Among the core Israeli national narratives fractured by the October 7 Hamas terror attacks and the months of war and violence that have followed was the notion that Israel’s ethos on firearms differed from that of the United States.

Both countries were gun-centric democracies, that narrative allowed, but the U.S. was a land of too many guns and too few laws—while Israelis “trust their state, and don’t fear each other.”  A common refrain emphasized that “in Israel it is not a right to bear arms, but a privilege.”

I knew this mentality well: Before October 7, I had spent over a decade collaborating with Israeli public health scholars and safety activists to better understand how a country with many guns saw only a fraction of the types of civilian gun deaths we do in the U.S. Partner shootings, homicides, gun suicides, accidental shootings, and mass shootings remained remarkably low, thanks to a web of public-health based laws and policies that seemed enviable, if politically impossible, in America.

Many Israelis received firearm training as part of mandatory military service, but the government banned assault rifles for private citizens and issued handgun permits only after an extensive vetting process.

Effective gun policy reinforced social cohesion. While Americans carry guns based on individualized notions of self-protection, Israelis considered gun ownership a shared responsibility.

Such cohesion was often articulated as being not-the-U.S. When the National Rifle Association sent high-level donors on tours of Israel to promote U.S. gun laws, Israelis widely dismissed the efforts as “American mishegas.”

Like many national narratives, Israel’s gun scripts were always based partially in myth. Armed settlers in the West Bank recklessly intimidated and harassed Palestinians. A robust criminal contraband arms market flourished in smaller cities; the victims of shootings from these guns were overwhelmingly Arab citizens of Israel.

Still, American researchers like me could view Israel’s gun safety efforts as models of successful public policy. I worked with groups like the Israeli chapter of Physicians for Human Rights and Gun Free Kitchen Tables that championed coalition-based community safety and advocated for disarmament in “civil space in Israel and the territories under its control.”

That calculus shifted on October 7. A catastrophic failure of state protection tapped into epigenetic–level fears about being Jewish, vulnerable, and exposed—and changed the nation’s relationship to firearms in ways that have profound and lasting implications.

Prior to the Hamas attacks, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir—a nationalistic arsonist once expelled from army service because of radicalism—repeatedly tried to weaken gun permit regulations and ease carry rights, arguing that Israel should “take the good things from the U.S.” when it came to guns, but his extremist arguments failed to gain traction.

After October 7, however, Ben-Gvir and his allies managed to fast track legislation that generated an unprecedented spike in armed Jewish civilians. “Carry a Gun, It’s a Life-saver: Ben-Gvir and His Wife Boast of Dramatic Expansion in Israelis Carrying Weapons” read a headline in Haaretz on October 22. Within weeks, the Netanyahu government distributed thousands of firearms and issued more than 30,000 new carry licenses. Contentious Knesset oversight committee meetings detailed how dozens of unqualified people—including Ben Gvir’s personal staff appointees—had been granted temporary authority to approve gun license applications.

“They’re handing out guns like candy,” a senior security official told Haaretz. “There’s almost no oversight.”

Rightist politicians invoked the U.S. to support the gun splurge. Simcha Rothman, a member of the far-right Religious Zionist Party, cited Ronald Reagan and the NRA—“Guns don’t kill. People kill”—to promote expanded gun licensing.

U.S.-based gun rights outlets reflexively lauded these developments, which would lead to the distribution of more than 100,000 guns in the West Bank alone.

It’s understandable why gun sales to civilians spike in times of peril. Guns provide real protection in some instances and the promise of protection in others.

As a longtime scholar of American gun politics, however, I’ve learned that gun safety and security are never as straightforward as the NRA’s “good guys” versus “bad guys” binary makes it seem. Armed civilians rarely prevent crimes such as mass shootings. Potential security benefits to arming civilians are often counterbalanced by rising everyday gun-related injuries and death.

Gun ownership can make people wary of governments and regulations. I once interviewed a man from Missouri who told me that he was “anti-gun” for the first 40 years of his life before he grew concerned about the “gang crime” he heard about on FOX News. He started carrying one concealed handgun for “protection,” then two, and then he bought several rifles. The man ultimately switched his political affiliation from Democratic to Republican because he worried that liberals would take his guns.

Gun politics can also be tribalizing, divisive, even antidemocratic. After the death of George Floyd, gun sellers played on fears and conspiracies to foment white anxiety about Black violence while at the same time citing concerns about police brutality to market semiautomatic weapons to Black and Latino populations. Pro-gun courts in the U.S. overturn firearm safety laws put in place by voters.

The Middle East represents a profoundly different context. But as I tracked Israel’s changing gun policies, it appeared that the right-wing Netanyahu government was doing more than adopting U.S. gun laws: It was also adopting a version of the NRA’s divisive playbook. Ben Gvir’s gun policies papered over security lapses, weakened trust in democratic institutions, and exacerbated existing political and social divides.

For instance, Israeli data had shown that shockingly few terror attacks are stopped by civilians with guns. Still, the Netanyahu government relaxed regulations around shooting other people based on American-style stand-your-ground justice, and doubled down even after civilians were shot and killed in “crossfire” shootouts.

Disproportionate numbers of the newly distributed guns ended up in the hands of supporters of Netanyahu’s conservative/religious coalition. Armed Jewish security squads formed in so-called “mixed cities” where both Jewish and Palestinian Israeli citizens live. Armed violence against Palestinians also escalated in the occupied West Bank—where members of Jewish settler groups had long been allowed to carry weapons, while Palestinians had not.

What does it mean for a nation whose guiding health principles were built on social-democratic solidarity to so rapidly adopt American-style armed individualism?

