How To Reduce Mass Shootings
For some reason, the notion of it happening at the Super Bowl parade seemed slightly more jarring than the other types of mass shootings. But that’s the world we live in now.
There are mass shootings now in the US almost every single day. For some reason, the notion of it happening at the Super Bowl parade seemed slightly more jarring than the other types of mass shootings. But that’s the world we live in now. Which gives us two choices: (1) we can just accept that wherever you go in public, you’re now taking your life into your own hands – if your kid goes to school or you go to church or Walmart or a parade, you might get shot; (2) or we could try to do something about it. Below, I try to break down why shootings keep happening and what can be done about it.
More than anything else, guns are just highly, easily available. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in this country, reportedly as many as 450 million. Gun sales exploded during covid. It is very easy for someone to walk into a store and walk out with an assault weapon, so of course those weapons are being used all of the time.
But why are these weapons used all the time?
The first reason is broad based dissatisfaction and pessimism across society. If you look at every poll, people are more pessimistic than they’ve ever been, even though the standard of living in the world is the highest it's ever been.
Social media, as we know, is the unhappiness machine. It forces you to compare your life to a fictitious version of someone else's, making you feel inadequate. Then it shows you everything bad happening all over the world, everywhere, all at once. Both feel awful.
There is more existential risk globally than ever before. When I was a kid, the main risk was nuclear warfare. That risk still exists. In fact, with the news of Putin now trying to put nukes in space, it's actually worse than ever. But on top of that, we've now got significant pandemic risk, climate risk, and perhaps AI risk as well.
While the standard of living in the world has gone up a lot over the past 25 to 50 years, and while markers like life expectancy are way up and while extreme poverty is way down, it does come, to a certain extent, at the cost of jobs and opportunities here locally. So people in the United States are even more pessimistic and more upset and just have even less hope for their own future.
Second, we have an economy based on highly visible income inequality. I'm a beneficiary of that inequality. I'm very much someone in the 1% who has the skill set that yields a lot of rewards in the particular economy and society that we live in. But we have a combination of extreme inequality and extremely visible inequality that produces widespread unhappiness.
To a certain extent, with the exception of maybe a brief period in the mid-20th century of capitalism where the disparity between CEO pay and starting worker pay was smaller than it is today, we’ve always had inequality. That alone is problematic.
But add in our new mediums of communication and the problem is that much more apparent and upsetting. You've got social media – which billions and billions of people are on – that shows you what you don't have and what everyone else does have (or at least a fictitious version of what they have). You have reality TV that just celebrates these rich idiots in every conceivable way. People feel inadequate and they feel deprived. And that makes them upset.
Third is that we have a massive mental health crisis and a massive drug crisis. Our physical health overall, even with the obesity epidemic, is still the best it's ever been. While overall life expectancy has dipped in the US in the last couple of years, globally, it keeps going up and up. But in some ways, the technological gains that created these scientific benefits, that created these new forms of testing, these forms of prevention and screening have also created so much mental strain in terms of the internet and social media and regular media that while people's physical health has improved, their mental health has declined commensurately. At the same time, we have a massive crisis of addiction, both in the US and globally, but especially here in the US. Opioids. Heroin. Fentanyl. Meth. Cocaine. Marijuana. Alcohol. It's not going away anytime soon.
People are unhappy broadly. They feel inadequate personally. They are suffering from mental health challenges and addiction. And they can get weapons that can kill lots of people very quickly, incredibly easily. So you put all those four things together and of course, this keeps happening.
Can anything be done about it? Long term, yes. But sadly short term, no. Even if tomorrow we somehow figured out how to solve all four of those problems, there are still hundreds of millions of guns already in this country. So the solution to this is multi-generational and multi decade. The hope is that over a period of 30, 40, 50 years, people neither have the access to weapons to kill others easily nor do they have the incentive, desire or need to do so.
To even get to that point in 20, 30, 40 years, what would it take? I have seven thoughts.
The first is creating the political will. It's not that we don’t need to restrict assault weapons and draw more attention to their evils. There's coverage of every shooting, every single day. You couldn't possibly broadcast it more widely.
