America: Exceptional for all the wrong reasons

A friend notes that, when she visits Italy, the question Italians ask is, “Why Donald Trump?” They think Americans were foolish for making him president in 2016 and for making him the Republican nominee again this year. They consider Trump an international joke. Of course, Italy had as prime minister through four governments Silvio Berlusconi, the richest man in the country who ruled like an authoritarian, had numerous conflicts of interest and a scandalous personal life.

A friend in France, who frequently visits her daughter in the U.S., says the primary question she gets about America is, “Why all the guns?” In conversations with friends, America’s liberal gun culture – and the frequency of gun deaths, in daily violence and mass shootings – is a constant puzzle for the French. It’s probably a puzzlement for anyone anywhere who came of age with the belief that the U.S. was an exceptional society.

Look at the news from overnight: Four police officers serving a warrant for a felon wanted for possessing a firearm killed and four other officers wounded in a shootout Monday at a house in Charlotte. Because the victims were law enforcement officers, the Charlotte shooting, the media make it big news; the president will be briefed, officials will decry the violence. But will anything change? Not even the massacres of school children move the political class to toughen laws or, more importantly, provoke the kind of profound culture change like we’ve seen in other countries that decided to eliminate the threat of gun violence on a mass scale. Meanwhile, in the U.S., mass shootings – there were more than two per day in 2023, according to the Gun Violence Archive – barely make news; they have blended into the new normal of a country that is exceptional for all the wrong reasons.