Jonathan Metzl argued that the topic of mass shootings in the United States is incredibly complex and rooted in the nation’s identity.
“This is a story not only of guns but of Americanness,” he said.
The Boston College Park Street Corporation Speaker Series featured Metzl, a professor of sociology and psychiatry and director of the Department of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University.
Metzl spoke on the intersection between politics, historical context, geography, race, class, and other variables that can dramatically impact conversations surrounding mass shootings in the United States.
“Part of this story of America is really normalizing something that you shouldn’t have to normalize in the context of civilian life, which is we have more mass shootings than days,” Metzl said.
Metzl referenced his newest book, What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, where he explores how the topic of guns is not only a conversation about safety or law, but one of identity.
“There are issues about identity that I think are important to think about, which is the polarization where people’s identities become oppositional to each other,” Metzl said. “People get on different sides of these issues, about issues of safety, and for them that’s a really deeply existential and deeply psychoanalytic topic of asking how exactly these identities form.”
Metzl said that drastically different opinions across the country create a polarized political sphere among voters, politicians, and legislators when it comes to gun violence.
“Americans basically are divided almost down the middle about what mass shootings mean,” Metzl said. “Half of our country thinks we need more regulation, and the other half of the country says this means we need more guns.”
While the U.S. has made powerful strides toward resolving other public safety concerns by enacting a ban on smoking or educating the public about its associated risks, the same cannot be said about gun safety, Metzl said.
“We made people believe, and rightly so, that secondhand smoke is a risk, that being in a car without a seatbelt is a risk,” Metzl said. “The question is, why didn’t we convince the entire country to do the same thing, but with guns?”
While Metzl began his research and authorship by viewing gun control as a matter of public health and safety, he recognized through his deeper exploration into the topic that America’s obsession with guns is deeply rooted in other societal issues.
“I started to see that guns were not just a health problem, they were a democracy problem, they were a race problem,” Metzl said. “They were all these issues that public health wasn’t talking about.”
Metzl said the journey of writing his book and continuing his research into gun violence challenged his existing perspectives and propelled him to look at an issue he was already familiar with in a new light.
“As a scholar, something can change your mind about everything you think you know which is part of the story of this project—that I thought one set of things about gun violence and race and guidance, and I ended the project thinking something totally different,” Metzl said.
