Note: This post is part of our League Symposium on Guns In America. You can read the introductory post for the Symposium here. To see a list of all posts in the Symposium so far, click here.
This past weekend I went to see The Hobbit with my family. We went to one of those large multiplex chains – the kind that has hit movies like The Hobbit playing on four or five of its twenty-five screens. For those of you that only see films at art house venues, one of the interesting multiplex marketing developments over the past decade or so has been the introduction of high-budget product advertisements shown alongside the coming attraction previews. These are always “feel good” ads for companies that have the coin to drop seven or eight figures into a sixty-second advertisement that will be seen be a relatively small but captive audience. (Most of the ones I’ve seen have been for Coke.)
The commercial shown prior to The Hobbit was for the Dodge Ram truck; it was made to be a movie tie-in with the upcoming Die Hard movie. I have tried in vain to find a video of the ad on the web, so you’ll have to make due with my written description: It’s essentially about a minute and a half of clips of Bruce Willis shooting very large, very loud guns at terrorists while yelling at the top of his lungs – with shots of a Dodge Ram happily driving down a road spliced in between each clip. That’s really all there is: Bruce shooting a gun while yelling, truck driving, Bruce shooting a different gun while yelling, truck driving, over and over for about ninety seconds. Then, the words: Dodge. Ram. Guts. Glory. The ad has nothing to do with Dodge, trucks, or any variety of big-horned sheep. It is, rather, an ad with a message made to appeal to our American reptilian brains, and that message is this:
Wasting bad guys with big, loud guns is fuckin’ awesome. Buy our truck.
Only in America…
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Today marks the beginning of our January symposium, Guns In America. Over the next several days we’ll be posting writings from League contributors, readers, and other bloggers on America’s unique relationship with firearms. Submissions continue to come in, but the posts we have so far include such diverse topics as hunting and family traditions, being the victim of a gun-related crime, arguments for a strong and arguments for a weak second amendment, a historical look at the Supreme Court’s take on gun rights, the relationship between gun violence and the welfare state, the different ways we choose to tell stories about guns, as well as how guns play out in our popular media – including video games.
The specter that hovers over all of these posts is, of course, the horrific tragedy that took place last month in Newton, Connecticut.
Tragic shootings seem to be an irregular but permanent part of American culture, like the occasional blemishing knot that is inevitably woven into any large tapestry. Still, I can’t think of any shooting in my lifetime that evoked the level of pure shock and horror that the Sandy Hook massacre drew from our collective souls. Reading about the victims of other shootings may have touched our hearts; this one ripped those hearts from our very bodies and ripped them to shreds. So terrible was the slaughter that it might well be “game changer” in terms of how we view our cultural relationship with guns. If it isn’t enough to change the game, it’s hard to fathom what we’d have to live through that would be.
The truth is that the League decided to do this symposium hours after we had all been made aware of the Sandy Hook shooting. Our decision to hold off three weeks before starting was quite purposeful. When we looked at shooting massacres in the past, we noticed a pattern: Before the tragedy, no one talked about guns. For a few days after the tragedy, everyone talked about guns – but with emotions running as high as they do after tragedies, no one ever seemed to listen. Within a week or so after the tragedy, discussions around the proper place for guns in our society all but disappeared. We planned the timing for this symposium with the hope of bucking that trend.
Likewise, we very purposefully decided to focus on the bigger picture of guns in America, as opposed to gun violence. The roots of our complicated relationship with firearms run deep, and much of it is quite positive: To many Americans, the ability to own a gun underscores our love of freedom and self reliance. There is a tradition of hunting for both food and sport that reaches throughout our country’s history and diverse sub-cultures. Guns are practically an extension of the bodies of our most enduring and treasured archetypes, the Frontiersman and the Cowboy. (And, let’s be honest: Even those most negative of armed American archetypes – the Outlaw and the Gangster – are both beloved and revered in our culture.)
Politicians are politicians, of course, and as such they tend to paint American gun culture using only the blackest and whitest of palettes. Our desire was to throw open the entire 64-Color Crayola Box and let people from all sides of the discussion have their say. If solutions are too unreachable a star, perhaps in our failed attempt we can at least grasp at a better understanding of one another.
Welcome, then, to the League’s Guns In America symposium. Pull up a chair; read, comment, listen, discuss, grit your teeth, consider, howl at the moon, and maybe – just maybe – enjoy.
I think the timing for this is important and I am proud of us for being patient. I’m also looking forward to reading what everyone submits.Report
It is interesting to note that White Males (like Adam Lanza) are 30% of the population and that White Males (like Adam Lanza) commit 70% of the mass shooting murders in the United States.
