On the "Culture of Violence"
On the "Culture of Violence"
"You know, Bells, even South Park covered this type of thing. Will somebody please think of the Children!" —The Marquis
"Well, someone has to." —Bells
We must, at some point, think of the children. Not in the goofy
South Park way, in which everything is perceived as a predator of childly innocence, but in the broader sense that these are the next generation of our society, or of our human species.
The problem, of course, is that I'm out of ideas.
Well, okay, that's not
everybody's problem; I'm neither Christ nor the sociological equivalent of Stephen Hawking. What happened in Newtown, though, just blew a huge hole in my longstanding backburner idea for gun control. By that idea, the gun owner would have to answer for allowing the gun into the shooter's hands.
Nancy Lanza, though, is dead.
However, we have crossed a threshold.
Kevin Sullivan reported this week, for
The Washington Post:
When many people in Newtown count the victims in last week’s massacre, they tally 20 children in Sandy Hook Elementary School, plus six adult faculty and staff members. Few count shooter Adam Lanza’s first victim: his mother, Nancy. Police said that before he attacked the schoolhouse, Adam Lanza pumped four bullets into his mother’s head as she lay in bed.
As this heartbroken town tries to process Friday’s horror, there is considerable anger toward Lanza’s mother. Her name is noticeably absent from many of the impromptu shrines, memorials and condolence notes placed around town.
At the foot of the street leading to Sandy Hook Elementary, 26 Christmas trees stand to honor the dead at the school, each bearing the name of a victim, but no Nancy Lanza.
Outside the Newtown Convenience and Deli in the town center, 26 small plastic Christmas trees with twinkling blue and purple lights stand next to a sign that says, “In loving memory of the Sandy Hook victims.”
The University of Connecticut honored the shooting victims Monday with a ceremony before a men’s basketball game, with 26 students standing at center court holding lighted candles.
“I am feeling that there is more anger toward the mother than there is toward the son,” said Lisa Sheridan, a Newtown parent.
“Why would a woman who had a son like this, who clearly had serious issues, keep assault rifles in the house and teach him how to shoot them?” she said. “To deal with that, there’s a feeling here that we’re just going to focus on the 26 innocent people who died at the school.”
In the end, Ms. Sheridan's question is valid, though I think any parent can sympathize with the cognitive dissonance. Swirling media reports include Nancy Lanza's sister saying the mother was preparing for some sort of doomsday, but also the suggestion that the apocalypse she faced was a multiple sclerosis diagnosis. We have also heard that Nancy Lanza home-schooled her son for a while, argued him out of joining the Marine Corps, and hoped to see him study engineering in college.
But the problem goes much further than Nancy Lanza's decisions.
In the political bluster, we hear about the "culture of violence", and it is something worth considering. But blaming pop media like video games, music, movies, and television is a cheap excuse. After all, if we're going to suggest video games and movies, why not consider the news media, whose approach to ratings includes trying to scare the hell out of people?
Because the culture of violence becomes more apparent when watching societal reactions to life. Terrorists hijack airplanes and crash them into buildings? Gun sales spike. (What? You can't take your AR-15 on the plane with you ....) Barack Obama is elected president? Gun sales spike. President Obama does nothing toward gun control? Gun sales spike. The economy crashes? Gun sales spike. President Obama is re-elected? Gun sales spike. Mayans decide to skip the math until it's needed in another fifteen centuries? Gun sales spike. A disturbed man goes on a rampage in a Connecticut school? Gun sales spike.
There is no problem facing this nation that can't be assuaged by buying guns. This is the
real culture of violence in the United States, and you don't need Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzeneggar, Gordan Freeman or Max Payne. The American heritage includes oceans of blood, from revolution and conquest to labor and booze, Americans have long settled their problems with a hail of bullets.
This is a society in which men settle disputes over dog leavings with guns. I mean, it's one thing to mock a real-life
poop shoot, or the kind of moron who thinks a gun is a sex toy, or maybe the kind of idiot who thinks bees are a good reason to ... um ... well ...
put buckshot in a .22 revolver and start shooting. To the one, you can see the punch line coming, right? I mean, how do you try to shoot bees out of the air with buckshot, and end up shooting yourself in the hand?
The real culture of violence in the United States is the one in which guns are the solution for everything from canine feces to bees to
proving one's
manhood.
Oh, yeah. And keeping the thrill in your sex life.
A pattern begins to emerge.
I remember a gun control discussion here at Sciforums some years ago, in which a gun advocate recounted the story of walking around some Indiana town and had to "show" his gun repeatedly. That's when it hit me how frightened of the world some of these gun nuts are.
It's gotten to the point that some folks with guns are looking for reasons to use them. Certes, the shooting of Trayvon Martin made headlines, but did you know it happened again? There is a reason
D. L. Hughley, actor and comedian, calls the stand your ground laws "a hunting license for young black men":
The backstory was not an altogether surprising one: A group of five black teenagers were sitting in their SUV, blasting their music far too loudly. If I had to guess, I'd bet they were probably using foul language as well and generally acting the fool. I have no doubt that it was a complete nuisance to everyone around them.
This time, the story played out a touch differently from the usual outcome. Michael Dunn, a middle-aged white male, decided to approach them and confront them about their noise. An argument ensued. That an argument would ensue is obvious to anyone: Kids who behave in a rude and obnoxious manner are generally not receptive to constructive criticism. The argument escalated, as these absurd street-arguments always do. That's when Michael Dunn took out his gun and shot up the SUV, killing one of the teens in the process ....
