Solutions for gun violence will require radical new levels of togetherness and depolarization.

The constant gun violence touches our lives so frequently even when we’re not directly affected. It looks different for each of us, but it’s always there. What that looked like for me recently is that last month, the balcony of an apartment I walk by every day was roped off with crime scene tape because of a gun homicide. And this past weekend, I got a few texts from friends in California who heard “Colorado” and “gay nightclub” in the news story about the latest shooting. Even though they know I’m not much of a clubber, they wanted to check on me just in case.

Sometimes the latest multi-person shooting hits a little closer to home because it affects people like you. This time the LGBTQ community cries out in anguish, and it seems extra cruel because the hate was directed at a minority group, but it’s happened at Jewish synagogues and Black churches and Asian businesses and each time it is just as cruel. It’s no less painful when a school, a predominantly white suburb, or an individual family is the one left crying out. Between the time I started writing this and now, another shooting at a Walmart in Virginia killed six people. It's always there.

It doesn’t have to be this way. No human-created problem is immutable. But gun violence in America is a big, complex, unique problem. Why? Well, no other country is a democracy of 330 million people, with power split between federal and state governments, a Constitution and laws that have allowed citizens to be armed since its founding, somewhere around 390 million guns among us, live and online spaces in which hate thrives, and deep affective polarization (the kind of polarization which makes people hate each other).

When problems are big, complex, and unique, individuals have a hard time wrapping their heads around the solutions because those solutions are necessarily big, complex, and unique. They are, by nature, beyond the reach of any individual. When the problem is especially terrible, like gun violence is, we feel despair precisely because they are beyond our individual control. 

Though we humans are problem-solvers by nature, we get overwhelmed with complexity, and often reach for simple solutions. And since we’re polarized, the simplistic, partisan solutions, like “no guns” or “guns for everyone,” seem appealing. They satisfy our need for a solution, feed our desire for confirmation bias, and make it easy to blame the other side for the persistence of the problem. But such simplistic solutions ignore basic realities: how could a gun ban possibly work given that 390 million guns are already out there? How could arming more people possibly help when there are already 390 million guns out there?

But specific, targeted solutions face problems too. Take the solution of “red flag laws” that seek to limit firearms for domestic abusers (a left-leaning solution), or the solution of increased security guards at schools for preventing school attackers (a right-leaning solution).. Each measure would certainly prevent violence in specific situations. But since we are such a big, federalist country, a handful of locally applied, specific solutions won’t solve the whole problem. When we feel like a small solution won’t solve the whole problem, we often give up on any such solutions (especially since the small, targeted solutions are so difficult to advance already due to partisan opposition).

But this problem of brutal, persistent gun violence has gone on so long that we all know our current approaches are not working. And our current ways of arguing about it are not working. 

The way we comment and argue about this stuff is predictable, tired, and stupid. Companies put out generic, PR-sanitized statements about how they are heartbroken and stand by the community, which are pleasant but make absolutely no difference. 

The fragmented and polarized way we consume media in the wake of every shooting simply reaffirms our previous beliefs, leaving no room for original thought, so partisans repeat the following patterns:

Left-leaners call for some gun control measures and right-leaners parrot rebuttals like“criminals don’t obey laws so it won’t help.” It’s so human to suggest a solution even if the cause seems lost, and so brutally unhelpful to dismiss someone’s desire to do something tangible.

Right-leaners say their thoughts and prayers are with the victims and left-leaners scream at them saying “your thoughts and prayers are useless! Change!” It’s so human to express sympathy in the wake of tragedy, and so harsh and alienating to attack people’s well wishes and faith. 

Don’t repeat either of the examples above in the comments. 

The way we communicate with each other, especially on social media, but also at the Thanksgiving table, mostly pushes away the people we would need to work with in order to create solutions.

Fundamentally, our current arguments with each other ignore that we share common desires: we all want to be safe. And we all want to be free. The proposed solutions of “no guns” and “guns for everyone,” or “red flag laws” and “increased school security” are all grounded in the common desire to be safe and free. But we fail to see that in each other–we only see enemies to defeat. We even ridiculously posit that our enemies want the violence to continue.

Solutions to our big, complex, unique, terrible problem of gun violence will require radical new levels of togetherness. That’s because we will need many specific, targeted solutions, at the personal, community, local, state, and federal levels, moving together all at once, to make meaningful improvements.

People on the right, center, and left have plenty of these smart, practical solutions but we have to get a critical mass of them moving forward together. Imagine if we could put in place a left, right, and center smorgasbord of solutions, like mental health support services, enhanced police training, individual gun safety training, red flag laws, increased school security, magazine capacity limits, gang violence prevention, community and faith programs for increasing civic connection and societal ties, background checks, buy back programs, early warning capabilities for online extremist threats, and more. One manifestation of “togetherness” would be to not dismiss the proposed solutions of others just because they are not our most preferred solutions.

Fortunately there are many things you can personally, individually do in order to bring about radical levels of togetherness. De-bias your news consumption diet. Listen to your political opponents and hear their desire to be safe and free. Find areas to agree instead of fight. Notice your compulsion to comment here on why this “won’t work” or why the “real problem is them,” and then…don’t. Say something new. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. But we need to solve our problems in new ways together. We are humans and we are capable of this even though we haven’t done it before.