There’s a popular joke among statisticians: my uncle was a heavy drinker, and couldn’t figure out what was really causing his drunkenness and his hangovers. So he decided to do a scientific analysis. Monday, he drank rum and water; he got drunk, and had a hangover the next day. Tuesday, he drank vodka and water; he got drunk, and had a hangover the next day. Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, he experimented with gin and water, Scotch and water, Bourbon and water, brandy and water, and rye and water. Each time, he got drunk, and had a hangover the next day.
So he decided to cut out water.
Once again, somebody with a gun has killed himself and various other people, and once again we feel helpless to take on the gun lobby, so we go looking for other causal mechanisms that we could tackle to get rid of the problem. This time, because both the killer and the TV channel that employed the victims were taping the incident, and it went viral online almost immediately, we’re worrying about the possible contagion of violence from all this involuntary viewing.
I don’t watch social media often, and I missed viewing this particular piece before Facebook took it down (about 15 minutes after it got online.) Apparently 500 or so people were not so fortunate. I don’t know how much of the TV taping turned up on everybody’s TV news later, since I rarely watch TV news either. But suddenly we are worried about the prevalence of “snuff tapes” in our media. Yes, that kind of exposure is bad for our culture, and may very well encourage copycatting, or at least harden us to murderous behavior, so that we care less about it. But is this rum, or is it water?
It’s too soon for any exhaustive search for ways to keep this stuff off of Facebook, although in fact, some people are already talking about the Facebook staff keeping a closer watch on the feed, so as to prevent the 15-minute gap between when the bad stuff gets onto the small screen and when Facebook takes it off. So far, nobody is talking about out-and-out censorship.
I would like to suggest a Third Way. In the Jewish tradition, we like to say, of some bad guy or other, “May his name be blotted out.” This would be violative of the First Amendment only if it were mandated by some government agency. If the media decided voluntarily not to publish the name or image of murderers more than, say, three times (once when the bad guy goes on trial, again when a guilty verdict is returned, and a third time at sentencing), there could be no serious legal objection. (A not guilty verdict would lift the prohibition entirely—why should we mind when a suspect turns out to be innocent?)
Anyway, before yesterday’s abomination, we worried about people with mental health problems having access to guns. Yes, that’s a valid worry too, probably a much more serious one than media exposure. People with mental health problems, like victims of shootings and car crashes, rarely check their insurance coverage before experiencing a psychotic break or getting shot or run over. Their health problems, thus, are a problem for the community as a whole. The local hospital can always decide (as an increasing number have) not to have a psych ward or a trauma center, but the community as a whole probably doesn’t want bodies piling up on the street, or maniacs roaming at large. We need to tackle this problem to ease the suffering of people with mental illnesses--but not just to keep innocent people from getting shot. Is this rum, or is it water?
And before that, at least here in Chicago, we worried about kids shooting kids. Most lawless behavior among young people happens between when school lets out and when the parents come home from work. So our local do-gooders have intensified their search for programs and activities to occupy the kids during that bloody four hours. Again, that’s a good idea. The reason we let kids out of school before dark in the first place is that, back when we were all farmers, we had to let the kids get home early enough so they could slop the hogs and milk the cows while it was still daylight. That’s not much of an issue these days. But once again, after-school programs aren’t really the best or most direct solution to kids shooting kids. Is it rum, or is it water?
Ordinary people, especially city dwellers, are likely to take the direct approach in their analysis. We know of very few drive-by stabbings. Yes, we all know that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. But people with guns kill people faster. And in greater volumes. Automatic and semi-automatic guns are more popular than ever—an ER physician from Chicago’s Cook County Hospital once pointed out, in a lecture to a bar group I was in, that her ER staff had gotten to the point where, when they saw a victim with only one or two bullets in him, they presumed suicide or accident rather than homicide. So why can’t we just control guns?
There appear to be two sets of problems here—the cultural and the political. Southern, Western, and rural culture consider the ownership and use of guns normal and reasonable. The solidly pacifistic Amish hunt with guns, for pete’s sake! Rural poverty being what it is these days, there are lots of country people who cannot imagine getting through the winter without a deer in the freezer. The guns involved are mostly long guns, usually single-shot. And the hunters eat what they kill. (And often, in the country, kill what they eat.) I have no problems with that kind of gun culture.
But political gun culture is a different issue altogether. In the first place, it is largely fueled by the profit motive. Most of the gun-rights movement’s money and energy come from gun manufacturers, and to a somewhat lesser extent, gun dealers. They create customer demand by appealing to a mixture of paranoia (“the Feds in their black helicopters are gonna take away your guns and then take your land” or “the thugs are gonna rape your women and kidnap your children”) and machismo (”only you can protect your family, and you have to be ready, willing, and able to do it all the time, everywhere.”) The machismo element sometimes shades over into both gun collecting and trophy hunting. My late husband always theorized that the gun rights lobby was also backed by organized crime. I have seen little evidence of that, but it’s not impossible. Certainly organized crime figures prominently in under-the-counter gun dealership.
Anyway, respect for rural gun culture pretty much requires that any kind of gun regulation be selective as to both locality and type of gun. Nobody needs an Uzi to shoot a deer. Indeed, the more ammo ends up in the prey, the harder it is to prepare it as food. But, despite the increasing volume of wildlife in our cities, almost nobody hunts it for food. Coyotes, reputedly, don’t taste good. So if Chicago and Baltimore and New York City want to ban guns, or even just certain kinds of guns, from their streets, why shouldn’t their citizens have the right to do it? The alternative, at least here in Chicago, is that almost every building has a “no guns” sticker on its front door. Okay, the right of a private property owner to set conditions on the use of his property is almost as sacred to conservatives as the Second Amendment (not quite, given the unpopularity of landowners who post their rural land “no hunting”), but why should we have to regulate guns building by building instead of county by county?
Judging from our public responses to gun violence these days, we have decided that the only way we can preserve gun rights while protecting the public is to lock up everybody who has ever been diagnosed with a mental illness, censor all news stories involving violence, keep kids in school until seven at night, and allow the concealed and open carrying of firearms in every building or institution in every city, village, and town. Is this maybe unnecessarily complicated? Maybe, instead, we need to rethink the Second Amendment. Surely an “original intent” fan like Scalia could be persuaded that the Framers really meant that every citizen has the right to keep and bear a specimen of the American Long Rifle that won the Revolutionary War for us? Enough already.
Tzivia L.