Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment Is Killing America's Heartland

by Jonathan M. Metzl

gun ownership became a defense of internalized notions of racial order as well as an ...

Privileges ultimately lay the foundation for politics. Guns became the totems for particular versions of white identity politics that rose with the Tea Party and soon encompassed the entire GOP. In his successful 2016 Missouri gubernatorial campaign, controversial conservative Eric Greitens won an election in which he handed out “ISIS hunting cards” at campaign rallies and filled the airwaves with ads showing himself firing a “Gatling-style machine gun” into a lake.

Ha just wait

Looking back to the complex histories of guns and race in America is not meant to disparage anyone’s right to feel safe and secure. Protecting self, family, and community represents a core human drive.

Sure but also be rational ffs

At the same time, investing such deep authority into externalized objects is complicated. Psychiatrists like me sometimes think that men who outsource their sense of power onto external objects—and particularly onto objects shaped like guns—do so in ways that convey deeper, gendered insecurities about potency and perhaps even racial insecurities or projected guilt.

No shit

guns are also incredibly dangerous, but the danger they pose to people who own and carry them and to their families becomes harder to acknowledge or recognize when these objects of potential self-destruction carry such weighted connotations.

the Man Card represented a footnote in a two hundred–year American history that coded firearms as larger than the sum of their actions, stocks, and barrels. Firearms connoted tools that claimed to help white men maintain privilege or restore it when it seemed under threat.

the nostalgia imbued in the object often made it harder to see how, when taken to permitless, open-carry extremes, expectations of duly-owed power brought with them the potential to make even white lives more perilous and less safe.

Gun logic required imagining danger around every corner; losing the Man Card needed to remain a constant threat. Over time, the dominant skill set and survival strategy for coping involved neither compromise nor negotiation.

There was this weird sort of mentality amongst the rural white folk that we gotta take up arms because the protesters could be coming for us.

So around that time, my dad bought a gun, even though he still lives in rural Missouri—in a different part than the one we grew up in, but still lives in the St. Louis area—and my best friend from high school, who lives nearby, bought a pistol for my dad and began like intense instruction in the use of firearms.

It was so disturbing to me because I walked into Dad’s house—I don’t know how well you know that area, I know you’re a Missouri person from long ago; he lives in a very safe suburb—and I walked into his house, and he and his wife were loading bullets into magazines on the living room floor while the music was playing, and I just thought, What the fuck has happened in St. Louis?

So constant referral to the “world” as if it’s not what we used to think it was, the “world” and it’s changing and radical Islam and Ferguson. I think it had a lot to do with the sort of zeitgeist of the sort of anti-police protests that began in Ferguson but extended through Baltimore and Wisconsin, other states where there were other shootings. North Carolina, where these things were happening and you were seeing these on the news, it was confirmatory evidence. “See, it’s not just an isolated thing in Ferguson, Missouri; this is what we have to do as white Americans.”

This certainly had a racial undertone feeling, and it did for my friend too, who again would say, “Racist? That’s a joke. Are you kidding? I’m an educated professional; many of my good friends are black,” and while that’s true, they would be the friends in his consulting firm. You know what I’m saying?

questions of risk emerged powerfully in the survivor stories people told in Cape Girardeau—where grieving relatives searched for warning signs they may have seen or preventive actions they might have taken. Yet these very same questions were rendered elusive by the social, political, and historical frameworks surrounding gun research and ownership.

Of course, in some other universe, coming up with better formulations of gun risk in places like Missouri would be entirely possible and even desired. Moreover, risk calculation is largely straightforward for pretty much any other topic except guns. Risk is an algorithm, a formula, a recipe. Risk is an exposed nail, unsecured scaffolding, a toxic vapor in the air. Risk is something people want to avoid.

risk becomes exceedingly difficult to evaluate when the variables blink on and off, seemingly vital facts are painted into the primer, and usual ways of building consensus disappear from view. Without a firm set of findings on which to base best practices, risk becomes an abstraction onto which people project anxieties, biases, and fears.

Politicians and lobbyists then manipulate the knowledge vacuum surrounding risk to balkanize everyday people on matters of life, death, and mundane daily routine—matters about which, if left to their own devices, people could probably forge consensus.

