Why Spectacle Matters

The sum total of all the deadliest mass shootings in the US is still dwarfed by deaths due to flu alone. Is this a valid reason to quell our response to mass shootings? Source

Recently Neil deGrasse Tyson, the famous astrophysicist, has garnered a lot of criticism for a tweet he posted regarding the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton.

The most charitable interpretation of Tyson’s tweet is that he wants people to look past their instinctive reactions to the mass shootings and pay more attention to more mundane issues that cost us more lives. Insensitivity aside, why is this stance so asinine?

Tyson is failing to consider how a mass shooting is different than a bunch of less dramatic events. Imagine instead that there were 34 more individual homicides that day than usual. Even if all the homicides had been racially motivated, without a single actor that takes the lives of many people it’s difficult to imagine that any of the individual homicides had the goal of planned, systematic, elimination of a minority group. Proof that there are those amongst us interested in things like “shooting as many Mexicans as possible” raises more uncertainty than an equivalent number of individual homicides might. In other words, the intent of a mass shooting could be more dangerous, so we treat it with an…