never happened again because he traveled here to commit murder because of these loose gun laws? Or would the state mobilize to protect the rights of people like the shooter? As I show, the rights of white men trump the lives of the people who were killed.

Americans experience so many mass shootings that we don’t remember them all. One takes place and then another one occurs ad infinitum. This type of organized forgetting is indicative of a traumatized and profoundly unwell society. But the people who are injured and maimed, the families and friends of the dead, the larger community and those many other people who are impacted directly and indirectly do not have the luxury of forgetting.

If you carry the pain of every mass shooting with you, you would not be able to function. This is what soldiers do in a war. They lose a friend and then they're back on the battlefield the next day. That is almost how we act in this country with gun violence. That wasn't always the case. The Columbine shooting was news for a year and the Parkland shooting was news for six months. Same with the Sandy Hook shooting. Now mass shootings are in the news for three days. And so, this is about habituation and conditioning. We are now so numb. In the book, I wanted to talk about the long-term effects for the people, their families, and communities from gun violence. And for us, people not impacted but who now must look over our shoulders at parades. We move on — but we are never the same.