After October 7, I started asking my former collaborators—leftist Israeli Jewish and Palestinian clinicians, advocates, journalists, organizers, and academics.

“We’ve been attacked,” many told me in the fall, shattered by the violence and the plight of hostages; they understood the desire for firearms. At the same time, no one could believe how many guns flooded in. “People we never imagined are lining up for permits and carrying guns,” one activist said during a group Zoom conversation. Others on the call chimed in. “My husband.” “My grocer.” “My father-in-law.” “Me.”

Being “like the U.S.” when it came to guns emerged as a source of inquietude. One activist lived in a Tel Aviv suburb a block away from a building that was hit by a rocket. Sirens rang in the background when we spoke; still he wondered, “I keep fearing that once peace does come, with all these guns around, how long will it take until we see our first American-style mass shooting?”

An ER doctor told a story about bickering neighbors holding up guns mid-argument. She asked a question that months before would have been unimaginable: “Do you think U.S. gun safety groups might be willing to take up our cause?”

“What violence is being done in our name?” an activist asked as the human catastrophe in Gaza spiraled over subsequent months.

Meanwhile, Ben-Gvir was arming his own controversial security apparatus on the West Bank and promoting racist notions of Jewish “supremacy.”

Lax gun laws increasingly portended existential threats to the socialist underpinnings of Israeli public health, and broader erosions of civil liberties. A leading peace activist detailed ways that the “gun drive is running roughshod over democratic procedures,” and going hand-in-hand with “rising authoritarianism” and “a trajectory of increasingly violent police responses against anti-war protesters.”

Gun safety groups mobilized in opposition.  “I don’t really think Ben-Gvir wants Israelis to feel safe,” a Palestinian Israeli lawyer explained in late December. “He wants settlers and crazies to intimidate others.”

Gun proliferation that began as a response to an external threat had become an enforcer of expansive internal agendas.

Tensions surrounding Israel’s guns became more divisive over time.

Liberal and secular Israelis had long found common cause with U.S. progressives around matters including racism and reparation, gay and trans rights, climate change, health equity, and regional peace. But by January, as seeming allies abroad protested against not just the war in Gaza but the existence of Israel itself, an Israeli Jewish journalist wondered whether disarmament would become more difficult as the country became increasingly isolated. She worried that feeling “under siege, not just by our enemies and Netanyahu but also by the supposedly liberal, modern people in the West who we thought we were part of” would make it harder for Israelis to imagine or “do peace.”

A safety activist told me in mid-March that “anchoring disarmament of the public sphere to peace would mean placing it in the very distant future…so in our messaging to Israeli gun owners, we now tend to speak about an ultimate transition to relative calm.”

However such efforts evolve, it becomes increasingly clear that the decisions Israel makes about gun proliferation today will go a long way toward shaping the future of the nation.

The country can overturn Ben-Gvir’s disastrous gun policies and begin the hard work of countering their polarizing health, social, and political effects.  Such an approach depends on larger upstream commitments to regional stability, and a renewed commitment to what Haaretz calls “the contract between state and citizen” that lies at the core of democracy and public health.

Or Israel can remain a fortress that—similar to the U.S. castle doctrine—arms itself ever more defensively in anticipation of real and speculative threats.

If I’ve learned anything from studying the U.S., an armed and internally divided nation is a nation less able to negotiate, effectively legislate, or meaningfully compromise.

The post What Could American-Style Gun Culture Do to Israel? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In June 2022, the United States Supreme Court ushered in a new era of gun regulation when it struck down New York’s century-old concealed carry law. The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision paved the way for the right to carry a concealed firearm in public to become the law of the land.

Debates around right-to-carry pit the argument that a “good guy with a gun” can prevent crimes against concerns about an increased threat of gun violence, with research generally supporting the latter.  Many policymakers have framed right-to-carry’s danger around the threat posed by individuals carrying their own weapons into public spaces. But new research I co-authored with John Donohue and Matthew Bondy of Stanford Law School and Phil Cook of Duke University found that while right-to-carry may indeed increase violent crime by 20% in large cities, it’s in fact dangerous because it reduces police effectiveness and increases in firearm thefts.

In 1979, nearly all U.S. states either prohibited the concealed carry of firearms, or required anyone who wished to carry a concealed firearm to be evaluated before obtaining a license, which enabled states to screen out individuals who had no specific need for the permit. But by 2000, over half of the states had passed so-called “shall-issue” laws, which mandate that authorities grant a concealed-carry permit to virtually any individual who applies. By the time Bruen arrived before the Supreme Court last year, only six states, one of which was New York, did not have a near-universal right-to-carry system in place.

Our research began by conducting a review of state statutes and media coverage to determine what year each state adopted right-to-carry. Then, we obtained police agency reports on various crime statistics, which we used to compare crime trends in cities that adopted right-to-carry to those in cities that never did. (We also accounted for other city characteristics researchers find to be correlated with crime, such as the percentage of people who are in poverty or are between 18 and 24 years old.)

Like most researchers, we found that right-to-carry increases violent crime, especially in large cities. But our findings were novel because they probed the mechanisms behind this increase. It wasn’t simply a matter of people with right-to-carry permits committing more violent crimes. Rather, we identified two particular causes of increased crime: declines in police effectiveness and increases in gun thefts.

To investigate right-to-carry’s impact on police effectiveness, we studied the police “clearance” of violent crimes—the number of violent crimes that police were able to identify a perpetrator for. We found that right-to-carry caused a 10% total reduction in police clearance in the U.S. cities where it was adopted. Nationwide—using the FBI’s 2019 estimate that 1 million violent crimes take place annually in the U.S., of which about half are cleared by police—this could add up to an extra 50,000 crimes going unsolved every year.

