Finding an answer for the NIU shootings
Well before we even knew the name of the gunman in the Northern Illinois University killing spree, some people already knew why he did it. Guns. Or, not guns.
And so, another tiresome argument over gun control was reignited, with both sides spilling their invective all over the Internet. The victims, their families and friends deserve better. If we have to discuss it, at least let the discussion be a little more intelligent and respectful.
Not that we needed another school shooting to begin the discussion. Mass shootings have been occurring with increasing frequency. Just a week ago at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge, a 23-year-old women killed two students, and then herself.
The recent massacres in a Tinley Park women’s clothing store and in a suburban St. Louis city hall remind us that the carnage isn’t limited to schools. But schools may be more dangerous than malls and other public spaces. We are reminded of Virginia Tech (33 dead), University of Washington (2 dead), Shepherd University (3 dead), University of Arizona (4 dead), Appalachian School of Law (3 dead) and University of Arkansas (2 dead). Those are just since 2000.
Looking at the history, one thing is inescapable: the further back you go, the fewer you find. Until you get to August, 1966, when a gunman at the University of Texas at Austin killed 16 and wounded 31. Before that, nothing. As someone who grew up in the 1940s and 1950s, I can’t remember a single such incident. No, I’m not saying that the ‘40s and ‘50s were some kind of golden age; they weren’t. But they were different.
How? Guns were just as available, if not more so, back then. Lead Sun-Times columnist Mark Brown, an NIU alum, wisely said, “We can blame the guns, and certainly those play a role, but that’s too easy. I believe we’ve got a screw loose in our collective psyches, a mental illness of frightening proportions that manifests itself in these spasms of violence.”
He’s right, but the question remains: Why? Do we have more mentally ill now than before?
NIU Campus Police Chief Donald Grady said the gunman had stopped taking an unnamed medication and become somewhat erratic in the last couple of weeks. Certainly, we had plenty of erratic, mentally ill and dangerous people in the ‘40s and ‘50s, but mass slaughters were not a regular occurrence. Medications were less available back then, and less effective, but the level of mass violence was lower. Obviously, a better understanding of mental illness is needed, but I think that’s barking up the wrong tree.
So, the why question remains. One Internet poster suggests the “depersonalization of society” is a cause. I’m not sure what that means; I don’t feel less connected with relatives, neighbors and friends than I did 50 years ago, but I’m just one person. I’ve always mistrusted generalizations about the “depersonalization” of society because of its vague meaning and the difficulty of measuring such a thing.
What else is different between now and then? We’ve improved in some ways, such as race relations, but only a lunatic would suggest that there’s a positive correlation between that and mass violence. A few nutty ideologues might instinctively blame a conservative in the White House, but we’ve had presidents a lot more conservative, without the carnage.
As an old gaffer, I guess the most obvious difference between then and now is the culture. By that I mean, the ease with which violence has been normalized. In video games, television and movies, for example. One Internet poster was struck by the similarity of the NIU shooting and a violent video game: “That guy seemed to have been acting out a video game: walk into an arena (stage in this case) and start shooting and get down as many targets as possible. He got a lot in a very short amount of time.”
No, I’m not suggesting a direct connection, as if the NIU shooter came direct from a video game parlor. But there is an increasing brutishness about our society, and it has come from somewhere. In this, it is worthwhile to quote from the American Psychiatric Association’s HealthyMinds.org web site:
The debate is over. Over the last three decades, the one overriding finding in research on the mass media is that exposure to media portrayals of violence increases aggressive behavior in children. The National Institute of Mental Health has reported that “In magnitude, exposure to television violence is as strongly correlated with aggressive behavior as any other behavioral variable that has been measured.” In addition to increased aggression, countless studies have demonstrated that exposure to depictions of violence causes desensitization and creates a climate of fear.
As the evidence linking increased aggression to excessive exposure to violent entertainment has grown, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other physicians and mental healthcare providers have joined the call for limits on the amount of violent depictions to which children are exposed….
Children and adolescents are exposed to more media depictions of violence than ever before. Such depictions pervade not only television, but film, music, online media, videogames, and printed material. Commercial television for children is 50-60 times more violent than prime-time programs for adults, as some cartoons average more than 80 violent acts per hour. With the advent of videocassette sales and rentals, pay-per-view TV, cable TV, videogames, and online interactive media, many more children and adolescents have greater access to media with violent content than had ever been available in previous decades. Again, these depictions desensitize children to the effects of violence, increase aggression, and help foster a climate of fear.
The critical period for lasting harm from exposure to depictions of violence is pre-adolescent childhood. Children as young as 14 months model behaviors. Viewers of violent programming can come to perceive the world as more violent than it really is, and a callous attitude toward violence can emerge.
So, what’s the answer? The media, of course, are only one part of this complex phenomenon. Peer pressure, for example, encourages adolescent boys, already inclined to violence by our culture, to engage in drive-by shootings. The more complex the problem, the more complex and difficult the solution. The standard solutions—i.e. more parental responsibility—have been turned into clichés, although the standard solutions are, indeed, real solutions. Standard solutions sometimes are fought by the politically correct, who mistakenly regard any call for media responsibility as a call for censorship.
We’ll continue to hold candlelight vigils and send in the counselors after the shootings. We’ll call for endless government “programs” and “interventions.” But those all are deflections from the real problem: The lowering of boundaries and limits, and acceptance of destructive behavior and attitudes that defy the accumulated wisdom of civilizations. The narcissism of radical individualism. A popular culture that regards choice as always superior to duty and responsibility and respect. We know the answers; we just choose to avoid them.
**
Dennis Byrne is a regular contributor to the Chicago Daily Observer, and a member of the Editorial Board
We all know why so stop pretending. It is the guns, it is our stupidity in allowing the NRA to run our government.
