Ken and Corey take an in-depth look at America’s ongoing struggle with gun violence, using the four quadrants to track many of the most critical and commonly-blamed factors, conditions, and causes that seem to be contributing to this terribly wicked problem.

Written and produced by Corey deVos

Why does America have such a deadly problem with gun violence? What can possibly be done to solve the issue? Why do there seem to be no easy answers?

rom the foundation of the American union through the War of Independence, to its near dissolution during the Civil War, to the open frontiers of the Wild West and the digital frontiers of video games and first-person shooters — America has always had a deeply complicated relationship with the gun.

Firearms are woven into the very fabric of American life, society, and history, enshrined in our founding documents. Which makes the question of how to reduce gun violence in America an exceptionally difficult one to answer.

America’s pathological relationship with gun violence is what is often called a “wicked problem” — a deeply complex, multifaceted problem that cannot be fully seen or understood from any single point of view, and therefore requires an integral multidisciplinary approach in order to solve. Unfortunately, when it comes to gun violence, there are very few discussions out there that are even trying to put all the pieces together, choosing instead to politicize the brutal deaths of innocent children and families, and allowing the narrative to become dominated by these narrow biases, ideologies, and objectives. In the meantime, nearly 100 Americans die from gun violence every single day.

Because few people can fully see all facets of this incredibly complicated problem, our relationship with the gun — as a deadly weapon, as a defensive tool, and as a deeply-embedded cultural archetype — has become shrouded by shadow. On the one hand it is the ultimate equalizer of power, allowing the most vulnerable among us to defend their lives and land from those who would take them away. On the other hand they are machines designed for only one purpose, to kill other living creatures — and we are seeing far too many senseless killings in America today. For some they are a symbol of independence, individual freedom, and personal sovereignty. For others they are objects of obsession and even fetishization, a substitute gratification for our felt lack of inner power and control over our lives.

In this discussion, Ken and Corey try to identify the root causes of gun violence in America, and suggest some innovative solutions that might help us turn the page on this terribly wicked problem. Ken and Corey begin by identifying some basic facts in order to frame the discussion:

America has a serious gun problem. In 2010, the U.S. homicide rate was 7 times higher than the average for populous developed countries in the OECD, and its firearm-related homicide rate was 25.2 times higher.
However, gun violence in general has fallen sharply over the last 25 years, by anywhere from 49 to 74 percent depending on which numbers you are looking at.
Suicide rates represent the majority of gun-related deaths. Suicides have risen by 25% in a 15 year period, and represent about 60% of all gun deaths.
While mass shootings are the most terrifying form of gun violence, they also represent a tiny fraction of total gun deaths per year. In 2018 there were 38,658 gun-related deaths. About 23,000 were suicides. About 14,000 were homicides. Only 71 were victims of mass shootings, or 0.18% of all gun deaths.
The majority of politically-motivated mass shootings since 2008 have come from the political right wing. Right-wing terrorism outnumbers Islamic terrorism by a 2:1 margin, and left-wing terrorism by a 5:1 margin.

Critical Factors

Ken and Corey then discuss some of the most important factors, conditions, and commonly-blamed causes of America’s affliction with gun violence, using the Four Quadrants to help illuminate and unpack the true-but-partial roles that each of these factors play.

Because this is such a complex and Integal problem, and because people tend to only identify one or two of these as the “root cause” of violence — typically the political left looks at exterior right-hand causes and solutions to gun violence, while the political right emphasizes interior left-hand causes and solutions — this conversation is one of the most comprehensive takes on the issue that you will hear.

Click on each factor below for fuller descriptions and video discussions with Ken and Corey.

CONSCIOUS
(INTERIOR-INDIVIDUAL)

What’s true: Obviously, anyone who pulls a trigger while aiming at random people are, by definition, mentally ill. But generally speaking, America is suffering from incredible mental health challenges. Roger Walsh has said that we are now living in the midst of the largest social experiment in the history of our species. So far, the results don’t seem to be looking so good, with record levels of anxiety and depression and social isolation. We are a nation that is struggling collectively with both our mental and physical health, not to mention our spiritual health.

What’s partial: While we need to give mental illness its proper place in the discussion, it’s important to remember a point that was made in a 2017 New York Times article:

“If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. But the mental health care spending rate in the United States, the number of mental health professionals per capita and the rate of severe mental disorders are all in line with those of other wealthy countries.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html

What’s true: Studies show that college students today are displaying 40% less empathy than students since the year 2000. Which likely signifies an overall developmental deficit in young adults today, at least in their interpersonal and emotional intelligence lines, and which likely underlies so much of the regressive elements of the left that Ken and Corey have talked about so much in previous episodes.

What’s partial: While this statistic is certainly horrifying in just about every way, it's important to remember that this is largely describing a sort of selective empathy that results from tribalism — that is, extending your empathy only to those in your group, or to those your group decide are the most worthy.

https://www.npr.org/2019/04/15/712249664/the-end-of-empathy?utm_source=pocket-newtab

BEHAVIORAL
(EXTERIOR-INDIVIDUAL)

What’s true: It has been widely reported that a great number of these mass shooters were either on SSRI’s at the time of the shooting, or have a recent history with them.

