If we had a nickel for every time an aggrieved white man in his 60s came to Las Vegas to shoot a bunch of people, we’d have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

The good news, if you want to call it that, is that the recent shooting at UNLV did not have the overwhelming body count of the 1 October shooting that took place six years ago. This, with the benefit of hindsight, appears due to a combination of comparatively modest planning on the attacker’s part — the UNLV shooter was apparently more interested in shooting specific faculty members than “spraying and praying” at a large crowd of concertgoers — and quick action by nearby police and bystanders.

The bad news is the perpetrator killed three victims and injured one more. Adding insult to injury, the three victims killed were all people of color, suggesting the perpetrator was motivated at least as much by racial animus as he was by his repeated failures to become gainfully employed by the Nevada System of Higher Education.

As is custom in the only rich nation where this sort of thing has been happening on a regular basis for several years, everyone has an opinion on what, if anything, should be done to prevent future mass shootings. Chances are, you not only have an opinion about what should be done, you likely also have opinions about how many people need to be shot before a shooting becomes a “mass shooting” (the consensus seems to be somewhere between three and four) and whether we spend an appropriate amount of attention on them (they make up a smaller fraction of gun deaths than they do headlines).

That’s right — we’ve been arguing about mass shootings long enough to argue over “mass” and “shootings.” It’s always a great sign when an argument has been running long enough to become an interminable epistemological slog.

Putting my cards on the table, I’m one of those who’s historically viewed shootings as isolated tragedy, not a public policy failure. During my campaign as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for state Senate District 15, for example, I was the only candidate in my race opposed to Question 1, a ballot initiative that sought to expand background checks on private firearms sales. 

Even now, I’m rather skeptical about the wisdom of granting the sort of police chiefs who become January 6 co-conspirators the legal authority to disarm anyone.

Having acknowledged where my ideological priors in relation to gun control lie, I’m still alarmed by some of the arguments I’ve seen in opposition to gun control during the past few years. When I see people argue that we need more guns in Nevada’s colleges and universities, or when I see people argue that the real problem isn't guns, it’s mental health, my mind immediately thinks of the disaster of Lysenkoism.

The connection between a century-old Soviet pseudoscientific movement and bad arguments against gun control lies in how Lysenkoism took root in the Soviet Union — and the movement’s effects. 

Lysenkoism took root because Trofim Lysenko, a politically connected biologist, correctly deduced that the leadership of the Soviet Union was more interested in preserving political power than it was in feeding its own people. Additionally, Lysenko, a former peasant, realized that Soviet leadership was deeply suspicious and paranoid of the bourgeoisie class of scientists the Soviet Union inherited from Tsarist Russia. 

Putting the two together, Lysenko claimed that genetics — an increasingly popular field of study among Soviet scientists — was a capitalist plot to undermine the radical political and social goals of the Soviet Union. Claiming that traits are inherited through genes, he argued, is inherently a claim that key traits, such as the motivations and behaviors of people, can’t be meaningfully altered through changes in their material and political circumstances.

Since the entire justification behind the brutality and bloodshed that birthed and sustained the Soviet Union was that it was the only way to deliver the changes in material and political circumstances necessary to improve the motivations and behaviors of the people under its rule, Lysenko had effectively charged the Soviet scientific establishment with treason. Soviet leadership, lacking the training necessary to directly evaluate scientific evidence and suspicious of most of the people who produced it, accepted the charge with little skepticism.

To replace the field of genetics, Lysenko proposed more ideologically convenient lines of inquiry. For example, Lysenko suggested that organisms of the same species help rather than compete with each other. Based on this suggestion, Soviet farmers were instructed to plant seeds extremely close to each other so the seeds could “assist” one another, just as the Soviet people were supposed to assist each other after they were forcibly relocated to provide labor for various Stalinist industrial projects.

The results were disastrous. 

Millions of Ukrainians, forced into government-run collective farms where Lysenko’s more ideologically compatible “science” was slavishly applied, died of famine. The experiment was unwittingly recreated on an even greater scale when Mao Zedong, after blindly accepting Soviet propaganda, applied the same farming methods to Communist China — tens of millions died in the resulting famine.

Lysenkoism proved beyond a reasonable doubt that political expediency and commitment to ideology over reality kills people. What, then, should we make of some of the claims made after mass shootings?

First, let’s consider the idea that America, as Texas’ Gov. Greg Abbott claimed after the Uvalde shooting in his home state, has a mental health problem, not a gun problem. 

