One of those things that never happens has happened again: There was a horrific school massacre in a place that has gun laws more like the ones American progressives would prefer — Sweden, in this case, where 10 died by gunfire this past week.
Americans think of mass killings as an American problem and a relatively new one, beginning with the Columbine episode in 1999. But that isn’t the case at all. What changed in the late 1990s was not American violence — which has certainly spiked — but American media: Thanks to the emergence of online media, we consume a lot more news (and disinformation and conspiracy theories) than we used to. And while our country is an outlier when it comes to the frequency of mass-killings, Americans are far from alone in enduring this plague.
The facts may surprise you.
The worst school massacre in US history was not at Columbine or Newtown or Parkland, as horrifying as those episodes were. The worst was at a school in the United States back in 1927 in Bath, Mich. Guns were not a factor: The killer, a failed politician, used explosives — and 38 children, along with six adults, died.
US history is full of massacres that are all but forgotten, sometimes because of who the victims were (the 1921 massacre of African Americans in Tulsa has only recently re-emerged in the public consciousness) or because they seem to belong to a forgotten world (as many as 140 were killed by Mormon militiamen at Mountain Meadows, Utah, in 1857).
The Columbine massacre we talk about wasn’t even the first to be called the “Columbine massacre”—that happened in 1927 when striking coal miners at the Columbine Mine in the ironically named town of Serene, Colo., were shot with machine guns by police acting as company goons. A Camden, NJ, man killed 13 people back in 1947. Eleven members of a family were murdered at a family reunion in Hamilton, Ohio, in 1975.
Americans are, as a rule, more violent than our European cousins — not only when armed with guns but other forms of violence. We talk about so-called assault rifles, but all kinds of rifles combined accounted for only 364 of the 13,927 murders of 2019, according to the FBI, with more Americans felled by knives, blunt objects, or fists. More Americans are murdered by strangulation and asphyxiation alone than all murders combined in Greece or Portugal in a typical year.
But man is a fallen creature, even in enlightened Europe: There were more people killed by the lone gunman at Utøya, Norway, in 2011 than by the US record-setting one in Las Vegas in 2017. From 2000 to 2022, there were at least six mass shootings in France, five in Germany, three in Finland, etc. Switzerland, Italy, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic — there are lots of European countries on that list, though it remains a US-dominated list. There were 109 mass killings from 2000-22 here, compared to 35 in the 15 countries at the top of the European mass-murder rankings.
What all this bloodshed suggests is that this is not just a gun-policy issue — though more intelligent thinking around guns is needed. We have mass killings that do not involve guns, and we consistently have mass shootings in countries with relatively restrictive gun laws. Here in the US, we’ve had mass shootings under many different models of firearms regulation. Connecticut has a lot of gun laws, New Hampshire has practically none, and both states have low murder rates; the District of Columbia is a heavy gun regulator, Louisiana a light one, and both have high murder rates.
The people who dominate the gun-control conversation would very much like us to believe that this bloodshed is a matter of needing heavier federal regulation of sporting-goods stores, which, along with other licensed firearms dealers, are in fact quite removed from actual violent crime. (Less than 2% of prisoners who were in possession of a firearm at the time of their crimes bought that firearm from a licensed retailer.) Criminal violence involving firearms is, without doubt, an urgent issue in the United States — and our policy conversation should account for these facts. It is a violent world, and more intensely so in the United States than in many other places.
As Edward Longshanks might have put it: The problem with America is that it is full of Americans.
