Gun Nuts Media

Or so Douglas Keller, a professor at UCLA would have you believe.  Now, the “your” above only applies of you’re a male who owns firearms, or if you’re in the media.

UCLA professor of education and cultural critic Douglas Kellner argues that school shootings and other acts of mass violence embody a crisis of out-of-control gun culture and male rage, heightened by a glorification of hypermasculinity and violence in the media.

Now, before I continue, I will say that I’m not a psychologist, and as much my commentary should not be taken as that of an expert in this field.  Dr. Helen would be much more qualified to lay expert commentary on the (imaginary) issue of male rage than I would.  With that said, I think that Keller is full of shit, to put a very blunt point on it.

The one point that he does make that I will agree with wholeheartedly is that the news channels tend to glorify people like the VA Tech and NIU shooters by providing them with postmortem coverage and fame.  I refuse to participate in that game, which is why you won’t see any mass shooter (ever) mentioned by name here; I do believe that the media helps create these people by feeding their belief that if they kill a bunch of people in a shocking manner, they’ll be famous.  In that, I agree with Keller that the media is partly to blame for each and every one of these shootings.

The emphasis in the above sentence is “partly”, because ultimately the individual is responsible for his own actions.  No one, not the media, or the “out of control gun culture” made him pull that trigger.  He made that choice himself, and that’s where the ultimate responsibility lies.

That’s why I don’t buy into this notion of “male rage” or the “gun culture”.  Whenever someone talks about the gun culture in a negative light, it shows a great lack of actual knowledge of the American gun culture, which overwhelmingly is a culture of safety and responsibility.  In the real gun culture, the concept of taking out any form of anger on innocent people is something that would never be considered.  In the real gun culture, we recognize that you can’t actually solve your problems with violence and force, unless an outside force has initiated violence against you.

Kellner recommends stricter gun control laws; improved campus and workplace security; better guidance and mental health care on campuses and in communities; a reconstruction of education to promote programs advocating peace and social justice (emphasis mine – ed); and projecting new and more constructive images of masculinity.

Peace and social justice?  Would that be the same “peace and social justice” that the NIU shooter was interested in?

With that last point, I would be in favor of projecting “new and more constructive” images of masculinity in modern media, but I sincerely doubt that Keller’s ideas and mine of what constitute those images match up.

Whenever you have some mass shooting or a similar national atrocity, there will be hordes of people seeking to lay the blame for the killings at the doorstep of their personal cause, whether it’s “violent video games”, an “out-of-control gun culture”, or even “male rage”.  The problem with all of these people is twofold: first off that they’re grandstanding in the blood of innocent people is quite simply morally repugnant; secondly their actions remove the blame from the individual and place it on outside sources, thus assisting in abrogating further mass murders from responsibility for their actions as well.   By redirecting the blame away from the individual, these people (Paul Helmke, Jack Thompson, Douglas Keller, to name a few) are helping future mass murderers by telling them that they’re not responsible for their actions.

I tried to write this post last night, and I’ve re-written it in my head about a dozen times since then. The problem is that I don’t have anything to say that I haven’t said literally hundreds of times before. I’m being quite brutally honest here, because when I read the story on CNN.com I’m filled with a sense of total exhaustion at the grotesque dance that I know is going to come next.

I’m tired of these cowards deciding that their life is too much to bear, but instead of having the decency to just off themselves in the quiet of their own home, they have to take a bunch of people with them. I’m tired of defending my rights because someone thinks that the illusion of safety is more important than personal liberty and responsibility. I’m tired of people grandstanding on the shoulders of atrocities for political gain.

In all likelihood, this is the last you’re going to hear from me about this story. It’s not that I don’t care, because I grieve for the families of the victims; I literally am sick of these shootings and the whole three ring circus that inevitably accompanies them. If actual news breaks on this, I’ll cover it; but beyond that I’m done with this subject.

Edit: Uncle probably has the best roundup of all the blags covering the subject.  I agree with everything he said.