Gun Violence

It seems like every time I thought about sitting down to my computer to write something about the shooting at the Aurora, Colorado theater, another shooting would pop up on the news. There have been no less than four nationally publicized shooting incidents in the past two months: Aurora in Colorado, the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, Texas A&M, and the Family Research Council in D.C. It's more than enough to make one sick.

And enough to raise major questions.

There was the usual fight between the "mainstream media" and the conservative talk-o-sphere, on the one side crying out for tighter gun control legislation and on the other side retorting that guns don't kill people, people do. The one position is impossible to maintain, the other is over-simplified and cliched.

To briefly address the first position, I might mention that there is some evidence that exists for low crime rates in cities and counties where guns are easily available. But even if you are unwilling to accept that evidence because of disagreement over the methodology of studying a law's effectiveness, you are basically forced to concede that, as the New York Times put it, "criminals are the people least likely to obey gun control laws, meaning that the laws probably have a disproportionate impact on law-abiding individuals." I might also mention countries like Switzerland that have enough armed citizens to make an anti-gun American cringe, and yet their "gun crime rate is so low that statistics are not even kept."

To address the other position, I have to characterize the conservative attitude as I see it before I really tackle it in order to make some sense. It seems to me that conservatives make these shooters out to be a couple of bad apples in a normally fine apple pie. The insistence is always that these shooters "acted alone", that they are "animals" ( a favorite expression of talk-show host Andy Dean), and that their actions reflect on them and them alone. The implication is that our consciences may remain unruffled by such mindless killing, because heck, we weren't the ones that did it, they were. Right?

I find this conservative position an awkward one to defend for several reasons.

The first is the assertion that these were only a couple of "bad apples." With the increasing number of these high-profile, increasingly creative, and wildly violent shooting sprees, I would say we have had something of a growing problem for several years. Add in the number of shootings involving the military in some way over the past three years and you begin to get the point. One shooting is an isolated incident, two is a coincidence, but three or more is a trend.

The second reason is that not only are these people not "animals" ( I find rationalization by denigration particularly offensive, Mr. Andy Dean), but many of them are relatively intelligent people who acted in a very methodical way.

The third reason is connected to the first: these individuals may have acted out these shootings by themselves with no accomplices, but as I mentioned before we seem to have a bit of a trend going. Culture and society have a huge influence over the actions of a human being, and to see so many of these shootings occur in such a short amount of time makes me think there might be a connection. Mightn't more than just the shooters have to carry some small share of the blame?

To illustrate the last point, I would point to America of the 1940's and 1950's. In those decades some of the favorite games for young boys were playing soldier, fighting mock battles with wood sword and fake guns, and pretending to be gun-slinging cowboys. Good guys would win, bad guys would die. Boys were taught to shoot and hunt with very little incident. Up until about 1966 with the mass killings committed by Charles Whitman from a bell tower in Texas, the kind of public massacre of the sort in the Colorado theater was virtually unheard of in the U.S. Now it seems there is a fresh shooting every couple months. Why?

I submit my humble opinion that our culture changed. Drastically.

Now, I am not a starry-eyed nostalgic who thinks that any time in America before 1960 was beautiful, good, and wholesome. There was plenty of wretchedness before 1960, as there has been plenty afterwards. But not this kind of psychotic violence. This is the sort of violence that holds the preciousness of life in reckless disregard, approaching other human beings with a cold calculating eye. Charles Whitman is a great example of this; he killed both his mother and his wife in the same 24 hours, systematically snuffing out their lives and then writing his thoughts about it. His murders and massacres were all methodical, studied, deliberate.

Perhaps this change came about partly in response to the Vietnam War, where more and more Americans became disillusioned with the bloody conflict and viewed it as a massive waste of human and material resources. Soldiers returning from the war certainly would have carried its mental scars. Perhaps the change occurred because of the cheapening of human life intertwined with the use of "the Pill." Man's own self became the center of existence, an attitude aided by the frustration of the sexual act and precipitating the sexual revolution. Pleasure would be sought at all costs, and consequence be damned.

The changing attitudes inaugurated in the 1960's I believe is the true culprit for these shootings. Shared heroin needles, multiple sexual partners, demented music, and complete moral relativism combined to form a toxic societal cocktail that would cripple or destroy the family lives of countless Americans. We still feel the effects of this lethal combination in the form of high abortion rates, countless teen pregnancies, general cultural ennui, and yes, these shooting massacres. Now it seems the only way to have one's five minutes of fame and importance is to do something shocking like killing people.

Yes,  these killers are the ones doing the killing. They have only happened to settle on the gun as the instrument of massacre and the blame does not lie with the availability of the gun. But the blame also does not lie solely with the shooter. As I said before, boys have been playing with mock swords and guns for ages. Since the advent of adventure books and movies and television, good guys have been killing bad guys with guns, and vice-versa. But somehow John Wayne riding in and cleaning up town with a six-shooter was not what it would eventually take to incite young men (and some women) to kill their fellow citizens with firearms. It would be Dirty Harry, The Last House on the Left, and Straw Dogs with their morally ambiguous depictions of characters that would create the heroes of the new generation. Suddenly the good guy was no longer so good, and the bad guy was sorta cool. And this trend has never really stopped. Think The Italian Job and the Oceans heist films. Those are relatively new films, and all are morally aimless. Revenge is the new justice, and the criminals are the good guys.

Once there was a sense of communal responsibility for protection of life and property in this nation. The young generation that volunteered to fight World War II was eager to defend, to serve, to go and maybe never come back. The Vietnam War-era generation was the opposite. And with this loss of eagerness to serve and defend comes a confusion about the role guns play in our lives. When we no longer have a robust sense of responsibility for our own safety because of our willingness to rely solely on government protection, then the firearm becomes a novelty item. When the gun loses its proper purpose at the same time that we lose our moral way as human beings, that is when it becomes truly dangerous.