There are a number of reasons for this decline in police effectiveness. As my co-author John Donohue has outlined in previous work, the most straightforward is that right-to-carry takes a toll on police time and resources, whether because of the need to investigate accidental shootings or simply to process permits. Additionally, in constrast to the logic of the “good guy with a gun,” the intervention of bystanders with firearms during crimes—particularly those who are not well trained in firearms safety—can make it more difficult for police to catch criminals.

Another concerning possibility is that right-to-carry makes police more fearful of the people in their community. In some cases, this could cause police officers to shy away from investigating suspicious behavior; in others, it could make officers more likely to escalate their use of force.

The other key way that right-to-carry increases violent crime is by creating more opportunities for firearm theft, inadvertently causing permit-holding gunowners to provide firearms to criminals. Reports from police agencies suggest that firearm theft, particularly from motor vehicles, is a large and growing problem across the country. And a 2017 survey from Harvard University estimated that there are 400,000 firearm thefts in the U.S. every year—more stolen guns than are even in civilian hands in Ireland or Japan. We found that right-to-carry may increase gun theft by a staggering 50% in large cities.

Much of the public attention on right-to-carry has been focused on the deliberate actions of permit-holding gun owners: whether they commit many crimes, and whether they stop many crimes from being committed. In fact, they do neither. Instead, as our research shows, the unintentional actions of concealed carry permit holders may be fueling violent crime by providing a flow of firearms ripe for theft and weakening law enforcement’s ability to apprehend criminals. Beyond the “good guy with a gun” versus “bad guy with a gun” narrative, the “good guys” can unwittingly end up helping the “bad guys.”

The Bruen Supreme Court decision has cemented what has become increasingly clear for the past few decades: at least in the short term, guns are here to stay in America. Now, it’s up to lawmakers across the country to enact pragmatic policies to curb the worst public safety impacts of a permissive gun-carrying culture.

Teaching responsible gun ownership may be the most feasible reform that goes the furthest to promote public safety. Research suggests that making firearm safety training a requirement of receiving a concealed carry permit has been effective at ameliorating some of the rise in violent crime. While there is no conclusive explanation for why these trainings reduce crime, it is quite plausible that gun-carriers who undergo training are more careful with how they store and use their firearms, resulting in fewer firearm thefts and accidental discharges.

Safety training is no panacea to gun violence. But if the “good guys with guns” know how to safely store firearms and when to fire them, they have the best chance of promoting public safety.

The post Why ‘Good Guys with Guns’ Don’t Make Us Safer appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The prospects for gun control laws have never been bleaker. As states and courts fall all over themselves to make guns more available, the civilian arsenal has ballooned to 400 million guns.

Twenty-eight states now have stand-your-ground laws, which allow you to shoot perceived threats out in public, on the street. Twenty-seven states have permitless carry laws, which, as the name suggests, allows you to carry a gun with no permit, and no safety training.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has chosen to elevate expansive gun rights. In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, Inc v Bruen, the court overturned state restrictions, enacted by elected officials, to assert a new—and according to many, outrageous—originalist standard. The conservative justices said we must look to the period between 1791 and 1868 (when the Second and Fourteenth Amendments were ratified, respectively) to determine the constitutionality of gun regulations—a period when there were few such regulations. Following suit, a Texas judge subsequently struck down popular Red Flag Laws, which forbid domestic abusers from accessing firearms, because domestic abuse was not illegal in the salient time period.

Unsurprisingly, gun fatalities have soared by 20 percent since the pre-pandemic period, and 40 percent from a decade ago. The number of mass shootings continues to rise; there has been more than one a day in 2023.

Americans don’t want any of this. Gun control is actually popular: majorities of Americans, from both parties mind you, favor stronger restrictions, especially universal background checks. But it’s blocked by politics and the courts. The gun lobby has deftly insinuated gun rights into our culture wars, making them a proxy for conservative values. To advance the cause of gun control, we have to look elsewhere than changing the laws. Instead, we should try changing culture.

In fact, there are already successful examples of this in Community Violence Intervention. CVI programs focus on likely perpetrators of violence and aim to interrupt conflicts before they occur. By halting destructive outbursts by those most prone to violence—and by those who they may inspire in turn—CVI stops the contagion of violence. In this way, CVI programs are the best counter to gun rights supporters, who use urban violence to justify loading up on guns and loosening gun laws. If violence were rarer, it could deflate the gun rights cause.

One prominent CVI program was Boston’s Operation Ceasefire, directed by the noted criminologist David Kennedy in the mid-1990s. Kennedy organized “call-ins” with the “less than 1% of the city’s youth…responsible for more than 60% of youth homicide.” At the call-ins, police addressed the gang members, spelling out the harsh penalties that await them if they continue a life of crime, while parole officers, social workers and members of community groups explained how the youths could change their lives. They gave them information about how to get a GED, relocate their homes, and find help for drug addiction or mental health problems. Youth homicides dropped nearly 75% within a year.

Other cities—Indianapolis, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Oakland, Los Angeles—implemented their own versions of the program over the next two decades, and saw success. Yet most all lost steam in the face of recurring challenges. In Boston, Operation Ceasefire lapsed after its directors got promotions and their successors failed to coordinate the complex and broad support needed for the program to succeed.

CVI’s holistic approach requires patience, which makes it politically unappealing and unpopular. After Baltimore implemented its version of Operation Ceasefire in 1999, the newly elected mayor, Martin O’Malley, decided it was too slow. He opted for a version of Broken Windows policing, which operates on the premise that no infraction, no matter how small, should be tolerated, in order to stem a culture of lawlessness that nurtures violent crime. Police targeted loiterers and roughly removed people from high crime neighborhoods after dark. Murders fell, but this approach was not sustainable, as it gravely eroded community trust.