Bullshit. People make choices.

Calculations of risk produce ever-safer cars, medications, bike lanes, and building codes. Yet the very idea of even studying risk becomes a risk itself when the conversation turns to guns, laying the groundwork for decisions that seem at odds with individual and national well-being.

Gun-industry trade organizations fund leading gun suicide–prevention programs—and then force them to restrict mention of the potential risks posed by firearms.

“Kansas City’s Terrifying Year of Homicides—the Worst in 24 Years,” read a headline in the Kansas City Star. That same month, the New York Times reported that homicide in New York plunged “to a level not seen since the 1950s.” Yet instead of asking the seemingly obvious questions—Did the fact that New York restricted gun ownership relate to its success? How can we model these strategies elsewhere?—GOP politicians in the US Congress championed a so-called concealed-carry reciprocity bill that would allow guns from places like Missouri to flow more freely into cities like New York.

The absurdity is furthered by another reality, one that will be our focus for much of the remainder of the Missouri section of this book: research that even attempts to use established statistical methods to assess the relative risk of firearms is roundly critiqued as unscientific by the same people who try to block funding for gun science.

To recall, Missouri had a long tradition of gun ownership in rural and hunting communities. At the same time, the state closely regulated handgun sales in an attempt to assure that licensed dealers or private sellers sold firearms only to low-risk persons. From 1921 until 2007, Missouri enforced a permit-to-purchase (PTP) law that required anyone wanting to purchase a handgun to apply in person at a local sheriff’s office.

Several lifelong Missouri residents with whom I spoke explained what it was like to buy and sell firearms under the PTP process. As they put it, the regulations were far from intrusive for gun buyers and represented rote components of everyday transactions surrounding guns. “It was no big deal at all,” a retired lawyer from Joplin who grew up working in his parents’ pawn and gun shop told me. “We never thought anything of it, just took a few minutes. Kind of made sense to have someone track the guns in town.”

By comparison, Connecticut had a largely uneven history of gun-control legislation until 1995, when its lawmakers passed PTP legislation mandating that all handgun buyers undergo background checks and complete safety courses.

Lots of gun companies in CT

The relevance of a comparison between the two states would thus seem clear. Missouri and Connecticut modeled two polar opposite approaches at the core of larger debates about guns in America: whether more or fewer guns and gun laws led to more or less crime.

People usually ask these kinds of basic questions about most any type of legislation when they want to know if what their politicians did had the impact they wanted it to or if unforeseen or unintended consequences altered the calculus of reward versus risk.

This was the approach taken by the Hopkins group, which published two high-profile comparative studies that compared the effects of the removal of PTP legislation in Missouri and on the potential effects of differing approaches to guns between Missouri and Connecticut.

These claims built on an earlier paper by Webster, which found that the repeal of Missouri’s PTP law was likely associated with increased “diversion” of guns to criminals.

Then in a 2015 study, the group used advanced statistical modeling to compare the potential effects of PTP laws on gun suicide rates in Missouri and Connecticut between 1981 and 2012. This second research paper involved a labor-intensive process of compiling data on all recorded suicides in Connecticut and Missouri over the roughly thirty-year time period, and then dividing these lists into firearm- and non-firearm suicides and pre- and post-PTP law changes for each state.

Connecticut experienced a drop in its firearm suicide rate coincident with the adoption of a PTP handgun law that was greater than nearly all of the 39 other states that did not have such a law at that time, and Missouri experienced an increase in its firearm suicide rate following the repeal of its PTP handgun law that was larger than all states that retained their PTP laws.

Both studies were relatively straightforward. Before and after. Compare, then compare again. Run some analyses, make some charts and tables. Estimate trends. This represented sound scientific practice.

Note the passivity of these conditional sentences. Physicians can counsel patients and family members. A PTP law that would restrict access to handguns could prevent suicide. The phrasing is in no way declarative, or in any way suggests that the researchers advocated taking away anyone’s guns. Instead, the argument conveys a measured position taken by scholars who knew they addressed just one possible intervention into a sensitive topic, and without the usual support of multiple other studies on the same topic in top journals as there are with every cause of unnatural death except guns.

