Saturday, Dec 15, 2012 11:00 AM CST
http://www.salon.com/2012/12/15/how_americas_toxic_culture_breeds_mass_murder/
Mass shooters in the U.S. are almost always
men — angry men who can get guns more easily than mental health care
As a
parent, an American and a human being, I’m having trouble functioning in
the wake of Friday’s elementary-school shootings in Newtown, Conn.
You’ll read this some hours after I write it, so you’ll know more than I
do now about the children and adults who have died and the families who
are enduring unbearable losses, and about the life and death of Adam
Lanza, the young man who apparently inflicted them. Those things are
dreadfully important to the people involved, but they won’t change the
bigger picture much. That’s a picture of grief and horror and profound
collective mystification about how such a thing could happen, a picture
of a disordered culture that produces these spectacular outbreaks of
psychotic violence more and more often, even in an era of relatively low
crime.
While the grief and horror are understandable, as well as
fully justified – I’m forcing myself to move my fingers across the
keyboard, when I would probably be better off sitting quietly in a
darkened room, or spending time with my own children – maybe we
shouldn’t be quite as bewildered as we claim to be. I don’t mean that we
should understand, or even try to understand, how a person can become
so angry and sick that he picks up a gun and starts shooting other
people’s children at random. There may be artists and psychiatrists and
philosophers who can glean something useful from looking into that kind
of hateful and bottomless despair, but I sure don’t want to do it.
What
I am saying is that we’ve had enough of these events over the last few
decades to see undeniable overlapping patterns, and the same toxic stew
of legal, cultural and psychological factors recurring in almost every
case. Some of this information has to do with readily quantifiable data,
such as the fact that most mass shooters acquire their guns legally on
the open market, and most use assault weapons or semiautomatic handguns
that would be far less easy to obtain if we had more reasonable and
realistic gun laws. Some of it is blindingly obvious but not openly
discussed, such as the fact that this is almost exclusively a male
problem. (As a remarkable survey published a few weeks ago by
Mother Jones
attests, 60 of the 61 mass shooters in America over the last three
decades have been men or boys. Now, I suppose, it’s 61 of 62.)
Some
of it is more nebulous and subjective, such as the media’s pornographic
fixation on events of this kind, even though they make up a small
proportion of the firearms killings in the United States every year. As a
culture critic by trade, I tend to resist cause-and-effect explanations
that blame violent entertainment for real-world violence. (I’m not
saying that it hasn’t happened in individual cases.) But I find it
unfortunately plausible that the massive media spectacles erected around
incidents like the one in Newtown, or the
“Dark Knight Rises” shootings
in Colorado, with their grave and studied theatricality – the
somber-looking anchors, the wobbly amateur video of people crying in a
parking lot, the police photograph of some crazy-looking guy in a prison
jumpsuit – can inspire copycats and emulators who want to be that
famous too.
Whether these patterns point the way toward preventing
these kinds of horrific events I really couldn’t say. Maybe they
suggest some places to start and some strategies worth trying, or maybe
they just help us understand the dimensions of the problem a little
better. Here are some of the key factors in these outrages, as I see
them.
Take the Second Amendment and shove it.
There are numerous reporters and commentators, at Salon and elsewhere,
more qualified than I am to go after the National Rifle Association and
the rest of the gun lobby, who have so successfully hijacked this issue
over the last 20 years or so. We’ve seen the Democratic Party largely
abandon the struggle for reasonable standards of national gun control
since the Clinton administration, no doubt because it didn’t focus-group
well in swing districts of Pennsylvania and Michigan or whatever. And
even if outrageous crimes like the Newtown and Aurora shooting begin to
swing the tide of public opinion back toward a nationwide
assault-weapons ban, the NRA has already won the war on the ground. The
country is flooded with millions of such weapons, and short of the kind
of house-to-house, black-helicopter search the gun nuts fear, we’ll
never get rid of all of them.
That’s not a reason not to try,
obviously. As I mentioned earlier, data collected by Mother Jones
indicates that the majority of mass shooters acquired their guns
legally, and that very few of them used more “normal” consumer firearms
like revolvers, hunting rifles or shotguns. Yes, you can still commit
murder with a weapon like that, and people do it all the time. But mass
murder becomes much more difficult. Urban liberals might aspire to live
in a European-style country where private gun ownership is exceptionally
rare, but that’s not likely to happen here. It’s not necessary to
repeal the Second Amendment, or force folks in Kansas to give up
Grandpa’s blunderbuss. Americans have a long history with guns, blah
blah blah – I’m actually not interested in prying your trusty .30-06 out
of your cold, dead hands. But gun owners have been brainwashed to
believe that private ownership of semiautomatic weapons whose only real
purpose is to kill large groups of people is a constitutional right.
That’s utterly insane and immoral, and over the long haul maybe they can
be brainwashed back.