Baltimore’s next mayor after O’Malley, Sheila Dixon, welcomed Safe Streets, which uses another model of CVI called the Cure Violence approach that deploys “violence interrupters” to defuse brewing conflicts between individuals and groups. The interrupters hail from the communities they serve, and are often former gang members. They are paired with, or followed by, outreach workers who connect the youths with social services needed to escape lives of crime.

This model builds on the approach of Operation Ceasefire, but further separates the work of violence deterrence from policing. Violence interrupters strenuously avoid any link to police. They insert themselves amidst warring parties, especially when tensions mount. They visit hospitals after gang members are shot, to learn of plans for vengeance. Much of their work involves “meeting one on one with aggrieved individuals, hosting small group peace-keeping sessions…creating cognitive dissonance by demonstrating contradictory thinking…allowing parties to air their grievances…and buying time to let emotions cool.”

After Dixon was convicted of embezzlement and unceremoniously removed from office, the new leadership reintroduced coercive police measures, which landed the city in riots in 2015 after Freddie Gray died in police custody. But while the city’s murder rate in the city has spiked since 2015, it is markedly lower in neighborhoods where Safe Streets operates.

Police don’t care for CVI models, because they see them as resource-intensive and insufficiently punitive. CVI requires constant attention to a city’s drivers of crime, which can quickly change. Police also dismiss CVI as effective for small and targeted areas, but not for whole cities. Yet violent crime is driven by a few key actors. CVI aims to zero in on them, and nip cycles of violence in the bud.

CVI received a boost from the federal government in President Biden’s vast infrastructure bill. Baltimore was given $50 million to spend in three years on Safe Streets and violence deterrence. This is still a pittance compared to what traditional policing receives. And there is reason to worry that the time line for success is too short.

Politicians and voters are smitten with coercive policing, which reliably blows up in our faces by eroding rule of law. When police behave violently, they send the message that lawlessness is endemic to a community, so much so that it has infected the police, too.

In this way, coercive policing has much in common with the gun rights movement. They share instinctive desires to punish. And they both suggest we can simply crush wrongdoing through force. In our armed society, however, this is hard to do. Even the police increasingly find themselves outgunned.

CVI approaches change our cultural approach to violence, seeing it as something that can be prevented rather than something that necessitates an even greater show of violence in response. As a society, we will not achieve lasting order and respect for law through force—whether it’s delivered by the police or by gun owners. Violence is contagious. It prompts and incites more violence.

In a political moment in which gun control seems politically infeasible, CVI can help stem demand for firearms by those who are responsible for urban violence, and in turn, give gun-rights activists less reason to arm themselves. Still, it’s reasonable to wonder how this approach can be fully effective so long as guns remain frightfully plentiful and gun laws recklessly permissive. Gun control would make the jobs of violence interrupters much easier.

The post If We Can’t Change American Gun Laws, We Should Change American Gun Culture appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Gavin Newsom’s new campaign for a 28th Amendment is the most important political idea in the country today.

But you wouldn’t know that from reading media reports following the California governor’s proposal to enshrine four popular gun control measures in a new federal constitutional amendment.

Instead, political opponents dismissed Newsom’s proposal as at best a waste of time, and at worst a dereliction of gubernatorial duty. Reporters called it a mere tactic in his rhetorical and legal war with the red states. Republicans labeled it a distraction from his job running California. Editorialists wrote that it was crazy, because, as the San Jose Mercury News argued, it’s virtually impossible to change the Constitution.

In truth, such objections are far crazier than Newsom’s amendment. The governor isn’t just taking on the American addiction to violence.  He’s taking on flaws in the U.S. Constitution that impact his ability to govern, and keep Californians safe.

It’s hard to think of a policy this country needs more than constitutional controls on firearms. The United States is awash in guns—Americans own nearly half of the 857 million civilian-held guns on Earth. And gun ownership and permissible gun laws have created an endless epidemic of gun violence. The U.S. has a gun homicide rate more than 25 times that of other high-income countries, and a gun suicide rate more than 10 times higher.

And the epidemic is getting worse, especially among young people. In 2020, gun violence overtook car accidents to become the No. 1 cause of death for U.S. children and adolescents.

Instead of trying to reverse this epidemic, the national government and many state governments are making it worse, by reducing regulations. The U.S. Supreme Court, along with conservative judges at lower levels, have reinterpreted the Constitution to throw out gun control laws in cities and states.

One of those states is California, which has had lower rates of gun violence than more pro-gun states thanks to laws under attack, like a 10-day wait on most firearm purchases.

In this context, Newsom’s decision to pursue the 28th Amendment is not some political choice—it’s a job requirement. The governor is supposed to prevent Californians from being killed. And he’s supposed to protect laws that protect public safety. Both are under threat.

As Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who is working with the governor to draft the amendment, has said, “We cannot stand idly while courts roll back our work and diminish the ability of our Legislature to keep Californians safe. This bold but fair resolution calls on other states to join us in protecting some of the most effective ways of reducing gun violence.”

If anything, the Newsom amendment is too modest. Rather than the repeal of the Second Amendment our country needs, the governor’s measure is limited to four politically popular measures that should reduce gun violence:

-universal background checks (which would reduce violent crime)

-raising the firearm purchase age from 18 to 21 (which would reduce suicides),

-firearm purchase waiting period (which would reduce all sorts of gun deaths)

-assault weapons ban (which might make mass shootings less common and deadly).

