In Defense of Neil deGrasse Tyson

Posted On August 5, 2019

Yesterday, in the wake of the horrific shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, liberal scientist and comedian Neil DeGrasse Tyson posted the above, highly-controversial tweet.

The author of this blog in no way expected to be defending Dr. Tyson at any point during his blogging career, let alone the first eight months or so.  Dr. Tyson’s politics are an ocean apart from the ones expressed in this forum, and Dr. Tyson is largely a down-the-line liberal who enjoys rhetorically knifing conservatives and conservatism.

However, this blog will give credit where credit is due, and today it is due to Dr. Tyson.  To summarize his brief tweet, Dr. Tyson ostensibly mentions that 1250 Americans die on any given weekend (48 hour period) from a combination of medical errors, the flu, suicides, and automobile accidents.  Unstated in this calculation is that America is a massive nation of 330M people (up 130M from 1968, when the US first crossed the 200M barrier), meaning that this nation experiences a significant number of unexpected deaths during any moderately “long” period of time.

Where, in the modern world, people have so much access to immediate information regarding virtually all newsworthy events, it becomes very easy to generalize the commonness of tragedies such as the El Paso and Dayton shootings (particularly where such shootings have become disturbingly more frequent in the past 5-10 years).  Moreover, the coverage of mass shootings (again, understandably) generates intense interest and widespread outrage, as the idea of being shot while shopping at Walmart or partying at a local bar is frightening indeed.

However, as Dr. Tyson’s tweet implies, the reality is that mass shootings are but a small part of overall gun-related killings (with suicides accounting for roughly 2/3s of that total and more generic small scale, person-to-person violence accounting for almost the entirety of the remainder).  Despite the attention dedicated to mass shootings, they are a relatively small portion of the gun-related homicides in the United States and an even smaller segment of overall gun-related deaths.

So why does our national debate focus regarding guns (and even violence generally) now focus on mass shootings at the exclusion of far more common phenomena?  There are two primary reasons, one understandable and the other far more unfortunate.

First, mass shootings are sensational.  It is easy to captivate the attention of the public with wall-to-wall coverage regarding such tragedies, especially where the reach of the national media now permeates into nearly every American household.  For those readers who may recall the excellent book from the mid-2000s titled Freakonomics, the author openly discusses how local (and even national) coverage of accidental shootings involving small children playing with unsecured weapons once dominated the discourse about threats to children.  And then he determined – from his own life experience guiding his statistical research – that such tragedies are quite rare, but that the seemingly-innocuous swimming pool presents a real threat against child safety, with a residential swimming pool about 100 times more likely to kill a child than a household firearm.  However, swimming pool deaths aren’t sensational; a three-year-old shooting his five-year-old sister is.  People fear – and accordingly fixate upon – a sensational means of tragedy.*

Second, and more nefariously, much of the public has internalized the narrative about mass shootings, believing that “this could happen to me (or my child); something must be done about it.”**  When far more lives are taken in the rough neighborhood across the tracks, such killings are often impersonally dismissed as another group’s problem.***  Many – particularly those on the left – seize on every opportunity to push mass shootings as a collective national crisis demanding immediate and radical action, a response that directly contravenes all data about the bulk of gun deaths and gun violence across this country.  To the extent mass shootings are a crisis, they are a far smaller crisis than neighborhood violence in poorer urban areas, a problem that is considerably less likely to receive sustained attention or result in dramatic policy demands from the media and certain segments of the electorate.

Bottom line, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s tweet revealed something conspicuously absent from our seemingly perpetual debate over mass shootings, guns, and the culpability of various politicians and organizations allegedly bearing some responsibility for these tragedies – the average American is extremely unlikely to be a mass shooting victim.  And if cooler heads, rather than hysteria, could prevail in the debate about how to deal with these catastrophic, yet isolated, events, perhaps a public policy that reduces their frequency could be agreed upon and implemented.

*Even more troublingly, there is mounting evidence that the plague of mass shooters is in large part inspired by the spectacle surrounding this type of violence.  The fringe minds of potential mass shooters see their killings as a way to become someone infamous/do something big, and are inspired to act in part by the coverage of the crimes.  This is sick and horrifying, but we are discussing sick and horrifying minds being behind mass casualty events.

**Something must be done about it, but rather than fighting trench warfare regarding access to firearms (and pushing gun restrictions opposed by huge portions of Americans), reasonable starting points include increasing law enforcement efforts, particularly at the resource-laden federal level, on identifying and stopping potential mass shooters (many of whom do not hide their intentions); passing legislation allowing for gun restraining orders against individuals for whom there is credible evidence indicating they are a public danger if allowed firearm access; and treating fringe ideologies like white supremacy as threats comparable to radical Islamism.

***If mass shootings are a problem (and they are), localized violence in poorer urban areas is a much, much, much bigger problem for this country.  An article setting forth the numbers killed an injured in mass shootings from 2009-17 – where the average number of deaths roughly appears to be about 100 per year –  is linked below.  By contrast, there are approximately 12,000 yearly gun-related homicides across the United States.

Mass Shootings in the United States: 2009-2017

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About The Author

Douglas

Now 44-year-old with a great deal to say on a wide array of topics!