After the Newtown tragedy: Shooting from the hip

On the morning of Dec. 14, 2012, 20-year-old Adam Lanza fired four bullets into his mother’s head. Nancy Lanza was at home in her Newtown, Conn. residence, lying in bed clad in her pajamas. Lanza then drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School where 456 children were enrolled. At the school, he killed 20 children and six adults with his mother’s Bushmaster rifle before committing suicide.

On the day of the shooting, President Barack Obama gave a televised address to the nation in which he said: “We’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” The president’s response to Newtown came on Dec. 19 when he formed a gun-violence task force led by Vice President Biden. A month after the shooting, President Obama announced his solution to mass killings: increasing the nation’s gun-control laws to include universal background checks, an assault-weapons ban, and limiting the capacity of magazines to 10 cartridges.

The president’s “meaningful action” comes in the form of a single-issue, legislative answer to mass killings. It is simple, reflexive, and short-sighted. It responds to the emotional repugnance at the murder of children but ignores the root of what is a complex problem. The president disregards research on the relationship of guns to violence; our policy toward mental illness; the nation’s cultural deterioration; the squeezing out of societal institutions by government; the impact of movies, television, video games, and music; the media’s role in reporting these incidents; and school security.

A background report published by the Heritage Foundation in January offers guidance in solving what is a complex problem, beginning with the relationship of guns to violence. The short answer is that gun ownership does not correlate with increased violence. If it did, the rate of national violence in rural areas where gun ownership is high would exceed that of urban centers where gun ownership is low. Also, the black community suffers from disproportionate violence even though its gun ownership is far lower than in the white community, which has less violence. Further, localities that permit right-to-carry laws have seen a decline in murder and other violent crimes. In short, if gun-control laws were a panacea, cities like Washington, D. C., Oakland, and Chicago, noted for their strict gun-control laws, should be safe places, but the opposite is true; they are among the most dangerous in America.

In addressing the nation, the president failed to mention that America tried a weapons’ ban on assault rifles starting in 1994. The ban sunset 10 years later, at which time a study commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded there was “… no discernible reduction in the lethality and injurious of gun violence.”

International statistics also show no correlation between guns and violence. The Swiss own three times as many guns per-capita as their neighbors in Germany, yet the Swiss have a lower murder rate. Other countries like Israel, New Zealand, and Finland have very high rates of gun ownership, yet report low murder rates. Meanwhile, Russia, Brazil, and Mexico have strict gun-control laws, but higher rates of violence than in the U.S. The only exception seems to be Japan, which has both strict gun-control laws and a low incidence of violence.

By focusing on gun control, the administration avoids addressing any serious questions about our national policy toward mental illness. In 2000, the New York Timespublished a study of 100 “rampage murders” that occurred over several decades. The report concluded that 48 percent of the murders involved perpetrators with a formal diagnosis of mental disorder and that more than half of these had histories of serious mental problems. More recently, Seung-Hui Cho who killed 32 at Virginia Tech, Howard Unruh who murdered 13 in Camden, N.J., Jiverly Wong who killed 13 in Binghamton, and Jared Loughner who killed six in Arizona all suffered from untreated schizophrenia. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, 7.7 million Americans currently suffer from schizophrenia and bi-polar disorders. At any given time, almost half are receiving no treatment. The risk of schizophrenics committing homicide is 10 times greater than the risk from the average citizen.

A discussion of our policy to encourage de-institutionalizing psychiatric patients is very much in order. The trend began in the 1960s with the creation of federally funded mental-health centers and accelerated in the 1970s when the U.S. Supreme Court raised the burden of proof for involuntary civil commitment. The court also expanded the rights of the mentally ill to refuse treatment. In the past, it may have been too easy to commit an individual involuntarily; now it’s too difficult. Society needs to find a balance that protects the rights of both the individual and society.

The country also needs to address cultural issues. Research has long told us that the family is the building-block of a flourishing society, yet four children of every 10 are born out of wedlock, with the rate in some minority communities reaching more than seven of 10. We know that adolescents who do not live in intact families exhibit more “psychologically affective disorders.”

We also know that married fatherhood is the single most reliable indicator for socializing males and that neighborhoods where adolescents live in intact families are less likely to experience violent behavior, like carrying weapons or fighting. Where is the discussion of the collapse of marriage and the rise of single-family households? Where is the discussion of violence and other risk factors resulting from these single-family homes?

If strong families are the first line of defense against violence, our civic institutions are the second responders. Again, research shows us that religious practice can have a powerful impact on maintaining stable, intact families and supporting the healthy development of children. Religious families tend to enjoy lower levels of conflict and higher levels of marital stability. The frequency of religious attendance at a house of worship is a better indicator of parental involvement than either employment or income.

America also boasts a multitude of civic organizations to channel youthful energy into productive channels. While traveling through our country in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville noted the ubiquity of religious practice and the plethora of groups that sprang up voluntarily to deal with community needs. Today, the space between the individual and government is being squeezed by the unrelenting expansion of government, where one-size-fits-all is the answer to all of our problems.

Where is the discussion of any impact violence in our media plays? It doesn’t take a professional to recognize the increase in violence in our movies, television, and music. Last year in the video-game industry, five of the 10 top sellers were based on not just death and violence but on torture, mutilation, and sadism. What is the effect on those prone to psychological disorders who spend hours viewing the media or listening to hateful music? Families, parents, and community leaders all have a duty to protect their youth from excessive consumption of violence. Does this mean creating different rating systems? Does it mean leveraging the free market to put pressure on the producers of violence?

And speaking of the media, what is the role of television, radio, newspapers, magazines, and websites in reporting these tragedies? Does the 24/7 reporting, which transmits more speculation than facts, magnify the celebrity status of mass killers and feed their need for attention? We know that copy-cat killings are as old as the media, dating back to Goethe’s 1774 classic “The Sorrows of Young Werther,” when the novel caused a rash of copy-cat suicides. What is the role of the media? Should the industry show more restraint?

And where is the discussion of the idea offered by Wayne LaPierre of the NRA to provide armed guards at our schools? Or should we arm teachers and administrators in the schools? Why is the suggestion dismissed out of hand when mass-killers so often select schools as their venue for violence? Our society accepts armed guards in banks and on airplanes. Other societies like Israel have armed guards at every school. If the idea has merit, let’s at least discuss it before dismissing it.

In retrospect, we learn that Adam Lanza came from a single-family home. He drove to Sandy Hook Elementary School armed not just with a rifle but also three other guns, which makes the question of the number of rounds in a magazine moot. We know that he avoided attracting attention and was uncomfortable socializing. Lanza’s brother told law-enforcement officials that his brother had a personality disorder. We also know that the Newtown shooter played violent video games for hours at a time.

If President Obama were serious about taking “meaningful action” to reduce the problem of mass killings, he missed the opportunity to have a thoughtful, national discussion of all the issues. Instead, he gave us a shallow, narrow, reflexive response intended to show the voters that government was reacting. Perhaps the populace will feel safer if we pass more gun-control legislation.

Until the next mass-killing.

Norman Poltenson is publisher of The Central New York Business Journal. Contact him at npoltenson@cnybj.com