Source
It is even more interesting that this interesting fact is very rarely discussed and never addressed.Report
White men succeed as a group and fail as individuals.
People of color and women succeed as individuals and fail as a group.
Duh.Report
+1,000,000.Report
Whites as a group also commit suicides with much more frequency. The cynical answer is that African American communities have different outlets for frustrations/depression/setbacks.Report
To be clear, Mike, my point is this:
When people within dominant groups do something well, the positiveness of that action is attributed to the group as a whole. For instance, when elite educational institutions are dominated by whites, it is because whites are smarter and work harder.
When people within dominant groups do something poorly, the negativeness of that action is attributed only to the individual. For instance, when white men go on shooting rampages, no one hems and haws over what is wrong with white people or white culture or rock music.
When people from marginalized groups do something well, the positiveness of that action is attributed only to the individual. For instance, Barack Obama wins the Presidency but I doubt many folks view black people as a whole differently because of his success.
When people from marginalized groups do something poorly, the negativeness of that action is attributed to the group as a whole. For instance, when Gilbert Arenas brings a handgun into the Wizards locker room, everyone wants to talk about gang culture, athletes, and rap music.
Does that make sense?Report
Or to circle back to a pithy bumper sticker slogan…
White perpetrators of mass violence are lone wolves. Muslim perpetrators of mass violence are terrorists.
One group’s members are seen as acting as individuals in disharmony with the expectations of their group.
The other is seen as being representative of their group, working in harmony with those expectations.Report
I’m not disagreeing with your premise. I’m just saying that in an African American comunity, if you have a very angry, troubled youth, they often turn to gangs, drugs and crime. That’s the outlet. In white communites troubled kids are supposed to go to therapy or get over it.Report
That’s some pretty offensive Microagression, Mr. Dwyer. In my opinion.Report
Mike,
I’d argue the opposite. Black youth get over their troubles far more often than white youth. Yes, some might turn to gangs or drugs or crime, but most are likely used to live not turning out as they hope and thus aren’t paralyzed when things go south. White youths, particularly wealthy white youths (suicide rates are likely equal parts race and class related), are often insulated from disappointment and are ill-equipped when they do eventually face it.Report
And I’m also not sure why turning to suicide rates is relevant to JHG’s point.
When we talk about gang violence, we talk a lot about African-American and African-American youth culture. So why aren’t we talking about white culture when discussing mass shootings?Report
Kazy – I was actually agreeing with his point. I was simply pointing out that yes, whites don’t seem to have healthy outlets for their troubles.Report
I see that now. I think JHG took offense to the notion that all troubled black youth turn to gangs, crime, or drugs. Some sure do. A whole lot of others deal with their trouble and lead reasonably healthy, normal lives.Report
Sure – and some turn to crime, more often than whites. Both communities have flaws that lead to bad things. I think if you look at mass shootings and suicides as a part of the white population and gun crime as part of the black community, there’s probably an interesting similarity.Report
Mike,
are you sure we aren’t just excusing “white crime”?
I know a lot of rascally kids out in the country regularly raid tourist second-homes when it’s not tourist season.Report
Desperate people do desperate things.
For various reasons (some stated), whites and blacks, the rich and poor, do different “desperate” things.
Where I tend to get feisty (and perhaps somewhat unfairly so) is when people want to hold up the desperation of rich white folks as equal to or somehow more understandable than the desperation of poor folks and people of color.
White perpetrators of crime are troubled youth who slipped through the cracks and were at the end of their rope… notice how much absolution of responsibility we have?
Black perpetrators of crime? Meh… they’re just rotten to the core, the products and proponents of an amoral culture rife with drugs and guns and rap music.
Personally, I’m more sympathetic to the poor black kid growing up in a racist society turning to drugs (or even violence) than I am the angsty rich white kid who is dismayed about his plight in the world turning to drugs (or even violence).
And, yes, I realize that is unfair to rich white kids who do legitimately struggle with mental illness or whathaveyou. But given how unfair the rest of the world is to poor black kids, it doesn’t seem a particularly useful starting point.Report
“..but most are likely used to live not turning out as they hope and thus aren’t paralyzed when things go south.”
I think you are right and I probably misspoke there about the ‘get over it’ part with white folks. I think more accurately what we do is when there is a setback we try to look at the positive, analyze the problem and propose some kind of solution. That’s often the wrong approach because it gives the person the impression that what they are dealing with is simply a problem in need of solving.
