America is full of guns—one gun for every citizen—and Americans often use them to shoot one another. After this week’s failure of gun-control legislation to survive the Senate, it’s not enough anymore to say Americans love their guns. The question is: Why do we kill?
But the literature on guns is just as messy as the statistics—often completely contradictory, with some studies showing convincing correlation between guns and homicide, while others equally convincingly show none. In the end, most of it shares an unfortunately quality: too much of the language implies causation (or lack thereof) between guns and death but only really shows varying levels of correlation. This is a problem in much social science research, but seems particularly vivid here. A Centers for Disease Control task force in 2003 summed up the situation nicely: “The application of imperfect methods to imperfect data has commonly resulted in inconsistent and otherwise insufficient evidence with which to determine the effectiveness of firearms laws in modifying violent outcomes.”
Talk about a moving target.
But the ambiguity can be useful, if you’re willing to explore the dark gap between correlation and causation. So if we can give up on guns as the root of the problem, just for a while, there are a host of possible other causes for the special American brand of rich country violence. Let’s start with what we are not going to discuss. The list runs very roughly from least relevant to most relevant:
The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted. —D.H. Lawrence(...) When I started my research, I must admit, I assumed the academic literature would turn up unassailable arguments along the lines of this headline from Harvard: “Where there are more guns there is more homicide.”
But the literature on guns is just as messy as the statistics—often completely contradictory, with some studies showing convincing correlation between guns and homicide, while others equally convincingly show none. In the end, most of it shares an unfortunately quality: too much of the language implies causation (or lack thereof) between guns and death but only really shows varying levels of correlation. This is a problem in much social science research, but seems particularly vivid here. A Centers for Disease Control task force in 2003 summed up the situation nicely: “The application of imperfect methods to imperfect data has commonly resulted in inconsistent and otherwise insufficient evidence with which to determine the effectiveness of firearms laws in modifying violent outcomes.”Talk about a moving target.
But the ambiguity can be useful, if you’re willing to explore the dark gap between correlation and causation. So if we can give up on guns as the root of the problem, just for a while, there are a host of possible other causes for the special American brand of rich country violence. Let’s start with what we are not going to discuss. The list runs very roughly from least relevant to most relevant:
Hurricanes. Tornadoes. Riots. Terrorists. Gangs. Lone criminals
Race
Mental illness
Drug use
Religiosity or lack thereof
Violent media and video games
Poverty
Gun control laws or lack thereof
Crises of masculinity
Culture of honor
Public faith or lack thereof in government
Inequality
Of all these, income inequality rings the most true—and there is high correlation between inequality and homicide in studies—but beneath even that there is another issue that transcends all the standard bugaboos of race, class, and poverty, one possibly rooted deep in the primate building blocks of humanity.
It’s called social capital, and while it’s a relatively new term, it is an old concept, with American roots reaching as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville and his classic analysis of the United States in the 1830s, in which he identified both American individualism and an American propensity to gather into groups “very general and very particular, immense and very small.”
“No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil, than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamour is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants,” he wrote. “Everything is in motion around you; here, the people of one quarter of a town are met to decide upon the building of a church; there, the election of a representative is going on; a little further, the delegates of a district are posting to the town in order to consult upon some local improvements; or in another place the labourers of a village quit their ploughs to deliberate upon the project of a road or a public school.”
This engagement was central to de Tocqueville’s understanding of American democracy. He saw voluntary groups spreading like wildfire (among primarily white males, of course) and filling a gap between family on the local end and the state on the more distant end. And it was in this middle ground that de Tocqueville perceived a budding sense of a new and better common good.
Both in academia and the wider culture, social capital burst into the national consciousness in the mid-1990s, driven by political scientist Robert Putnam, who defined it as “the collective value of all ‘social networks’ (who people know) and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other (‘norms of reciprocity’).”
It includes everything from voting to dinner parties to Little League, from religious groups to farmer’s markets and the local zoning board. It includes Facebook, yoga classes, picnics of all kinds, hanging out on the stoop, and watching over the neighbor’s kids. Putnam raised an alarm about declining social capital, pointing to precipitous drops in the very voluntary associations—the Rotary Club, the Boy Scouts, the Jaycees—that de Tocqueville had gushed over and writing that “we are becoming mere observers of our collective destiny.” He attributed the decline to sprawl, television, and demographic shifts, but his underlying focus was on the struggles of dual-income middle-class families whose overworked members were not able to participate in wider society as they once did.
There are two kinds of social capital—bonding and bridging—and each impact a society differently. Bonding capital is what you get within a given group. These tend to be closer and more reliable bonds that form the foundation of our social capital. Yet bonding social capital is not always positive: Tight-knit groups can turn insular, reaching their logical conclusion in gangs and militias but with negative effects found in everything from families to groups of friends to certain kinds of religious communities.