What is boldest about the amendment is the method Newsom is advocating for its passage: using a provision in Article V of the Constitution that allows states to call a Constitutional Convention. Thirty-four states must support such a convention in order for it to be convened. This avoids the longstanding approach of presenting the new amendment to Congress, which can then send it to the states for ratification.

The U.S. has never had an Article V Convention before, and that poses uncertainty. Newsom will seek to limit the convention to the question of guns, but once a convention is in session, delegates might be able to propose to alter the Constitution in other ways. Indeed, some conservatives want to use an Article V Convention to pursue policies like term limits and a balanced budget amendment.

This possibility may frighten Americans, who are deeply attached to their Constitution. This is why UC Berkeley law dean Erwin Chemerinsky, channeling the democratic cowardice of America’s progressive elites, recently called Newsom’s proposal a “well-intentioned, terrible idea.”

But the political dysfunction of the country suggests we should be afraid of the status quo, rather than attached to it. How much violence must we suffer, how many rights can the Supreme Court take away, before we fight back constitutionally?

Indeed, it’s hard to think of a republican constitution on Earth more in need of updating than that of the United States. Newer, more democratic constitutions govern other rich countries in this world—counties that tend to be healthier, happier, and considerably less violent than America.

Constitutional change would also be good for California, whose power is diminished by a document conceived 60 years before our statehood. Newsom, in pursuing a 28th Amendment that could lead to sweeping change, appears to recognize this reality. The second most powerful elected official in the country is opening the door to a new federal constitution. (California, as I’ve argued before in this space, should demonstrate the benefits to America of a new, 21st-century constitution by convening its own state-level convention to draft a model to emulate.)

The big question now is how hard Newsom will push for an idea that is far more consequential than anything else he is doing. One test of the governor’s intent is whether he will refuse to endorse Democrats who don’t join the movement for the 28th Amendment, including President Joe Biden who is likely to resist the divisive proposal.

If the president won’t get on board, there is another way for Newsom to demonstrate he is serious about reducing gun violence and making our constitution. The governor could—indeed he should—run against Biden for the presidency next year.

The post Newsom’s Gun Control Amendment Is the Most Important Idea in U.S. Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On a radiantly sunny afternoon in late January, I visited the parking lot of Star Ballroom Dance Studio in Monterey Park. It had been less than a week since a gunman killed 11 people there ranging in age from 57 to 76, many of them regulars who were there to celebrate Lunar New Year Eve. Eleven altars featuring portraits of the victims had been placed against the brick wall of the studio, along with traditional funeral wreaths draped in white sashes (“Exact Tax Inc.,” “Boys and Girls Club of the West San Gabriel Valley”). Buddhist monks clad in saffron robes chanted sutras in front of a table set with 11 plastic trays of rice and vegetables, and 11 bottles of water: sustenance for each person who died. The earthy-sweet scent of burning incense sticks filled the air. It all momentarily transported me to my grandparents’ funerals in Taiwan, my uncle’s funeral in Arizona. For so many of us with roots in North and Southeast Asia and its diasporas, this is how mourning looks, smells, and feels.

Mounds of flower bouquets, candles, notes, and messages written in chalk adorned the cement in front of the smiling portraits of the victims, along with pyramids of glossy orange tangerines, Asian pears in white Styrofoam netting, and Virgen de Guadalupe candles. “RIP from the ?’s of all of us who dance in El Sereno!! It could have been any of us. Rest in Power.” “We Love You – Cal State LA Dance Club.” “Sorry for lost [stet] to your loved ones – Lopez Fam.” “Thoughts and prayers from East LA.” “We are Monterey Park Strong = from the LGBTQ-MPK.” I watched as a young adult wearing a black hoodie crouched, head bowed, in front of one of the memorial altars. After a long moment, they wrote on the asphalt in bright sidewalk chalk: “爸爸, 我愛你.” Dad, I love you. 

The people of Monterey Park and its surrounding region had made the parking lot of Star Dance Studio into the public memorial space they needed. These diverse immigrant and ethnic communities don’t wait for permission or for someone else to do it. Instead, they collectively make the space (most often a strip mall parking lot) into what it needs to be, whether that means growing vegetables in a median, making a parking space where none exists, or turning a sidewalk into a marketplace.

In the weeks since the shooting, the media, rightfully, has uplifted Monterey Park as an Asian American hub, a space of possibility for Asian immigrants to make lives and build community. Indeed, it was the first majority Asian city in the continental United States, and today about 65% of its population is of Asian descent.

But what this characterization sometimes glosses over is the incredible multiethnic and multiracial richness of Monterey Park’s history and present. This city, less than 10 miles from downtown Los Angeles, has developed a distinctly regional racial consciousness: a worldview that is, for the most part, aware and respectful of cultural differences and not centered around aspiring to achieve dominant white American, middle-class norms. Residents have created what the historian Matt Garcia, in his book about the eastern San Gabriel and Pomona Valleys, calls “a world of [their] own.”

In the first decades after World War II, Monterey Park became a flourishing L.A. suburb. It had a majority white population, sizable Mexican American presence, and relatively small but noticeable number of Chinese and Japanese American residents. Before people called it “Little Taipei” and the “Chinese Beverly Hills,” it was known as the “Mexican Beverly Hills.” For these earlier generations, Monterey Park was one of the few suburbs that was “not for Caucasians only”; it was a place where, as people I interviewed for my book told me, “we thought we could belong.”

This earlier history, together with sweeping changes to immigration law, laid the groundwork for an influx of new immigrants from the 1970s–1990s, largely from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia. The arrival of these new residents triggered massive white flight, transformations in political leadership, and nativist backlash such as the 1980s “English-only” movement. By the 1990s, Monterey Park was a majority Asian city, with a large Latinx (mostly Mexican American) minority, and few remaining white residents.

