Within the space of a week, two incidents have captivated news audiences the world over – the Navy Yard shooting and the al-Shabab-related shootout in the Westgate Mall in Nairobi, Kenya – and the debate over what should be done about the gun problem has resumed with gusto.
This is a subject I’ve written about at least once before, back in January in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook massacre (and, less notably, the Piers Morgan-Alex Jones interview), and I feel like I did a pretty good job of expressing how I feel – not only about the language in the debate or the framing of it, but in the debate itself. That said, I feel like reiterating a few points.
Forget about gun ‘control.’ There’s no putting the genie back in the bottle here. Guns – whether we like them or not – are here to stay. Controlling these guns is going to require a massive, expensive and oppressive effort on the part of the federal government. Background checks, restrictions on trade, Starbucks banning guns from their cafe spaces – all of these will do exactly nothing to stem the tide of the nearly 270 million guns already floating around in the United States.
Forget about mental health disorders. After establishing that the perpetrator of a particular heinous act is not, in fact, a terrorist, it seems that most news organizations, bloggers such as myself (though I haven’t really reported on something like this, until now) and pundits scramble to tease out of the ether a particular mental disorder or atypical neurology to assign to the subject. This, at least, is somewhat natural; in intense situations like a shooting, when all moral reasoning is thrown out the window and savagery rushes in to replace it, people will try to make sense of a situation any way they can.
That being said, can we stop attributing things like autism to every shooter who isn’t brown? It isn’t so much that we should “forget” about mental health disorders when reporting on something like this; we should just be excruciatingly careful with what we use and how we use them. Like, we shouldn’t use them unless we have a verified diagnosis from a family doctor or something.
Forget about video games. This is always such a fun aspect of the debate. When it gets brought up, you can practically hear the millions of video game players who don’t exhibit violent or extreme behavior as a result of playing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 852 sigh collectively. How many studies have been done on the link between video games and violence? How many have come up with evidence substantiating this link? The violence in video games is, at any rate, a symptom of a much, much larger problem.
Focus on violence. Not just the individual violence of the incident at hand – but the entire culture of violence we immerse ourselves and our children in every day. Everything from the economic violence of capitalism, to institutional violence such as the federal government “breaking our legs and getting stingy with the crutches” when it comes to food stamps and other basic welfare, to the kind of violence we condone – the violence that emanates from the police and military that claim to protect us, and the violent acts that the people we elect to make decisions for us instigate – all of this plays a role in how we view our world. Most of us frame it as “Social Darwinism” and ignore when the less shocking aspects of our violence culture play out. But when a “bad apple” or two breaks the mold and does something truly disgusting, when people who don’t upset the volatile equilibrium of our covertly savage system get hurt and killed as a result, we are outraged.
And we should be outraged. No one deserves to die. Not a one of the people – especially the children – who have been killed in various acts of violence all over the world just this year alone deserved someone ending their life. But we have to stop narrowing our scope to that with which we are comfortable. A wide view on our violence culture is not only recommended – it’s necessary.