‘Please sign this petition and let’s NEVER AGAIN witness a
day like today!’
Her caps, not mine.
Let me make two things clear:
1) I would like to see the end of all guns, everywhere, but
it isn’t going to happen.
2) If I were a US
citizen, I would be the first in line to sign a petition calling for stricter
gun laws – much stricter – as strict as we have in Britain.
Where I have a problem is with the phrase ‘…let’s NEVER
AGAIN…’ carrying, as it does, the implicit suggestion that making the
acquisition of guns more difficult will somehow stop the Newtowns, Columbines
and the rest. It won’t. It might reduce the number and severity of such
incidents – which is a good enough reason in itself to restrict gun ownership –
but it won’t stop them. On the same day as Newtown
happened, there was a news report from China which said that a man had
gone into a school and attacked children with a knife. It said that twenty
children – ironically the same number as at Newtown – had been injured, but none of them
killed. OK, point made: guns make it easier to kill people. I agree. That’s why
I support stricter gun laws.
Nevertheless, a fundamental point has to be made: when
somebody goes around attacking the innocent en
masse, the origin of the problem isn’t the gun but the twisted mind that’s
using it. And statistics would appear to suggest that there is something about
American culture which fosters a higher incidence of twisted minds than occurs
in other developed countries. I don’t claim to have any idea what it is, but
until an earnest attempt is made to get to the root of the matter, I fear that
such horrors as Newtown will continue to happen more frequently there than
they do elsewhere.
You have my sympathy, America. Yours is a country
brimming with good, positive, compassionate, brave, resourceful people. I wish
you the best of fortune in getting to the root of the malaise by addressing the
right question.
8 comments:
The U.S. has a gun culture that simply isn't present in other countries. Stricter gun control will help the problem, but as you say, it won't solve it completely, because the gun culture will remain.
It's kind of like having a really violent, disturbed little kid, and then the kid gets his hands on a hammer and starts beating other kids with it. Some people say, "Oh, it's not the hammer that makes him violent; he's disturbed." Yes, but YOU STILL TAKE AWAY THE HAMMER.
Of course, Americans are not the same as little kids. They're much worse.
I knew just such a kid when I was a boy, and the interesting thing is this:
I had to wrest the hammer off him more than once (to stop him attacking me with it) and when I did he became pleasant and friendly - until he got hold of the hammer again. The very possession of the weapon seemed to bring out the mania. Maybe that's an angle on the issue, or maybe it isn't. He was clearly disturbed on the inside, even without the hammer, and I've occasionally wondered what became of him.
I saw an interesting newscover about the perpetrator who said he had a high level of depression and mental health problems. A politician said we need to give more money back into our system here so we could screen more kids for depression on top of stricter gun laws. Something to think about...
I agree; that's a start. But then it brings on the next question. If this behaviour stems from high levels of depression and mental health problems, and if it's also more prevalent in America than elsewhere, does it indicate that American culture somehow engenders high levels of depression and mental health problems? I once heard that Canada has a similar level of gun ownership than America, but only a fraction of the gun crime. Could that indicate a different general ethos, or that the specific gun culture mentality is stronger in America than in Canada? I don't know, but I think it's the kind of thing that America needs to be looking at.
It might be that American culture affects the character of the manifestation of mental illness, not the mental illness itself. So a person with the same mental illness in another country might be equally unwell, but his behavior would be different. It's also likely that other countries provide better mental health care, so that people like the shooter would have been given treatment long before his illness escalated to this extent.
Regarding the manifestation - good point. As for others having better mental health care, there's a treasured impression in Britain that Americans have psychiatrists almost as routinely as everybody else has dentists. Maybe that's just a false prejudice we pick up from the media.
Well, it's true and it's not. Mental health care in our country is linked with social and economic privilege. The middle and upper classes are more likely to seek out treatment when they need it and to be able to afford it. (Many of our so-called "health insurance plans" don't cover psychiatric care or therapy, just because they can.)
Also, I think it depends on the type of mental illness. People who are genuinely psychotic are less likely to realize they have a problem and seek help than those with equally severe illnesses (e.g. depression or anxiety) that don't affect reason and judgment (or at least not to that extent).
But even before you get to the issue of available treatment, it still seems readily apparent that the incidence of psychosis is increasing in the developed world, and particularly in America. So are we coming full circle and having to seriously consider changing the whole basis on which high tech, high speed, high consumption societies are based? Are we putting people under too much pressure and exposing psychotic tendencies in a minority of vulnerable individuals? If so, how do you turn down the pressure without turning the clock back? Is that what we need to find a way to do? Is that the big challenge of the 21st century? If so, it's a big one. My original post is beginning to look a bit simplistic!
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