Get the guns out, get out the lawmakers who have done this to us.
take ur meds
Gosh, Dennis, at the risk of sounding like an addled liberal, let me point out two things-
One, it’s highly unlikely this disturbed person would have killed anyone if he’d burst forth on the lecture stage with two or three, say, knives, or bats.
And two, he was mentally unbalanced. Off his meds.
It’s sad when people devolve into murderous psychosis for reason known only to God.
It’s even sadder when otherwise intelligent people can’t seem to grasp the basic fact that deranged individuals couldn’t do a small fraction of the damage we regularly hear about without the ability lethal fire arms give them to send metal tearing through multiple human beings with the mere jerk on a trigger.
There’s a reason the founding fathers made the first amendment regard speech, and not arms.
Do you really believe they envisioned any fool owning automatic weapons?
blaming video games is an easy out, fear what you don’t like and demonize it.
Gosh, Bill, you missed a whole bunch of points, including the ones about how people didn’t used to crash into classrooms to kill people, even when guns were easy to get. Something has changed, and it isn’t the availability of guns or the presence of the mentally ill in society.
And, Bill, where did you get the nonsense idea that I’m for any fool owning an automatic weapon, or am opposed to certain gun control laws. But, go ahead, and just jump to any ignorant assumption you want to make your argument.
I don’t know if you’re a liberal, but addled seems to fit.
Is everyone who disagrees with you addled? How convenient for you.
I am a liberal and I am against censorship and I am for gun control. But there is obviously more to this. People who doubt the effect of television and video games surprise me. “D’oh!” is in the dictionary. People who’ve never seen the Simpsons use it. Use of that expletive has become a reflex. I’ve even seen it used in movies and on tv shows that take place in the past. The late 20th century actors and directors involved don’t even notice when they’re doing it so they can’t make the thought “Elizabethan Susie wouldn’t say ‘D’oh!’ when her gigantic collar got snagged on the chandelier.”
It would be nice if tv only infected us with harmless slang from fictional nuclear power plant employees. But we can’t just take the good and ignore the bad. We should be more careful about what ideas we let into our homes and the media should care about what they’re sending out.
This is an absolute tragedy.
I wondered what possible explanation there might be as to the shooter’s motives. Late today, I learned that he had been reading Nietzche and “The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers” was one of the books found among his belongings. Clearly, this was a premeditated crime. Why he chose NIU or that particularly classroom is anyone’s guess. As an NIU graduate, the killer was familiar with the campus and the building may have simply been convenient and easily accessible.
I do agree that common decency suggests we need to insist upon certain limits to the desensitizing amount of movie and television violence. Stylized depictions of violence make everything look like a cartoon. The recent film “Shoot’em Up” featured almost three thousand rounds fired in rapid succession.
Why should blood and violence be glamorized in such a manner.
I do resent the implication that the rights of all Americans need to be restricted because of the depraved acts of a deeply disturbed individual. Illinois is not a gun friendly state, but all of the waiting periods, permits, restrictions and registrations failed to deter this person. Disarming law abiding gun owners has no correlation to preventing such a tragedy.
Well I think the obvious difference between the 40s and 50s, is simple.
Kids back in the 40s and 50s were generally more respectful to other people because ‘hard’ discipline was the norm back then, and parents took more responsibilities on themselves to mould and discipline their children.
Today, in a Society where we are constantly told ‘hard’ discipline isn’t necessary, and in fact ‘hard’ discipline is now breaking the law. Parents have no idea anymore HOW to parent their children, because they have no idea what that means…. that they can do and should be ‘hard’ disciplining their children, but that ‘hard’ discipline doesn’t mean physically or verbally abusing a child. People today, absolved themselve from responsibility of their children blaming TVs, media or children’s friends. Because people would rather blame replacement ‘parents’ for their childs lack of discipline and education than themselves.
Ultimately responsibility of events like these falls on the shoulders of parents, and Society as a whole for unintentionally convincing parents that if they use a TV or similar to totally replace personal parenting, that absolves the parent from responsibility if their child grows up with the lack of concept of right or wrong, and any fear of retribution from doing something wrong.
Exposure of media to children isn’t the problem. Its Parents not teaching children the difference between right and wrong which IS the problem, its about balance.
My parents were very busy as well, hardly finding time for myself, but they still made the effort of through my younger life to force me to sit down and study for some period of time at night while they watched over me or disciplined me for every lie I told or every act of rudeness I displayed. At the same time I did grow up watching ALOT of TV including horror movies and computer games from the age of 5 or 6 years old…. The difference was my parents thought me, albeit with threat of caning, that doing someting bad/wrong there would be obvious and clear retribution for it.
Would I ever cane my child though? no I wouldn’t but neither do I think my parents were wrong in the way they parented me. Do I think caning was necessary? No it wasn’t necessary. But Society forcibly removed that option without proper effort at educating new or upcoming parents on how instead they should be disciplining children, and how they should no matter how busy or how much money they have to buy ‘replacement electronic parents’ they should always be directly parenting the child themselves.
Good Lord, the ignorance.
I’ll check with my niece’s boy freind, way down south around Marion, IL, the card carrying member of the NRA. He kills animals with a bow and arrow, and with a long gun. He’s very good at it. But I don’t believe- could be wrong here, I’ll double check- that he’s ever felt he needed a 20 round clip to take on critters in the woods- or even more than two shells in a shot gun.
‘Course, them pesky humans, they tend to scatter a bit when folks be shooting at ‘em, so you need a bit more fire power when you hunt them down, especially in places they don’t expect it, like university lecture halls.
By the way folks, there’s nothing “simple” about the difference between the 40s and 50s, or the 60s, or any ten year period of time in America, except in minds that need to make things simple for their own intellectual convenience.
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