What’s partial: We might need to hold this somewhat loosely, since it could just be correlation without causation — people who shoot random crowds have severe mental illness, and many people with mental illness have a history with SSRIs. But we also can’t neglect the possibility that these medications are somehow lowering inhibition and self-restraint and increasing sociopathic tendencies in certain people.

CULTURAL
(INTERIOR-COLLECTIVE)

What’s true: Understanding the centrality of the gun as deeply embedded symbol of the American narrative shows you that, whatever solutions we find around gun control, it will likely never be as easy as “we need to take all the guns off the street” because that will never be selected for in this country. For many the gun is a deeply-engrained symbol of independence and individualism, of exploration and expansion, of self-reliance and self-dignity. Firearms are woven into very fabric of American life, society, and history, enshrined in our very founding documents. The American nation was founded at the beginning and the end of a gun, American culture is a historically martial culture, and in many ways we have begun to dissociate ourselves from that legacy, for better and for worse.

What’s partial: While the gun is indeed an important and primary archetype in American culture and history, it’s also true that we tend to fetishize our guns and gun culture, often to a disturbing and even dangerous degree. The gun as an American symbol is one that is more often than not hidden in the shadow — different shadows for the left and for the right — and we need to bring more consciousness to the dual nature of the gun itself. On the one hand, it is a machine designed for only one purpose: to kill another living being. On the other hand, it is the great equalizer, and the ultimate tool for self-defense, a right that should never be denied to any sentient creature. We cannot have a meaningful discussion about guns unless everyone is able to acknowledge both of these intrinsic qualities.

What’s true: Everyone feels like their values are being threatened with extinction by everyone else, and we have very few leaders telling us otherwise.

What’s partial: Much of the rhetoric in the culture wars is, of course, completely overblown, and in many cases are products and propaganda generated by enormous media corporations who have built entire revenue streams out of creating fear, division, and mistrust of our fellow citizens. The majority of people on the right are not Nazis and white supremecists. The majority of people on the left are not SJW snowflakes pushing for open borders. Both of these extreme ideologies exist, of course, and need to be tamped down by their respective parties — but we need to do so without completely writing off the huge swaths of the American public who simply hold different political beliefs than our own.

As neoliberalism has shifted from the media age into the Information Age, it has further eroded our shared communities — both because of the substitute gratifications that things like Amazon and social media give us, and because it offers green a platform to further dissolve necessary amber social structures. As a result, people are feeling far more isolated and disconnected from each other than ever before, our communities are more fragmented than ever before, and there are more opportunities for dissociative personality disorders than ever before.

What’s true: We have in fact been seeing a measurable return of white supremecist movements across the U.S., and in fact across much of the West. Moderate GOP representatives are retiring from office and will not seek reelection in 2020, many of whom have been critical of Trump’s xenophobic and arguably racist Twitter posts, particularly the “go back where you came from” tweets.

What’s partial: Although there has been a measurable increase of white supremacist motivations behind many of our recent politically-motivated massacres, and although these ideas and identities are directly to blame for those specific attacks, they are not the driving force behind most of the gun-related violence in America over the last several decades. It’s just the reason du jour to open fire on random citizens. It’s a problem of extremism itself, not a particular flavor of extremism. The question is not “how do we get white supremecists to stop shooting people”, it’s “how can we prevent people from getting so radicalized into such extreme views in the first place”.

What’s true:What’s true: One trait shared by many of these shooters is the lack of a strong father figure in their childhood. We see the same in the criminal system, as many convicted criminals also come from broken homes without father figures.

What’s partial: There are a lot of fatherless families out there, and the vast majority of fatherless children do not grow up to be domestic terrorists. It’s also largely a symptom of systemic dysfunction. For example, when disproportionate number of black men are incarcerated (particularly for nonviolent crimes like drug possession) — and when our for-profit prison system makes genuine rehabilitation nearly impossible for these individuals — this increases the number of fatherless families, and the problem only gets worse over time. The claim that 26 out of 27 shooters come from fatherless families appears to have been debunked.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mass-shooters-fatherless-us/

SOCIAL
(EXTERIOR-COLLECTIVE)

What’s true: We do have a massive supply of guns circulating on the street, far more guns per capita than any other country — a staggering 120.7 guns per hundred people, which is more than two times as many as the next major country on the list, Yemen. We are the only nation in the world with more guns than people.

And surely we can enact some sensible gun-control measures that are supported by the majority of American population — close certain loopholes, create buyback programs, and deny purchase to high-risk individuals (mental heath history, terrorist watch list, etc.) In most cases these sorts of reforms have as much as 90% support among voters (particularly after Sandy Hook), and yet nothing has been done — due largely to conservative obstructionism, plutocratic bribery, and far-right conspiracy theories around mandatory disarmament, national registries, and sovereign citizenship.

