Listening to Tavis Smiley’s show tonight, and the segment My America where they talked about gun violence. At one point they quote a man who lost his brother to gun violence:
You can be in a club and bump into somebody on accident, a little of your liquor, a little of your water spill on their coat, now, you go outside, he got five or six people out their because you spilled your damn drink. Which, a person should be able to say, "man, my fault dog, I apologize, you know how it is." You got people that just ain’t gonna be right, man.
Tavis Smiley: So you take that, you put guns into the equation, that changes mediation efforts dramatically.
Several times they talk about how small matters of respect lead to violence. The conclusion is that guns are the problem.
I don’t really know what to do with this. In my life (and I suspect all of your lives) issues of respect do not lead to violence. As a result I have a hard time thinking of this as a gun problem.
OK, so it’s a violence problem. The other thing that gets me is there’s this strong undertone to this conversation that "we aren’t doing enough." This attitude is of course the norm for an NPR show. But it’s not we — I, and everyone I know is not part of this we. My "we" does not resort to violence. My "we" does not project respect into minor social interactions. When I say it’s not "we", I don’t think it’s just that I tuned into the wrong radio show — am I being recruited into this "we"? Do they really think listeners are part of this "we"?
There is no reflection in these shows about why this (whatever the issue of the show) is a general problem. Of course most talk shows tend to generalize wildly, to turn every anecdote into a sign of some change in culture, some disease of our society, something more than just an anecdote. (Though some good NPR shows do not attempt to generalize anecdotes at all.)
There’s a strong attitude, in this show and others, that this is a problem for us all to solve. Why exactly is this a problem for me to solve? Why is this a problem for government to solve? (I’m not a conservative, but I feel it’s unfair that only conservatives seem to be able to ask that question: why should government solve this?)
I don’t ask these questions rhetorically (and maybe that makes me different from the conservatives, who tend to only ask questions rhetorically). There may be a good answer to these questions. But it’s far too easy to say "we must do something about this" without saying who and why. We (especially those of us who listen to NPR) are all far too fatigued with the constant admonitions that not enough is being done, and something has to change. This kind of approach is not an effective call to action.
And it’s yet another thing trying to make me feel bad for something that’s not my fault. And dammit, it really isn’t my fault!
No related posts.
You actually pay attention to what they say on TV? I stopped doing that years ago. The reason you feel emotion is you take what they say as being representative of what people really think, when in reality all they are trying to do is push your buttons. If you really want to know what people think go converse with them, don’t watch TV and think this is real. With your conversation you will work out whether people are thinking deeply about an issue or just thinking shallowly.
This was actually on the radio. And it’s not all bad.
Disclaimer: I’m Australian
Yes the media can suck but lets change topics.
Why is there a problem with violence? Is there a problem with violence? The USA is portrayed as a violent gun toting society but is that the truth?
In Australia after a few incidents with gun violence the government cracked down on guns. Did this solve our problem with violence? No I believe it did not it just transferred the problem so it is different.
In the many incidents of violence cited by modern Australian media there is always talk of a cultural difference. Muslims are called intolerant because they don’t fit our cultural ideal. Somalian refugees cause problems because they don’t properly integrate with our society.
So we seem to have transferred the blame of societal violence from weapons to cultural differences. This is no different from gun control. We have no ability to affect cultural differences so therefore there is no solution to the problem.
It is closer to the truth but still walking a big wide circle around it. A clever trick to make us feel guilty for something we really have no control over. As if the violence in society is somehow the responsibility of certain members of society alone and not the responsibility of those actually committing the violence.
Why do our societies transmit the blame from those who commit the crime to other groups? I don’t know but I think that is a more interesting story than gun control or water.
“There’s a strong attitude, in this show and others, that this is a problem for us all to solve. Why exactly is this a problem for me to solve? Why is this a problem for government to solve?”