Bouquets of flowers piled at the entrance of the Star Ballroom Dance Studio. Photo by author.

During and after these decades of dramatic demographic change, on an everyday level, in neighborhoods, schools, shops, and restaurants, Asian American and Latinx residents of the West San Gabriel Valley, particularly young people, were making multifaceted connections across race and ethnicity. In these generally lower-middle to middle income cities, they experienced relative class parity compared to their wealthier white counterparts. The mix of available forms of housing in the West SGV allowed them to live with extended family members in more creative and flexible ways. And many of them shared an immigrant ethos as well as historical experiences of racism. For example, earlier generations of Mexican Americans who had come from Boyle Heights remembered when their Japanese American friends and neighbors were incarcerated during World War II. Others grew up eating food cooked by friends’ parents, acclimating to one another’s family cultures, and experimenting with passing for Asian or Mexican; many eventually made new multiethnic Asian American or “chinx-latinx” families of their own. Across race and ethnicity, they easily understood the particulars of each other’s identities, whether one was Teochew or Taiwanese or Chicanx, a fifth-generation Mexican American or a recent immigrant. Here, they did not have to experience the crude flattening of racial and ethnic identities so common to dominant understandings of race in the United States.

Star Dance Studio seems to have been a space where such a world was being created and enjoyed: among the 11 people killed on Lunar New Year Eve were immigrants from China, Taiwan, Vietnam, and the Philippines. In the aftermath, several of the victims’ families ruminated on their loved ones’ connections to the Studio and to Monterey Park more broadly.

A note left at the Star Dance Studio memorial space by a relative of 68-year-old Valentino Marcos Alvero addressed the city of Monterey Park as well as “Tito Val”:

Monterey Park,
you have welcomed immigrants and lost ones and gave them a home.
Tito Val, may you dance in Heaven with the Creator. We love you. ?

Alvero, a hospitality worker by profession, had planned to retire next year and return to his native Philippines. He was sometimes the only non-Mandarin speaker at the studio. Two days after he was killed, Siu Fong, a karaoke instructor there, reminisced about him to a local reporter. Once, she recalled, she tried to hand him an English songbook instead of the Mandarin songbook everyone else was using. “But he said, no, I want to sing this song, ‘Xiao Feng.’ I said, what (laughing)? And he sang it, I mean, perfectly—the tune and the voice. He has a very strong voice. And his pronunciation of Mandarin is just perfect. He just surprised the whole class.”

When I heard this story on the radio, I nodded. This simple moment of intercultural connection resonated deeply with all I had learned from residents about the history of Monterey Park and its surrounding areas. I also teared up: the past three years of intense anti-Asian racism and often horrific violence in the United States have worn me out, and this joyous interethnic affinity felt like solidarity; a form of love.

This, too, is one of Monterey Park’s legacies: a home for “immigrants and lost ones,” where those who have been historically excluded or vilified elsewhere might come to dance with others who are not exactly like them.

The post What Mourning Looks Like in Monterey Park appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

COVID only accelerated this work, moving our events to a livestream in spring 2020 and, this year, once public health restrictions allowed, pushing us to introduce a new hybrid event format. Now, audience members can once again join us in-person or tune in from anywhere in the world. It’s turned out to be an advantageous mix for a roving organization that’s both global and local.

In 2021, Zócalo made it to South Central L.A., Culver City, and to our new home at the ASU California Center at the Herald Examiner. Our move to this historic building in downtown Los Angeles means, among other things, that we can offer an even bigger stage (quite literally) to further foster community and connection among Angelenos and beyond.

In a year that saw both changes and a return to a new kind of normal, it was fitting that our very first Zócalo speaker returned as well. We welcomed back The Economist’s Adrian Wooldridge (whom we probably owe a Zócalo members-only jacket for all the times he’s shared our stage) for one of the events that Zócalo staffers voted among their favorites.

Selecting just five events to spotlight proved to be a nearly impossible task. We owe a warm debt of gratitude to our audience members, speakers, and partners for joining us in making the public square such a dynamic place. See you there next year!

 Can Boyle Heights Save America?

In short: “yes.” USC historian George J. Sánchez—whose new book, Boyle Heights: How a Los Angeles Neighborhood Became the Future of American Democracy, inspired the conversation—Josefina López, author of Real Women Have Curves and founding artistic director of CASA 0101 Theater, and Los Angeles Times city editor Hector Becerra, a Boyle Heights native, came together in May to make a strong case for why Americans should look to this “magical and multiracial neighborhood” to understand the true meaning of citizenship and belonging. Bonus—our chat room was packed with people from Boyle Heights who shared their memories, restaurant recommendations, and more.

Is South L.A. Forging a New American Identity?

Zócalo’s first-ever hybrid event explored how place-based identity can forge new bonds across racial and ethnic lines. Held at the Mercado La Paloma, in partnership with Esperanza Community Housing, the event was part of the South Central Innervisions: An AfroLatinx-Futurism multidisciplinary arts festival. Fittingly our panelists, Community Coalition’s Corey Matthews and USC sociologists and South Central Dreams co-authors Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Manuel Pastor used much of the conversation to look ahead at South L.A.’s future.

Is There Still Merit in a Merit-Based System?

New Yorker staff writer Nicholas Lemann, as moderator, asked Wooldridge, whose latest book is The Aristocracy of Talent, and the other panelists to define meritocracy and evaluate whether it has any currency left in today’s deeply unequal society. Among the event’s trenchant observations: “We need to look for better ways, the best ways possible, of finding promise, wherever it is in society,” said Wooldridge.

