A tale of two narratives

Yesterday, a shooting in an Indiana mall reminds us that even as COVID has passed, the media remains a tale of narrative, not news. A gunman entered a mall and killed three people before a citizen who was legally carrying a handgun pulled it and killed the shooter. CNN, the leader in breaking mass shooting stories to whom Uvalde represents it’s best hope for gun control had this to say:

Fox News, on the other-hand:

The details don’t matter. What matters is the media has performative confirmation bias and without independent, self sourced work like Substack, readers are fed narrative rather than information and critical thinking.

In the past month, I have been evaluating businesses to buy and of the hundreds I’ve looked at, it’s a local gun range and retail shop that is most interesting to me. Over the course of my life, I will spend on the order of $250,000 in car insurance premiums for an accident I don’t expect to have. I will spend an equal amount on fire insurance, flood insurance and break in insurance for a once in a lifetime event. I spend on the order of $1200 a year for 37 years of term life insurance (to get that story, you’ll have to read What the F@&k is Wrong with Everybody Else?”). Health insurance is on the order of $9,000 a year for life and I go to the doctor once every 3 - 5 years, and that was before their COVID performance. If I’m not bleeding out, I’m likely not going. I raise all this because we are conditioned to prepare for the worst.

Imagine you are at a mall in Indiana with your kids looking for matching t-shirts that say “I’m with Stupid →” and a man opens fire in your vicinity. You can’t tell me that the first thing that wouldn’t cross your mind is “Of all the times I wish I had a gun, this is it.” All gun incidents end with guns, usually the police. Hockey teams have an enforcer that ensures that if someone takes a cheap shot at your best player, they pay the price. Russia and the United States have nuclear weapons as a deterrent. Why would you not own a gun as an insurance policy against a random event if you are trained, store it properly and understand the law?

There are 400 million guns in America. Most gun “violence” is suicide, conveniently included in the gun death stats (28,000 of the 40,000 gun deaths here are suicides with the rest gangs in Chicago… I kid). New York has very serious gun laws, and an active shooter in Buffalo killed 10.

To be clear, when it comes to suicide we don’t even make the per capita top 20:

Don’t “yeah but me…” if you are going to kill yourself, you are going to kill yourself one way or the other. Stats are stats and differentially, access to guns doesn’t promote suicide. Depression does.

So, there is an epidemic. It’s of mental health. It’s of social media. It’s of Hollywood movies. It’s of people and their coping mechanisms. But, when all else fails, I want to own a gun as my insurance policy. Similar to fossil fuels, the easy answer and politically convenient is to regulate supply and not mention demand. However it is demand that is flexible. We could limit AC use to 85 F, restrict driving to 20 miles a week, only allow Amazon delivery once a month… But we don’t. Focus on mental health, focus on laws if your gun is used in the commission of a crime, and focus on hardening easy targets like schools. There are solutions, but both sides of the aisle and their respective media arms need to start having dialogue, not pushing narrative.

This is a very worthy watch on gun culture if you haven’t seen it.