Do Guns Kill People? (continued: Who's to Blame?)

If you read the post on Friday, you know that I was about to reveal who was at fault for the proliferation of violent crime. I apologize for the cliffhanger, but I’ve got to do something to keep you all coming back. Without further ado…

I blame the hippies.

Not what you expected? In some ways I experience guilt pangs when I say that. I love much of what the hippies stood for: their advocacy of peace, their challenges to the government and to social norms, their optimism for a better world. If I was born 40 years earlier I could have been a hippy.

But the hippies brought two things into mainstream American culture which would eventually prove to be the destruction of morality, accountability, and the family structure.

The first of these was the Sexual Revolution. In theory, the Sexual Revolution was a positive thing. It did a great deal of good for feminism and equality. It encouraged dialogue about sexuality, bringing the taboo topic out of the shadows and into the public forum.

On the other hand, the Sexual Revolution made casual sex not just acceptable; it made casual sex the norm. It gave its adherents permission to be irresponsible, unaccountable children. Sex requires a certain level of maturity. It requires love, sacrifice, commitment, or the damage it can do is irreparable. Unfortunately our bodies reach that level of maturity before our minds do.

The Sexual Revolution told us that sex is an expression of our freedom and by repressing our sexual urges we were denying ourselves a beautiful gift that life had given us. Sex is a beautiful gift, but as with all gifts it comes with certain responsibilities.

The result of the Sexual Revolution was that young women were becoming mothers before they were emotionally or mentally prepared to do so. Men, given permission to procreate, embraced their instinctive urges. But when it came time to face the inevitable consequences they lacked the maturity and moral fortitude and often panicked, ran. So we are left with mothers too young to be mothers and fathers that are nowhere to be found.

This trend has continued to this day, and in many ways has been magnified as casual sex becomes more and more accepted, a process which has been helped along by advertising and the media.

The second culture-crusher that the hippies made mainstream was illicit drug use. Of course drugs were around long before the hippies, but the hippies glorified them and made them a cultural norm. They justified drug use by claiming it expanded their minds and spread harmony. In reality, it was escapism at its worst.

It started with pot smoking in the ‘60s and escalated into cocaine snorting in the ‘70s. By the time the ’80s rolled around dealers were realizing that drugs were big business and invented crack, a much more potent and addictive high than its predecessors. The result? As with the Sexual Revolution, it led to the disappearance of fathers and the destruction of the family.

Before I start to sound too much like the “Moral Majority” I want to make a disclaimer: I’m against the “Moral Majority.” Too many of them are bigoted, hateful zealots and I refuse to be associated with them. But when it comes to the importance of family I agree with them wholeheartedly. Family is the only thing that can save American Culture. And I’ll agree with them that it is ideal for a child to grow up with both a mother and a father. These roles meet different needs of a developing child.

The number one factor for the spread of violent crime in American society is absent fathers. The overwhelming majority of violent offenders are young males, and the overwhelming majority of these young males grew up without a father. There was no one there to teach them what it meant to be a man, to teach them about accountability for their actions, responsibility to provide, or respect for their fellow man (/woman). There was no one there to ground them when they hit their sister, to smack them upside the head when they cussed, to be a stable force in their lives that gave them something to aspire to.

So they turned to the only male figures they could find: rappers glorifying violence and gang leaders filling their minds with hate, selfishness, and greed. We are left with young men running amuck. They don’t understand accountability, consequences, or respect. They have never been shown what it means to work and they think they are entitled to whatever they want. So they arm themselves with the means necessary, and they take it. No one ever showed them manhood, so while physically they are men, mentally they are little boys.

While the hippies stuck the wrench in the cog of American culture, introducing elements that would prove the downfall of the family structure, it is up to us to fix it. The hippies are gone and it is essential for us, more specifically fathers, to clean up the mess. So men, before you become fathers consider the consequences of your actions, and prepare to be accountable. Take responsibility for teaching your sons what it means to be a man. And all absent fathers: Grow up, be a man, and be present in your children’s lives.

Thanks for reading.

Note: A quick response to the comments Pat made on the last post. I agree with Pat that it is dangerous for the media to portray violence in any sort of glorifying way, and I don’t intend to let them off the hook. They must take responsibility for the material they are producing and need to understand that, unfortunate as it is, many young men are being influenced by the violent, degrading, immoral images and words they present.

But I don’t think that taking violence out of the media is the answer. Media is a reflection of culture, not its guide. The media takes its cues from what is happening in society and from consumer tastes. The problem is that it’s circular. We are a society that craves violence, so the media gives us violence, which further desensitizes us to violence (I agree with Pat on that, too), so we crave more violence, etc.

