On a blog without a name

I have held off posting about the awful shootings at Virginia Tech for two days. Reliable news about the incident was slow to appear, though that didn’t stop ‘the internet’ from speculating (incorrectly) about who the shooter might be.

Bizarrely, one incorrectly identified suspect allowed the rumour to run, in the hope of making a small fortune out of the (non) story, as Wired News reports he rather shamelessly reports on his own blog:

My original intention was to wait until I got AdSense on my site and donating all the proceeds to Charity. However, this situation has now spiraled out of control. I am now confirming that I am not the shooter. I will be available for interview by a news agency to clear my name, talk about the experience, and give my opinion on how the situation could have turned out better if other students were allowed to be armed.

Rather inevitably, as this student hints, the response in America, as elsewhere, has turned quickly to the question of gun control. Countries such as Britain, which tightened its own gun laws in the wake of murders in Scotland more than a decade ago, have tended to be rather smug in the wake of such tragedies in America.

Always after these incidents, American politicians respond in predictable ways. Some call for greater regulation of weapon ownership. Others argue that if only more people were armed, victims of such attacks would not be helpless victims. Such arguments, counterintuitive though they may be, will be made all the more forcefully in this case given the (seemingly - details have yet to emerge) slow response of police to the first shootings, and the fact that the university campus banned possession of guns. If you ban guns, so a favourite slogan of the ‘gun lobby’ says, only criminals will have guns. It is worth mentioning that despite the speculations of the pro-gun movement, no high-profile violent incidents have been ended by resistance on the part of members of the public. The cowboy-film image of good citizens defending each other does not seem to play out in public, as far as I can see.

Still more politicians will suggest technological solutions to these kinds of problems: metal detectors, warning systems and the like. American loves technology, and the idea that investment and research can solve its problems.

By far the majority of politicians, however, will jockey for position, seeking to force their opponents into making statement that will anger staunch defenders of the Second Amendment, which reads:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

When originally written, it was binding only on the Federal Government, though - like the rest of the Bill of Rights - now binds all levels of American government.

For right or wrong, the notion of the ‘militia’ in its broadest sense, that of citizens taking action in their own defence and the defence of their community, is deeply rooted in American culture. The law that defends it, and makes knee-jerk responses to such shootings difficult, is deeply and deliberately entrenched, and (though things may change) will remain so for some time.

Which makes it all the more important to ask the tougher questions. The problem at the heart of this and similar incidents is the notion that murder in this fashion is a ‘normal’ response to feelings of alienation, grief or disappointment. Unfortunately, the more of these incidents there are - at schools, universities and workplaces - the more this will become entrenched. It is, at heart, a ‘cultural’ phenomenon more than it is a technological or regulatory failing. Which is not to say that fewer lives might be lost to these incidents if weapons were harder to obtain.

There are wider issues about American attitudes to violence. Violence as the solution to life’s problems is a staple of American film and television, though I find that less disturbing in itself than the growth of violence and gore as spectacle. Films whose only selling-point is ever more and more extreme acts of violence - many of which never make it to more regulated environments outside America - are a striking part of American culture, and highlighted all the more by America’s more puritanical attitude to depiction of sexulatity. American television will filter out relatively mild swear-words, and pixelate all suggestions of the naked form, but will quite happily advertise in detail the latest film to test the nation’s appetite for blood, suffering and violence.

Films do not cause violence in themselves, but there can be no doubt that America has de-sensitized itself to violence, while both fiction and reality suggest that the perpetrators of violence will be remembered. With plenty of examples to suggest the idea, and with the ready availability of weapons, it is a form of suicide that will, sadly, be taken by more and more young Americans. Sadly, however, there is no single cause, and no fixes that would be acceptable to American society or - perhaps more to the point - guaranteed to work.