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| ESSAY:VIOLENT STRAIN? | |
 July 14, 2000 
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ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Americans are a violent people. Haven't you heard that all your life? I certainly have, from my earliest grade school history classes. It came, most often, with a good spin, of course. We had to throw off the yoke of England, subdue the Old West, defend democracy in foreign lands, defend ourselves and our homes and families. In historical short-hand, we were violent form the get-go. That's how we have seen ourselves and continue to see ourselves -- how else to explain the odd daily disparity now evident in so much news coverage? SPOKESPERSON: Police believe that this is a case connected to a custody dispute... ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Crime statistics are down all over the country, and yet our nightly news-- certainly the local variety-- continues to be a bloodbath. Car chases, crime scenes, manacled prisoners; they are the staple of these broadcasts. To watch them, you'd think nothing had changed, and that crime was at an all-time epidemic high. Throw in the spate of cop dramas and mafia shows -- from "NYPD Blue" to "The Sopranos," violence is a small screen staple of our nightly entertainment as well as of our nightly news. The easy answer is that violence sells, that it's good for ratings, keeps us on the edge of our seats and tuned in. But there's something deeper, something that has to do with our unshakable self-perception as a violent country with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, the myths we recycle -- Americans are violent. We might be in a temporary crime lull, make no mistake, our true selves are, and always have been armed, and ready to fight. But a forthcoming book, "Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture," says the myth is wrong; that we, in fact, were not always armed. Author Michael A. Belles says that no more than 10% of American private citizens owned guns before the Civil War. By contrast, most estimates today show that there are now more than firearms in private hands to the entire population. In short, we've been recycling a myth about ourselves, a myth, which by blaming a violent past, may make us feel responsible for our violent present -- (Gunshot) -- which, while statistically down, nonetheless continues to haunt us. MAN: I saw... I saw the gunman. I saw two gunmen -- ANNE TAYLOR FLEMING: Columbine, for example, no recent rampage has so disturbed us, and we dutifully set about, in its wake, recycling these perversely comforting myths about our inherent violence "bound to happen -- kind of country we live, you know, loving guns and all." Along with the culture-wide palaver, my journalist colleagues and I engaged in a number of these deconstructive sessions-- on air print-- about the causes of Columbine. We looked for answers. We talked of this inherent violent strain. We talked about the moral fiber of the country, about jock culture, about the disenfranchised angry, white male, who spent hours having his aggression stoked in the killing fields of computer games and cyberspace. Alas, we missed one major point - according to a recent, scrupulously researched series of articles about rampage killers in the New York Times. The Times series made clear that underneath all the talk and all the explanations lay the simple, start truth: most of e rampage killers, be they at Columbine or Pittsburgh, or Honolulu, or Atlanta, had had years of being mentally unstable. Most had sent up flares for years, asking anybody to help stop them. Most of them, in fact, are not young and not all of them are male. All to say that while my colleagues and I got some of it right, we often missed the bald bottom line: These killers are sick, and needed help and nobody-- parents, teachers, friends, you, me, the mental health care system heard them in time to stop them. The truth about our rampage killers isn't as sexy as our theories about mythological America. The facts are more damning, more specific, more personal. With all our sophisticated interpretations about guns and violence and the whole historical/cultural nine yards, we, in effect, got ourselves off the hook while seeming to do the reverse; a slight of conscience. We need beware these stories, these half-truths, even untruths we tell ourselves for fear that they, in fact, mask the truth. I'm Anne Taylor Fleming. |
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