.... No one likes kids blasting their crappy music. No one likes babies crying on airplanes either. But you don't get to kill them. If that were the case, Ice Cube would have signed my death certificate many years ago -- and for many of my childhood friends as well. So let's identify this law for what it is: a hunting license for young black men.
Frankly, a hunting license would be an improvement over the Stand Your Ground law. Hunting is a very heavily-regulated sport. There are only certain times of the year where hunting is permitted, and the animals you kill have to be of a certain minimum size. Juveniles are not, generally, considered fair game (it's where the term "fair game" comes from). You can't bait your prey, either: they have to be given a fair shot.
I was at a Florida golf course once where there was a different kind of nuisance: A fourteen-foot alligator had swam nearby. Clearly, this was a danger to the golfers and could not be allowed to stand. But that alligator -- a species not even close to endangered -- was captured and released elsewhere. Shooting it, which would have made us all safer, was still not legally permissible. But if it were a young black man hissed at a Florida citizen, his life would be possibly moot -- and legally so.
There is only so much, at present, we can do in the U.S. to limit the availability of guns. The problem is not so much the Second Amendment itself, but how we've read it for the last seventy years. As the idea of a regular militia has declined, only the second half of the Second Amendment seems to have any relevance in the courts. This must change.
Meanwhile, the craven need to own and use guns also needs to change. For many gun enthusiasts, the power to take life seems very nearly an identity complex.
As with so many issues facing the American future, this is one that cannot be resolved anytime soon.
Such as things are, I've now lived long enough to witness certain generational changes. To wit, fans of
The Simpsons might remember the 1997 episode, "Lisa's Sax", which recounts the tale of how Lisa Simpson became a musician. The story also includes Bart's first day of school, and shows how a single day in the public schools turned a bright, eager young boy into a sad child who finally found identity in comedy and rebellion.
That part of the episode would seem crazy to my daughter, yet it depicts a process very common to my own generation. I remember the descent in kindergarten, and how going to school weighed on me more and more until, in fourth grade, I simply started going through the motions. Many of my peers felt pangs of sympathy for a depressed Bart, walking into the house after his first day of school, unable to speak to his parents. But seeing the students at my daughter's school, and working in the classrooms, the difference between once upon a time and today is readily apparent to me. So much of what parents have criticized as flowery liberal destruction of the educational system seems to be having positive effects all these years later. My daughter and her peers look at school in an entirely different context. We'll see how much of that carries into high school and such, but for now it's an entirely different world. She's in fourth grade now, the year when I began my withdrawal from society, and she shows no signs of a similar decline. The difference inside the classroom is, if not shocking, at the very least disorienting to me. I still don't get it, but I do see the fruits of what people have been complaining about for the last thirty-some years. I have lived long enough to witness a generational transformation.
To the other, this is a bit grim an outlook, to think that solutions to our gun crisis are thirty years away. And, in truth, it gets worse; this one will take longer.
But we can make little headway on the idea of gun control and safety regulation until we address the underlying culture of violence. And that isn't movies or music or video games. Rather, it is this strange idea that guns are a solution to everything, and lethal force is an identity complex.
We
do need to think about the children, but we cannot reinstall childhood innocence the way we can an operating system. What damage is done is done. Parents across the country who are freaking out in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre are, in many cases, only further eroding the innocence they hope to protect.
We must think of the children because we must transform our culture of violence. Our society will certainly survive another generation learning that the power to destroy human life is an identity complex, but the number of sacrificial lambs in the meantime? A staggering projection. It is not a healthy path for a society. The gun advocates' solution of more and more guns is no real solution. After all, it seems crazy to suggest that the one thing we need, as a madman is on a rampage and everyone is scrambling for cover, is a crossfire.
As it is, there are places in this country where one can provoke a confrontation, and then kill in self defense. What happens, then, when everyone straps on and stands their ground?
Our society will certainly survive another generation of violence, but there is no guarantee that it will not be maimed. Prevention is the best harm reduction theory, but effective prevention will also mean resolving whatever neurotic plagues drive the widespread belief in guns and violence as solutions.
Real solutions will involve efforts spanning decades. As with so many American pitfalls, this hole is deeply dug, and it will be a hard climb back to the daylight.
Meanwhile, I think of a dispute in New Zealand that involved three of the funniest words I've ever heard, "Assault with hedgehog". I can't say much about New Zealand, but I can easily believe chucking a hedgehog is the sort of thing that will get a person shot in the U.S. To the other, we recently had an assault with weasel in my area, and nobody got shot. In Seattle, a few years ago, a parking garage dispute apparently erupted into a crazy fracas involving fifty people; one woman was stabbed. The upshot there is that nobody, apparently, was carrying a gun. Fifty people strapping? That would have been a legendary "Mexican standoff". This is a society where people will shoot at
bees, for heaven's sake.
If all you've got is a hammer, they say, everything looks like a nail. And if all you've got is a gun?
It seems everything looks like a target.
Our culture of violence has to change. That's the only way out of this mess.
____________________
Notes:
Sullivan, Kevin. "In Newtown, Nancy Lanza a subject of sympathy for some, anger for others". The Washington Post. December 19, 2012. WashingtonPost.com. December 21, 2012. http://www.washingtonpost.com/natio...425f1c-4a1e-11e2-ad54-580638ede391_story.html
Hughley, D. L. "The Law and Unintended Consequences". The Huffington Post. December 5, 2012. HuffingtonPost.com. December 21, 2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dl-hugley/law-and-unintended-consequences_b_2246220.html