BlazeVOX
Review by Walter Cummins
With every page of American Outrage—with every listing of the name of a person killed by gun violence, with every accumulating fact about guns in America, with every comment about the nature of violence—I couldn’t help thinking of the Joseph Stalin’s pitiless statement: “The death of an individual is a tragedy; the death of millions is a statistic.”
If not millions, Hix lists the deaths of a thousand with an individualizing detail about each one that makes this book a collection of tragedies, page after page, person after person. The facts that “Stephanie Works, who liked fly fishing, had been born with six toes on each foot, like her father,” and that “William Kinney was an avid baseball player” individualizes and humanizes them. Stephanie should still be out fishing, William playing ball, not dead because some person fired a gun or chose a self-inflicted wound.
Of course, I didn’t know these two or any of the many listed by Hix, but I do know people like them. The listing also made me think of the people I pass on the street or mingle with in a store or sit close to at a nearby restaurant table most every day. They are ordinary or perhaps unique human beings. They deserve to live their lives, as “as a receptionist at a nursing school” or “a member of a Brownie troop” or whatever people do and care about.
Hix could have gone on and on with this listing; as he notes that more than 30,000 Americans are killed by guns every single year, more than 20,000 of them by suicide. In 2016 the U.S. had 4.3% of global population, but 35.3% of suicides. In 2017, civilians in this country held 875,000,000 firearms. People can purchase one at close to 60,000 gun stores and pawnshops.
Hix explains how those purchases affected the one thousand names tabulated here: “Some persons whose names are included in this testamentary died when a hate crime was perpetrated against them, others from a violent action performed by a mentally ill person. Some died by themselves, others among multiple persons killed in a single event. Some died from acts of violence perpetrated by private citizens, others from acts perpetrated by officers of the state. The great majority died from gunshot wounds, but some few died from other forms of physical violence.”
He refuses to designate all of those killed by violence with the term most often used by law enforcement and journalism and common speech:
“Victim” is the customary category term for persons who have been killed in acts of violence, but identifying a person as a “victim” accepts as definitive the person’s membership in a group in which the person has been placed by the agency of another/others, rather than foregrounding the person’s self-definition through the person’s own agency, so no one whose life is recognized here is labeled a “victim.”
For them Hix uses as a subtitle the term “testamentary,” which usually refers to a legal document that tells how a person’s assets and property should be distributed after their death, most often a will. While clearly not a will, American Outrage serves as the legacy of each of the thousand, how he or she might have chosen to be remembered, what they had hoped to offer the world around them.
Beyond what amounts to compiling a memorial, Hix is outraged. This book makes me feel and share that outrage. Yet only a small number of Americans will read this book and some of those who do may even dismiss it as an attack on their second amendment right. That would be another reason for outrage in light of the convincing case against guns developed in these pages.
America, as Hix shows, is unique in its number of gun deaths and its passion for gun ownership. Do we in contrast to the rest of the world’s billions possess a singular characteristic, like a sixth toe? I’m reminded of an earlier Hix book, American Anger, that now exists as a companion to American Outrage. Is the nature and extent of anger in this country a reason certain individuals are driven to mow down innocent others or themselves?
Hix includes a passage from Randi Gross Nathenson’s “Finding Your Inner Gun” as a possible explanation of the reason Americans possess an unusual attraction to guns and why some occasionally use them to deadly effect:
Guns are connected to the American Dream, to manifest destiny, the belief that we are culturally directed by God to achieve, to do, to succeed, regardless of cost. The gun provides us with the means to achieve, and a potential solution when we cannot. Taking up arms to solve our problems is seen as a norm, a positive way to reclaim power. We carry the archetypal image of the gun-toting cowboy, the myth of the American West to support this conquering mentality.
Yet, despite all of his research, Hix cannot find a dominant cause for these deaths by gun violence, no single source, no one reason that if eliminated would serve as at least a partial cure: “Apparently, there is no one exacerbating factor the elimination of which by itself would end the ongoing disaster: nothing sets a limit to it. No simple, single change would draw the outrage back within bounds, end its outrageousness.“
We seem to be helpless to control the slaughter as so many Americans are convinced that owning a gun protects them, up to three quarters of owners. Yet throughout the book Hix cites statistics that people risk much more danger and death when they own and use a gun. Have they fallen prey to a myth? A deadly one?
Hix ends his main text before the supplementary Parerga with this statement: “Recognition of the life that has been ended is a call for justice.” A quotation from Evans and Lennart’s Violence in the Parerga underlinesthis call: “Violence is always an attack upon a person’s dignity, sense of selfhood, and future. It is nothing less than the desecration of one’s position in the world.” That certainly makes it an outrage.