Writing for Fox News, Lott accused Webster and the media of “cherry picking” data to elevate the risk of PTP repeal in Missouri.

Thats fucking rich coming from.him.

Gun-rights advocates basically raised the same concerns about the research as did the researchers themselves. Most of the points they made came straight out of the authors’ discussions of the limitations of their own studies. Critics also failed to mention that the overreliance on death data, speculative methods, and tentative language resulted in large part from the broad-ranging effects of the ban on federally funded gun research.

the potential weakness of gun violence prevention research paled in comparison with the cavernous absence of even the most basic evidence demonstrating the health benefits of guns.

In summary, people who reflexively shouted “Gun research doesn’t add up!” were often the same people who supported...

They did so without ever once suggesting they would support research that might better test not just the comparisons between Missouri and Connecticut but also the pro-gun positions that they themselves promoted.

For all their criticisms, gun advocates overlooked the most glaring problem with the suicide research: its lack of analysis of race.

NAW YOU DONT SAY

Such framing was curious because race functioned as a central component of the earlier 2014 homicide paper by the Hopkins group. “Homicide is the second leading cause of death for people aged 15–34 years in the USA and the leading cause of death for black males in this age group,” read the very first sentence of Webster and Crifasi’s 2014 analysis of the effects of PTP repeal on gun homicides in Missouri.

The focus on race in the 2014 study but not in the 2015 study subtly conveyed the notion that homicide was a race problem but suicide was a policy one.

Blackness, as an analytical category, thereby remained front and center in discussions of violent crime. Whiteness remained controlled for and invisible.

Framing race as such likely allowed Crifasi and her colleagues to smooth out statistical differences between distinct geographic locales. But doing so also precluded the authors from addressing questions directly relevant to Cape Girardeau, stand-your-ground laws, the Castle Doctrine, and the Man Card: What if risk emerged, not just from the presence or absence of guns or policies? What if the guns and the policies rendered whiteness itself as a risk?

Then on his mother’s side of the bed, there was a .38 Special fully loaded. The kids had access to all of it. We teach the kids about gun safety. They know not to touch them. JMM: Was it one of those guns that he ended up using? Speaker 2: Absolutely. It was the .38 Special.

JMM: Yes, that was a question I was going to ask. Has this changed your views about guns or the role guns play in people’s lives? Speaker 2: It absolutely has not changed my view about guns. This does not make me anti-gun. But part of me blames the parents. You don’t leave two handguns, fully loaded, laying on a nightstand in a bedroom. If you choose to leave loaded weapons laying around your house and one of your own kills themselves with it, then why are you not criminally responsible? I don’t understand that.

the hovering questions that my findings seemed to point to were the same ones glossed over by Crifasi and colleagues and by the critics of their work. Did being a white citizen of Missouri put a person at higher risk of firearm suicide? Did that risk change after Missouri loosened its gun laws? In other words, was risk not merely individual and psychological but collective as well?

Just to say it again, I believe we should press ahead with firearm research whenever we can because I don’t think that anyone on any side of this gun control debate is well served by censorship or the absence of knowledge—save the organizations and industries that benefit from polarizing Americans and making us think we hate each other or will never reach consensus on difficult issues.

Yeesh

Once open, we chose “Fatal Injury Data” from the pull-down menu—and were immediately greeted with a litany of caveats, such as, “There was a coding error in the 2014 file that increases the number of unintentional firearm deaths,” it explained. And later, “Year-to-year death data for a given state can sometimes be affected by unexpectedly large numbers of death certificates with the underlying cause coded as ‘other ill-defined causes.’”

Categorizing an “intentional” cause of death is difficult under any circumstance, and particularly so when the pathogen kills in milliseconds.

A bullet isnt a pathogen.

The difficulty of putting death into categories is ever-more complex because of stigma against mental illness or concerns about life-insurance reimbursements that might tempt coroners or doctors to list cause of death as anything but suicides or accidental shootings.

For reasons that hardly seem to make sense, the most recent census lists White, Black, American Indian/Alaska Native, Asian/Pacific Islander, and Other list as “Races” and then separately lists Hispanic/Latino as an “Ethnicity.” There are various, oft-problematic reasons for these somewhat random racial and ethnic distinctions, but for this study, we took them at face value.