Loaded Questions

On two books about mass shootings, only one of which exists

I started this before the recent tragedy in Nashville, so it’s a grim coincidence that the book and movie I was planning to write about—Paul Auster’s Bloodbath Nation and Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine—are both about mass shootings. I’m posting it a week after, which points to one of the practical issues of trying to write about them: most people only pay attention for a few days after each one. (As I write this, the news cycle has already moved on to the Trump indictment.)

In the wake of the Las Vegas massacre in 2017, I started researching and writing about mass shootings. I spent about a year searching newspaper archives and racking up late fees at the campus library, reading about colonial history and the evolution of firearms and the American media. Eventually I wrote a book proposal and sent it out. It was met with the same shrug most book proposals get: not commercial enough. I pitched an excerpt to a few magazines, didn’t hear back, and gave up. That was four years ago. I’ve been pissed about it ever since.

So when Auster’s Bloodbath Nation was published in January, I was curious. It sounded pretty similar to my failed project: a book-length essay by an author with a personal connection to gun violence (and to guns) that takes the long historical view of mass shootings. I tried not to be bitter about that, but it’s possible that parts of my response to this book might be sour grapes.

The best thing I can say about Bloodbath Nation is that it’s an earnest, cogent attempt to analyze mass shootings and the reasons and responsibility for them. Most writers engage with gun violence only via outraged social media posts to people who already agree with them, so I respect Auster’s effort to do something more substantial. His book also fills a gap in the literature. For such a major issue, there aren’t as many books about mass shootings as you might think, an absence I noticed while researching them. 

I think the response to my book proposal was right: books about mass shootings don’t have a lot of commercial potential. American audiences don’t have the same level or depth of interest in the subject as they do in, say, serial killers. The best books I’ve read about mass shootings tend to be about individual events,¹ which makes me wonder if writers are leery of approaching them as a phenomenon. I’m guessing that also has a lot to do with mass shootings being one of the hottest-button issues in American life. So give Auster credit for his ambition.

The audience for a book like this one, a long essay by a literary novelist published by an independent press, is bound to be mostly anti-gun, which Auster seems to understand. He spends a fair amount of time playing the greatest hits of gun control, comparing guns to cars and lamenting the minority of Americans who own them, studiously avoiding the facts that car rights aren’t protected by the Constitution, or that the minority of gun owners is twenty million larger than the one that voted for our president. He also spends pages interpreting the Second Amendment by what he believes it says, rather than what the Supreme Court has repeatedly decided it does.² And fair enough: there’s nothing wrong with understanding your audience.

But Auster’s also brave enough to go against the liberal orthodoxy on gun control, which he argues isn’t likely to solve mass shootings. Auster makes a point I’ve often tried to myself: even if guns were somehow banned tomorrow, it probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. He cites one estimate that there are currently 394 million guns in America, and compares a theoretical gun ban to Prohibition in terms of how effective it would be. I might compare it to the war on drugs, a long, spectacular, expensive failure that has contributed to or created so many of our worst social issues.³ There are a lot of Americans who want to own guns, and our government is historically awful at banning things its citizens want. Add in the current Supreme Court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, and it seems pretty clear that gun control isn’t going to be as big a part of a solution to gun violence as most on the left seem to think.

While I admire Auster’s overall project, its execution leaves something to be desired. Mass shootings are not a subject that lends itself to the broad and shallow treatment a book this short mandates. For example, Auster looks to American colonial history—and particularly the genocide of Native Americans—for insight into how mass shootings originated. But he relies too much on the same few secondary sources,⁴ and leaves a lot of important things out. He focuses on the English colonies, ignoring the Spanish, who introduced both guns and gun massacres to the Americas more than a century before Jamestown. The book barely mentions the long and sordid history of racist gun control laws, and neglects entire categories of American gun massacres, like the white-supremacist terrorism of the Reconstruction era or robber barons’ penchant for mowing down striking workers with Gatling guns.