Can California Help Reduce Gun Violence?

Too often a dialogue around gun violence in the U.S. derails into a reductive “pro-gun” versus “anti-gun” stalemate. This was not that conversation.  Instead, this Zócalo/California Wellness Foundation event brought together a group of people who fundamentally agree that gun legislation can save lives, and asked them to discuss the difficulties and occasional victories of their work. Their solution-centric talk focused on the policies, research, and everyday action coming out of the Golden State that might have a ripple effect on the nation as a whole.

What Will It Take to End Homelessness in L.A.?

A graduate of Yale University who had worked on Wall Street, Shawn Pleasants shared his journey into and out of homelessness during this powerful panel put on in partnership with United Way and the Committee for Greater Los Angeles. Pleasants, who is now an advocate for the unhoused, and fellow speakers from a variety of local organizations and perspectives called for more innovation, collaboration, and simple human relationship-building to address what might be L.A.’s most pressing crisis.

The post Our Favorite Events of 2021 appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Yet this country has homegrown examples of effective gun regulation. Hawai‘i is one.

Although it’s best known for tropical weather and natural beauty, the Aloha State has another quality that distinguishes it from other states: the lowest rates of gun violence in America. In 2015, Hawai‘i had a mere 2.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents, compared to 11.8 nationally and an astonishing rate of 19.2 in Alaska. Even Hawai‘i’s urban areas are relatively free of gun violence. Honolulu, the capital of Hawai‘i, has the lowest violent crime rate of any city in America. Its homicide rate is similar to the Dallas suburb of Plano, Texas, which is among the country’s most affluent communities.

What is Hawai‘i doing right—and can it be a model for the nation?

The islands’ low unemployment and a local culture that takes living with aloha seriously certainly contribute to the state’s low rates of gun crime. But Hawai‘i is far from being a crime-free paradise. Property crime is relatively high in Honolulu, and the city has about the same number of car thefts per capita as Los Angeles. In other words, there is crime in Hawai‘i, just not much gun-related crime. And this suggests that Hawai‘i’s strict gun laws—rather than its prosperity or unique local culture—are responsible.

Hawai‘i is the only state that requires all firearms to be registered—both rifles and handguns. All police departments are required to run background checks on anyone trying to purchase a gun. The law does not limit the number of guns that may be purchased at one time, but it does require all purchasers of firearms to register for a license. Buyers with a history of mental illness, drug or domestic violence convictions, certain sexual offenders, and anyone with a restraining order are disqualified.

Put this all together, and Hawai‘i is the state with the seventh-strongest gun laws, according to grades from The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. In 2017 Guns & Ammo magazine ranked it as the 47th-worst state for gun owners, in part because it has a de facto ban on concealed carry weapons permits. The result of these regulations is that, by most measures, Hawai‘i has one of the lowest gun ownership rates in the nation. One recent study estimates that about one-quarter of households own guns, compared to a national average of 57 percent and a high of nearly 77 percent in Mississippi.

The scholarly research on firearm policy is complex, but most studies support one conclusion: states with more guns have more gun-related deaths and violence. It is no coincidence that Alaska, which has the highest rate of gun fatalities in the United States, also has one of the highest rates of gun ownership.

And America has lots of guns—nearly one for every man, woman, and child. Mass shootings receive the most media attention, but every year thousands of people fall victim to gun-related violence. According to the Human Development Index, the United States has nearly 30 gun homicides per million people, compared to 5.1 in Canada and just 1.4 in Australia. More guns are associated with higher suicide rates and violence against police, too. Simply having a gun in the house increases the risk that a family member will take his or her own life. Hawai‘i’s low rates of gun ownership almost certainly contribute to the fact that it has the third-lowest suicide rate for men.

Hawai‘i’s experience isn’t the only evidence that comprehensive gun laws make a difference. One major article in Epidemiologic Reviews reviewed 130 studies from 10 different countries and determined that restrictive laws were associated with fewer gun-related homicides and suicides. But looking to other nations for our inspiration is not always a useful exercise. America has a long tradition of gun ownership, and the Second Amendment makes it impossible to enact regulations like those in Japan or the United Kingdom.

Which is why Americans might think more about Hawai‘i. Over the past decade, as other states have made it easier to purchase or carry firearms, Hawai‘i has doubled down on its restrictions. Recent laws prohibit the possession of so-called “bump fire stocks” and require people with significant behavioral or mental disorders to surrender their firearms and ammunition to police. Hawai‘i was also the first state to cooperate with the FBI’s new “Rap Back” system that will notify local police whenever a gun owner has registered anywhere in the United States.

Hawai‘i’s relative isolation suggests just how well strict regulations can work. In many cities and states, it is easy to subvert the law by driving across state lines. This can make it difficult to gauge the effectiveness of gun laws. But Hawai‘i’s unique geography make this impossible: All guns must be transported on a plane or arrive in a regulated cargo shipment.

Hawai‘i’s experience suggests that common sense gun regulations, when they cannot easily be subverted, save lives. These laws work even in a place that struggles with other, less serious forms of crime. It is time for Congress to pass national laws that follow Hawai‘i’s lead.

The post Why Hawai‘i Has America’s Lowest Rates of Gun Violence appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I don’t become easily flustered at the prospect of violence. I grew up in Black Los Angeles in the ‘body count’ ’70s, and taught in an inner city high school for five years during the rock cocaine epidemic. I became desensitized to prison-like security and sworn officers of the law putting young people in headlocks—and the sound of gunshots in the distance. Then, after leaving for graduate school and receiving my MFA in creative writing and selling my first novel, my life as a publishing novelist afforded me the opportunity to teach at many of the better universities in Southern California.