In contrast, bridging social capital reaches across a societal divide such as race, region or religion and is by nature weak. But it also promotes empathy and tolerance and enlarges our radius of trust, allowing us to see other people as people, not as a faceless other.
This sense of bridging a divide is especially important in the U.S. because, contrary to popular opinion, we regularly put the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the individual in a way Europeans don’t. In surveys, Western Europeans are more likely than Americans to say citizens should follow their conscience and break an unjust law or that citizens should defy their homeland if they believe their country is acting immorally.
On the other hand, Americans are more likely to believe they control their own fate and to believe in a more laissez-faire relationship with the state. It’s a more complex mix than our myths allow for, and the end result is that it can be hard to fathom just how different Americans are from the rest of the world.
Race
Mental illness
Drug use
Religiosity or lack thereof
Violent media and video games
Poverty
Gun control laws or lack thereof
Crises of masculinity
Culture of honor
Public faith or lack thereof in government
Inequality
Of all these, income inequality rings the most true—and there is high correlation between inequality and homicide in studies—but beneath even that there is another issue that transcends all the standard bugaboos of race, class, and poverty, one possibly rooted deep in the primate building blocks of humanity.
It’s called social capital, and while it’s a relatively new term, it is an old concept, with American roots reaching as far back as Alexis de Tocqueville and his classic analysis of the United States in the 1830s, in which he identified both American individualism and an American propensity to gather into groups “very general and very particular, immense and very small.”
“No sooner do you set foot upon the American soil, than you are stunned by a kind of tumult; a confused clamour is heard on every side; and a thousand simultaneous voices demand the immediate satisfaction of their social wants,” he wrote. “Everything is in motion around you; here, the people of one quarter of a town are met to decide upon the building of a church; there, the election of a representative is going on; a little further, the delegates of a district are posting to the town in order to consult upon some local improvements; or in another place the labourers of a village quit their ploughs to deliberate upon the project of a road or a public school.”
This engagement was central to de Tocqueville’s understanding of American democracy. He saw voluntary groups spreading like wildfire (among primarily white males, of course) and filling a gap between family on the local end and the state on the more distant end. And it was in this middle ground that de Tocqueville perceived a budding sense of a new and better common good.
Both in academia and the wider culture, social capital burst into the national consciousness in the mid-1990s, driven by political scientist Robert Putnam, who defined it as “the collective value of all ‘social networks’ (who people know) and the inclinations that arise from these networks to do things for each other (‘norms of reciprocity’).”
It includes everything from voting to dinner parties to Little League, from religious groups to farmer’s markets and the local zoning board. It includes Facebook, yoga classes, picnics of all kinds, hanging out on the stoop, and watching over the neighbor’s kids. Putnam raised an alarm about declining social capital, pointing to precipitous drops in the very voluntary associations—the Rotary Club, the Boy Scouts, the Jaycees—that de Tocqueville had gushed over and writing that “we are becoming mere observers of our collective destiny.” He attributed the decline to sprawl, television, and demographic shifts, but his underlying focus was on the struggles of dual-income middle-class families whose overworked members were not able to participate in wider society as they once did.
There are two kinds of social capital—bonding and bridging—and each impact a society differently. Bonding capital is what you get within a given group. These tend to be closer and more reliable bonds that form the foundation of our social capital. Yet bonding social capital is not always positive: Tight-knit groups can turn insular, reaching their logical conclusion in gangs and militias but with negative effects found in everything from families to groups of friends to certain kinds of religious communities.
In contrast, bridging social capital reaches across a societal divide such as race, region or religion and is by nature weak. But it also promotes empathy and tolerance and enlarges our radius of trust, allowing us to see other people as people, not as a faceless other.
This sense of bridging a divide is especially important in the U.S. because, contrary to popular opinion, we regularly put the needs of the group ahead of the needs of the individual in a way Europeans don’t. In surveys, Western Europeans are more likely than Americans to say citizens should follow their conscience and break an unjust law or that citizens should defy their homeland if they believe their country is acting immorally.
On the other hand, Americans are more likely to believe they control their own fate and to believe in a more laissez-faire relationship with the state. It’s a more complex mix than our myths allow for, and the end result is that it can be hard to fathom just how different Americans are from the rest of the world.
by Nathan Hegedus, TMN | Read more:
Image: Georg Baselitz, Das Motiv im Grand Canyon, 2003. Copyright © Georg Baselitz. Courtesy Galleri Bo Bjerggaard, Copenhagen.
