Americans kicked off 2025 in the same way we spend so many of our days: awash in extreme violence. There was, most shockingly, the terrorist attack in New Orleans on 1 January, in which a former US serviceman drove a car into crowded Bourbon Street, killing 14 and injuring dozens, as well as a solider who blew up a Tesla cybertruck outside of a Trump hotel in Las Vegas. Less-covered events from New Year’s Day include the mass shooting in New York that left ten injured; the three killed in a robbery in Mississippi; and the seven shot, two fatally, in an Illinois town.
The US is one of the world’s most violent countries that is not engaged in direct warfare. We are far, far more violent than our economic peer nations. Guns are a clear driver of American carnage. Nearly every nation has mentally ill people, short-fused young men, religious extremists and dangerous people, but compared with other prosperous places that don’t have conflicts raging within their own borders, only America regularly experiences this kind of homicidal violence. That is in large part because what might be mere disputes in other nations can quickly spiral into mass murder when much of the population is armed.
But while guns are the primary reason America is such a deadly and violent place, they are not the only reason. After all, there is something particular about a culture that watches angry young men murder scores of elementary schoolers – not in just one awful incident, but in two now notorious ones – and seems to respond with a shrug.
America is a culturally violent place. We spend enormous sums on our military but then neglect our veterans when they return home, especially when it comes to mental health. Some of the weapons we use to exact violence overseas return to our shores and are used by police departments against American citizens, as though armed-to-the-teeth cops are there not to serve and protect but to brutalise and occupy – as though US citizens were enemy combatants. Both men implicated in the New Year’s terror attacks – the one who ran down revellers in New Orleans, and the one who blew up a cybertruck in Vegas – had served in the US armed forces. And both seemed to understand that acts of public carnage are one excellent way to capture the nation’s attention. “Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence,” the cybertruck bomber wrote in a social media post; in another, he said Democrats should be removed from the federal government and the military, by force if necessary. The man who carried out the New Orleans attack said in a video posted online that he had initially planned to murder his family members but knew that would not grab headlines for his ultimate cause: the war between Muslim believers and non-believers.
The US isn’t just a nation marked by violence; we are a nation that is disturbingly accepting of political violence. The 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol is the most notorious and shameful incident of political violence in the last several decades, but President-Elect Donald Trump, in whose name the rioters rampaged, has framed these violent men and women as political prisoners and said he will pardon them. A number of figures have become right-wing heroes after killing others, from the man who shot Black Lives Matter protesters in Wisconsin to the man who choked a homeless man to death on the subway in New York.
For decades, anti-abortion fanatics terrorised clinics and doctors, leaving behind a bloody wake of murdered abortion providers and clinic workers, bombings, shootings and arsons. One tactic was to put doctors’ faces on Western-film-style “wanted” posters, and to harass any person or business that supposedly “enabled” the clinics’ or doctors’ work – including, in one case, a dry cleaner who laundered a doctor’s clothes. In 2021, the state of Texas formally took up the movement’s vigilante strategy and passed a law that didn’t just criminalise abortion but targeted anyone “aiding and abetting” a woman getting an abortion – putting a target not just on doctors, but on anyone who so much as gave a woman a ride to the hospital. It was, in many ways, the formalisation and legalisation of a strategy born of political violence.
The American left has, at least in the past few decades, engaged in far less-deadly political violence than the right. But the corrosive effect of a culture that condones violence has crossed partisan lines: when a young man shot a healthcare CEO to death on the streets of Manhattan in December, many on the left cheered.
How do you fix a culture like this one?
Curtailing gun ownership in a gun-obsessed and violence-abetting culture is incredibly difficult when more guns fuel more violence which fuels greater fear and a wider desire to own a gun. Gun culture itself is a chicken-egg problem. (Are we culturally accepting of violence because mass gun ownership has inured us to the violence guns bring? Or do we have so many guns because we are a violent nation?) But even if we managed to pass sensible gun legislation tomorrow, that would not fix America’s violence problem. Doing so would also demand a reckoning with mental health care, economic inequality and political extremism – not to mention a culture that is highly individualistic and idolises the image of a rugged, gun-toting hero ready to defend himself and his things no matter the cost.
[See also: In America, women are disposable]
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