In black communities there is a healthy dose of “get over it” with regards to life’s problems. You also see this in lower class white communities. I grew up in a place like that, very blue collar, very the-world-doesn’t-owe-you-anything. I think I am far more equipped to deal with setbacks than my friends who grew up in more affluent surroundings.Report
Which is why I think the issue is just as much a class one as a race one (and of course the whole intersect between class and race).
But I still don’t see the relevance. Is your point that mass shootings by white males are bred from the same phenomenon? These white males have reached the same breaking point as their suicidal peers but they’ve chosen a different path? If so, it still seems to be like we are talking about issues within white and/or affluent culture that should be addressed. But because we tend not to view white and/or affluent culture as “things”, instead just seeing their presence as “the norm”, we look for other things to talk about… like guns or autism or everything but white and/or affluent culture.Report
Kazzy,
You DO realize that many of these mass shootings end in suicide, right? To be accurate, they should probably be termed mass murder-suicides. So yes, I tend to lump them in the same phenomenon.Report
That’s fair. So let’s have a conversation about why white, affluent males seem to lack proper coping mechanisms for facing opposition in life and what can be done about white, affluent male culture to address this problem so that we see fewer white, affluent males killing themselves and others.
Ironically, I’d start with particular aspects of white, affluent liberal culture. The “everyone gets a trophy” mindset does not prepare kids for the inevitable day where they do *not* get a trophy.Report
I think you already sort of nailed it above, but it also relates to this:
https://ordinary-times.com/blog/2012/02/parenting-by-class/Report
That was a great post (as evidenced by all my comments, under my former handle (BSK)).Report
Totally agree Kazzy. Maybe we need to discuss the mindset that mass shooters or mass suicide shooters have. Why are they unable to deal with alienation and self disappointment? Many successful people are successful after first failing miserably first. Why do we say that not being a winner is the worst thing in the world that can happen? That is what I think we are teaching children when we give them trophies when it is not for an accomplishment. More should be done to teach kids how to cope with failure, to use the disappointment as a spring board for future success. And to show that we don’t succeed at everything.Report
When I was working at the drug rehab centre for teens many moons ago, it was instructive to talk to the counsellors who were assigned to the kids. They often had to go to court when their client’s were there and they watched the different attitudes the authorities took.
With middle-class kids it was “This kid made a big mistake – don’t let a mistake ruin his life!” The idea was that respectable adults had made an investment in this kid (good schools, etc.) and therefore the kid represented at some level an accumulation of socially-approved capital with a net benefit to society somewhere along the line. The counsellors called it the “therapy argument”.
With poorer kids it was “This kid made a big mistake – he needs a firm lesson so he doesn’t go completely wrong!” The idea being that if let off he’d only continue down a bad road and end up a total menace to society so a strong firm hand should be applied now to set him straight. The counsellors called it the “it’s for your own good argument.”
In many cases the kids had done the same things – buying and selling drugs – but somehow it was different when it got to court. Context matters.Report
Thanks for sharing that, DRS. Lots of takeaway from that.Report
I have to say, I think there’s something fundamentally different between being depressed to the point of suicide and/or belonging to a gang and giving in to a tribal impulse, and being a serial killer and/or going on a shooting spree in a mall or a school. They do *not* seem to be two sides of the same coin, to my mind.
And I’m open to the idea that race and not class plays a major part of the discrepancy in numbers for the latter.
I once heard a speaker talk about how – despite how rare it is – those of us who are male and have European ancestry are, statistically speaking, far more likely have brains that operate with very faulty wiring. Sometimes this bad wiring results in something we might think of as benign – say, being a musical prodigy or being a savant with numbers (usually at the expense of other higher brain functions, such as complex social skills). But sometimes the faulty wiring results in monsters – serial killers, psychopaths, mall & school shooters, etc. However it plays out, though, males of European descent are simply far more likely to have their wires significantly crossed.
I have no idea how true this is, but I find the idea an intriguing one.Report
Tod – IIRC the correlation with race, for serial and spree killers is not, when you look at the big picture (internationally, across cultures), very highly-correlated to “white/European” at all (there are many grisly and well-documented Asian and African examples of both as well), though it IS highly correlated to being male (again IIRC, males tend to have a wider distribution on the bell curve for mental function – males comprise both more savants, and more well-below-average individuals, than females do. So it stands to reason there’d probably be more males with “faulty wiring”; and this plus increased testosterone/aggressive tendencies in general in males would lead me to predict more male serial/spree killers).
