The Los Angeles Times carried an article in which the
reporter queried people in and about Newtown regarding the mass killing of
school children and adults at the Newtown public school. He found a community
long given to guns with a plethora of gun shops, gun repair shops and shooting
ranges. Indeed, the small state of Connecticut is the birthplace of the iconic
Colt and Winchester guns, the Colt being established in 1830 and still manufactured
in Hartford. Newtown citizenry is split between multigenerational families and,
beginning about 15 years ago, wealthy newcomers from New York who found a quiet
haven 70 miles from New York City from which they commute for work. Last fall
Newtown’s police commission put an item on the ballot proposing limited hours
for firing ranges and police permission to fire guns on private property. This
was done primarily in response to complaints of noise from firing ranges. The
proposed ordinance was defeated by local gun shops and their trade association supporters.
The mother of the 20 year old shooter was a wealthy
divorcee living in a colonial style home. She liked guns, beer and volunteering
at the local public school. She had an arsenal of five weapons, including an assault
semi-automatic rifle, which the Times reporter found not to be all that unusual
in Newtown and environs. The shooter’s mother had said she needed this arsenal
for protection, a reason others gave for their own arsenal.
With funeral services still being held for those killed
in the shooting, the Times reporter queried gun retailers and members of gun
clubs and failed to get any rethinking of guns and mass slaughter, other than
that schools needed to hire police personnel or arm teachers and principals.
The remedy was more guns. The good people had to arm themselves against the bad
people. This is the position the National Rifle Association has taken. Their
leader publicly declared that the only remedy for a bad person with a gun is a
good person with a gun. This profoundly simple-minded response to the mass killing
of young children with a high capacity automatic weapon betrays either a high
level of cultural callousness or a society that has lost its connection to
reality. In either case this response from a multibillion dollar organization
that expects it to fly raises so many questions as to the state of American
society and American culture that the depth and complexity of our social
sickness and its causes await an urgent analysis and the beginning of an era of
remaking America as a society focused on human well-being.
I am personally of the opinion that there are many
contributing causes to tragedies such as Newtown. Among them are gross overpopulation, which
cheapens human life; massive movement of wealth to a very few and the
consequent decrease in the wealth distributed among the rest of American
society; a narrow-minded moral meanness that has spread in our society with the
political rise of the South; the loss of a sense of reality occasioned in no
small part by 24/7 advertising, which replaces truth and fact with emotional
fantasy; the effects of a communications and an entertainment technology that
increasingly isolates Americans from the human presence of each other. So
called social networking is often little more than self-advertisement by the
millions seeking to be somebody in a very homogenized society. This litany of
contributing causes is neither complete nor may not even mention those most
important, but it does provide a sense of the complexity of the problems we
face as our world begins to unravel around us. We are at the point where
Americans will reject the path of self- indulgence, cultural arrogance and global
imperialism and begin to seek remedies for our many shortcomings, including
seeking them from other developed societies or we will continue down the path
of self-delusion, decline and demise. I am not that hopeful, given what history
tells me about human behavior, but if we have the capacity to put exploratory
hardware on Mars and understand our evolutionary roots, we may find a way to
avoid the extinction that most certainly awaits us if we do not. It would be a
startling and valuable precedent to see a society as large and complex as ours
recover its sanity.
No comments:
Post a Comment