This title is blasé. I mean it to be, for what word can more appropriately describe the US government’s attitude to gun control? If the government’s attitude weren’t blasé, it would have been unlikely that a former student would have shot and killed at least 17 pupils at a high school in Parkland, Florida on Valentine’s Day. Furthermore, it would have been even less likely that this would have been the 18th such incident at a school in the USA since the beginning of 2018.

The US government doesn’t have a concrete definition for “mass shooting” despite how often it is splashed across national and international headlines. Surely if anything reeks of nonchalance, avoiding defining this tragic phenomenon is it? This phenomenon which, by the way, seems to constantly plague our social media timelines, newspaper front pages, and headline news reports.

So far, it is only an American non-profit, called the Gun Violence Archive, which defines a mass shooting as four or more victims shot at the same time or place. By contrast, the FBI only has definitions for “mass killing” and “mass murder,” with the former being the killing of three or more people in a public place and the latter being the killing of four or more people in the same location.

There is dramatic power in defining and naming an incident. To define and name an incident a “mass shooting” would reveal how frequent and or normalized these tragic incidents are in a particular culture. In the case of America, this is perhaps why the FBI omits the means of killing from their federal terminology; it would be extremely painful to hear “mass shooting” reports on an almost daily basis if the fatality toll required only four lives. Inversely, more frightening would be to see the fatality toll adjusted to a much higher figure in order to keep such incidents out of the daily headlines.

All of this is even before considering how the term “mass shooting” would destabilize the legitimacy of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, where the right to bear arms is for defensive purposes. Combine this with the National Rifle Association being a massive sponsor of conservative politicians this is perhaps the most likely reason for the absence of “mass shooting” in FBI terminology.

So, the government will continue to tip toe around these needlessly, tragic massshootings with prayers, condolences and claims of “mental illness” for white perpetrators, and “terrorist” or “gang” links for those of colour. By refusing to call a spade a spade, the blasé US government has successfully established a rhetoric which the American public respond to in one of two ways which maintain the status quo; either they stand by their Second Amendment rights or they are so emotionally drained from the recurrence of shootings that, like my American roommate said, “it happens so often I’m not even fazed anymore.”

Also published on Medium.