What gunfire over a game of Monopoly can tell us about America’s other shootings
Resentments over the preternaturally infuriating and interminable game Monopoly tend to culminate with an overturned board and a hail of counterfeit bills at worst. But the gunfire that punctuated one recent family dispute over the game offered bizarre and instructive context for a rash of better-known American shootings.
The media and political focus on mass shootings, most recently the horrific massacres at a Colorado nightclub and a Virginia Walmart, create the perception that gun violence in the United States consists of a series of extreme and anomalous eruptions. The largely overlooked Oklahoma board game shooting represents a reality that is far more routine.
Granted, mass shootings by themselves have grown frequent enough in this country — approaching two a day by one count — to defy easy cataloging. The murder of seven employees at a Norfolk area Walmart last week unfolded less than two weeks after another mass shooting in that state, one that cut short the lives of three University of Virginia football players, and just three days after five were murdered at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs. California Gov. Gavin Newsom noted that his recent tweet counting up the year’s mass shootings was already outdated two days later.
Numerous as they have become, however, such shootings represent a tiny and not particularly representative sample of a brand of violence that went from bad to worse during the pandemic. Murders surged more than any other crime over the past two years, and four of five American murders are committed with firearms.
Nearly 49,000 Americans died by bullets last year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a record toll and the highest per capita since the 1990s. But fewer than 700 of the dead, or about one in 70, were lost in what the Gun Violence Archive defines as a mass shooting. The number killed in what the FBI defines as an “active shooter incident” is even smaller, just 0.2% of firearm deaths.
The other 99.8% aren’t the unfathomable and grotesque outbreaks of violence, fueled by hatred, nihilism and lunacy, that periodically capture our attention. They’re more like the thoughtless, politically inconsequential Monopoly shooting — and, lacking the quirky involvement of an infamous board game, even less noticed.
Perhaps partly because it evolved from a diversion designed for the less than lighthearted purpose of demonstrating the oppressive perils of capitalism, Monopoly is enraging. There’s even research suggesting as much: One survey found that it’s far more likely than any other board game to lead to disagreements, hurt feelings and violent misuse of game pieces.
The trouble is that in a nation with more firearms than people, the deadliest weapon on hand is not always a die-cast miniature Scottish terrier. It certainly wasn’t in Tulsa, where the alleged shooter did — as more than one writer couldn’t resist noting — “go directly to jail” despite failing to hurt anyone.
Such a fortunate outcome is down to a roll of the dice as long as guns are available to settle any given dispute in the worst way imaginable. On Sunday, for example, less than a week after the mass shooting at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, a Walmart customer was shot in the parking lot of a store in upstate New York. On the same day, a Walmart employee was shot in a store in Tennessee. And the next day, courts were grappling with a 2019 shooting that left two dead at a Mississippi Walmart and another that killed 23 at a Texas Walmart.
In the context of a single week in the life of our country, that is, the Walmart shooting was really just a Walmart shooting. And all these shootings are just threads of a violent tapestry that defies description, let alone comprehension.