If we assume for the sake of argument that this is true, where does this diagnosis leave us? Should the government be empowered to seize every gun owned by someone it deems mentally ill? Does the government or any other institution even possess the ability to reliably and recurrently assess the mental health of every single current or prospective gun owner in the United States?

Would opponents of gun control really prefer government-mandated mental health screenings over, say, registering firearms and requiring owners to be licensed and insured?

Being less charitable to the idea for a moment, people will always get angry. Some people, once angry, may become angry enough to kill. Though some people are statistically more likely to get murderously angry than others — according to one study, a majority of mass shootings between 2014 to 2019 were committed by perpetrators of domestic violence — that doesn’t mean we’ll ever be able to predict with certainty whether someone will be angry enough to commit murderous violence.

Claiming that gun violence can’t be reduced until we, as a society, somehow solve mental health is a claim that gun violence can’t be reduced until the government can see inside the minds of every single gun owner. At the very least, that is arguably a less ideologically convenient line of inquiry for conservative-leaning opponents of gun control than the argument that some people shouldn’t have guns and the government should have the power to decide who those people might be.

It’s also a transparent attempt to claim nothing can be done about gun violence until either the Rapture or the New Soviet Man somehow perfects humanity. 

Perhaps a little more imagination is required. Let’s consider the idea that what Nevada’s college campuses really need are more guns in more hands.

This has been a common argument pushed by certain conservatives, including Michele Fiore, who argue that the reason bad guys with guns are able to kill so many people is because there simply aren’t enough good people with guns around to fire back. This argument was also recently presented by an opinion columnist in Las Vegas’ largest newspaper immediately following the shooting at UNLV who argued that, to quote the title, guns, not gun control, stopped the UNLV shooter.

Well, yes. Guns did indeed stop the UNLV shooter — namely, guns in the hands of trained police officers who shared a plan and communicated with each other stopped the shooter. As the old saying goes, guns don’t kill, people do.

Now let’s imagine classrooms were full of panicked professors and students and they started shooting in the general direction of where they last heard gunfire. Would we expect the UNLV shooter to be dispatched sooner? Or would we expect students and instructors to accidentally fire on each other and the police officers dispatched to save them?

Besides, aren’t university students too young to be trusted with TikTok, much less a firearm?

The idea that the solution to rapidly increasing gun violence is more guns is admittedly a certain kind of clever. At the very least, it’s counterintuitive enough to feel intelligent to the sort of person who views contrarianism as wisdom.

Again, I ran for office as a Libertarian. Twice, in fact. I get it. Really, I do.

If this claim were actually true, however, we would expect declines in gun ownership rates to lead to increases in firearms violence. After all, there would be more unarmed victims to shoot at and fewer people around to stop gun violence. 

Does the data back that up?

According to the RAND Corporation, gun ownership declined from 1980 to 2015. During that time, according to the Pew Research Center, gun suicides increased and murders decreased. This, if you want to prove the solution to gun violence is more guns, is not an encouraging start.

Since then, according to Pew, self-reported gun ownership rates have been constant, with 42 percent of adults reporting they either owned guns or lived in a household where guns were present in 2017 and 2023. During that six year stretch, however, gun suicide and homicide rates both increased dramatically.

The good news, if you oppose gun control, is you can point at the relatively static levels of gun ownership during the past six years as proof that the cause of increased gun violence isn’t an increase in the gun ownership rate. It’s a good argument. Go ahead and borrow it.

If you’re a sufficiently motivated sort of ideologue, however, that’s not enough — it’s necessary to claim that the bad thing is good, actually, since that’s how you demonstrate loyalty to the in-group. In-group signaling, however, is a poor basis for public policy, as every student of Marxist-Leninist governing can attest.

In reality, a trip to a sportsbook will not cure a gambling addiction. Bottle service at a New Year’s Eve party will not cure an alcohol addiction. Smoking more won’t cure lung cancer. Encouraging every student to bring a gun to school won’t reduce gun violence. And requiring the government to peer into the minds of every American citizen certainly won’t reduce gun violence.

What might reduce gun violence? If you ask a majority of voters, the answer is to start taking guns away from people. If opponents of taking guns away from people don’t like that increasingly popular answer, I suggest they reconnect with reality and come up with a better one.

David Colborne ran for public office twice. He is now an IT manager, the father of two sons, and a weekly opinion columnist for The Nevada Independent. You can follow him on Mastodon @[email protected], on Bluesky @davidcolborne.bsky.social or email him at [email protected].