In early October 2015, after Chris Harper-Mercer shot and killed nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, then-presidential candidate Ben Carson, a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, was asked if he would visit the crime scene to meet with victims and the community. He replied, ‘I mean, I would probably have so many things on my agenda that I would go to the next one.’ The comment aroused outrage and ridicule, but in the United States, it was perfectly reasonable: if you take the phrase ‘mass shooting’ at face value, he could have waited until the next day, when four people were shot, one fatally, at a strip mall in Baltimore. For most Americans, though, a real mass shooting involves the murder of multiple strangers in sufficient numbers to make the national news. For that, he would have had to wait until 2 December, when fourteen people were killed and twenty-two injured at a county services building in San Bernardino, California.

Mass shooting is the flashiest form of American gun violence, but it is far from the most common. Paul Auster makes this clear early on in Bloodbath Nation, a new essay on gun violence, reminding readers that more than half of gun deaths are suicides and most murders are ‘single victim/single offender’, to use the FBI’s terminology. That these are so frequently overlooked Auster attributes to our alleged ability to treat as an understandable part of everyday life contract killers, ‘one-on-one grievance murders’ and that mainstay of urban legend, ‘the young kid from a rough urban neighborhood who knows his life will be under constant threat if he doesn’t join a local gang and therefore goes out into the streets one afternoon and fires a bullet into an anonymous passerby to prove he has the guts to be embraced by the clan’.

Whether Auster or the ‘we’ he corrals into his meditations really understand anything about suicide or regular murder is difficult to say, because he gives them only scant attention, preferring to linger on more spectacular violent outbursts. The book includes Spencer Ostrander’s black-and-white photographs of nightclubs, schools, homes and places of worship where mass shootings have taken place. The images are unremarkable, if not conspicuously dull, but their point is not aesthetic or to provide insight; they are occasions for the exercise of piety, icons to gawk at and mope over, to enable viewers to tell themselves they have felt well and truly bad and hence are exempt from the perverse infatuation with violence that is indelible to the American character.

The sense that this is not a serious exercise grows as Auster digresses, struggling to shoehorn every conceivable progressive rallying cry and grievance into 160 pages. He reminds readers of the injustices of colonialism, excoriates the hypocrisy of Thomas Jefferson in regard to slavery, lambasts Donald Trump and the Capitol rioters, and mistily recalls the hope he felt when ‘large biracial crowds’ marched in protest after the murder of George Floyd. Nothing Auster writes is objectionable, but virtually all of it is gratuitous, and his vigour in asserting that bad is bad and good is good gives this book the character of a plea for Auster’s inclusion in the census of the virtuous.

‘Shooting is fun, it’s enjoyable,’ Auster said in a recent interview with Publishers Weekly, and through fond recollections of his boyhood passion for cowboy films and a felicitous day of skeet shooting, he seeks to establish his ‘credibility as someone capable of writing about’ gun violence. This attempt is unpersuasive, and the story of his grandmother shooting his grandfather and his description of the crippling effects this had on their children’s lives suffer from cursoriness. At no point does he avoid the impression of a person talking down, and in appealing to the rationality and empathy of gun owners, he repeats an error that has stymied the gun control movement in America for decades: thinking that they care.

Gun owners are not ignorant of mass shootings, gang violence or the dangers of the mentally unbalanced having access to high-powered weapons; they are not too stupid to realise that the presence of guns can turn any bar fight or marital dispute into a murder scene. They have considered these realities, are exposed to them daily on the news, and have decided that they want their guns anyway. A gun-toting relative once justified his support of the Second Amendment to me with the following logic: ‘The way I see it is this. Some guys rape women, but I’m not going to cut off my dick.’ His perspective was crudely expressed, but not unrepresentative. With guns, as with obesity, climate change and much else, Americans have disjoined cause from effect with a degree of obstinacy that would dismay David Hume. When Auster calls for an ‘honest, gut-wrenching examination of … who we want to be’, he seems to take it for granted that the answer won’t be John Wick or Dominic Toretto from The Fast and the Furious. It won’t be for me, for him or for his readers, but we’re not the ones who blew away nineteen thousand people last year. Auster must know this, and to the extent that he does, this particular instance of preaching to the choir is just another gesture of despair at the impossibility of dialogue, a despair that has made gun violence one of the most intractable issues in American political life.