Our Gun-Massacre Culture

Though only our most spectacular gun attacks, like the weekend massacre at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, gain anything like sustained national attention, a broader look at daily news headlines suggests that mass shootings are weekly, if not daily events: see http://www.bradycampaign.org/xshare/pdf/major-shootings.pdf.

A review of the above list reveals a variety of killers and apparent motives: domestic disputes (children-parents, ex-spouses, etc), hate crimes, religious violence, student-on-student violence, nightclub/partying mayhem, gang vengeance, “regular” street crime, neighborhood disputes, disgruntled (ex-)worker/client attacks, and the occasional random loner looking to end his depression or anonymity in a hail of bullets.

All the response we seem to get from our politicians is an ineffectual spray of mournful words. None are ready, willing, or able to diagnose the deeper sources of our gun-massacre culture or to offer social or policy solutions. The meaninglessness of priestly words of comfort from political leaders responsible for solving public problems has by now moved to the level of the obscene. We should declare a national moratorium on such mournful words from politicians, who should instead be held accountable for developing a bipartisan plan to stop the mayhem.

If I were to offer the beginnings of a diagnosis, I would say a place to start is with the need to develop some kind of etiology of gun massacres. An unscientific review of news headlines suggests that we face a combination of perennial human relations problems plus specific hate crimes plus mental illness issues, all made more lethal by the availability of mass-murder devices to anyone and everyone.

Thus: domestic disputes, in which children temporarily hate their parents, or a marriage is falling apart, or someone is insanely sexually jealous of someone’s new relationship, are nothing new under the sun. But the willingness of the aggrieved to kill their parents, or their ex, their ex’s new lover, their own children, their in-laws, and whoever happens to be in the room when they snap, this seems more than the perennial problem, and the availability of the advanced killing machines we call assault weapons provides a tool to kill more people when that moment comes.

Further: anyone who ever went to high school knows how emotionally exhausting it could be, how difficult the relationships were, and how there were always people (sometimes us) who got their feelings hurt or felt angry or left out. But access to sophisticated assault weapons is a new factor that we didn’t need.

Further: everyone knows that things get kind of crazy in the dark nightclub scene late at night when the Mojitos are flowing and the hormones are racing. But guns make the inevitable stupid decisions and misunderstandings and macho posturing all the more dangerous.

Further: there are all kinds of unhappy people working in terrible jobs, or forced out of jobs that they either loved or hated. But the availability of guns makes it all too easy for that disgruntled, unhappy (ex) employee to “tell off” his hated co-workers or boss using a hail of bullets rather than words.

Further: everyone knows that there are lonely and depressed people in our relationally dysfunctional and atomized society. But what’s new is the availability of military-quality weaponry for some of these lonely and depressed people to release their homicidal/suicidal howls of pain to the world.

Further: tensions over religious or ethnic pluralism are a problem in many societies, but the vulnerability of those mass gatherings we call worship services (especially for religious minorities), together with the easy availability of guns, means that whenever any group gathers for open worship they must understand themselves to be at risk.

Further: there seem to be a distressing number of people who value neither their own lives nor those of other people enough to be deterred from waking up one day and deciding to kill others and themselves. We face a problem related to suicide, not just homicide.

In sum: sin is not new. Crime is not new. Broken relationships are not new. Bad jobs are not new. Depression is not new. Hatred of the “other” is not new. Suicidal self-loathing is not new. Outbursts of anger are not new. But what does seem to be new, and unique to US culture, is the ready availability of mass killing devices in the hands of just about anyone who might ever feel like killing someone.

At a cultural level, we need to raise children who will become adults who know how to control themselves when faced with intoxicants, broken relationships, problems with parents, sexual jealousy, depression, loneliness, and really bad bosses. One role of religion in family training of children is to offer instruction and spiritual resources to help young human beings learn how to control their emotions and not do what their instincts tell them to do. We need this function to somehow happen in society, regardless of what happens with our levels of church attendance.

We need higher value to be placed on human life. Human beings matter. It is not a small thing to take up a gun and pierce someone’s body with bullets. Life is sacred. We need more of our people to know that sacredness so deeply that they will restrain themselves from killing specific others or random others. Where did we go wrong? When did life become so cheap? Is it all of our wars, our video games, our violent movies? Or does the problem go deeper?

In the short term, ironically, we may need a more heavily-armed police and security presence in all of our public places. Everyone who is responsible for public gathering places, such as houses of worship, schools, malls, theaters, arenas, parks, clubs, and so on, needs to consider the vulnerability of those who gather there to the random or not-random mass killer, and needs to provide an adequate security presence.

And, of course, our gun laws need to change. We need politicians with the courage to face down the ridiculous and in fact lethal demands of the gun lobby. No civilian needs an assault weapon. No civilian needs military style body armor. No one needs to buy a handgun every month.

The Second Amendment was written at a time when the greatest fear was the tyranny of centralized power over the individual citizen or the local community. Today our greatest fear surely must be the tyranny of individual gun violence over all of us.  

If we cannot solve this very basic public policy problem, we will have all the evidence we need that our political system is irretrievably broken.