“It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society” Jiddu Krishnamurti

Do Guns Kill People?: A Dialogue

Thanks to Pat Corcoran for weighing in on the “Do Guns Kill People?” post. I appreciate hearing from readers (don’t think I’m forgetting you, Chris Casselman), and his comments were right on.

I think the problem with the gun control debate is that both sides are so blinded by their preconceptions that they miss the point entirely. They focus on guns as they relate to violent crime. The fact of the matter is guns are inanimate objects and therefore CAN”T CAUSE VIOLENCE. Yes, guns are often used as a means to commit violence, but they cannot of their own free will do harm. The widespread violent crime in our country says nothing about the need for more or less gun control (as demonstrated by Switzerland and Japan). But it says everything about our degraded cultural values.

America is a self-serving, hedonistic, morally numbed society. There are a number of different reasons for this which are easy enough to point the finger at. We could say the consumer-driven, capitalistic advertising industry is to blame. This force pounds it into us that our personal pleasures are the only thing worth living for. It tells us that we need need need, and no cost is too great. But in truth the advertising industry is reactionary. It does whatever is working to sell a product, and what is working is based entirely on our tastes. So the industry is only telling us that pleasure is the ultimate goal because that is what we want to hear.

It’s also easy to blame the increasing violence in music, movies, TV and video games for our cultural immorality. It’s argued that this barrage of violence is desensitizing us to its effects. I’m not buying it. I don’t believe that a moral person could possibly become so numbed by witnessing a fictional murder on television that they would go commit a murder in real life. It just doesn’t make sense. As human beings we have an instinctive capability for compassion. We can relate to the pain and suffering of other human beings. But violence in the media does make a convenient scapegoat.

So what is to blame? Tune in on Monday to find out…

Thanks for reading.

Do Guns Kill People?

Crime in America has spun out of control. Violent crime rose 3.7 percent nationwide in 2006, and this pales in comparison to what we have seen so far in 2007. According to the justice department offenders are becoming younger, bolder and increasingly violent. Turf wars between rival gangs have taken control of Los Angeles neighborhoods, New Orleans has become reminiscent of the Wild West with its combination of survivalism and opportunism, and we won’t soon forget the tragedy at Virginia Tech that shocked the nation.

I foresee gun control being a major issue in any upcoming elections. Gun lobbyists from both sides of the aisle make major political contributions, demanding to be heard. Politicians have exploited citizens’ fears to win votes, but they have been focusing on the wrong source of fear. To be blunt I’m much more concerned about being robbed and shot in a dark alley than I am about being blown up on a bus by a terrorist. It is essential to the survival of the country that violent crime is reined in.

Among gun control lobbyists there are divergent methods of accomplishing this goal. Those that are against governmental gun control argue that if more citizens had easy access to firearms, violent criminals would be hesitant, not knowing who was armed. Violent crime could be deterred before it started, and could be stopped if it did occur. In states such as Florida, where citizens are allowed to carry concealed weapons, this has proven to be true. The problem with this theory is that more people would potentially take the law into their own hands and it could very easily end in lawlessness

The advocates for stricter gun control argue that fewer guns lead to a lower rate of violent crime. This seems logical to me. If nobody has guns, nobody gets shot. This theory has never been fully put to the test, as no state has gone from allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons to outlawing the practice. Therefore, we don’t know if the crime rate would rise or fall. A compelling argument against stricter gun control laws is that violent criminals will obtain firearms anyway, legally or not, and average, law-abiding citizens will have no way of defending themselves.

To explore these arguments I invite you to take a look at two countries with incredibly low crime rates: Japan and Switzerland.

Japan is well known as having some of the strictest gun control laws. Shotguns (for hunting purposes) are the only firearms that citizens are allowed to own, and they can only obtain these after rigid background checks. Only about .6% of households have firearms (compared with 41% of U.S. households), and as a result they experience only 0.004 murders per 1,000 people (the U.S. is at about .04).

Switzerland, on the other hand, maintains only a very small standing army and relies on a militia system for national defense. Most adult males in the country are members of this militia and keep fully automatic, military assault rifles at home in case of a national emergency. But with all of these firearms, there are only .009 murders per 1,000 people.

Hmm…So the Japanese don’t have guns, and nobody kills anybody, and the Swiss have abundant guns, and nobody kills anybody.

The logical, tragic conclusion:

Guns don’t kill people…Americans do.