[As anyone who reads this blog knows, the people who comment around here and very smart and knowledgeable. And opinionated. One of these people is Mike Blottin. And I am proud to offer the following as the first article here by an outside writer. Mike makes an interesting argument about how the (understandably) sanitized news coverage of horrific events—be they mass shootings or drone strikes—allow us to be more accepting of them. I’m not sure what can be done about this issue. But it is food for thought. -FM]
So I imagine folks living in the United States know all about the shooting that left 27 dead a week ago last Friday at Sandy Hook Elementary, in Newtown CT. For those of your who don’t, read this article from that day. [But really? -FM]
It’s fairly safe to assume that, given the details and number of dead, especially children, the elementary school must have been a pretty gory scene. Something I’ve heard time and time again in the news is that emergency response and public safety personal instructed survivors to close their eyes, while leading them out through the carnage. Again, the assumption is that they did so because it was such a gory scene.
I can understand why they’d tell a young child to do this. Seeing dead bodies, bleeding out, especially of kids their own age who they each might have known personally if not intimately, would almost certainly be traumatic. Likewise, I can understand why they told adult survivors to do so, especially considering that some must have had quasi-parental relationship to a number of the children. But I have a question.
Our culture seems to, if not glorify, normalize violence. Not just physical violence, but emotional and psychological as well. Do you think it would have been better to not have closed the rest of our eyes—the eyes of all of us on the outside? With our eyes closed we block out much of the horror of the event, in addition to those little yet poignant details that impart the most striking impressions. Such details could serve as a powerful motivational force, driving all of us to do whatever it takes to forestall such events from happening again—to make the conditions leading up to them less and less potent.
Those who lived through the Sandy Hook tragedy saw enough of the horrors. But the rest of us? I wonder if it is right to spare ourselves from the full impact of such cataclysms. We’re shocked and saddened by the statistics (26 killed, 20 children), but that’s as far as it goes. And as a result, we don’t actually do anything remotely significant about it.
This is something like willful ignorance: ignoring the preconditions leading up to such a massacre. Instead, we rationalize them. The shooter was crazy; the exception not the rule; a bad apple… And in doing such we end up de facto contributing to them, in one way or another.
Before we begin to meaningfully deal with these events, as individuals and a society, perhaps we must first take our blinders off. We need to get past our own misunderstanding, fears, and hatred—the tunnel vision, that stops us from seeing the world as it really is. And given that, who would argue that what happened at Sandy Creek had to happen? That it is the price we pay for freedom or some other abstract concept?
I hope the events in this month alone – in Sandy Creek, Webster, New York (gunman killed firefighters responding to a fire he lured them to), and central Pennsylvania (gunman kills three random people) – motivate people to demand rational, effective Congressional action against gun violence. In both Sandy Creek and Webster, it appears the gunmen used the same type of semi-automatic weapon. Mike Blottin’s article caused me to think more deeply about how we respond to and debate these events. Effective responses will not come from passions that are inflamed, because those passions produce prejudice, irrationality, and potentially more violence. I characterize the spike in purchases of assault-style weapons after Sandy Hook, and the call for arming schools, as irrational and dangerous responses based on inflamed emotions. Nor will there be an effective response if the public minimizes these events by failing to see that they could happen in any of our communities, by dismissing each one as an aberration, by believing there is nothing society should do, and by not empathizing with the feelings of horror and loss felt by the victims and their families. Yes, we need to take our blinders off. We need to empirically study why these crimes occurred and what can be done to prevent them, including comparing gun violence and policies in our country to gun violence and policies in other countries. I hope the debate centers on rational themes. If so, I believe Congress will hear our outcry and act.