The Culture of Fear_ Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things - Barry Glassner [33]
Stealth Weapons
One media commentator did provide an astute assessment of Thomas Hamilton and the search for deeper meaning that his butchery provoked. “We seem to think a monstrous effect must arise from a monstrous cause. But not much evidence turned up to make the eruption possible,” suggested Lance Morrow in an essay in Time magazine. To depict Hamilton’s abominable act as a “pedophiliac-itch-gone-violent” was, Morrow wrote, “inadequate, trivializing ... almost sacrilegious in its asymmetry.” In point of fact no one knows why Thomas Hamilton snapped. The headmaster at the school where the shooting occurred got it right when he said, shortly after the slaughter, “We don’t understand it and I don’t think we ever will.”47
Which is not to say that these deaths are inexplicable. Actually, four causes of the bloodbath in Dunblane can readily be identified. That the American news media barely managed to mention them is shameful. They were at once the most proximate and the most verifiable factors in the children’s death.
I refer to the two revolvers and two semiautomatic pistols Hamilton used to carry out the carnage. Without his guns Hamilton never would have been able to slay so many people. More rigorous enforcement of Britain’s gun licensing laws unquestionably had been warranted in Hamilton’s case. At the local gun clubs Hamilton had a reputation for being unstable, and he was refused membership by one of the clubs five weeks before the killings. And several years before the bloodbath at the school, when a mother accused him of molesting some boys, Hamilton reportedly threatened her with a gun.48
Yet many American reporters brushed all this aside. “There were demands for even tougher gun laws in a country where gun homicides are about as common as water buffalo,” Newsweek brusquely remarked. “In the days after the bloodletting, there were the predictable calls to toughen the country’s gun control laws even further,” said People.49
Some of the European press, however, got the point. An editorial in the British newspaper the Daily Mail asked the question that by rights should have been at the heart of all of the news media’s coverage of the Dunblane massacre: “Why should any private individual be legally allowed to own hand guns that can cause such carnage?” Their answer: “Whatever gun club apologists and sporting enthusiasts may say, there was nothing sporting about the caliber of the weapons which Hamilton was licensed to hoard in his own home. These were not small bore pistols for target practice. They were not suitable for shooting game birds. They are the macho tools of the killer’s trade.”50
Some American reporters and editors have swallowed so much baloney fed to them by the gun lobby they cough up explanations for gun deaths that credit everything except guns. They even blame their own industry. A columnist in Newsweek wrote of the Dunblane massacre, “Onanistic solitude, lived out in a fantasy world ruled by terror and thrilled by incessant gunfire, poses a lethal combination. Media moguls, enriched by promoting these fantasies, deny any blame for society’s degradation. They are only giving society what it demands, they say.”51
Blame It on the Tube
In other words, it is the guns on TV that cause people to die in real life. Numerous American journalists, including some of the most intelligent among them, have actively endorsed the dizzy proposition that television creates “a reality of its own that may crowd out our real reality,” as Daniel