Learned helplessness and a lone shooter

Learned helplessness pervades much of the current American political landscape, but we often fail to see it or mistake it for something else. Nowhere is this effect and the confusion surrounding it more visible than in discussion of gun control.

We're a week out from a Las Vegas shooting that killed nearly 60 people and wounded over 500 more. My initial response wasn't shock. It was a sort of muted horror stemming from the knowledge that gun violence on a mass scale appears to be a loose thread in the American fabric we can't seem to cut free.

It's become such a regular occurrence that the national response is routine:

• The president and media express outrage and send "thoughts and prayers."
• Many prominent figures claim now is the time for debate and action on gun violence.
• Defenders of gun rights express "now is not the time" to discuss such issues.
• Congress asks for a moment of silence and we fly flags at half mast.
• We fight familiar fights on our Facebook feeds, retreating to ideological corners.
• Legislation (often weak or meaningless) is put before Congress, and it doesn't pass.

Over time, we become desensitized to these events because of the regularity and the routine, and many writers have been saying as much for years.

But I think it runs deeper. I think we've barreled into learned helplessness territory. To be desensitized to certain events simply means that we no longer react with strong emotionality because we've seen it before. Rampant gun violence certainly creates desensitization, and that can inhibit our willingness to act, but not to the degree of learned helplessness.

Learned helplessness comes about in much the same way as desensitization, but its much more insidious. For example, let's say you have a rat in a cage. You then administer a small electrical shock to a portion of the cage floor. Naturally, the rat will move to escape the shock. 

But what happens if you electrify the entire cage floor? At first, the same thing. The rat will attempt to escape the shock. Over time, however, he will eventually learn that there is no escape, and he'll stop trying.

Does the shock still hurt? Yes. He hasn't been desensitized fully. But he's learned that he is helpless in his situation and thus no longer fights it.

I think that's how most Americans are starting feel about gun violence, and the data backs this up. According to Pew Research, the majority of Americans -- often a significant majority -- support a variety of gun safety measures:

• 50% want to ban high-ammunition clips
• 52% want to ban assault-style weapons
• 68% favor creating a federal database to track gun sales
• 71% favor banning individuals on the no-fly list from buying guns
• 76% back limits on gun ownership among the mentally ill
• 81% back universal background checks

And before any Second Amendment purists absolutely lose their shit, yes, there are issues with each of these solutions. For example, how do we define mental illness? And what about people erroneously placed on the no-fly list? Then there's the fact that, in many instances, enacting all of these measures won't eliminate the problem. 

I admit these weakness, but I would argue those are piss poor excuses for not at least trying to mitigate this problem. Surely there can be some reasonable middle ground here.

But my larger point here is that the majority of Americans want to see some action taken on this issue, but for a variety of reasons, Congress refuses to do anything of substance. And this refusal is incredibly dangerous for our democracy. If you're in the majority here, it's hard to look at this situation and not feel helpless. I mean, damn. We're a democracy. Shouldn't majority opinion have more sway? 

And that feeling of helplessness, perhaps more than any other single factor, leads us to check out more and more from the political debates that substantially affect our lives.

It also leads us to make rash political decisions in a desperate attempt to retake some control. It's hard to look at the election of Donald Trump without seeing learned helplessness at play. The narrative of forgotten Americans wandering the political wilderness searching for a voice -- any voice -- is how you end up with seemingly reasonable individuals even entertaining a candidate so thoroughly and obviously unqualified and unfit.

There are a number of issues about which Americans are in relative agreement: limiting gun violence, modernizing infrastructure, providing universal (or at least expanded) access to affordable health care, and not starting a nuclear war, to name a few. But the longer elected officials delay in tackling these issues, the more helpless the electorate feels; the more disconnected the citizenry sees itself from its representatives; the more unstable our democracy becomes; and the more dangerous and unpredictable our political, social, and economic futures appear to be.