FFWD Weekly
Copyright © 1998 All Rights Reserved.
| NEWS These are tough times to be a gun in America. What with all the dirty looks and bad press, guns are rapidly becoming the newest pariahs in pan-American society. The latest generic massacre of students - at some soulless suburban grade school in yet another stereotypically languid Southern town, has sent waves of smug self-satisfaction from the gun control lobby washing across the continent like the warm swaddling winds of El Nino. But if anything, the Jonesboro tragedy should be chalked up as the latest indictment not of the gun, but of the pop cultural porridge of brutality and violence which we feed our children from birth. The evidence is overwhelming. The rural South has been saturated with guns since forever. Generations upon generations have been born and raised, have fought, loved, lived and died in the company of guns. The South and the gun go together like fried and chicken. Yet, until now, it was inconceivable that children would hunt children from schoolyard bushes. The presence of guns, in accessible quantity, is nothing new. The willingness of children to shoulder them in combat against 11-year-old schoolgirls is. (The irony being honed all the more by the fact Jonesboro is both a dry and excruciatingly God-fearing town.) For the unconvinced, two more examples should suffice. Switzerland, our Disney-imaged Shangri-La of lederhosen-clad yodelers and tight-lipped bankers, is festooned with fully-automatic assault weaponry. Swiss law dictates that every adult male is a member of the army reserves and is obliged by law to keep his service rifle in his home. How is it then that no Swiss tyke has ever taken daddy's gun and terminated half his class? The case of Israel is also illustrative. A nation born in blood, saturated with both guns and real violence, it has no comparable phenomenon to modern American kiddycide. The conclusion is inescapable: Guns don't kill people, cultures do. Of course, one needn't be a flaming post-modernist to observe that cultural reality is a social construction. From cop-killing rap lyrics to the rollicking violence of the latest Arnie Schwarzenegger flick, the socializing messages which children are exposed to depict violence as not only moral, but normal. The unthinkable has been made commonplace in the consequence-free milieu of televisionland. Entertainment apologists will hasten to point out that a rate of three or four mass murderers out of 50 million youngsters is still a pretty poor argument for denying the rest of us the right to enjoy our shoot-'em-ups. Try telling the parents of Jonesboro that. In the other corner, gun-haters will rightly argue that eliminating every last gun is the surest antidote to gun violence. Unfortunately, this argument is cut from the same illogical cloth as the suggestion of outlawing matches to thwart arsonists. Sickened minds will always find means. In the days after the massacre, when the adrenaline had worn off, the two pre-pubescent murderers are said to have cried in prison and asked for their mothers. They wanted to go home. They wanted the movie to end. Who will have the heart to tell them? |