It’s also important to note that these sorts of LR solutions are what governments tend to do best. There is very little they can do to change LL or UL realities, other than changing the LR social containers and conditions within which those realities emerge and exist. Governments cannot legislate morality, but they can legislate morally.

What’s partial: However, this is not as cut and dry as most liberal politicians in particular make it sound. Canada, which shares a border and much of our culture with us, also has a high number of guns per capita compared to other nations (34.7 per 100 people, still far fewer than America's 120.7), but far less gun-related violence per capita. It is likely that solutions that work for nations like the U.K. or New Zealand to keep guns out of circulation cannot and will not work in the U.S., because we are too many tipping points beyond those sorts of solutions.

What’s true: It is likely no accident that the number of mass shootings correlates so strongly with internet adoption rates from, say, 1999 to today. This gets to the inherent disembodiment and dehumanization of social media and its emphasis upon text-only communication, as well as the internet’s power to convene and radicalize people around dangerous and socially malignant ideas.

And of course, with the Information Age comes an overabundance of bad information, the delegitimization of journalistic institutions, and the spread of anti-intellectualism that Isaac Asimov characterized as "the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'” This gives rise to things like “fake news” and the balkanization of media into multiple echo-chambers that only confirm and reinforce our own pre-existing biases. Our sense of shared reality gets increasingly splintered by this aperspectival madness, and our shared cultural symbols and reference points become fewer and fewer.

What’s partial:

The internet is a global phenomenon, and while other nations also have issues with fomenting violence on social media — an entire genocide in Burma was planned and executed using Facebook as a platform of hatred — we generally don’t see the same levels of violence in other online societies as we do in the U.S.

What’s true: Our culture is permeated by violent video games, which goes a step beyond other forms of violent media such as film or music, in that gamers have an interactive and participatory role in that violence. This has caused many to be concerned that our video games are desensitizing us to violence, creating more opportunities for violent wish fulfillment and various sociopathic tendencies.

What’s partial: Ever since Columbine there has been study after study trying to link violent video games to real-world gun violence. And time and time again, the studies tell us that there is no link. While many studies have demonstrated that violent video games do temporarily raise interior arousal and aggression levels in individual gamers, and that there may be a correlation between aggressive behaviors and actions in players of video games, there is no evidence of a causal link between these games and actual violent behavior in the exterior world. If it did, we would expect to see similar trends of gun violence in other nations who spend more money on video games per capita than we do — and that is not what we see at all.

What’s true: Most day-to-day gun violence is committed by poor people, while most high profile mass-shootings are committed by middle class people, predominantly young white men. Much of our gun violence (including suicide rates) is animated by economic anxiety, including loss of employment (typically due to automation, but commonly blamed upon immigration). And of course this is not to say that we want to eliminate wealth inequality altogether — some degree of inequality is inevitable, and even desired for the optimal health of any capitalist society. But when we go so far beyond Gilded Age-levels of wealth inequality, when so few people wield so much power over so many different segments of our society, and when an extreme minority of individuals can use dollars to amplify their “freedom of speech” and completely drown out the voices of ordinary American citizens, then our society begins to rot. This would also help dismantle the plutocratic control that our transnational corporations have over our nation’s politicians and political systems, helping to reduce the influence of things like lobbying, campaign donations, and other forms of plain-sight bribery that turn our governing systems against the very people they are created to govern.

Add to this the additional pressures that workplace automation is creating, which is the primary reason people are losing their jobs throughout the country. However, the blame is typically shifted to things like illegal immigration, which only fuels things like racism, xenophobia, and the culture wars in general. But immigrants are not taking our jobs — robots are. This problem will likely continue to escalate as more jobs are automated, and as things like climate change drive more and more migrant displacement.

What’s partial: Even the poorest among American citizens tend to enjoy a quality of life that is significantly better than other impoverished nations across the planet. Which is not to say that the struggles of poor Americans is not legitimate, or that violent crime is not strongly correlated with poverty. But the rates of per-capita gun violence in America nonetheless greatly outweighs the gun violence found in nations that are more impoverished and with a lower average quality of life than the U.S.

Integral solutions

Finally, Ken and Corey explore some possible Integral solutions to gun violence — the simplest possible interventions that can have the greatest impact across multiple conflicting perspectives and political paradigms.

Audio version

About Ken Wilber

Ken Wilber is a preeminent scholar of the Integral stage of human development. He is an internationally acknowledged leader, founder of Integral Institute, and co-founder of Integral Life. Ken is the originator of arguably the first truly comprehensive or integrative world philosophy, aptly named “Integral Theory”.

About Corey deVos

Corey W. deVos is Editor-in-Chief of Integral Life, as well as Managing Editor of KenWilber.com. He has worked for Integral Institute/Integal Life since Spring of 2003, and has been a student of integral theory and practice since 1996. Corey is also a professional woodworker, and many of his artworks can be found in his VisionLogix art gallery.

Web
Facebook

Wicked Problems: Gun Violence