And the Beat Goes On ...

Another shooting, another deranged young man and another who was able to amass an arsenal of weapons and ammo that would have made John Dillinger envious (LA Times). This latest tragedy happened to occur on a street less than 30 blocks from my apartment, luckily while I was teaching in North Hollywood. The frequency of these shootings has become so common that it appears like just another news story that will soon fritter out, replaced by another celebrity breakup, constructed Obama scandal or sports star who turns out to be a cheat. Will we learn nothing as the mean streets of suburban America become more dangerous than Tel Aviv at the height of the terrorist attacks? Will we ever pass sensible gun control laws that actually makes it harder for the mentally unstable to acquire weapons? Can our schools do a better job of diagnosing and helping these troubled youth? And will we ever have a real conversation about the deleterious effects of Hollywood and video game producers love affair with violence?

The reality is that America has a culture of violence that has to be addressed at all levels. Those same violent videogames and movies exist in Japan, South Korea and China, where violent acts at are substantially lower rates (though there was a horrific school shooting in China a couple of years ago that the government covered up). Canadians own as many guns as Americans, but don’t seem to go on rampages that they must know will end in their own death. England has more broken homes than America, so it’s not that alone either. But when you combine the dramatic gap between rich and poor, the spectacle and consumer cultures that seize our children as nowhere else in the world, the endemic unhappiness that seems to plague the country, the celebration of violence without any nod to its effects and the ready availability of not only guns, but semi-automatic ones to almost anyone, you can see where the problem lies.

NRA spokesman and other gun control opponents like to argue that the bad guys will get guns anyway, but is that really true? Would all of these disaffected white suburban kids really have the wherewithal to find the weapons, the ammunition and enact the crimes? Could the ready availability of weapons and ability to accumulate them undetected by law enforcement make a moment of madness into a tragedy? Do we really need to celebrate violence with quite the aplomb that we do? What WWII should have taught us more than anything else, is that a crowd ushered into a culture of violence will often embrace it unquestionably. We do not live in a fascist state, at least not yet, but it does appear that all the hate, all the racism, all the anti-gay rhetoric and other forms of rabble rousing are having the natural, if unintended effect. Is this really the world we want to live in? The only way to start ourselves on the path to real change is to elect sane representatives (at this moment Democrats) to actually represent the interests of the majority – rather than a loud, boisterous minority.