Restore the concepts of duty, honor, and moral uprightness to the culture and the questions about gun control fade away. Besides the moral problems of our culture, America does have a certain fetish for guns presently speaking, probably because many Americans who own them see them more as fun items to own, shoot, and flaunt rather than as practical tools with a martial background. Almost all the male citizenry of Switzerland carry firearms and own firearms, but not because of machismo. They carry them because the citizenry is the military. I could almost guarantee that the average Swiss male between the ages of 18 and 45 could take on the typical YouTube gun-toting American in a shooting match and come out on top. The difference is in the reason for the gun. The American showing off his guns on YouTube owns those firearms in many cases just because they are cool. The Swiss male owns his because his life and his countrymen's lives depend on it.

Culture is a river that man is immersed in every second of every day. Clean the pollution from that river. Change society, not the legitimate tools that society uses. And pray for all the victims of all shootings, publicized or not. Those families are hurting more than they can ever express, and neither calling for gun control nor" blaming the person and not his weapon" gives them any extra ounce of comfort.





Photo by Sam Lisker, via Wikipedia.

The Pellet With The Poison Is In The...

I decided to end this week with one of the funniest movie scenes ever. What Friday is complete without Danny Kay stumbling over himself to remember a ridiculous ditty that his life depends on? Enjoy!

America's Last Just War

U.S.S. West Virginia burns after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

My DVD shelf at home exhibits a wide variety of topics and genres, from romantic comedy to thrillers, and yet if you were to canvass the content of said DVD shelf with respect to how much money was spent on each genre, the war genre would most definitely top the list.

The genre of World War II movies, to be precise.

No, it's not because I'm a sucker for blood and gore (although war and war movies tend to produce prodigious amounts of both), nor is it because I need a patriotic rush every now and then (which seems to be the reason behind the making of Captain America.) I own war movies of that kind both for the stories of greatness and tragedy that they contain, but also to remind myself who we are and why we fight wars, and which ones to not fight.

But thinking on my buying habits concerning movies focusing on World War II, I think I stumbled on something interesting. It seems that my fascination for this particular war is hardly unique. In fact, it exists and persists almost universally in (male) America today. The evidence for this is everywhere, from Stephen Ambrose's many books on the topic, to the endless number of video games that depict various battles of World War II. I live not 30 miles from one of the most beautiful World War II monuments ever built, the D-Day Memorial in Bedford, VA. It is a relatively new construction of staggering emotional complexity and artistry, dedicated shortly after Saving Private Ryan, a film about the D-Day invasion, hit theaters. Saving Private Ryan was quickly followed by a string of World War II films, notable among them being Band of Brothers and The Pacific, as well as Pearl Harbor.

Why the mystique? What makes World War II so especially memorable? A comparable number of soldiers died in battle in World War I, and yet many Americans hardly know the events of the war that set the stage for World War II. Why is that?

I offer here my humble opinion on the subject: I put forward for consideration the idea that World War II is the war of choice for study and dramatization because it holds little to no controversial value in terms of the justice of the Allied cause. In fact, I will go as far as to say that World War II could very well have been America's last great morally justified war.

Consider it for a second: on America's side there was no preemptive strike of any kind, nor did we actively push for war with either Japan or Germany. Those are two very important factors, especially for the perception of a war in hindsight. It takes the greater part of the onus of explanation and justification off the United States.

To bolster that fact even further, let us first look at the Japanese side of the conflict: we were brutally attacked at Pearl harbor with little warning from Japanese leadership, with whom we were in peace negotiations with at the time. In other words, Japan was saying one thing and planning and doing something quite different, attempting to hold us up in peace talks while the Imperial Navy knocked out any and all of America's ability to wage war at sea. The attack on Pearl Harbor thus became a morally ironclad reason to go to war, perceived as such at the time and ever after as well.

The other side of the equation, Nazi Germany, was a somewhat different affair but the ending was the same. Instead of attacking us, however, Adolf Hitler took the next most self-destructive action and simply formally declared war on the United States. Our case would have been a little harder to make otherwise.

Then of course there remains the indisputable evil of Nazism and the horror of the “Final Solution.” Most sane people cannot harbor any remorse they may have had for Hitler's dashed dreams when they see pictures of Dachau and Auschwitz. The skinny limbs and hollow faces of Jewish corpses evoke too strong of a reaction to be forgotten that easily. It was then and remains to this day an evil worth fighting to destroy. In a similar vein, the horror of Japanese occupation and treatment of prisoners lends a powerful moral argument to the righteousness of America's cause.

The fact is that no one seems to look back at World War II and declaim against the involvement of the United States in the conflict. We more look back for a fresh perspective on the war and how it was fought, not necessarily why it was fought. The reason why we fought is culturally accepted in the United States as good.

I think we are in a healthier place now in our view of the Second World War than we were immediately following it. The films of the late forties and fifties generally depict the war as all guts and glory on the Allied side, death as a noble and bloodless thing, and the American fighting man as close to a demigod in the rightness of his cause. We know a bit better now, as the film Saving Private Ryan suggests with its horrifically real portrayal of the assault on Normandy beach. Heroism was involved, yes. However, we now can accept the soldiers who fought in the war as human beings with courage and cowardice.

All in all, it makes a compelling case for the continued fascination with the last epic global conflict. Never again, it seems, would we live in a world that was so patently divided into good and evil and in which the good fought the evil the old-fashioned way.

Our modern world of the 21^st century being so muddied up in its morals, alliances, and pursuits, maybe having such a war to reflect back on does our nation some good.