In the wake of last week’s FSU school shootings, Americans were again reminded that our gun problem isn’t over.
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There were at least 12 school shootings since December 2012, from Newtown, CT to Marysville, WA. Last week’s attack on Florida State University has made that number even larger. The American fear of guns is real and justifiable.
Although I’m best known as a former model, I’m writing about this issue as a Canadian living in the United States, and as a mother witnessing the influence of the Internet on gun culture. The fact that it’s 2014 and parents still have to worry about the kind of violence that we saw in Florida is ridiculous (the Canadian parliament shooting earlier this year, though terrible, wasn’t a school shooting). Perhaps because I wasn’t raised in America, I have a hard time understanding why more isn’t being done to prevent these acts. It’s sickening to even think about having to talk about these things in front of my child. I don’t want her to know about them, but if she continues to live in the United States, I know she’ll have no choice.
Even as the Internet hypes up Ebola as an American epidemic (as one accurate joke puts it, you are more likely to marry Rush Limbaugh than contract the disease in the United States — and would probably suffer more too), school shootings are a real epidemic in this country. Despite overwhelming support for laws requiring background checks on all gun buyers and preventing people with violent mental illness from buying guns, the gun control bill President Obama attempted to pass last year was thwarted by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and other pro-gun lobbies.
In many ways, this is a story of how influential lobbying groups can use the Internet to further entrench themselves into our power structure. After all, it was the massive online mobilizing conducted by the NRA in 2012 and 2013 that allowed the industry to avoid any major regulation after the Sandy Hook shooting. When New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg vowed to create a political counterweight to the gun lobby, he naturally sank his money into an aggressive social media campaign to create solidarity and instill a sense of purpose in pro-gun control groups, attempting to wrest control of the Internet back from gun groups.
Even when it wasn’t the organizations at the top using cyberspace to promote firearms, the cause is still popular at the grassroots level, with bloggers disseminating conspiracy theories about the gun control movement to providing a one-sided account of the Second Amendment.
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The media also play a large role in exacerbating the problem of gun violence — and I’m not just talking about the usual culprits, like violent movies and video games. As the contrast between the CBC’s coverage of the Ottawa shooting and the reporting of major American networks on the regular mass shootings that occur here makes clear, there is a notoriety associated with real-life violence in the U.S. that is deeply troubling. A school shooter in America is guaranteed not only 24/7 news coverage, but weeks of subsequent psychoanalysis. As Psychology Todayexplains, the groundbreaking work of sociologist David Phillips in 1974 showed that “highly publicized stories of deviant and dangerous behavior influences copycat incidents.”
Although Phillips focused specifically on suicides, the same trend is clear with mass murder events like school shootings. In the words of renowned forensic psychiatrist Dr. Park Dietz, “We’ve had 20 years of mass murders throughout which I have repeatedly told CNN and our other media, if you don’t want to propagate more mass murders, don’t start the story with sirens blaring. Don’t have photographs of the killer. Don’t make this 24/7 coverage. Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story, not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.”
A plethora of other scholarly studies on school shootingsreinforce this point — by turning school shooters into cultural icons, the media inadvertently creates an appealing archetype attractive to those desperate enough to pursue homicidal methods to gain attention.
While the media, which saturates youth culture thanks to the ubiquity of the Web, provides reinforcement by offering potential school shooters an appealing narrative context for their personal struggles, the Internet can actually offer support from like-minded people. In 2013, Frank J. Robertz wrote in his essay “On the Relevance of Phantasy for the Genesis of School Shootings” that “print media and Internet searches provide easy sources for susceptible adolescents to find out how to carry out a school shooting in order to get into the international headlines, how to inspire fan pages on the Internet, etc.”
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Martha J. Markward, Stephanne Cline, and Nathan J. Markward concluded twelve years earlier that “the Internet probably provided several school shooters who have felt victimized over time with the support they needed to murder those they perceived to be their perpetrators.” Indeed, as investigators learned more about the motives for the Elliot Rodger shooting at UC Santa Barbara, they discovered that the culture of online misogyny bred in Men’s Rights Activists forums played a large role.
There are other cultural factors which need to be confronted if we are to effectively face this issue. There is the popular misconception that buying guns will somehow make you more likely to protect yourself or others in the event of a crime (which is questionable at best), for example. Others argue that guns will help you overthrow the government in the event of tyranny — a notion that, despite leading to a proliferation in right-wing militias during Obama’s presidency, is absurd when you consider that the state has nuclear weapons, drones, and countless other weapons that would make every legal firearm seem like a peashooter by comparison.
