There is no doubt that America suffers a high rate of spree killings than other nations. A lot of attention is given to the number and availability of firearms in this country because of this, but I believe that this is looking at symptoms and not causes. After all Switzerland has lots of firearms and doesn’t have the problem. The problem and the causes are far deeper than the tools used to create the effect.
The primary cause in my opinion is that we are a culture that venerates the concept of righteous revenge. Revenge is often the motivation of both our heroes and our villains.
An easy example is Quentin Tarantino’s award winning film Inglorious Basterds. This movie is nothing but an elaborate revenge film with the hated NAZIs as the subject of the characters’ and the audiences’ revenge fantasies. Few people weep or are outraged when a theater filled with people is burned to the ground, murdering the guilty and the innocent alike because the guilty are the truly, the genocidal NAZIs.
However even in lighter fare revenge is celebrated and venerated, as is the case in Rob Reiner’s film The Princess Bride. It is a moment of celebration for the audience when Indigo Montoya kills Count Rugen the six-fingered man.
The difference between the hero and the villain is that for the audience the villains revenge is unjust and unfairly applied. Khan is wrong to blame Kirk for the death of his wife, Nero is wrong to blame Spock in the 2009 incarnation of Star Trek for the death of his family, though these villains are motivated by the same reasons as heroes we glorify we do not accept their revenge as just.
What does this have to do with mass murder? As any decent writer will tell you the villain is never the villain in his own mind. The best and most dangerous villains see their cause as honorable and just.
The cowards who kill innocents do not see themselves as cowards attacking innocent victims, but as people who have been horrendously wronged and are now taking their justified revenge, just like the Basterds and Indigo. There is a reason the modern incarnation of this plague started in the workplace, with managers and supervisors targeted for murder.
We have been taught almost from birth that each and every one of us has a right to revenge. That taking that revenge, beyond the law and beyond societal mores is right. We hear in songs from ‘Coward of the Country’ to hip-hop and beyond. We hear it in the tales of the Old West, our American Myth, we see it time and time again in countless action movies and television dramas. Revenge is right if you have been wronged.
This is not the sole cause, but it lies at the root of all other causes. It is our culture and why we do not quietly kill ourselves, but others, innocents, to avenge our deep wounds on our pride. We can talk about guns, but we will not stop the trouble until we talk about culture, and why so many people feel so deeply wronged and powerless.v
I also expect that violent video games are mostly cathartic (though I do believe there is a desensitizing effect as well).
Clarity achieved. I missed that.
You’re right it doesn’t have anything to do with revenge culture or mass shootings. Which is why I was correcting something said by joyce. She made a direct reference to the Florida ‘stand your ground’ law.
http://tv.msnbc.com/2012/11/28/black-teens-shooting-revives-stand-your-ground-debate/
I’m not sure what stand your ground laws have to do with a lunatic shooting a bunch of children or with revenge? This is not making sense to me?
There seems to be an awful lot of disinformation about ‘stand your ground’ reforms of self-defense laws. Disinformation which might actually lead some foolish people into committing criminal acts.
As opposed to the UK where currently the subjects can not legally use force to defend themselves against criminal violence, in the United States our citizens right to self-defense is an old and honored right, even appearing in the rights enumerated in the California constitution.
Over time, mostly during the 19th century, this right evolved in most legal jurisdictions in America to acknowledge that legitimate self-defense did not require a duty to retreat, as it is here in California. There has never been a duty to retreat in California.
However in some places old standards of self-defense caused all kinds of unjust results for people who employed justified self-defense. It was as a direct reaction to these unjust events that many ‘stand your ground’ reforms were passed in some states such as Florida.
In Florida before the ‘stand your ground’ law, the DA might still charge a person with an illegal homicide even if the homicide was a legally justified self-defense. The defendant would be acquitted of the charge, but still suffer the burden of an expensive trial that often would ruin the defendant. This happened too often because of some DA’s failure to use appropriate prosecutorial discretion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stand-your-ground_law
I think it is a reasonable theory and bears further investigation.