We haven’t done anything about these deadly weapons because every policy output is the result of a political input. In my experience, every politician makes every decision solely based on reelection and nothing else. Because of gerrymandering, typically only the primary matters. Primary turnout in this country is typically about 10% for both parties.
Most politicians don’t actually believe in or care about pretty much anything other than staying in office. And so however they have to adapt to stay in office is what they're going to do. The only way to move them to the middle instead of catering to the extremes is to radically increase primary turnout. The only way to do that is by letting people vote on their phones.
If you are, say, a Republican congressman from Florida and turnout in your primary is 12% and NRA members are half that 12%, you know, intellectually that it's fucking crazy that someone can walk into a store and walk out with an assault rifle. But you also know that should you ever say that – or try to do anything about that – you automatically lose your next primary. So you put one job and one life – your own – ahead of everyone else.
That’s only going to change if the political inputs change. So if, all of a sudden, primary turnout were 36% instead of 12%, and the NRA vote share went from half down to 15%, then the math would flip, and it would be that if you didn't do something about this, you would be vulnerable to losing your next primary. In which case, you would do something. We have to align political incentives and policy outcomes or nothing will ever change.
Number two is assault weapons. The notion that you need to be able to fire hundreds of rounds a minute to kill as many people as possible is insane. You don’t need assault weapons for hunting or for personal protection.
There are other worthwhile ideas too. We saw in Michigan last week that a parent of a mass shooter was held liable for manslaughter. We could pursue policies like saying you can't have property and casualty insurance if you own a certain type of gun. We could try more smart gun technology that would make it harder for people who aren't licensed and approved to own and use a gun. There are many things we can do. We should be doing all of them.
Third is treating mental health on parity with physical health. That's true for funding, for research, for care, for drug formation, for treating addiction. The first and primary issue is funding itself. We've got to make sure that in the same way that people are covered to go to the doctor to get a checkup, they need to be able to get their mental health taken care of as well. We have to train a lot more therapists and mental health professionals. We just have way too few. There’s also a very technical issue that we work on out of my fund that’s important – cross state licensure. People can receive good mental health care online through telemedicine. But there are protectionist laws in some states that prevent doctors in one state from treating a patient online in another state. That exists in about half the states right now. We have to remove that obstacle. And we have to start mental health care a lot earlier in life. Just like there's the school nurse, there should be the school therapist. At the end of the day, every human being suffers from anxiety. Every human being, unless you are truly a sociopath, has doubt and fear and shame and anger. Those are emotions that come with being human. And if there is a way to help ourselves better understand and process those emotions, it would be crazy not to do so.
The fourth is making the internet itself less toxic. That starts with repealing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996. It says that internet platforms cannot be held liable for the content posted by their users. The reason why this is problematic is because of human nature itself – we are drawn to negative content far more than to positive content. If you’re Instagram or YouTube or TikTok, you make your money by selling advertising. The rates that you charge are based on how many clicks are generated by your users. The more you push negative content to your users, the more clicks you're going to get, which means the more money you're going to make.
So for as long TikTok or Instagram or X are in no way liable for negative content, they’re going to push as much of it as they possibly can, because that's how they make more money. We could change this simply by repealing Section 230. Washington being Washington is so wildly dysfunctional that even though this is the one issue in 2020 that both Biden and Trump agreed on in their platforms, and Biden has since called for in his State of the Union address, they've made no progress at all other than hearings designed for no purpose other than getting senators’ faces on tv.
The good news is, states have stepped up. There's a bill right now here in New York that would protect minors by saying that social media companies can't just bombard them with feeds and advertising and doom scrolling – it can only show them what they opt into and what their parents opt to. There's similar legislation in Florida and lots of other states too. Those need to all pass.
We need a framework for data privacy. There are still no privacy protections in the US on a national level, and there are very few states other than California that have them on a local level. Europe has had a law called GDPR for probably a decade at this point. Americans deserve that kind of protection, too. And finally in this category, we need to be a lot more aggressive in antitrust against the big platforms. The FTC has done a really good job with this. But they need more tools, more money, more leeway, to go after these companies.