Still, some of the entitled—and barely conscious—students I have since encountered at these prestigious schools make me nostalgic for the daily grind of the high school classroom. At the college level I usually grade generously because a fiction workshop is subjective by nature. But with one student I couldn’t bring myself to give him an “A”. He wrote smug and mean pieces that left me depressed. I gave him a B+ instead of the A- he coveted. As soon as I submitted grades I received an angry email from him.

“You have 24 hours to change my grade to an A- or else….”

I was alarmed, but less so when I bothered to read a few sentences down to see that he hadn’t threatened to kill me, rather he’d get his parents to sue me. I laughed it off, but then a female student who was in the same fiction workshop emailed me this:

This may seem strange or out of the blue to you, but it has worried me the past few days and I thought I would email you about it. I’m sure you have heard about the tragedy at Virginia Tech that happened yesterday. Today the news released information about the gunman, who was also student. Classmates and teachers of the gunman have talked about how he was a creative writing student who wrote disturbing plays and stories in class about murdering people. His teacher reported him to the school administration, and nothing was done. I don’t know if you remember this, but one of the students in our class wrote a story that was disturbing to say the least. It talked about stalking female students and included graphic details of several murders. I don’t know his name… I don’t really know what I’m asking you to do, but I wanted to possibly trigger your memory about this. The mere thought of something happening on our campus terrifies me, and if this kid is deranged, or “troubled” as the papers have described the VT gunman, the administration should know about it immediately. I may sound paranoid, but I think when something like this happens there’s no reason to take any chances.

She was describing the student trying to intimidate me into changing his grade. I reported him to the administration, but he kept writing vaguely threatening emails to me even when he was told to cease contacting me.

A few years later another student, a guy who seemed pleasant and a little goofy, made a comment before class in the hallway in front of his fellow classmates that his next story would be about killing his classmates. Suddenly half my students were skipping class (before attendance had been great). Again, a female student told me that students were frightened of the goofy guy. The student boycott got the attention of the university higher-ups and he was interviewed after I talked to him. He had no idea of the panic he caused, or that armed undercover campus security officers were in the hallway ready to handle the situation if I called them in.

I teach at UC Santa Barbara now, the school I graduated from. It’s a university that has experienced its share of tragedy. I was on campus on May 23, 2014, the night when Elliot Rodger killed six people in Isla Vista, the college town abutting the university. I had just finished class in the late afternoon and noticed an email to the campus community:

May 23, 2014

To: Campus Community

Re: Campus Wide “Responding to Distressed Students” Training

The offices of Student Mental Health Coordination Services, Student Health, Counseling & Psychological Services, and the UC Police Department invite you to a “Responding to Distressed Students” training on May 28, 9:00 – 11:00 am. The goals of the training are to provide attendees with a context for student mental health, to introduce and review the distressed student protocol and appropriate campus resources for students, offer suggestions on how to refer students, and review potential distressed student scenarios. This interactive training is open to staff and faculty and all are invited and encouraged to attend.

Please join us on Wednesday, May 28, 2014, 9:00 – 11:00 am in the Multipurpose Room of the Student Resource Building. Coffee and bagels will be provided.

Unfortunately Elliot Rodger wasn’t a student at UCSB eligible to receive counseling services and coffee and bagels. David Attias, son of film director Daniel Attias was, but he didn’t seek counseling back in 2001 when he ran over five people in Isla Vista. Both young men had families who knew their sons were troubled and desperately tried to intervene to prevent tragedy, but the efforts didn’t work.

About a year ago I brought Elise, my 15-year-old daughter, to sit in on the fiction writing course I teach at UCSB, so that later we could celebrate the birthday of my older daughter Giselle, who was then a Global Studies major at UCSB. Our plans were scuttled when the university was put on alert and locked down. No one could enter or leave the university while the campus police searched for a shooter. Seemingly it was a drug deal that became a dorm robbery that resulted in a massive response including multiple helicopters circling campus. It felt strangely like being a kid in South L.A. when the police were chasing somebody down.

As a kid I feared being killed because there was epidemic of shootings around me. Pootbutts (nerds) like me got shot along with gangbangers: Friends shot friends as well as family members and bystanders. I learned then that having a gun isn’t a magic talisman that keeps bullets from finding you. The tortured logic is that maybe you can avoid being shot because you’ll shoot first, or get a shot off if the shooter misses—and then that baby in the stroller gets a bullet in the brain. I had guns pointed at me four times; once out of anger, twice out of mistaken identity and, the last time, as part of a family dispute. In all of these instances guns were pointed at me suddenly and without opportunity for escape. The last time it happened all I could think to do was stare down the barrel of a shotgun and smile stupidly. The lesson I learned in L.A. was invaluable: When your neighborhood becomes awash in guns, no one is safe and you need to find somewhere sane to live, or spend your life inside of the house, hiding in the bathtub. What I dealt with as kid, fear for my personal safety, I wouldn’t now tolerate for myself, or my family. Sadly professors at these public universities in Texas—with possible gun-wielding students—have to carefully consider what it means to teach in a potentially militarized classroom.

The Texas legislature must believe more guns equal more safety, and that gun ownership is such an unmitigated good that it should be a largely unregulated right shoehorned into all aspects of daily life. The consequences remain to be seen. I can imagine being a professor at the University of Texas and leading a critique of a lousy story of a potentially armed student. Or the joy of explaining his failing grade during office hours behind my bullet proof partition, my own pistol close at hand deep in the heart of Texas.

The post Professor, Get Your Gun appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.