I've been watching the wave of horror and anger and outrage from the shootings in Newtown, CT, wash over the various communities I belong to online. As always, the Internet is a huge sounding chamber, amplifying the noise, dampening the signal, providing immense amounts of heat, but very little light. So many people want to express fury and assign blame, and so few people--seemingly--want to take this opportunity to work together to do something practical.
Let me suggest one thing, at least. Let this incident, and all the ones that have gone before it, provide a final halt to calls for one single, simple solution, It is the heroin of the American psyche, the thing that everyone seems to crave, to demand, usually while knowing full well that it's unachievable and won't provide the surcease from fear and sorrow we seek.
Why won't it? Because, in the real world, there are no simple problems, and attempting to solve complex problems with simple remedies, will, if we are fortunate, not actually make the problem go away. That's the best outcome. The worst, which we far too often get, is the our "simple solutions" make the problem much, much worse than it was to begin with, in ways we can't anticipate.
As the latter half of the 19th century drew to a close, America was struggling with alcoholism. It had reached epidemic proportions, and to many people, there was a clear, simple solution. Ban alcoholic beverages entirely. Originally it was proposed to ban the sale of them, but this quickly transmuted into a ban on their manufacture and consumption as well. The result? Prohibition took the small, disparate, evil but fragmented criminal elements in America's big cities and built from them the organized crime syndicates that spread through America's economy and society like a fast-moving cancer. Even today, after nearly a century of fighting organized crime, we are further from eradicating it than we were during Prohibition.
Shootings like the one in Newtown take place all over the world, even in places with strict gun control laws, but they are more common in the United States than anywhere else. Ready access to firearms is a part of them, but so is mental illness. All the incidents like this that I know of have been committed by people who were mentally disturbed. We need to do something about guns, yes, but we also need to do something about mental illness. Think that's easy?
Read this heart-rending essay. Then think about all the people like Michael who don't have someone who loves them and cares for them looking out for them (and for the rest of us).
Shootings like the one in Newtown are horrific, but they represent a tiny fraction of the over 10,000 annual homicides committed in the United States using firearms every year. We need to do something about guns, yes, and mental illness, but we also need to do something about the poverty that drives people to crime, especially to work in the narcotics trade (which, of course, is a violent industry created almost entirely by another "simple solution").
I keep adding to the list of horrendously complex problems that we need to address, and I'm insisting we give up on our national security blanket of "let's find the one thing we can do to fix this". And I'm going to suggest another deprivation: we also have to discard the mental pacifier of "it's all THEIR fault".
Whenever a gut-wrenching murder scene like this is played out, the first thing that happens is that some people, in their grief and anger, insist that the blame lies on those who own guns and demand that their rights be curtailed or eliminated entirely, as a solution, yes, but also as a collective punishment for the sins of whoever committed the crime. The instantaneous reaction is for those who own guns (all of them also horrified and angry) to deny that any sort of curb on their rights is called for and to insist that something or someone else is at fault, or that there's no way to achieve a complete elimination of this kind of tragedy, so let's not even try.
Get this, people: both of you are wrong. We are none of us directly to blame for shooting 26 people in Connecticut. The person who did that is dead; like most murderers in this sort of situation, he killed himself. And all of us are to blame, indirectly, because we allowed a situation to develop to which this miserable event was the outcome. We can't make this about blame; that's the solution we find every time, and it has never served to make anything better. We have to work together, coming from very different points of view, with very different concerns, and find a way of making this sort of thing much, much harder to happen. That's going to take cooperating with each other, instead of demonizing each other. It's going to take finding common ground, instead of focusing on our differences. It's going to take mutual concessions, instead of standing on our rights and demanding an absolute surrender of everyone else to our personal concerns.
We need to make gun laws consistent. I've had one real conversation about this tragedy, a conversation face to face--the sort of conversation that almost always ends up with people agreeing because they have to listen to and look at each other, instead of shouting into the Internet at people you can pretend you don't know and maybe aren't even real. In that discussion, the I spoke to person expressed views about how easy it was to purchase and hold guns that told me he either doesn't live in the state I live in or doesn't know anything about its laws. There are significant restrictions in my state, but almost none in some neighboring ones (perhaps the one he lives in). States to which I can drive in an hour, or two at most. These distinctions need to go away, and national rules need to be put in place that cover any type of sale, anywhere. Gun owners need to make some concessions to the sensibility of the rest of the population.
And those who don't understand the desire, the need for others to own guns also have to accept that just because they can't understand that sentiment doesn't make it any less real or any less Constitutionally protected. I can't foresee a future in which most of the Americans that I now who own firearms will agree to give them up. It's a simple fact that we are a nation of gun owners, and there is a fundamental belief at the root of the American experience that Americans have a right to bear arms. We need to make them more difficult to purchase than they are in some places, and safer to own and protect than they are in a good many homes, but guns are not going to disappear.
Many today want to limit or do away with public support for healthcare. Guess what? We can't restrict it further if we want to address some of these problems. On the contrary, we need to expand it. Thirty years or more ago, we began a grand experiment. We saw that many mental institutions had simply become like prisons--places for storing members of society we didn't know how to deal with in conditions that verged on the barbaric. So we began trying to eliminate as many asylums as possible, opting instead to try and socialise people, house them in the community, find ways to keep them with families or in local half-way houses. A wave of new pharmaceuticals promised that we could pill people into becoming functioning, effective members of society. And pills, of course, were a much cheaper solution than personal care--the personal care that was so expensive in institutions that it quickly devolved into simple warding, or even mistreatment and neglect, leading to the awful conditions that we reacted against.
It shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that the simple solution of just giving people the right pills has not worked. For some, the abolition of institutions has been a godsend, bringing them back to smaller, more friendly programs that can help them participate, at least a little, in their own care and make them feel like real people, not zombies. But for others it tore away the only safe place they had, throwing them into a world that they weren't equipped to deal with in the midst, as it turned out, of a recession that saw local, state, and national governments cut back on the aid they had promised would be there. And the wonder drugs? Worked for some people, some times, but not for everyone, and not always consistently. Many psychoactive pharmaceuticals are developed and sold without knowing exactly how they work, just that they do work...for most people, most of the time. And the more dispersed and divided our society becomes (and from the point of view of someone who's lived in it for nearly 50 years, it's doing so more and more every day), more and more people aren't even being identified as needing mental health treatment until it's too late. There's no point in any sort of gun-based solution whose cornerstone is keeping firearms away from mentally ill people if we don't even know who is mentally ill.
That's a dozen paragraphs or more on the simplest and smallest of the issues involved in gun violence. We haven't even gotten to the tough problems, like drugs and poverty. Which brings up my main point:
There are no simple solutions. If someone tells you that "all we have to do is..." begin distrusting them immediately and question all their premises. We have serious problems in our country. They cannot be solved by
ten-word answers. We have to find solutions that work, though, and we cannot do that by reverting to black and white, red and blue. We have to come together. We have to look into the grey.. We must solve these problems together, by making concessions. And we have to accept that, at the end of the day, when we have given more than we wished to and done all that we feel we can, someone will still find a way to kill a dozen innocent people.
We cannot stop every tragedy from happening. But we have to try our best to prevent as many of them as we can, and to reduce their impact as much as possible. We owe that our nation today and to the nation we hope we will become.
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