Fifth is a very big picture item: changing the underlying social norms of society itself. Trump epitomizes the key human conflict in one person – he's the ultimate zero sum person. Trump genuinely believes that if you win, he loses. If he wins, you lose. His only goal in life is to be the winner at the expense of everyone else. And that is a recipe for misery. Even when you win, you're miserable. He’s got money, fame, power, fans, beautiful women, luxury, everything you could theoretically want. And he's a miserable human being. He's wildly unhappy. Because he’s stuck in a zero sum mindset.
We need an abundance mentality, which is everyone wins together or everyone loses together. We're not all in competition with each other for a scarce set of resources. This obviously gets back to philosophical debates that have been raging for hundreds of years right now: Hobbes vs Rousseau.
If we have a view of the world where all we want to do is see ourselves succeed at everyone else's expense, then even when we win, we still lose because we're going to be miserable. When we realize that if everyone succeeds, everyone is happier, then all of a sudden, a lot of the underlying incentives that make people feel so inadequate and so alienated from society – incentives that spur them to do crazy things like shoot innocent people – would change.
The sixth is addressing income inequality. I've been arguing for a while now that universal basic income is the way to go. Having worked in government, having run governments, having run state budgets, I think that if you tried to redistribute wealth through taxation, it really wouldn't work, because for every dollar that you or I pay in taxes, only a small percentage of that actually ends up being used to help somebody on the other end of it. If I pay a dollar on taxes, by the time that we're done with waste and fraud and corruption and unions taking their piece off the top and everyone else, maybe thirty cents of that is actually helping someone in need.
Universal basic income means that a dollar of my money shifts all one hundred cents to a person who needs the money. And then they have the autonomy to decide what to do with it. I know that many people think that anyone who didn't go to an Ivy League school is too stupid to be able to make their own decisions, and therefore they should just be told what they have to spend the money on through government programs.
Personally, I think individuals are far better and far more capable of deciding what's in their best interests than anyone else. Sure, if you gave everyone a thousand bucks a month, some people would blow it on hookers and cocaine. But relatively few would and most people would use it to feed their families or to pay down debt or to save money. If you want to figure out a way to address the underlying inequality of society, there needs to be a wealth transfer. But if you're going to do a wealth transfer, doing it in a way that just makes a couple of constituencies in the political class happy and rich and fat at the expense of everyone else is pointless.
At the same time, if we want less inequality, we need to fix our schools. We have just shitty schools because all of the political power is used to protect the adults in the system. The kids come second, thanks to our friends in the teachers unions. Our schools are never going to produce what we need when the people we’re educating are a secondary consideration.
We also need to change our mindset about opportunity. This notion that everyone should get a liberal arts degree from college, as opposed to learning how to become a programmer or welder or something equally in demand is insane. We also don't have enough legal immigration in this country. There are a lot of jobs, both high skill and low skill, that are unfilled. That impedes economic growth and opportunity. I don't think we should just be letting people into the country left and right. But if the Department of Labor every year can say, “this year, we believe we need 4 million additional workers in these specific categories,” we should let 4 million people in who have the skill set to do those jobs. America's greatest advantage is to always absorb the cream of the crop from all over the world. If you can get the most talented, hardest working, most ambitious, most dedicated people from every part of the globe, that's how you win. Instead we've closed ourselves off to that. It's crazy.
The last category is AI, which is obviously still very emergent. We don't quite know where it's all going to go yet, but we are on track to mint a class of trillionaires and then have lots of people – white collar jobs through AI and blue collar jobs through robotics – see their livelihoods go away. And they will suffer. Yes, we have to think about how we regulate AI in terms of preventing harms caused by the technology itself. But perhaps even more important is regulating AI so that as the economy undergoes these transformational shifts, all of the benefits don't accrue to a handful of people — people like me.
As a venture capitalist, I’m incredibly well poised to benefit from AI. Financially, I've got investments in the AI space. But society is going to be a fucking mess if there are mass layoffs with nothing short term to replace people’s jobs and activities. If society is a fucking mess, so what if I have a lot? All things being equal, I'd rather have a lot than have a little. But if I have to live in a walled complex where I'm constantly under siege and under fear, it's a shitty way to live. It gets back to the zero sum versus abundance mentality.
To me, those are the seven categories of ideas that, from a policy standpoint, could start to change the underlying economic and psychological incentives that are destabilizing our society and leading to so many mass shootings.