In the aftermath of such a horrific national event such as the mass shooting in Las Vegas, it is a fundamental human response to try and do something that might prevent this from happening again.
As has been the case after many of what now seems an endless parade of public attacks, there has been an outcry from one side of our political spectrum for action under the general rubric of “gun control.”
One concrete suggestion is to ban the sale of the bump stock, a device used by Stephen Paddock in the Las Vegas assault to convert his arsenal of weapons from standard to automatic. Automatic weapons have been banned in the United States since the 1930s, and so making illegal this end-around from that previous law is perfectly rational. If Paddock had not had access to this mechanism, it is likely that fewer people may have been harmed by his murderous rampage and that’s a good thing. However, he was set on killing as many as he could, he seems to have been planning to use a car bomb, and he was aiming to explode nearby tanks of aviation fuel, and so a ban on the bump stock would not have prevented this assault.
Similarly, there has been a call to extend background checks for the purchase of guns at gun shows as is currently required for purchases at brick-and-mortar stores. This is a reasonable effort also as there is no reason for gun purchases in one venue to be excluded from the safety checks required at another venue. However, Stephen Paddock had passed all of his background checks.
These gun control efforts are acts of whistling past the graveyard. They may make us feel like we have accomplished something and that’s not necessarily bad. For Democrats, if successful it would be a small victory for them over their political bogeyman, the National Rifle Association. Good for them. However, we have to be very careful not to think that efforts that do not solve a problem are in fact true solutions.
The seeming regularity of these public assaults raises unsettling doubts about our national character. Though it seems as if we are getting progressively more violent in contemporary America, perhaps this is not true. American history has been sprinkled with sociopaths and serial killers, though during the opening of the Western frontier the likes of Billy the Kid, John Wesley Hardin, and Jesse James have been romanticized. Similarly, the prohibition years produced John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Al Capone who demonstrated little limitation on their willingness to murder. Serial killers were uncovered frequently in the latter half of the 20th century.
Is America generally more violent than other societies? Certainly, we have more guns. On one hand, news of individual rampage killings seem infrequent from other parts of the world. On the other hand, state-sponsored mass killings occur across the globe but not here. The United States has not produced a Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Zedong or a Saddam Hussein. We have not seen an ethnic cleansing since the assault on Native Americans in the 19th century, and ethnic-based mass murder elsewhere in the world is a regularity.
This by no means suggests that we should not seek to understand this convulsion of irrational public violence in America. It is very tempting to have suspicions about the role our mass media may be playing. Graphic and horrific violence suffuses television, movies and the video games our children play. We can certainly conjecture that this daily diet of violence desensitizes our population to the reality of violent behaviors.
An alternative viewpoint is that rather than polluting American society with violence, the media is responding to the audience by producing the entertainment that the American public temperament is seeking.
When I have watched television produced overseas, this degree of violence is not evident. On the other hand, the martial arts movies produced in Asia are full of violence, and the violent movies and video games produced in America are very much appreciated across the globe.
The television and movies we watched when I was a child were far less explicitly violent than what we are seeing today. Both Stephen Paddock and James Hodgkinson, the shooter who sought to kill Republican Congressman Steve Scalise during a charity baseball game practice, are of the same generation as I. The worsening violence of contemporary media cannot be blamed for polluting their young minds with violence.
It may be worthwhile to look at these shootings in a more granular way. It is now clear that both Paddock and Hodgkinson meticulously planned their assaults over a long period of time, scrupulously kept their plans secret from those around them, and sought to kill.
From time to time we hear the story of a person who lives in seemingly good circumstances and who commits what is usually a violent suicide that is inexplicable to the people around them. This happened to a good friend of mine from high school, who later in life was happily married with two children, owned a successful business, and then committed a carefully planned suicide in his home. His wife and his family was shocked and mystified, as they never saw this coming.
I have often wondered at this phenomenon, and suspect that these secretive but well-planned mass shootings are on a continuum with those suicides. There is terrible rage and anger that must fill these people to commit these acts, yet these acts are clearly not impulsive as demonstrated by the concerted planning. There is a careful effort to hide these plans either out of shame or to prevent any interference in carrying out these acts. In both cases, the planning is unrestrained by social relationships and responsibility, and goes on unmoored from any morality that might prevent the taking of life.
In earlier times, these violent acts would be simply identified as evil, and it would suffice to eliminate the perpetrators. Perhaps that approach is as much as we can ask for even now. Until we can understand how a brain or mind or soul can be deranged like this and until we develop the capability of identifying these people before they commit acts of violence, we are unlikely to be successful at preventing these attacks. Token actions are not solutions.
Jay Fleitman, M.D., of Northampton writes a monthly column. He can be reached at opinion@gazettenet.com.