The slaughter of six and seven year-olds in Connecticut seems to have violated acceptable limits of violence we have lived with for decades. No one with a heart could fail to be moved by the ages of the victims, the horrific nature of their deaths by assault weapons, and that once again the shooter had untreated mental health problems. There was hardly a person with dry eyes when first hearing the news.
Politicians reassured the public. Schools announced new security procedures. First responders were praised, the victims memorialized, acts of heroism noted. Experts suggested ways to strengthen community and console children. Clergy offered prayers and assurances that the dead were in a better place. As self-appointed judges, the pundits ruled that for such violence there really can be no answer.
But I disagree. We have known for years what causes gun violence. Only if we as a nation have the political will can we stop it.
Since 9/11 nine thousand people are murdered with firearms each year. Twice that number die from gun accidents and suicides, racking up a gun-related body count of roughly 35,000 a year. Since Martin Luther King’s killing there have been roughly 1.25 million deaths involving firearms. This number is twice the carnage from all American wars combined – from the Revolutionary War to the current war in Afghanistan.
The US may no longer be first in education or standard of living, but we are first in guns. Our 280 million civilian weapons are enough to stop any invasion of terrorists, zombies, or aliens – violent fantasies that figure prominently in popular culture. We are fifth in annual numbers of firearm homicides. In contrast, India’s population of a billion has a gun homicide rate a tenth of ours. Japan, with its hundred million citizens, had only eleven murders by firearms in 2008 – compared to our nine thousand the same year.
So, to those who claim there are no answers: look across the ocean. Look across all the oceans for answers which pundits claim are unknowable. Such violence is unique in the Western world. Why is that?
From our favorite TV shows to computer games, to our military spending on endless wars – eventually we must face what a violent society we have become. Here everything is framed as a war: the War on Terror, the War on Crime, the War on Drugs, the War on Christmas. Now we’ve managed to turn weapons of war on our own children. The gun lobby calls gun regulations a War on the Second Amendment.
A couple of years ago, just in time for Christmas, Activision produced an advertisement for its computer game, Call of Duty: Black Ops, with the subtitle, “There’s a soldier in all of us.” In the ad, playing to a track from the Rolling Stones’ “Let it Bleed” album, a variety of civilians – fast-food, hotel, and office workers, a young girl, and a short-order cook – blast, shoot, bomb, and kill their way through an alien landscape.
The marketing gurus had it just right. There is a soldier in all of us. One retired ATF agent explained to a journalist the “cool factor” of the Bushmaster used in the Connecticut slayings: “When I say cool, it’s because a lot of dedicated people … carried it in the military, [and] would like to shoot it. They see it from the aspect of reliving their days in the military.”
And while the President mourns children who could be his own, the drones he sends to assassinate suspected terrorists have already killed hundreds of children and innocent civilians.
Like a dark twist on Mr. Dickens, this Christmas season the weapons of wars past have come back to haunt us all. None of the comforting words and platitudes recited, and none of the bandaid legislation we will create to make armaments of war in civilian hands a bit more difficult, will change things until we realize what a violent and militaristic nation we have become. Only after we renounce our culture of violence will the terror we have unwittingly unleashed on ourselves finally end.
This was published in the Standard Times on December 23, 2012
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20121223/opinion/212230309