I think that social problems like these are best addressed through better education, because education is, after all, about giving children the tools they need to be able to live decent lives in a modern, well-functioning society. Of course, this doesn’t provide a quick solution or seem like a timely reaction when one is apparently needed, so there will always be the temptation to take other action, but regardless of whether such other action is beneficial, if the underlying, long-term factors aren’t addressed then any action will have a limited impact.
Naturally, saying that education needs to be improved doesn’t “inspire” voters, but that’s where society in general gets caught up in the matters described, regardless of whether anyone feels that they identify with a particular group of people or not (and such groups have to be part of the wider society, or you’ve just created a parallel society with all the dangers and disadvantages that this carries with it). The voters choose their government who in turn gets to set the priorities in society. Sadly, recalling some electioneering in the United Kingdom a few years ago, things like education are “expensive” and any small increase in taxation to pay for it is thus “unpopular”. Of course, waging war is also expensive – much more so than previous funding proposals for improving the education system – and it’s only after certain countries have accumulated huge debts that the investments in education and other areas start to appear rather modest.
Perhaps there’s scope for some kind of slogan where you replace the neglected area of public policy as appropriate: “Education – expensive, yes, but surprisingly affordable compared to war.”
@richard: “Did this solve our problem with violence? No I believe it did not it just transferred the problem so it is different.”
Not being either American or Australian I follow the lengthy discussions of gun control trying not to take sides, but I feel a question should be asked here: isn’t “transferring the problem” exactly the desired effect? You can’t stop people from resorting to violence as means of dealing with conflicts, but you can – or you can try, with various levels of success – stop them from shooting each other. There is a big difference between a broken nose and a head shot through.
In response I say people are still being killed just not by the same methods. If I look at the massacres in Rawanda I don’t see a lot of shots being fired but I do see a lot of people being killed. In Australia I don’t think the murder rate dropped by much. Many anti-gun fanatics (myself included) like to say we are less violent than America due to our stricter gun laws but that doesn’t take into consideration other factors such as lower population density, lower difference between the poor and rich, different cultural mixes etc. It looks nice on paper but reality I fear is not much different than from before the laws were implemented. People who want to kill other people are not going to be stopped just because you take a certain type of weapon away. Just as suicide is not stopped by the removal of guns murder is not stopped either. You might chip away at certain types of crime by such a method but you won’t eliminate it all.
Plus it is disingenuous to say that actually lowers violence. People are still motivated to do harm even if they find it hard to do the act. We have many cases come through the courts that involve murder just without the guns.
@richard: my point is, basically, that it is easier to kill with a gun than by other means. I’m not saying gun control lowers violence. I’m saying I would expect that, all other things being equal, the same violent people would kill more other people with guns than without them. I’m not a scientist, and if there’s evidence to the contrary I’ll call it counter-intuitive, but I’ll accept it. However, few people protest stricter seat-belt rules, or stricter drunk-driving rules etc. even though it’s obvious that they can’t stop people from dying in car accidents, and can’t stop other people from reckless driving or drunk driving. In some areas everybody is happy to just reduce the death toll by a margin. I can’t see what’s so special about gun control (leaving aside for a moment the USA and their constitution).
For those lives it does save it does make sense. However you can’t extrapolate that by saying eliminating guns eliminates violence. There are other weapons that kill better than guns and we keep very tight lids on them, so yes having some sanity in gun control makes sense and saves lives.
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@richard
your logic is very confusing. It is not a clear way of thinking.
Violence, in the context of gun control, is normally understood to be referring to crime or assault conducted with the use of firearm. But you have somehow introduced a context of violence as a state of mind, as a kind of hostility. Then you assert that this violence (hostility) has been “transferred” to another area, namely xenophobia. It is not easy to follow this sort of argument.
Anyway, it is a lot safer on Sydney streets then anywhere in USA (although stabbing is a new trend here in Sydney. Usually fatal.) But American believe gun deters crime. So be it.
i think it is “everyones” problem to some degree (in the united states, anyway) because issues like these are greatly impacted by government. The incarceration rate of black men in their 20′s is something like 20% (just googled), largely due to things like the “war on drugs”, which is entirely a government initiative (and incarceration itself as well as its terms are entirely mandated by government as well). When 20% of your friends get hauled off to jail on a regular basis, things like that just don’t have a positive effect on the development of a community. So I think even the attitudes and voting patterns of places as far removed from urban violence as nebraska and oklahoma ultimately have an effect on the issue through channels such as this one.
