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Shocked, but hardly surprised
If we hear the phrase “isolated incident” one more time in connection with gun-related crime, it’s time to smash the TV screen. Last week, the mayors of Toronto and Aurora, Colorado sounded as if they were reading from the same hackneyed script. Oh, yes, they were horrified by the mass shootings that erupted in the most innocent of places, a neighbourhood barbecue on Monday night, a movie theatre early on Friday morning. But these extraordinary scenes should not make citizens afraid, our communities are still very safe. All we have to do is up police presence on Danzig Street, increase security at the movie theatres, and these things won’t happen again.
Are these politicians blind and deaf as well as dumb? Everything they’re saying is idiotic, the solutions they’re proposing are doomed to failure. It’s very obvious that crimes like those that happened last week are not isolated, are not extraordinary. They are becoming commonplace, and are part of a tragic but inevitable trend.
And the places where they are happening are far from innocent. How many witnesses to the Scarborough horror said they weren’t surprised that it occured, that the neighbourhood had been seething for months, if not years, just waiting to boil over? A petty fight over a parking space was hardly the cause of the gunplay, it was just the spark that set it off. In retrospect, announcing a street party on a hot summer night was just possibly the worst idea imaginable, but calling it off would only have delayed the inevitable.
And how many witnesses at the Aurora theatre said that it took them quite a while to realize that what was happening wasn’t part of the movie, or part of the promotion of it? The opening of the Batman film is so brutally violent that what the shooter was wearing and carrying fit right in. The shooter obviously chose the film, and the moment, carefully. He didn’t open fire during Ice Age 4.
Indeed, if anything is the root cause of the culture of violence, surely it’s what passes for entertainment these days, on the silver screen, on the TV screen, on the laptop screen. From the time they’re in kindergarten, young people are surrounded by guns. The most popular computer games, the most-watched TV shows, the films with the biggest box office, even the books most often read on airplanes or beaches, are ones that feature mind-numbing violence, most often featuring guns. And if they’re inured to violent death so young, why are we surprised when they adapt so easily to dealing death in the real world? Except that it’s not actually any more “real” than the video game. To the shooter in the Aurora theatre, the dozens of victims he sprayed with actual bullets weren’t any more to him than the points he racked up by killing people on his computer screen.
So we can talk about gun control, about social programs, about the effective use of police. But we need to also talk about popular culture, about why and how it became so ugly, and how we can turn it around. A small example from last week’s Cosmos is illustrative. In his monthly column on scouting, Mark Humphrey wrote: “The Scouts were wrapping up their regular program with an outing to Uxbridge Shooting Sports on Concession 4. As Scouts we do not hunt. We may target shoot on a proper range, with supervision.”
So Scout leaders do not teach, or even allow their young people to hunt, which to us seems just about the only legitimate reason for using a gun at all. Instead, they encourage them to shoot at targets with handguns. Does anyone else see what’s wrong with this picture?
July 14, 2011
