54-46

There’s a tendency to focus on the different, the obvious, the engrossing. The slow burn of small arms violence in American cities fades into the background after we hear about it enough times. In a quote whose variants should be attributed to German author Kurt Tucholsky, “The death of one man: That is a catastrophe. One hundred thousand deaths: That is a statistic!”

We realize that we are supposed to be concerned with death — this is hardly controversial. What is more difficult is sustaining a concern for the real, daily violence in our cities. In cities, small arms deaths occur far in excess of what the equivalent rural population would suggest. Despite this, we are typically concerned only after tragedies of which we are made blatantly aware, typically through the media — which has its own set of biases, particularly for the unusual or sensational.

In fact, it seems that only the latest spectacle becomes national discourse. For all this sensationalism, although often justified, there is a lack of urgency regarding events just as shocking for those involved, though significantly more distant from the general public through lack of media coverage. Yet these atrocities can be just as horrific. These problems are not insoluble but they are equally problematic, socially and morally. It seems this should be an ideal campus — one of the best, due to its nominal emphasis on “encountering the other” — to turn attention to less obviously deviant or unexpected violence.

Unfortunately, the extent to which we gain a subjective, urgent understanding of social problems is lacking. As Charles Darwin said in “The Descent of Man,” “If, indeed, such men are separated from him by great differences in appearance or habits, experience unfortunately shows us how long it is, before we look at them as our fellow-creatures.” Once this gap is bridged, however, we feel the same sympathy with which we view those more proximate to us. This requires, or is at least greatly abetted, by subjective, immediate and accessible understanding of what it is like to fear something which does not directly affect the observer. The complete affective landscape, access to the matrix of interactions rather than the nominal notion of them, seems crucial.

Recent student groups are encouraging on this front — both SPEAR and PAST cast a wide cross-cultural net and include perspectives of those involved. This brings us back to small arms violence. Last week the Senate voted 54-46 against an amendment to include background checks on guns purchased at gun shows and over the internet while still leaving many loopholes unresolved. If voters not obviously connected to small arms violence feel the same visceral drive to prevent it by donating blood after shootings, for example there might have been enough political will (the political opinion was not lacking) to tip the scales in the legislation’s favor.

Part of this can be explained using the classic political principle of centralized gains and distributed losses. A political organization can exert outsize influence through the motivation of a core base of supporters, even if the broader, less motivated public is in opposition. We might also consider whether voters far removed from small arms violence respond more favorably to parables about the virtues of an armed citizenry and morality tales about theft and self-defense than to actual blood and death in urban centers.

That the impact of this particular amendment would be mostly symbolic speaks to this point. Unless we master the arts of understanding and telling the perspectives of distant people, whether in Detroit or Thailand, the expertise of public servants might be bound by an unreasonably constrained political system.

James Di Palma-Grisi is a psychology major from Glen Rock, N.J. He can be reached at jdi@princeton.edu.