What we have instead of the mass-shooting novel is the mass-shooting essay. Mass-shooting essays, classically, are full of solutions. They work in a fairly simple way: you pluck out a single, overriding factor that causes these events, and then you suggest how it might be sensibly eliminated. As I write, the New York Times has published over fifty mass-shooting essays this year. Some talk about the internet, social media, radicalization, alienation. When a shooter claims to be acting in the service of far-right ideology, there are essays about the long history of American racism, or the specific culpability of Fox News and the GOP. But the vast majority, understandably, are about guns.