It’s not your fault, but maybe it’s your concern.
If you walk by a pond and see two kids flailing away, drowning, it’s also not your fault, but I hope it’s your concern.
As a society, we have the option to be concerned enough to want to do something about it, even if the pond isn’t in our neighborhood. Maybe we’ll require the abutters to put up a fence, or require schools to teach swimming, or we’ll jail the parents. Or, we could just blame the kids who ignored the sign.
I think most of us would agree that something should be done to prevent more deaths. Discussing these concerns publicly is one step in coming to consensus about what should be done.
(I wandered in here from your Plone links. I hope you’ll adjust your RSS feed.)
Well sure, it’d be nice to do something about gun violence. I don’t disagree with this. That doesn’t actually mean there is something to be done, at least in any generic sense. This is a specific problem in specific communities. While these are areas with poverty, I would be surprised if this violence actually correlated with poverty. And yes, there are a variety of problems, including a very high rate of incarceration among black men. But looking for underlying reasons can itself be a means of avoidance. In part because those underlying reasons are hard to fix. If this really is an important issue, then it’s worth fixing directly, as presumably the symptom is itself damaging.
Then the question: how direct do you want to be? Guns kill people, get rid of guns? Or, bullets kill people, get rid of ammunition (one technique that actually was proposed is making ammunition harder to acquire). Of course people are most likely to be killed by someone they know. Stop the right to assembly! Well, that’s silly, but ostracism is not so silly. But it only works when there is a small number of disfunctional people — what if violence (most of it non-fatal of course) is widespread? Then we’re just circling back to the segregation and high incarceration rates that themselves add to the problem.
Another technique people take up personally is simply to leave these communities. And for any one family, this is a very sensible approach. But this evaporation of people from a community is itself a part of the problem. And are these small-scale choices analogous of the large-scale choices society and government makes?
I was answering your question “Why bring this up if it’s not my fault?”
Well, if the direct solution is ridiculous (ostracize people before they commit a crime), maybe the indirect solution is worth looking at.
I googled up a couple papers. The first looks at rural youth violence causes:
The second, urban violence:
This is probably as much as I have time to discuss this. There’s real science out there that has been done and still needs to be done to understand the causes and suggest real solutions. The rest is a never-ending discussion on whether we want to try.
If they are poor how can they afford guns? If you are that poor other things are far more important to you. I know because I sit at the poverty threshold.
Maybe they are a) Not poor b) Get the guns from elsewhere c) Save up to buy guns d) Guns are cheaper than food, or the cost of bills, if a gun cost me only AUD20 then I could afford it.
I’m glad that “we” don’t have a problem with this. Because otherwise it’d make volunteering to work on the network when we outsource it so much more exciting.
Sean
Ian, the major problem, I think, with what we might call the “NPR approach” towards problems of violence is the implicit assumption that killing a man for a minor offense is aberrant, and therefore that we have to conjure up some great malignant force that must have produced it. Thus all of the bogeys that have been trotted out over the years, from blaming the evils inherent in private property (Marx) to blaming the inability of teenage boys to have sex whenever they want (Carl Sagan in Cosmos, which I read as a teenage boy, and, boy, was I a fan).
But, in fact, retaliating with overwhelming force against even perceived slights is the normal way that males of our species defend territory — so, NPR should be looking and digging for explanations of you and your friends and why you behave non-violently, and ask how on earth people like you came about through world history, rather than wringing their hands over perfectly reasonable primate behavior among gun-toting club-goers.
