Panic And The Ability To Talk About It

It was true of the dangerously wrongheaded excuse that black men are justified in resisting, fleeing and fighting with police because of a “reasonable” fear that the cops might kill them. And they end up being beaten, shot, maybe even killed, not for whatever the cause of the interaction was, but because of how they responded to the cops’ commands or efforts to take the person into custody.  It’s not that outrageously wrong police conduct doesn’t occur, but it remains an extreme outlier, happening in an infinitesimal percentage of cases. Unless the guy resists.

This is a panic. A fear born of hyping the extreme cases such that people internalize the false believe that the one in a million case is the norm.

And the flip side of the panic took the life of Kaylin Gillis and almost took the life of Ralph Yarl. Fear of strangers encroaching on your privacy. Fear of big black kids at the door.  The difference here is that in both of these cases, the fearful had guns and used them. Why does that not evoke what would otherwise seem the normal human reaction when innocent lives are lost and the discussion of what to do about it bends over backwards not to include guns in the discussion? It’s one thing when killings are done by the evil, outraged or crazy, as they’re evil, outraged and crazy, but these were shootings born of fear.

Again, the plural of anecdote is not data. And as the right is wont to note, the vast majority of gun deaths are not in mass shootings, they’re killings of the everyday American variety—with handguns.

It wouldn’t be hard to scrape local news sites for even more anecdotal evidence, but there’s no need, because the hard data is devastating enough. To cite just one piece of such data, over the past two years gun deaths for people under the age 18 are up 50 percent.

Still, the right-wing fearmongering culture warriors have nothing to say.

In an essay so brilliant it will likely be hated by both right and left, Conor Friedersdorf writes of how our inability to engage in rational, civil discussion about the issues involved in transgender discrimination has impaired our ability to not only resolve controversial issues, but help and protect the vulnerable.

Many Americans who observe the overall tenor of these online conversations are reluctant or even terrified to participate––to ask honest questions, to hazard tentative opinions, to try out arguments––because culture warriors on all sides of the issue police ever-changing taboos. Some are difficult for even the very-online to understand. For example, if a person were to say, “Sex is determined by one’s biology, while gender is a social construct,” would that be consistent with conventional wisdom, or seen as fighting words, or offensive to the left or the right, or somehow, all of the above? To merely ask others to clarify their views is to risk being castigated for “just asking questions”––internet vernacular for accusing others of bad faith that manages to stigmatize curiosity-driven dialogue––if not to be labeled as transphobic from one faction and “a groomer” from another. Little wonder that many decline to talk about the subject at all.

We can’t talk about transgender rights. We can’t talk about guns. The argument against engaging in reasonable, rational discussion is that any concession, any accommodation, will st us on a slippery slope to strip the defensive party of ever more rights and privileges. It’s not that gun owners are against requiring people to take gun safety courses or register their weapons, but that once the gun haters have their nose under the tent, it will just be a matter of time until they criminalize AR-15s.

Most Americans who feel strongly about their constitutional right to own guns will not give them up voluntarily, and if you think the government will someday go door-to-door demanding people fork over their weapons, please allow me to remind you of the fact that many Americans believed government workers going door-to-door to offer free, voluntary COVID-19 vaccines was a harbinger of oncoming Stalinism (or Hitlerism). That should disabuse you of the notion that there will ever be a peaceful de-weaponization of the American population.

We, as a nation, are doing a great many dangerously stupid things out of fear. We don’t really want to do anyone harm (do we?), but we are doing harm to ourselves and others under the misguided panic that arises from sensationalized reporting, exaggerated claims of death and destruction and the irrational inability to accurately assess the likelihood of something bad happening to us. And so we strike first to save our own butts, even though our butts were never really at risk.

And people who did nothing to deserve it die.

We need to be able to talk about it. All of it. Or we’ll just keep killing people for no good reason. And going to war over every inanely petty bit of culture war nonsense (thinking of you, Bud Light) hasn’t eradicated discrimination and produced Utopia.

It’s not that there aren’t things to be done that can vastly improve our circumstances and save human lives, even if we will never achieve Nirvana or “fix” all of our problems. But at least we can find consensus and agree that the resulting trade-offs produce the best outcomes we can and saved as many lives as possible. But we need to talk about it. All of it.

We need to end the panic that drives us to do stupid and dangerous things, and instead work toward surviving together. And we need to be mature enough to realize that we can’t always get our way on everything. But this will not happen until we can talk about it. All of it.