Maybe my biggest issue is that Auster engages in the same misguided synecdoche as nearly all other media about mass shootings, mistaking them for gun violence at large. Although the book—or at least the jacket copy—claims to be about the latter, it focuses mostly on mass shootings and only includes photos of sites where they happened, despite acknowledging that mass shootings account for roughly one percent of all gun murders. That one percent is also the only kind that gets any real media coverage, a major factor in mass shootings that Auster mostly overlooks. Which is not to say that mass shootings aren’t important or deserving of attention—only that they are, in many ways, including their causes and solutions, a separate issue from the other 99 percent of gun deaths.

Around the time I finished Auster’s book, I rewatched Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine, perhaps the best-known American work about mass shootings. I hadn’t seen it since it came out twenty years ago, and was struck by how much the gun debate has changed since it was made. Moore spends most of its two-hour runtime trying to answer the question of why mass shootings happen in America, and takes a broader view than do his contemporary liberal brethren on the potential answers. He explores a number of possible factors: not only guns, but American foreign policy, the military industrial complex, violent movies and music, capitalism and inequality, and our news media, especially its fearmongering and sensationalism. Moore never explicitly identifies a cause, but suggests that the answer to what causes mass shootings is all of the above.

I’m no expert—I never did finish my book—but I think he’s probably right.

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A few other unrelated things I’ve read/watched/liked this month:

• Steven Moore’s new collection of essays, The Distance from Slaughter County. Steven’s a friend, and I actually read this a few months ago, but it came out in March. It’s a wide-ranging book in the best way, but all of the essays touch on place, and specifically on what it’s like to grow up in a rural, largely conservative American place—he’s from Iowa—and to wind up in a much different one, literally and figuratively. You can sample a few of the essays here, and buy the book here. (It’s worth buying for the Shania Twain essay alone.) Oregonians, he also has a couple of events soon, including one in Corvallis on 4/29.

• Last Chance U: Basketball, the Netflix documentary series about community college sports. The basketball version is a spinoff of the original, which is about football, and the most recent season seems to be the last for the series. Ever since it debuted in 2016, I’ve been trying to convince everyone I know to watch it. I don’t think I’ve been very successful. Last Chance U exists in that tiny space on our cultural Venn diagram in which the sports and literary spheres overlap, which means usually I’m either trying to convince a literary person to watch a show about sports, or trying to convince a sports person to watch a character-focused series about obscure junior colleges. But it might be the best documentary series I’ve ever seen. It’s incredibly smart and subtle, and beautifully shot, much more of an arty documentary than it is reality TV.

• A while ago, I was teaching the Zapruder film in my true crime class when I stumbled on this old New York Times op-doc by Erroll Morris. In it, the author Josiah Thompson, who first noticed the infamous “umbrella man” in the Zapruder film and other films and photos of JFK’s assassination, talks about John Updike’s idea of a “quantum dimension” in historical research, where if you look at any event enough, you reach a level of random, inexplicable weirdness. Watch the doc for the rest of what he says, but I love that idea, which is true to my experience of writing nonfiction.

• On a recent episode of the NYT Book Review podcast, Dwight Garner talked at length about Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, one of my favorite weird/true crime-ish nonfiction books, and one I have repeatedly tried—mostly unsuccessfully—to teach. 

• I loved this article from Filmmaker Magazine that applies Ursula LeGuin’s “Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” to structuring nonfiction/documentary texts. There’s a lot of smart stuff about non-narrative structure in particular: nonlinear time, decentering conflict, and the polyvocal approach.

• After writing about AI last month, I stumbled on Voice.ai, a free-to-try app—disclaimer: it is definitely harvesting your information—that can alter your voice in real time to resemble those of various presidents and celebrities. Thankfully, it’s still pretty bad at the moment. I’m not ready for deepfake podcasts.

1. Two that come to mind are Dave Cullen’s Columbine and Tom Zoellner’s A Safeway in Arizona.

2. As a philosophical exercise, I happen to think the militia clause is more relevant than Antonin Scalia did, myself. But I also acknowledge that Constitutional rights are not subject to my personal interpretation.

3. In the absence of criminal justice reform, gun control would play out the same way drug laws have, by disproportionately punishing people of color and the poor.

4. Albeit good ones, especially Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment.