When UC Davis violence researcher Dr. Garen Wintemute queried Americans on political violence, race and threats to democracy, he didn’t know exactly how scary the results would be.
“We expected the findings to be concerning, but these exceed our worst expectations,” said Wintemute, a go-to source for many years on gun violence, which he witnesses firsthand as an emergency room physician in Sacramento.
The report by Wintemute and his team at the Violence Prevention Research Program was released Wednesday by UC Davis. The findings were posted by medRXiv.org, a health sciences website that lists works in progress prior to peer review.
Wintemute told me that with midterm elections coming up in a politically divided and frenzied nation that has more firearms than people, he wanted to go public with his findings now rather than wait for peer review, which might not come until after the election.
Most gun-related violence in the United States involves daily assaults that don’t make headlines, but where weaponry and politics intersect, here are some of the highlights — or maybe lowlights is the better word — of what Wintemute and his research team found:
- Slightly more than two-thirds of more than 8,600 survey respondents perceive “a serious threat to our democracy,” and 51.1 percent believe that “in the next several years, there will be a civil war in the United States.”
- 42.4 percent said having a “strong leader” is more important than “having a democracy.”
- 18.7 percent said they agree strongly or very strongly with the idea that violence or force are needed to protect democracy “when elected leaders will not.”
Sadly, none of this is surprising. Thanks to political polarization, the culture of distortion and social media saber-rattling, millions of delusional Americans believe that Donald Trump is no longer president only because Joe Biden stole the election.
And the fear is that many of them, armed to the teeth, are prepared to storm the gates.
“About a year ago we began following a surge in gun purchasing,” Wintemute told me. “It was unprecedented and started at the beginning of the pandemic.”
At the same time, there was ample evidence of an erosion of faith in democratic institutions and elections, and he wanted to study how serious a threat that constituted.
In his report, Wintemute said that despite the “continuing alienation from and mistrust of American democratic society … founded in part on false beliefs,” there’s hope.
“A large majority of respondents rejected political violence altogether,” he said, and the challenge is for that majority to recognize the threat and respond to it.
Easier said than done, but worth the effort.
Wintemute said he hopes the Jan. 6 hearings and the findings of his team’s report are a wake-up call. He said we should recognize that some who feel alienated have legitimate grievances about government failures and address them. We need a better mental health care system, he said, and a better way to make counterpoints available to those attracted to extremist views.
And then there’s the obvious need for sensible gun control, and the endless work of trying to convince enough people that the weapons they buy for self-protection actually put them and their loved ones in greater danger.
“We are right now in the middle of a huge national experiment,” Wintemute said. We’re finding out “what happens when you take an angry, polarized society and make guns much more easily available in a real hurry. What happens in that society? We’re living through the answer right now.”
Steve Lopez is a columnist for the Los Angles Times. steve.lopez@latimes.com
