The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [124]
Thus the pattern I noted in the 1980s and ’90s continues. And as then, the most immediate and confirmable factor in most of the deadly crimes—access to firearms by people who should not have them—continues to be largely ignored in the coverage. Having been on the receiving end of vitriolic attacks by gun lovers for daring to make that point in this book and elsewhere, I confess to being somewhat wary of returning to an issue that so many politicians, journalists, and scholars have decided to brush aside rather than endanger their careers or their families’ peace of mind.
But the dearth of attention to gun violence ought not to go entirely unremarked. Shortly after the bloodbath at Columbine, Jeffrey Fagen, director for the Center for Violence Research and Prevention at Columbia University, pointed out that three common themes apply to school shootings: the perpetrator has a long-standing grievance, a mental illness, and access to firearms. None of these alone produces a massacre, he noted; their convergence does.41
Eight years later, that point was driven home again for those who cared to notice, after a student went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech. Cho Seung-Hui, who killed thirty-two people on that campus in April 2007, had been diagnosed with mental illness while still in middle school and had been treated while at college. The creepy videotapes he left behind demonstrated a long-standing grievance. And he had firearms: a 9mm Glock and a .22-caliber Walther.
American society, unlike many others around the globe, has no effective means for removing the one factor in that deadly triad that outside forces can control—a fact that barely got mentioned in the extensive news coverage following the shootings. In a cover story, Newsweek magazine puzzled instead over Cho’s background. “A Cho who grew up in, say, Japan, would almost certainly not have acted on his hatred and fury: biology and psychology set the stage for homicidal violence, but the larger culture would likely have prevented its execution.” That in the “larger culture” of Japan it is extremely difficult to buy a handgun somehow eluded the writer and her editors.42
True to form after gun disasters, Newsweek, along with other media outlets, politicians, and pundits, engaged in lots of head-scratching over criminal minds, negligent parents, powerless teachers, and ineffective mental health workers. Access to guns was treated as just one of many factors contributing to violence on campus, when in truth, as Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University succinctly put it, “Guns transform what is widespread teenage behavior into disasters.”43
The same can be said of disputes between adults that need not be deadly. Pick any one-month period, search news and police sources, and you’re almost guaranteed to find dozens of instances of jealous lovers or ex-lovers, disgruntled employees or ex-employees, shooting and killing one another and, often, unlucky bystanders as well. With close to 30,000 Americans dying and more than twice that number wounded by firearms annually, the carnage is not only tragic, it is expensive. The leading cause of uninsured hospital stays, gunshot injuries cost the nation’s hospitals about $800 million a year. Yet regardless how familiar or surprising the event—be it everyday gunfire by estranged partners or shooting rampages at a nursing home, immigration center, health club, or church (all occurred in 2009)—little will be heard from political leaders or media analysts about the unique and preventable role that firearms played.44
When reporters bother to look beyond the propaganda that “gun rights” advocacy groups shower upon them, they discover