Following the horrific massacre of 26 people,
including 20 children, at a school in Connecticut, there has been more heated
debate about America’s so-called gun culture. In the eyes of most observers, it
is a given that it is the availability of guns in the US that leads to these
mass shootings in schools. Apparently, the ease with which guns can be sourced
- thanks to the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees
Americans the right to bear arms - makes it inevitable that American kids will
run the risk of being slain by gun-toters.
Is
this true? Really? Even a fleeting glance at some of the statistics on school
shootings - especially the fact that multiple-victim shootings were extremely
rare before the 1980s - should reveal there is more to these outbursts than the
availability of guns. After all, guns have been around in the US for a very
long time, but it is only over the past 30 years that mass shootings in schools
have become relatively common (‘relative’ being a crucial word here). The
fetishisation of the means through which school-killers carry out their acts is
really a way of avoiding confronting the cultural factors that might shape such
acts. The obsessive focus on the technical execution, the guns used, looks like
a massive displacement activity, brought about by an unwillingness to examine
the potential cultural underpinnings of the school-massacre trend. The ‘gun
culture’ is the wrong culture to be talking about.
The
post-Connecticut commentary gives the impression that America is in thrall to
The Gun. A writer for the New
York Review of Books summed
up the rather elitist
East Coast view of the problem when he described the gun
as ‘our Moloch’ - a modern-day version of the pagan god to whom children are
sacrificed. Strikingly, he depicts the gun almost as a sentient force, godlike
indeed. ‘Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned’, he
says. Here, the shooter’s moral agency, or the broader cultural influences he
may have been subjected to, are downplayed in favour of depicting the gun
itself as the determiner of events and judge over life and death. In a
desperate effort to get around the inconvenient fact that guns are mere tools, no more responsible for
evil in our societies than knives are, the writer goes into denial. ‘The gun is
not a mere tool [or] bit of technology’, he insists. ‘It is an object of
reverence.’
The
idea that America reveres ‘the great god Gun’ has
been widely expressed post-Connecticut. You can see it in the very phrase ‘gun
culture’, which suggests guns, inanimate objects, have somehow conquered
America. You can also see it in the childlike claims that greater gun control
would solve many of America’s problems. As a British writer says,
‘I am so sick of listening to even liberal Americans being apologists for their
nation’s absurd gun laws. No guns = no gun killings. Simple.’
That
s-word gives the game away. It is what the ostentatious head-shakers over
backward Americans’ alleged worship of guns continually strive for: simplicity.
Or, as some of us might prefer to describe it, naivety. Because in truth, it is
not obvious at all that the shooting in Connecticut was the inevitable
byproduct of the availability of guns. And to argue this is to ignore some
complex and profoundly important cultural factors.
Firstly,
there’s the fact that shootings in America’s elementary schools, like the one
in Connecticut, are, in the words of Slate, ‘very, very rare’. Of the 191 school shootings that took place in America between 1979
and 2011, just 18 - nine per cent - happened at elementary schools. In a 17-year
period - July 1999 to June 2006 - 116 people were killed in ‘school-associated
homicides’, and just 25 of them were elementary- or middle-school students. For
older students, too, getting killed at school is extraordinarily rare. A 2004 US Department of
Education report looked at trends in the mid-1990s, a high point in school
shootings, and found that where students aged 15 to 18 had a one-in-14 chance
of being threatened with a weapon at school, and a one-in-seven chance of
getting into a physical fight, their chances of dying in school, whether by
homicide or suicide, was one
in one million, a statistical insignificance. The shrill critics of
America’s ‘gun culture’ depict US schools as Moloch-ruled hotbeds of violence,
but such perverse fantasies do not accord with reality.
Secondly,
and even more importantly, the argument that gun availability leads inevitably
to mass school shootings overlooks the fact that these bloody spectacles are a
modern phenomenon. If you look at a long, comprehensive
list of shootings in American schools from July 1764, when four American
Indians entered a school in Pennsylvania and shot and killed the schoolmaster
and 10 children, right through to Friday, when the horrors unfolded in
Connecticut, what is striking is how, for the great part of US history,
shootings in schools were just an extension of crime in general. They largely
involved the killing of one or two or three people, as part of gang-related
skirmishes, or acts of revenge against presumably ruthless teachers, or crimes
of passion by one young person against another. It isn’t really until the 1960s
and 70s, and more notably the 1980s and 90s, that mass school shootings, where the aim is
simply to kill a lot of young people for no discernible reason, become more
common.