If I have time later I’ll try to grab some supporting links.Report
That might well be true. As I said, I have no idea.Report
… my mind boggles. Seriously, it literally boggles.
Drugs and crime are as much a problem, if not moreso, in poor white communities than black communities. Black communities at least organize to stop the problem — they’ve got a lot more experience, and the drugs they’re passing around aren’t quite as toxic/longlasting.Report
There was no issue with calling McVeigh a terrorist.Report
Is that true? I remember differently. I remember him being called a nut, a survivalist, an Aryan national, etc., but I don’t remember the word “terrorist” being used in connection with him until after 9/11.
In fact, I don’t remember there being a lot of debate about the word “terrorist” with anyone from the US or an allied country prior to 9/11. I”m sure law enforcement used the term, but I can’t recall it being part of the public vocabulary in such instances.
(This isn’t to say that McVeight *wasn’t* a terrorist; it’s just that that’s not how we identified such people back then.)Report
It was the many children lost as collateral damage that placed him deep in terrorist labels at that time. It was an awful site.Report
Our use of that term changed dramatically back in September of 2001, if I recall correctly.
He still gets the qualifier “domestic”, something not afforded to Hasan despite him having also been born and raised in America.
Joe Stack doesn’t get that term.Report
Or that a lot of depressed black people wind up in jail, where suicide is significantly harder…Report
To say that White Males commit 30% of the mass shootings when they’re 70% of the population is a bit of a sleight of hand. Because mass shootings are overwhelming committed by men (it might be worth talking about THAT). As the source you yourself cite admits, whites are only slightly over-represented in the mass shooting statistics.
I’m all for discussion about how race (and class) are treated in regards to group versus individual assumptions. But let’s be honest going in: men of all backgrounds commit mass shootings, and apparently and more or less the same rate.Report
Firearms were used in 19,392 suicides in the U.S. in 2010, constituting almost 62% of all gun deaths.10
Over 50% of all suicides are committed with a firearm.11
On average, 49 gun suicides were committed each day for the years 2005-2010.12
White males, about 40% of the U.S. population, accounted for over 80% of firearm suicides in 2010.13
A study of California handgun purchasers found that in the first year after the purchase of a handgun, suicide was the leading cause of death among the purchasers.14
Firearms were used in nearly 44% of suicide deaths among persons under age 25 in 2010.15
More than 75% of guns used in suicide attempts and unintentional injuries of 0-19 year-olds were stored in the residence of the victim, a relative, or a friend.16
The risk of suicide increases in homes where guns are kept loaded and/or unlocked.17
Think we should see why so many commit suicide. Most of the mass murders seem to fall in the suicide range. So maybe if we could figure out how to help those who would commit suicide better we could lower the instance of mass killings. I know others have said the same, I wanted to link to the page I saw, the stats were eye opening for me.Report
I forgot to put quotes around the first the stats paragraphs. Only the last is my own words.Report
Slate, in cooperation with a tweeter feed, @gundeaths, has been keeping a toll since Sandyhook.
It’s here. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/crime/2012/12/gun_death_tally_every_american_gun_death_since_newtown_sandy_hook_shooting.html
As if this a.m., it lists 387 people died. Twenty dead children helps focus our attention; but the the mass shootings are a small part of the problem.
Three days ago in my state, a handgun was used to murder two teenagers, a boy and his girlfriend, and the boys’ mother was also shot with the intent to kill, by the family’s landlord over parking and snow removal. Over snow removal. Weeping.Report
Good point. From a cost-benefit standpoint, mass shootings don’t kill enough people to be worth throwing a lot of effort at (you just can’t save very many lives by preventing mass shootings, even if you can figure out how). It’s the regular day-to-day shootings that have the biggest aggregate impact.Report
Those ads are one of the reasons I try to avoid mainstream multiplexes as much as possible. Luckily living in San Francisco, there is a theatre that sells tickets for mainstream movies at a higher rate but the benefit is no ads like that. There are only tasteful still ads for local restaurants and real estate agents and the pricing is not that much higher.
I think your sum up of the add is accurate. This is going to be controversial but I think there are a lot of people out there for whom “American fuck yeah!” is a real and living attitude. That is largely why the South Park slogan works. It is funny (and tragic) because it is true.
This opens up a whole socio-economic can of worms of course and is largely connected to the huge culture wars of America that never seem to end.Report
As an outsider looking in I would only note that US society seems more stressful than European society generally, especially North European society. Where you have more stress you will get more people who can’t cope with it. The failure to cope will sometimes produce violence.
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I suppose I’m saying that one way to reduce random violence is to make society less stressful.Report