America has a major angry-man problem.
Reading the Mother Jones article, whose lead author is former Salon
reporter Mark Follman, I was actually surprised to learn that there was
one female mass shooter in recent American history, a disgruntled postal
worker in Goleta, Calif., who shot a neighbor and several co-workers.
But the other 61 people who have so tragically acted out their twisted
private fantasies on people around them have all been male. While some
element of sexual or misogynistic drama was frequently involved – a
mother or ex-wife or girlfriend; a rejection or divorce or suggestions
of closeted homosexuality – the one thing you can point to in almost
every case is perceived humiliation.
Over and over again you read
stories of workplace shootings – at technology companies, aircraft
factories, day-trading firms, fast-food franchises, maintenance yards
and (infamously) post offices – in which some guy who got fired or lost a
promotion or generally felt that everybody hated him goes and gets a
gun, or several, and acts out his revenge fantasy. Of course there’s no
possible justification for such an act, and it seems reasonable to
conclude that anybody who shoots a lot of people has suffered a mental
breakdown, probably one with deep roots and multiple causative factors.
Nonetheless I suspect that economic realities play a role. It’s
plausible that these grotesque events are by-products of the downward
pressure on wages, especially in the working class and lower fringes of
the middle class, and reflect what has sometimes been called the “crisis
of masculinity,” meaning the perceived emasculation and loss of
privilege felt by some men in an age of increasing sexual equality.
I’m
not suggesting this is good news, but the stereotype that these kinds
of shooters are invariably white men is less true than it used to be. In
the last decade or so, almost every possible demographic has been
represented: There have been two infamous campus shootings by Asian
graduate students, one by a Native American teenager living on a
Minnesota reservation, and a couple by African-Americans and Latinos.
Overall, 43 of the 61 shooters in mass killings since 1982 have been
white, which is only a little higher than the proportion of whites in
the general population.
Each of these cases represents a failure of the mental-health system.
If, that is, you want to claim we even have one. One of the repeating
elements in these dreadful dramas is an attempt to point fingers at some
shrink or counselor or teacher or social worker who knew there was a
problem and didn’t do enough to intervene successfully. In several
recent cases, including the “Dark Knight” and Virginia Tech shootings,
the perpetrators had sought help at various times before they went off
the deep end into apocalypse. It’s impossible to imagine the pain and
guilt a professional in that position would feel after something like
this happens, but we’re pointing fingers in the wrong direction.
There’s
only so much the overworked people in the mental-health field can do
about someone who very likely has a worsening disorder, is by definition
poorly equipped to make good decisions, and may be refusing to accept
competent care and advice. But what lies behind that problem is the fact
that the U.S. doesn’t have a national health-care system that could
maintain standardized medical records of at-risk individuals, and at
least seek to enforce a nationwide standard of care. Of course that
wouldn’t prevent every single mass killing, but you can’t convince me it
wouldn’t stop some of them. There are many reasons why the
social-welfare states of Western Europe have lower rates of violent
crime than we do – but the fact that
they still have social welfare states, however decayed, has a lot to do with it.
Media fascination with violence, and the 24/7 news cycle, may have made things worse.
“If it bleeds it leads” is a longtime maxim of the news industry, to be
sure. By the time Martin Scorsese made “Taxi Driver” in the mid-‘70s,
the archetype of the psychotic killer as media hero was well
established. But the mass shooting as a collectively created media
spectacle, shared by television, the major Internet news portals, the
mainstream media’s big names and millions of individuals on social
media, has changed the nature of the experience. I do realize the
painful and profoundly unfunny irony of raising this issue in a
day-after analysis story on the Internet, one of dozens or hundreds you
may come across this weekend.
When I wrote about the
“Dark Knight” shootings
in Colorado earlier this year, I discussed the way that particular
lunatic seemed to want to elevate his evil psychodrama to the level of
spectacle seen in Christopher Nolan’s film. The shootings at Sandy Hook
Elementary School on Friday had nothing to do with a movie, but the
whole thing was a spectacle all the same. News reports suggest that
Lanza arrived at the school dressed in the all too predictable “black
fatigues and military vest” required by his role, and he had to know
that shooting little kids would guarantee him several days of stardom in
a drama of his own construction, even if he’s no longer here to see it.
What
Lanza apparently did was contemptible and unforgivable, and it would be
better to ignore him and focus on the bigger picture. I am not
suggesting he deserves our pity, but he is a victim too. Moving
backwards from the evidence here, I would suggest that these atrocities
tend to occur in a culture with numerous fundamental problems: one that
is economically divided and socially stratified, with a dark
undercurrent of male anxiety and anger, one where high-powered firearms
with no legitimate uses are far too easy to find, where the social
safety net has been shredded and decent mental-health care is not
available to all, and where our experience of the world is increasingly
as a shared media spectacle. Does that sound familiar?
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