On July 4, 2023, the hottest day on earth, residents of Highland Park gathered in front of their city hall to remember the victims of the massacre that took place there a year earlier. There was music, a moment of silence, and Mayor Nancy Rotering spoke of the damage done by a single gun in a single minute: 83 rounds fired, seven killed, dozens more injured. “We know the impact of gun violence,” Rotering said.
“Gun violence.” It happens so often now, there’s a danger that we’re getting inured to it. Not the bloody event itself, but the term, sliding into our ears as easily as other compound nouns we’re used to, like weather report, or school bus, or even its close cousin, gang violence.
But gun violence is different from those, and the difference is significant. It’s a Trojan Horse, with an opposing army inside.
OK, I’m a writer. I might be hyper-focused on language. But let’s take a minute here to note that the idea that words are important has never had more street cred than it has right now. The nursery school lesson of “sticks and stones” (“may break my bones, but words can never hurt me”) is ancient history, as are the nightclub seminars of Lenny Bruce, surveying his audiences of spics and micks, kikes and dykes, and any other slur you can think of, to talk about how power comes from the suppression of words, not the use of them.
Nobody’s just blowing off slurs and insults anymore.
Marjorie Taylor Greene addresses another right-wing congressperson as a “little bitch”? She’s booted from the so-called Freedom Caucus. Alderperson Rossana Rodriguez Sanchez tweets a poll asking if an Italian ice monument would be a good way to honor Italian heritage in Chicago? There’s a demand for her resignation.
But not all damaging words and phrases are as obvious as the b-word or a bad joke.
“Gun violence prevention” is now the favored way to describe the mission of organizations and people seeking to end the Wild West environment that lax and nonexistent gun laws have given us. And Highland Park, under Rotering’s leadership, has been in the forefront of that effort, enacting its own assault weapon ban in 2013. But the yoking of those two words can imply that guns—like, say, knives—have an existence apart from violence.
They do not.
Guns have a single purpose: to hit their target and take it out. Gun violence is as redundant as “bomb violence” would be. And on a subconscious level, “gun violence” can buy into the fantasy that there’s some other kind of gun activity—a congenial, even nostalgic culture of hunters and target shooters, harmless as a sewing circle, that needs to be perpetuated.
Do you know anyone who’s hunting because that’s the only way they can put food on the table? Didn’t think so. Hunting now is “sport,” a dying(!) sport, with an ever-dwindling number of licenses being sold.
If we don’t buy into that fantasy, the gun industry wants us to believe that we need guns to defend ourselves from—you pick it: the armed robber, the 15-year-old with bad aim on a drive-by, or the government. This has been a successful marketing ploy. There are now about 400 million guns in America—more guns than people—and we are afraid of crowds, and of each other.
I’m not kidding myself that a handgun in my purse or pocket would save me in any of those situations. And I don’t want to have to worry that the person in line behind me at the grocery checkout or coffee shop is angry, irrational, and packing. What we need, if not gun eradication, is much stronger gun control, starting with a reinstated federal assault weapons ban and legal liability for manufacturers and sellers. Did you know that they were granted broad immunity by a 2005 law signed by George W. Bush?
In fact, before “gun violence’’ and the effort to reduce it became the favored terminology, “gun control” was the more direct phrase we used to hear a lot from organizations fighting the proliferation of firearms.
Here’s a relevant statistic: domestic violence victims are five times more likely to be killed if the abuser has access to a gun.
We’re not able to eradicate the human tendency to violence, but we don’t have to make it so easy for the brutal husband (yes, it’s almost always a man who’s pulling the trigger)—or the nascent mass murderer—to arm themselves. We don’t have to stand by while our world is saturated with weapons.
The problem we can remedy is a gun problem.