Congratulations To America On The Occasion Of Breaking Its Own Mass Shooting Record

Unfortunately, we knew we could do it.

I think about Cesare Lombroso a lot.

Cesare Lombroso was the father of the study of criminology, so it should probably not surprise you that he was also an absolutely massive racist. Or, as one would say in Italian, razzista gigante. Lombroso had a number of interesting theories about criminality, which he believed was entirely innate and apparent from physical characteristics. For instance, left-handed people? Born criminals, the lot of them.

But let me tell you about my “favorite” thing he thought. You see, one of the things Lombroso sought to investigate was the problem of “brigandry” in southern Italy. Though it had always been present in some form or another (like anywhere else at that time), brigandry, of both a political and non-political nature, escalated after the Risorgimento (the unification of Italy) in 1861.

So Lombroso, he looked out at the Mezzogiorno, what was once the Kingdom of Two Sicilies (though there was just the one Sicily), seeing a land freshly devastated by war and conquest, where food prices had surged and people were very, very poor and he thought to himself “I know exactly what is causing this.”

And what did he land on?

Criminal head shapes.

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Yes, criminal head shapes. Criminal skulls, criminal noses, criminal foreheads, criminal eyebrows, criminal lips, criminal eyes and the like. And he didn’t stop there! Criminal limbs (long, long criminal limbs), criminal hair (dark, naturally), criminal torsos, etc. etc. The criminal man, he explained in the book The Criminal Man, is "... an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals."

He developed a whole theory around criminal physical characteristics, based supposedly on comparisons between skulls and skeletons of evil Southern Italian brigands and wholesome members of the Italian Army who never hurt nobody. Sort of. It wasn’t anything that happened to them that made them turn to “brigandry,” it was that they had both the physical and social characteristics of early humans, either prone to violence and crime or too subservient (as he believed those from Naples were).

Now, I’m making light of this, but it was and remains a pretty big deal in Italy and elsewhere. His research, specifically, was cited when Southern Italians first started emigrating to America as a reason to keep them out and has been the basis for all sorts of scientific racism since then.

Why am I bringing this up? Well, because last weekend, just a few weeks before the year is over, we broke our own record for mass shootings in a single year. One, in Dallas and the other in a suburb of Vancouver, Washington. Those were the 37th and 38th. Then, on Tuesday, another in Austin, Texas, involving a 34-year-old man with a history of violent episodes, who was kicked out of the army after a domestic violence incident and also worked as a shooting safety officer on two gun ranges. On Wednesday, there was a shooter on the University of Nevada campus who killed three people. On Thursday, another in El Paso left four dead.

We are now up to 40 mass shootings and 206 dead from them — and that’s only if you only count, as many sources do, shootings that resulted in the deaths of four or more people. If you’re counting shootings in which multiple people were simply shot, that number goes up to 635.

And yet, no matter how much that number increases, we’re all going to have to spend the rest of our own goddamned lives (perhaps until we die in mass shootings) coddling idiots who look out at a situation with very obvious causes and solutions and choose to ignore them.

We know what we would have to do in order to stop this shit from happening. We know because, as The Onion has famously put it, we are the only country in the world where this regularly happens. We can look out at other countries where this doesn’t happen, or where it did happen and they implemented gun control and then it stopped happening. But no! Not only are we not allowed to make those changes, we have to hear all about how these mass shootings would still happen even if we did.

Why? Because some people are just innately bad and, apparently, whether they have an AR-15 or a hunting knife, they are going to go out and kill 60 people and nothing but a hero with another AR-15 can stop them.

Part of the reason, I am personally convinced, that Lombroso went with this theory of innate criminality was because it was the more flattering option for northern Italy — which largely considered (considers) itself superior to the south. It was also the option that required the least effort on their part. Because hey, if people are just born criminals, what can you do?

On some level, as much as it might just be that the Second Amendment People are afraid that we are nefariously trying to use these mass shootings as a pretext to take their guns away because we hate them and don’t want them to be happy, it could also be that they are clinging to narratives about themselves that they happen to find especially flattering. That they are so dazzled by the image of themselves as rugged individualist, rootin’, tootin’ gun-totin’ cowboy patriots that they are willing to make us all suffer to preserve it.

Because the other side of other people being “natural born criminals” or innately bad is that it means that you, yourself, are innately good and thus absolved of having to do anything or make any sacrifices to make the world a better place for others. The other side of someone else being “... an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals” means that you are human and deserving of all the fair treatment and respect that deserves. It means that it is absurd and insulting for anyone to worry about you having a gun, because you, of course, would never use it to mass murder people.

The solutions they propose to this problem are also, by sheer coincidence, solutions that they would personally enjoy — a super cool, badass good guy with a gun heroically taking a mass shooter down, more extreme punishments for those who commit these crimes, armed teachers, and, of course, doing nothing at all.

Emma Goldman said that “every society creates the criminals it deserves,” and while I’m not comfortable with “deserves,” I do think we often create the kind of criminals we end up with. Whether unification was good or bad in the long run, it created more poverty in an already impoverished area and also a lot of people who were mad about it enough to try and continue what was, as far as they were concerned, a civil war.

It seems relatively obvious that if you starve people, you’re probably going to end up with a few of them stealing bread rather than piously starving to death like The Little Match Girl. It would be strange to not acknowledge this, even as we accept the term “hangry” into the lexicon. If we refuse to regulate guns and make guns that can kill multitudes of people in a very short period of time very easily accessible, we’re going to end up with mass shootings. Because mass shootings are there, as an option, for anyone who chooses to partake. If mass shootings are not an option, we won’t have mass shootings.

If our society decides that protecting the feelings and egos of fragile right-wing gun humpers — who openly say that one of the reasons they need their guns is so they can kill us all should they feel any “tyranny” is being done to them — is more important than protecting human lives, more important than the majority of Americans who believe we need stricter gun control laws, can we be all that surprised that these mass murderers also see their own feelings and egos as being more valuable than human lives? I’m not sure that we can.

It’s also not surprising, given this, that many of them are also fragile, right-wing assholes who want to change society in ways more amenable to them.

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I also think, to some degree, that the surge in belief in conspiracies and misinformation is directly tied to people shielding themselves from fully reckoning with bad or scary things, unflattering narratives and the consequences of our actions as a society. People would rather believe that the Left is setting up endless, elaborate false flags as a pretext for taking their guns away than wrestle with the fact that there are serious consequences to them getting their way on gun control. They would rather believe that George Soros pays people to disagree with them than believe that people sincerely disagree with them. These are even more ridiculous conclusions to draw than “criminal head shapes.”

Reality has to jump through a whole lot of hoops to create a world made up of innately good people with good intentions who will almost always do good things and innately bad people with bad intentions who will almost always do bad things — particularly when everyone thinks they are the former.

It would just be lovely if, instead of jumping to ridiculous conclusions, imagining bizarre scenarios or doubling down on the cartoonish idea of “good guys” and “bad guys,” we could all just agree to just stop fucking living this way. We could create the kind of society where this doesn’t happen, where mass shootings are not available as an opportunity — it’s a matter of choice, not biology.