Can one quantify the popularity of criminal revenge entertainment vs actual crime? Is this revenge notion one which has only gained popularity in recent decades? (Perhaps beginning with a big splash in the early 1970’s with Dirty Harry and Death Wish?) Is the criminal revenge fantasy an abandonment of ‘cowboy culture’ exemplified in old western movies which seemed to cloak legitimate revenge only within legal boundaries?
Re: violent video games
I strongly suspect that home video games have had the practical effect of reducing violence in American society.
Home video is now bigger economically than Hollywood. This rise coincided with the 20+ year drop in rates of homicide. The key is demographics and opportunity, in my opinion.
The very kinds of people to whom violent video games are most appealing are similar to the demographic most involved in violent crime as both perps and victims, young unmarried men. If those people spend hours playing games at home, those are hours they are not spending on the street making trouble or finding trouble.
I am reminded of the calming effect that TV provides to convicts in prison. Bored prisoners watching TV are watching TV instead of getting into trouble.
Well, there is no ‘do this step’ and the problem is solved. It is far too complex for that. There are the cultural issues, the mental health issues (in some cases), the infamy issues (which very few address) and lastly the weapon issues. However this fixation on the weapons is just window dressing. Firearms are even the most effective tool for mass murder. Explosives have a higher rate as well as fire as a weapon, leaving guns as number 3.
It took years to create the conditions that foster these actions, it will take years to undo them. News has to show the same responsibility in these cases that they have learned on live car chases, and we have to take action that prevent people from becoming so abused and isolated that this form of revenge looks appealing.
I would say that the disrespect in effect is triggering a form a revenge, so the effects are related.
But it also speaks to a truism of human nature, that a humiliated person is capable of anything. For someone who feels deeply humiliated moral considerations are entirely secondary.
We have to include in this the deeply cultural concept of “dissing.” The honor duels of the 18th and 19th centuries have morphed into our “stand your ground” where a man shoots a car of teenagers because the music was too loud. He felt disrespected when they did not instantly kowtow to his wishes.
This has been very disturbing for me. You have hit upon a part of it but no one has really hit on enough to solve the problem.
You are correct to point out that it is not guns alone that are the problem. Not only does Switzerland have plenty of guns but so does Canada, as pointed out in “Bowling for Columbine”, an admittedly sensationalized work but that particular point is correct. They have similar gun ratios to us and they don’t have nearly the numbers of spree killings. More gun control is not the answer. (Especially since the latest shootings were perpetrated with ordinary weapons, not automatic, military grade ones.)
Some have brought up our horrible record on mental health care. This is a valid observation but when one examines the recent shootings any warning signs would not be the sort to cause someone to Baker Act any of the individuals in question prior to the shootings. We MUST improve health care for those with psychiatric disorders – no doubt – but this would have had no impact on recent events.
I have not heard anyone bring it up but I can’t even fault violent video games and their alleged desensitizing influence. Most of the games originate in Japan and Japan has minimal spree killings and gun violence, especially when considering the density of the population.
So it isn’t guns, poor mental health care or video games. Revenge certainly may be a part of it but it certainly isn’t all of it.
Perhaps being a high school teacher, I might point out one thing that I see in young people today that might also be a contributing factor – a general rudeness and lack of home training. When I was small, my mother tried (and for the most part it did not “take” for many years) to teach me about being fair and treating other people respectfully and nicely. Many young people today lack this form of education. They think nothing of answering others – staff and their classmates – in mean, ugly ways. Mean things occur to them that would never, ever have occurred to us “back in the day”. Their behavior is often careless, thoughtless, and lacking in the most basic concepts of decency. (Pick up your own mess. Put things back where you found them. Just because you disagree with someone does not mean you get to be mean to them, etc.) Since developmental psychologists have stated that character and moral concepts form well before school age, could this be the result of too little parenting? Of not being taught even the most basic of consideration and therefor having a society that is now almost devoid of empathy?
Obviously I don’t know the answer and am merely adding to what you have suggested. What does anyone else think? And how do we fix this?