My productivity in this blog has been sparse.  This is largely due to my uncertainty about the new contours of power in the nation (and I'm not referring here so much to Trump as to his corporate and financial backers who appear desperate to prop him up), and to my feeling I was slightly behind the times (some of my students used to think I was at least twenty years behind the times), and in danger of making dumb analytical mistakes.  The school shooting this morning in Santa Fe, Texas, has prompted me to comment.

Another School Shooting in Texas:

The increasingly frequent tragedy of students shooting other students is regularly reported in the media as giving urgency to an ongoing "conversation" about gun control.  I put this word in quotes because the concept of conversation carries with it the notion of mutual sincerity, in an effort to reach common ground while maintaining mutual respect.  In fact, however, school shootings have been used as opportunities for advocates of gun control to speak to each other, bathed with the pathos,if not the authority, of tragedy, and for opponents of gun control to double down with the NRA.  No respect for the other side is evident, nor any search for common ground.

This is not a conversation at all, and all the hoopla around the shouting match has produced precious little in the way of understanding, much less to solving the problem.  For much of television, the shouting is what is being covered in the aftermath of a shooting, not whatever insights might be available to shed light on what makes this scenario so frequent.

My quarrel with worn out, knee-jerk reaction to shootings is not that the issue of gun control is trivial.  It is not trivial; gun control goes to the heart of democratic practice; it raises serious issues about why our political system cannot deliver what the public clearly wants in restricting access to certain lethal weapons, the role of bribery, often legal, in our electoral processes, and other serious matters such as what attitude I might have about gun control should I lose confidence in the workings of the rule of law in the age of Trump.  They should be on the agenda, and if shootings revive them so be it.

My quarrel is this:  The most serious question lurking behind the shootings is not gun control, although it plays a role, but this:  what kinds of forces in our society are at work to prompt dozens of young men and boys, to want to go out in a blaze of what appears to be displaced anger?  Why is this not happening in other societies?  Why is it not happening in Mexico, for example, which is already going through an orgy of mutilation and death related to drug trafficking, and where, in spite of strict gun control laws, AK-47's are as common as margaritas at the Kentucky Club in Juarez on a Friday night?  Why is it not happening in Bolivia or Timbuktu?

There are, of course answers to these questions, and the field of sociology was designed specifically to explore such issues.  So why aren't the sociologists, from respectable institutions, regularly asked for their opinions about the forces at work producing a mindset that sometimes ends up in a tragic shooting?  Why do we focus only on the psychology of the shooter?  Sociology and other branches of social science have much to say about all of this, and we should at least encourage a broad, public discussion about some of their insights.

The last time the sociology of mass killings was explored in mass media was in 2002, when Michael Moore won an Academy Award for best documentary, Bowling for Columbine.  In the movie he explored possible clues about the social origins of the killings, and his answers, while sketchy, read like an indictment of much of what is wrong with our society today:  a media culture that teems with violence, bipartisan foreign policies citizens don't understand, but which seem endless and in which the response to resistance always seems to be to kill and maim whoever gets in the way; what appears to be the conscious creation of fear from government and media alike; and which is often reinforced by school administrators.  I'm not sure Moore got this right, but he made an effort to explore, and today there appears to be a tacit, bipartisan rule that we don't even seek to discuss the social pathologies that account for what appears to have systemic and social, more than psychological, causes.