Clearly,
there’s something other than ‘gun culture’ going on here. There must be other
‘cultures’ at play, ones which have their roots in something newer than the
Second Amendment. Those cultures, to my mind, are today’s profound culture of
atomisation, which can have the effect of wrenching individuals from the
communities they live in and from the social and moral norms that once governed
everyday life, and the destabilising culture of fear, whose treatment of every
school shooting as an epoch-defining event which destroys American values does
nothing to quell such acts of violence, and in fact could act as an unwitting
invitation to other loners who want to make a massive impact and hold the
modern world to ransom.
No
one knows what was going on in the mind of the Connecticut shooter. But what
was striking about his shooting spree, like that which occurred in Columbine
High School in 1999 or at the West Nickel Mines Amish School in 2006, was the
utter lack of restraint, the absence of any moral code saying ‘It is wrong to
violate a school’ or simply ‘It is wrong to shoot a six-year-old child in the
head’. Such a dearth of restraining morality is something new, springing more
from today’s culture of estrangement, and the individual nihilism it can
nurture, than from the 200-year-old Second Amendment. School shootings are
better understood, not as the end product of American revolutionaries’
insistence on the populace’s right to bear arms, but as part of today’s trend
for highly anti-social, super-individuated acts of nihilistic, narcissistic
violence - from so-called ‘Islamist attacks’ carried out by British men on the
London Tube to Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre of 77 of his fellow Norwegians
last year. What such assaults share in common is a profound sense of cultural
disconnection. They are, in many ways, the most extreme expression of the
narcissism of our age, in which there is the constant promotion of
self-obsession over socialisation, and individual identity over collective
citizenship, giving rise to a sometimes volatile atmosphere - through both
removing individuals from any sense of a meaningful social fabric and imbuing
them with a powerful sense of entitlement, where one’s self-esteem counts for
everything, and thus any undermining of it is a slight of the most dire order.
To try to explain mass school shootings through the fact that guns exist is
like trying to explain the al-Qaeda phenomenon through the fact that aeroplanes
exist: it fetishises the technical means as a way of avoiding grappling with
cultural factors.
Then
there is the culture of fear, the tendency to inflate every threat facing
society. Largely courtesy of anti-gun liberal observers, there has been a
palpable moral panic about school shootings in recent years. This was
particularly the case following the Columbine massacre of 1999, when two
students shot and killed 12 of their fellow students and a teacher. As one author puts it, the mass media overlooked the rareness of what occurred - they
‘emptied out the social and historical complexity of what was taking place’ -
in favour of depicting ‘youth as pathological aliens’ and the Columbine killers
as indicative of ‘The Monsters Next Door’: white, middle-class kids who at any
minute might massacre your children.
The
problem with such coverage is not only that it exaggerates the problem of school
shootings, but worse that it has the effect of amplifying the actions of one or two
attention-seeking individuals. In recent years, a warped symbiotic relationship
has developed between mass school shooters and the mass media. Indeed, from the
Columbine killers to the Virginia Tech shooter(who murdered 32 of his fellow students in 2007), shooters have started
to make their own videos or to write their own manifestos, sending them to
media outlets before they carry out their violent acts. They seem to recognise
that, courtesy of a fear-fuelled media, they will become stars, legends,
symbols of the rot at the heart of America, as soon as they start firing their
guns. They recognise that bringing a gun to school is all you need to do to
hold American values and the whole modern world to ransom. In short, they’re
aided and abetted by the culture of fear, by the media itself, which in effect
completes these shooters’ acts by dutifully transforming them into terrifying
symbols we must all bow before and search our souls in response to. This can
act as an unwitting invitation to other glory-hunting individuals likewise to
bring America, and the world, to a standstill simply by shooting some kids.
The
post-Connecticut blaming of The Gun is shot through with elitism, with ‘gun
culture’ seen as springing from those communities which also cleave to ‘religious
fundamentalism’ and ‘deny global warming or evolution’. You know who this
means: Them, rednecks, whose gun lust is apparently poisoning even decent,
middle-class America, places like Connecticut. Yet a closer look at the
school-shooting phenomenon might reveal that it is more a product of the very
modern, even liberal-promoted cultures of individual identity and fear-stoking,
than it is the fault of Texans or Moloch.
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