America is different from Canada for a lot of reasons. It has a lot of wonderful things going for it, but its gun issue needs to be addressed. The point here isn’t that government should be automatically trusted, but that a disproportionately high rate of firearm-related homicides indicates a very serious problem of its own. I love this country and wish to stay here, but whenever I see these stories in Newtown or Florida, it makes me afraid for the nation I now call my home. This is a tragedy, both because I love America and I hate to see the parents and children of my countrymen suffer so needlessly.
While raising children in Canada, you worry about your kids’ socks getting wet walking to school in the snow or not getting good grades on their report cards. Bullying still occurs, the economy isn’t always great (its six-year low in unemployment is still nearly seven percent), and there are plenty of childhood and teenage hardships that one experiences regardless of nation or culture. Then again, you know your child is going to get a good education regardless of their gender, receive easily-accessible and quality health care, and that his or her peers aren’t likely to have such easy access to firearms that they’ll be able to go around popping off people for no reason.
Wouldn’t it be great to live in a country where, instead of being terrified of the next school shooter, we could go back to worrying about our children’s wet socks and bad grades?
This article was co-written with Matthew Rozsa.
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About the author
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This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.
Photo credit: Jim Wrigley Photography/Flickr (CC BY N.D.-2.0)
“Even as the Internet hypes up Ebola as an American epidemic (as one accurate joke puts it, you are more likely to marry Rush Limbaugh than contract the disease in the United Statesf” If that were true, we wouldn’t be wasting precious money doing research for a vaccine. Does she suggest we cease? During my childhood in the 1960s and ’70s urban police could not prevent robbery from skyrocketing as neighborhoods experienced demographic change, and leaders quite plainly told us back then that there was little police could do to suppress crime until the root causes — racism, poverty and… Read more »
Part of the problem, a major part, is articles like this one. Its not a gun problem its a people problem. I wonder if Cohen is ignoring the fact that once again gun homicides are down in the FBI statistics or if Cohen is being willfully blind?
Please let me remind you that people like Cohen (Progressives) believe it’s better for society for a woman to be beaten and raped then for that same woman to shoot and killer a violent perpetrator. They are both anti death penalty but pro abortion. On what planet does that make sense? No need to answer that…
The authors should read “More Guns Less Crime” by John Lott, and then consider the benefits of gun ownership as well as the costs of violent crime.
Of the 62 mass shootings over the past 50 years, all but two occurred in so-called gun-free zones. Gun-free zones are really just criminal-enablement zones, They’re places where evil people know the chances of someone actually preventing their evil is artificially low. Enabling evil is itself EVIL. One of the places we NEVER see mass school shootings is Utah where teachers are permitted (not required) to carry a firearm concealed on their person if they are otherwise allowed to do so. You wouldn’t suggest children be left unprotected against diseases like polio or chicken pox, would you? Why do you… Read more »
Oh it must be nice to live just a little on the outside of reality in the mistaken belief that nothing bad is going to happen in UK schools because of a gun ban. The guns are still there,hidden in nooks and crannies ,waiting for the nut to do his thing. He/it may not even use a gun…the Chinese do very well with knives. Lets not forget that gasoline can bad things. The day is coming when you poor people in the uk will wish you had some way to defend yourselves.
For an another take on the question, “Is the damage to society from the misuse of guns worth the freedom to have guns?” please read http://jack-burton.hubpages.com/hub/damage-society-guns
Homicides and Homicides with guns were lower in England and Wales before it instututed gun control.
America’s violenent crime level is at the lowest in 50 years, in spite of, or perhaps because of record sales of guns. Violence is a cultural phenomena. Guns have little to do with it.
As mentioned in the article, the glorification of mass shooters leads to the copycat effect.
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2014/10/gun-registration-and-confiscation-in.html
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/01/european-murder-rates-compared-to.html
http://gunwatch.blogspot.com/2013/12/real-prevention-measures-for-school.html
Here is a citation for the low crime rate. There is no “epidemic of violence”.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2012/0109/US-crime-rate-at-lowest-point-in-decades.-Why-America-is-safer-now
Come on Dean, if they could save just one child… Facts do not matter to Liberals, even a Progressive knows that.
“Wouldn’t it be great to live in a country where, instead of being terrified of the next school shooter, we could go back to worrying about our children’s wet socks and bad grades?” It IS great – I already live in just such a country! Every nation has it problems and my home country, the UK, is no exception and I’ll be the first to hold my hand up and admit it. But at least here I can send my kids to school in the safety of knowing that there won’t be a gun-toting madman bursting in and killing innocent… Read more »
Will all those who dislike the American bill of rights ,please leave for Canada and the U.K. immediately.
I second that… Please feel free to move to the country that supports your idea of what is best for your family.
Why Can’t America Control Its Violence Epidemic????? what other counrty has millions of people living in inner city ghettos pampered by socialist commiecrats ….. crickets … the biggest crime wave is in democratically countrol cities