You have chosen a perfect time to ask this question: just in the last few weeks, two superb articles have come out addressing this very issue. I suggest that you start with Jared Diamond’s recent article in the New Yorker, and move on from there to the excellent review in the Weekly Standard (yes, I know, they are conservatives; try reading the article anyway!) about Stanley Kurtz’s recent book about what we might call conflict problem-solving skills on the local level in the Middle East.
Both of them use plenty of examples which I think you will find deeply illuminate the situations they were addressing on NPR. Let me know what you think.
There is a base level of criminality and violence in the human condition but some cultures make it worse. The black economist Thomas Sowell blames such “honor” cultures in America on the Scotch-Irish who were largely Southerners in his book Black Rednecks and White Liberals (that isn’t a recommendation, I haven’t read it). There are many causes of poverty but all honor cultures are poor or would be if they weren’t sitting on oil wells. Honor subcultures in otherwise Western/protestant countries (e.g. gangs and the mafia) are also poor and violent. I can’t find a link but gangs and the mafia (and the KKK!) are known as “tournament” economies. Very few of the members make much money and the lowest members participate at great risk to themselves. They take the risk because the few top dogs make decent cash and more importantly are feted by everyone below them. All the participants delude themselves that they will make it to the top (see also: waiters who are going to be rock stars/models/writers). It is easy to see how tournament economies thrive in honor cultures.
The easiest way to win is not to play. People who don’t know criminals generally don’t get shot, stabbed, or raped. The statistics are true: people who get shot are likely to get shot by someone they know (and possibly with their own gun!) but what that stat leaves out is that the shooter already has a criminal record. If you are a 25 year old male without a criminal record the chances of you ever having one are vanishingly close to zero.
All of the above is why this isn’t a problem for you, me, and “we.” We’re not playing that game. For the same reason the government can’t really solve the problem: culture is local and pervasive. The government can stop exacerbating the problem though, and has; the housing projects which concentrated violent honor/tournament cultures have mostly been torn down.
An aside about gun stats: don’t trust them. In Anglo countries there is little difference in violent crime despite widely varying levels of gun control though some specific categories vary (the UK has a high home invasion rate, the US has a higher murder rate). Gun stats that cite “children” include 19 year old “children” to capture young males at their violent best. Be suspicious of the phrase “gun deaths” because it includes suicide; the US rate for “gun deaths” is quite high because it includes suicide-by-gun. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the US suicide rate is nestled in between cold Canada and sunny Australia – men [and they are overwhelmingly men] find a way.
Jack:
http://www.gun-control-network.org/GF01.htm
You are correct, suicide rate by gun in the US is high.
However, homicide rate is also high: 4 in 100,000 in the US, under 1 in 100,000 everywhere else.
Regarding the original topic, it’s the “monkeysphere” in action again. We find it very hard to care about people not in our own social network. “Society” in terms of cities and nations is not one cohesive community, it’s thousands of them crammed in together.
People who commit violence have social and/or mental problems. Easy access to lethal weapons increases the risk that these people commit violence with a lethal outcome. End of story.
It’s interesting that you included This American Life as an example. Here’s [an excerpt of an interview with Ira Glass](http://blog.phiffer.org/post/19567157/the-sound-of-young-america-interviews-ira-glass) where he’s taken to task a bit on the narrowness of his subject matter. Here’s the [full interview](http://www.maximumfun.org/blog/2007/11/podcast-ira-glass-of-this-american-life.html).
The touchy feely liberalism of NPR likes to take the easy route in such complex issues as gun control. Some of the posts here do as well ;). For instance, I can assume that the murder rate and violent crime are tied to the level of access that the mentally unstable and poor have to firearms, and I would be right! The problem is that this doesn’t look critically at what constitutes the murder rate, violent crime, and mental instability. Violent crime is perpetrated most often by a poor person with a gun. Violent crime is not, as in the case of the Ford Pinto, a business making the decision that recalling a car with a faulty gas tank is less cost effective than dealing with lawsuits that occur due to preventable deaths. Furthermore, why should a murderous law enforcement agency(see Sean Bell case among others) have access to firearms while I do not? The right to bear arms means equal access.
Also, I’m not a conservative.
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