Murder Most Routine

We're being confronted anew with bloodshed that isn't new

Kurt Andersen, reacting to the latest story of gun horror asks the question that always nags at me.

The answer is horrific gun crimes are normal in America. They always have been, whether we paid attention and saw patterns or didn’t. Armed Americans using gunfire as a debate tactic is a constatant. A quick search of newspaper archives shows incident….

Appleton Wisconsin Crescent 1969

After incident

Brazosport Facts 1998

After incident

The Gaston Gazette, Gastonia, North Carolina 2016

after incident

Paris, Texas, News 1999

There are literally a hundred thousand more over the years. And we can also evoke the incident-after-incident-after-incident mantra today, as within the last two weeks, as Andersen references, there have been the shootings of a 16 year-old Kansas City teen, a 20 year-old New York young woman, a 6 year-old North Carolina girl and her father, and two Texas cheerleaders.

Are such incidents new? No. But they tightly clustered in a way that concentrates the mind. Murders have increased significantly since 2019 , and while most of the aforementioned cases weren’t murders they were all shootings, and therefore potential murders. The percent of murders committed with firearms is also at an all time high, firearm use in the United States being the reason that ours is the most dangerous country within the OECD other than Mexico or Colombia.

America has always had a gun problem, with specific sub-categories of shootings generally following the overall trend. We’re not experiencing a change, fissure, or national breaking point. We’re just awash in guns. How would you even characterize the type of gun murder or assault that describes the cluster of shootings that have been getting recent coverage? Would they be of the “neighbors gunning down neighbors, or strangers, in their driveways ,or yards, or in some cases cars?” That’s not a category. Maybe someone will come up with a general descriptor called “hair trigger” shootings, but aren’t most of them?

If you search the Gun Violence Database, and choose your parameters to exclude drug crimes, gang crimes, hate crimes, shootouts, home invasions, accidents and robberies you will find that there are still almost a hundred shootings a day. Choose your own set of 4 shootings to craft a narrative of unprecedented anger or America newly at the breaking point. In fact, we’ve been living there for a while.

It reminds me a bit of “Road Rage” as a general category of societal violence. In the 1990s road rage incidents became the latest scourge, Time magazine describing it as “America's car sickness du jour.”

Time Magazine January 12 1998

The media at the time lit upon the “road rage” narrative, some state legislatures specifically targeted “aggressive driving, Hollywood churned out content about the phenomenon; still does in fact. One study from the 90’s tried to put a count on it, which found the actual number of incidents almost impossible to quantify. Despite the acknowledged difficulty in defining the problem it was still said to be on the rise.

According to a The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety studied more than 10,000 reported cases of road rage and found a 51 percent increase in serious incidents between 1990 and 1996.

While at the same time

…crash data suggest that road rage is a relatively small traffic safety problem, despite the volume of news accounts and the general salience of the issue.

The coverage of “road rage” spiked in the aughts, then steadied…

But incidents of road rage still occurred, and reports of road rage still persisted, with a story or a study surfacing every few years to assert it was on the rise.

The latest statistics, from the Gun Violence Archive, indicates that there were about 700 incidents of road rage every year from 2019-2021, and then an odd plunge to 501 incidents in 2022. But road rage murders were up even as incidents were down.

But just like the narrative of “hair-trigger” crimes being new or on the rise, the road rage data reflects one fact and several stories to explain the fact. The stories are that we’re angry- in our homes, in parking lots, in driveways, in cars. The fact is that gun crime is prevalent, and as incidents overall increase, incidents of specific types of gun crime keep pace.

2020 was a record breaking in terms of a spike in gun violence, but it was far from the year with the highest homicide rate. I wouldn’t dismiss the idea there might have been an uptick in incidents of short-fuse interpersonal violence, like the ones we’ve been hearing about so frequently, but I am certain that we’re hearing about them so frequently.

None of the old articles I screen-shoted to begin this post made national news. A few didn’t even make the front pages of their own local outlets. But today, media has the ability to cull information like never before, and news of certain types of killings no longer stay sequestered on page A12 of the Appleton Crescent. The information dissemination apparatus has exploded, and filters of skepticism or discernment have degraded. To be fair, as the coverage of the possibly-invented phenomenon of road rage demonstrates, we were never terribly discerning. But if there always was an appetite to be told that we are living in uniquely dangerous times, our current times and tech conspire to make that instinct seem especially convincing. News of these hair-trigger shootings are everywhere, algorithmically guaranteed to be unignorable.

We have not figured out how to address the rash of shootings that has always characterized America. We have expertly invented tools to assemble information about these incidents and highlight them to mass audiences. None of this is comforting, but it is familiar.