Sunday, December 16, 2012

Gun Control and the Spectacle

A few days after the mall shooting, the worst school shooting in U.S. history occurred in Connecticut Thursday. As everyone is by now aware, the 20-year old white male walked into a school and killed 6 adults and 20 children, after having killed his mother and taken her gun: HuffPost. Now news has emerged that a student at an Oklahoma High School was planning his own massacre: Salon. This has been a year full of shootings in malls, schools, movie theatres and on the streets. It thus seems an apt moment to discuss the causes of these tragedies and methods that can be used to stop them. The most obvious, gun control, seems off the table. Why? For one, the power of the NRA to undermine any effort at controlling the sale of weapons. Another is the gun culture that has long reigned in the U.S. But a third factor is, of course, the companies that continue to make huge profits selling guns and ammunition, with little concern for who buys them or how they are used. 

Another factor to consider is the effects of the pugilistic eroticism we find in movies and video games, on television and across the popular culture landscape. While I grew up shooting asteroids, chasing round objects around a maze grid and running over barrels to get at a big gorilla, today games from Grand Theft Auto to Call to Duty allow people to engage in very real feeling violence without consequence. Studies showed little effect of this orgy of violence on all but those with predilections to violence. But isn't that enough to give us pause? Maybe we don't have a general public waiting to shoot each other in the streets, but what if we are feeding the frenzy of ticking time bombs across the country? What if we are desensitizing the public in general to violence and its affects on our citizens. I read a story recently of a father who was playing a video game while his infant sat crying a few feet away. Having had enough, he turned and punched the child -- killing it. The mother and he were then caught as they tried to figure out how to hide the death. 

The reality is, as I stated a few days ago, the spectacle moves so quickly these days and the media framing is so important that we have but a few days or weeks to actually do something about this latest tragedy. And something needs to be done. For one, I believe it should be harder for people to get guns. Those who argue against this are deluding themselves. Places like England still have crime, but making it hard to get a gun decreases gun-related violence. An informative article from the Washington Post (Linkincludes a number of telling statistics including the fact that most of the mass shootings over the past 30  years have occurred with people who acquired their guns legally. Another is that states with tougher gun laws have lower incidents of gun violence. And the public does support some gun laws, while there has been no increase in overall calls for complete gun control. While we don't have the highest gun-related homicide rates in the world (Poltifact) as many often argue, we do have by far the highest rates for high income countries and only trail two countries in the overall number of homicides per year. 

As with so many other social/political issues in America, there are two factors that often disrupt sensible debate. One is the passion of those groups that support continuation of the status quo (in this case the NRA, most of the GOP and the large liberatarian wedge). It also includes the businesses that would be adversely affected, or put out of business, if actual change occurred (gun and ammo companies, gun show participants, etc.). In fact, one could argue that most issues we call social are in fact either directly or indirectly economic issues, from affirmative action to global warming to women's rights, labor power and the like. The second is the nature of political framing in the mainstream media. The move further and further toward spectacle and its resultant sensationalism undermines the ability for rationality to intercede. Generally, we have talking heads who will simply repeat their ideological positions no matter what happens, debates that consist of two people on opposite sides of the issue talking at (or yelling at) one another and a few factoids to offer the veneer of objectivity. Missing will be the sorts of debates we used to see up until the 70s and the sensible policy discussions that could actually lead to change. 

Yet something must be done to start to address this growing issue. Fear is one of the greatest ways to control a population and one could argue the fear fed to the general public on a daily basis since at least the 80s (with the Cold War and McCarthy trials two examples before then), has led a whole generation of kids to spend most of their time inside watching television, playing videogames and surfing the net. So one issue might be finding more ways to get these kids back outdoors playing, interacting with one another and escaping for even a few hours from the media bubble they tend to live in just like poor John Travolta so many years ago, in a less metaphoric role. Another is to again make it harder for people to get guns and to include more data collection in the approval process. If kids have records in high school of being high risk or developmentally disabled, should we really give them access to guns? A third issue, in my mind, is the increase in bullying that has occurred in recent years. We need to find effective ways to deal with this issue so that alienated kids aren't growing up to be alienated adults intent on revenge. 

And finally, I do believe it is time to have a national discussion about the movies, television programming, video games, music and advertising that kids are inundated with on a daily basis. I might have grown up watching cowboy and indian movies and had a few six shooters myself, but that felt like a fantasy world so different than the world that I lived in that paralleling the two seemed absurd. Since the kids today so often live in a world of media immersion, the line between fiction and reality has melted into one miasmic social fabric were distinguishing between the two becomes an exercise in futility. Isn't it worthwhile to ask why we need to celebrate and glorify violence on such a regular basis? Sure it sells, but does it give us any long and lasting pleasure? Does it make our lives better? Does it make us happy? And what if it contributes to the senseless death of any more innocent children or adults? One hopes the country is ready to ask these questions in a meaningful way ... 

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