After last week, when I reviewed the Sift’s past articles about guns, I thought I might go some long while without discussing the topic again. But the news hasn’t slowed down. This last week has included multi-death shootings in Tulsa, Philadelphia, Saginaw, and Chattanooga. The news cycles have begun to overlap: I hear someone talking about a mass shooting and think they’re still talking about the previous one, not the one that just happened and I haven’t noticed yet.
The reason last week’s article was a review rather than a fresh take on the subject was that I thought I had long ago said everything I have to say about guns and gun control. This week I heard an argument against gun control that made me realize that’s not quite true: The problem can’t be the guns, the argument goes, because lots of Americans have always owned guns. The cause of our mass-shooting problem, then, must be something that changed more recently. That, presumably, is how they come to blame video games or abortion or the decline of Christianity rather than guns.
What this argument overlooks, though, is that America’s guns have changed a lot in recent decades. I grew up in one of those gun-owning households of the mid-20th century. But the weapons I had access to didn’t have anything like the destructive capabilities of an AR-15.
So this week’s featured post discusses my personal history with guns. I’m calling it “America’s guns have changed in my lifetime.” It should appear shortly.
The weekly summary summarizes the news reports about the shootings I listed above. It also sets up the 1-6 Committee public hearings, which start Thursday evening. And of course there continues to be pandemic and Ukraine news. That should be out between noon and one EDT.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
My conservative relatives were quick to hop on the “they took God out of the schools, gave kids trash movies and TV and all those 1st person shooter games, so of course we have shootings” bandwagon.
They weren’t too happy when I pointed out that these changes aren’t unique to the US. (I live in Europe.). Schools here have become more secular (as has society as a whole), European kids binge on the same movies and TV shows as American kids, and they play the same video games as intensely.
We even have a thriving hunting culture and laws that give hunters access to private property in some circumstances.
Yet we don’t have a mass shooting problem.
Could it be that the crucial difference is that guns are highly regulated here?