The American Way of Violence: Mike McIntire on Guns, Greed, and a Daily Trickle of Bloodshed

“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed

Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it’s the gun itself that can be blamed for the perpetual American plague of violence.

Yes, the gun did it. In his new book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, McIntire observes that every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, and significant mental illness. But what no other country has are schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers massacred on a regular basis. Up to forty thousand Americans die from guns every year — half of them suicides — and yet we treat these uniquely dangerous machines as if they were iPhones.

How did this catastrophe happen? McIntire’s answer focuses on the law as much as the culture. English common law imposed a duty to retreat in the event of conflict. Then, amid the centennial jingoism of 1876, an Indiana court declared that “retreat” was not “the tendency of the American mind.” A “true man,” explained an Ohio court, doesn’t fly from threats. Stand your ground was born — and with it, a legal redefinition of what it means to be an American.

And then there’s the NRA — founded in 1871, ironically, by a former New York Times correspondent as a marksmanship club, and radicalized a century later. Its greatest coup was reframing the Second Amendment from militia clause into individual right — a maneuver that Warren Burger, a Republican chief justice, called the “biggest fraud” ever perpetrated on the American people. And today even the NRA looks moderate compared to new online radical right-wing gun rights groups.

McIntire, a gun owner himself, doesn’t preach. Instead he describes his first murder scene as a young cop reporter — the dead man peacefully lying in the grass, one small round hole in the side of his head. Clean, efficient, clinical. Like an iPhone app. That’s the American way of violence. The gun did it. And will continue to do so until America retreats from its deadly love affair with the firearm.

Five Takeaways

•       It’s the Gun Itself. Every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, mental illness, and toxic social media. What none of them has, McIntire argues, is a repetitive, constant problem of schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers being massacred. Up to forty thousand Americans a year die from guns — half of them suicides — and firearms account for three-quarters or more of all homicides. Yet America treats these uniquely dangerous things as ordinary consumer goods, bought, sold, marketed, and carried around like an iPhone or a wallet. Whatever role Hollywood plays — and McIntire takes David Thomson’s argument seriously — you have to start with the one thing that is actually different: the gun.

•       A Daily Trickle of Bloodshed. When a plane crash kills two hundred people, there is a massive media and government response. When two hundred people die in scattered shootings across fifty states in the same period, there is a local news story, and then nothing. Gun violence in America has slipped into the category of acceptable losses — background noise. The conundrum for gun-safety advocates is how to sustain attention on a crisis that onl