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| 14th Annual Lantern Festival in JP. Lantern reads "eternal life." |
[I didn't read the news all day on the 13th so while I was finishing up this post I was unaware that there had been yet another school shooting. When I found out hours later all I could think was, "Oh no, not again." The only fatality was the shooter (described by a classmate as "a little geeky but in a charming way,"), who took his own life at the age of 18. It seems he managed to injure just one student, so it could have been much worse, but that's not really much comfort. The actions of this one teenager will change people's lives forever. By today we'll be seeing the "Who was he?" articles and we'll play out the same drama we do after every school shooting, but by next month it will have fallen out of the news cycle and will be out of sight, out of mind until the next dramatic school shooting. I'm reminded of the Narcotics Anonymous quote: "Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results." Update: The student who was shot died in the hospital eight days later. Also, I found this excellent piece in The Guardian about how Australia has seen a significant drop in their gun deaths since enacting strict and sane gun laws.]
Preface
I started writing this last year, but got so bogged down with the research that by the time it was mostly finished the screen seemed to swim every time I looked at it and I wasn't sure there was any point in posting it. However, it was a lot of work to write (there were many sleepless nights involved) and I feel strongly about the contents so I kept it and decided to finish cleaning it up and post it this year.
In lieu of a memorial service, the families of Sandy Hook victims have
asked for the anniversary to be marked with acts of kindness, which I think is a really good way to handle it. Anniversaries of tragic events can be very difficult and for some they only serve to perpetuate grief. By doing something positive we can look forward, not back. Last year I spent part of the 14th marking the 20th anniversary of a shooting at my college by taking photographs on the beautiful Episcopal Divinity School campus. It was a way of remembering the victims, one of whom had an interest in photography, and finding beauty on a day of sadness.
So today, I urge you to do something kind for someone you love or for or stranger and do something creative to honor the memories of those who've died from senseless violence.
*****
Friday, December 14, 2012, was a terrible day.
- It was the 20th anniversary of a shooting at Bard College at Simon's Rock (then known as Simon's Rock College of Bard) where a young man with a semi-automatic rifle killed a teenager and an adult and left four people injured (3 teenagers and 1 adult). It was also...
- the day that a young man in Newtown, Connecticut used a rifle and two handguns to take the lives of 20 children, 7 adults (including his mother), and himself and...
- the day that a young man in Chenpeng Village, China used a kitchen knife to injure 23 children and one adult.
On Saturday the 15th as I was getting ready to leave for the
Tewassa Christmas concert, I received an email from one of our organizers that
NHK (Japan's national public broadcasting network) had been planning to come up from New York City to cover our little concert, but had instead been diverted to cover the shooting in Connecticut. It struck me as odd until I realized that of course a tragedy this big means that the world's media descends (and apparently starts
interviewing each other) and that it would probably make headlines in Japan because our lax gun laws are in such contrast to their strict gun laws. As an added note of interest, NHK
reported that there were five Japanese students attending Sandy Hook Elementary, all of whom escaped physical harm.
Japan as a model?
In any conversation about gun control, at some point Japan is usually held up as a model of peace and sanity. Especially given the contrast between the number of lives lost in Connecticut and the fact that everyone in China survived, I was sure the comparison would be made again. (
China has even stricter gun control than Japan.) Sure enough, the day of the shooting, Max Fisher at
The Washington Post referenced an article he'd written for
The Atlantic back in July titled, "
A Land Without Guns: How Japan Has Virtually Eliminated Shooting Deaths."
Sounds fantastic, right? However, the lack of guns doesn't mean a lack of violence. I immediately thought of the
Osaka school massacre in 2001, in which a young man with a knife killed eight children and injured 13 children and two adults. And the
Akihabara massacre in 2008 in which a young man used a truck and a knife to attack a crowd of people in Tokyo, killing seven and injuring 10. The oldest homegrown mass murder in Japan (we won't talk about WWII and what the US did) that I could find a reference to
happened in 1938 when a young man in Tsuyama killed 30 people, and injured three using a "Browning shotgun, Japanese sword, and axe," then killed himself. It's true that Japan has far fewer incidents of mass public violence and that even when they happen, the death tolls tend to be lower than in the United States, but they're not violence-free.
Usually when Japan is held up as a model for gun control there's no discussion of culture - just citing of their great statistics and a recap of their laws. I was glad to see that Fisher's
Atlantic piece discusses the role culture plays. He refers to Japan as "a generally peaceful country," which is a little ironic considering Japan's long and bloody history (
samurai,
Japanese war crimes). One thing he didn't tackle is how Japan's gun laws came to be in the first place. I have to assume that Japanese culture and ways of thinking played a role in their formation and in the populace's continued adherence to them.
In America we're all about the individual and individual rights. Modern American gun laws are what they are because of American culture and ways of thinking that date back to the days when this country was founded. Our right to bear arms is written into our Constitution in the
Second Amendment, a right that many gun owners hold sacred. The results of our gun laws mean that:
- The US leads the world in gun ownership per capita. It's often cited that there is one gun for every United States citizen, although all of those guns are owned by just one third of the population. And that's just the legal guns.
- We're in the top 12 for per capita firearm-related death. The only countries ahead of us are: Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica, Swaziland, Guatemala, Columbia, South Africa, Brazil, Panama, Uruguay, and Mexico.
- We also lead the world in school shootings.
Shock & knee-jerk reactions but no change
After every mass shooting in the US, some people stand up, wave red flags, and call for more gun control. In response, gun owners and the gun lobby say, "Hell no, you can't take our guns. We need them to protect ourselves!" Post-Newtown:
- We went back to business as usual with over 100 firearms deaths in the seven days following Newtown, none of which got anywhere near the same amount of attention. The Huffington Post made it their lead story on their front page for 24 hours under the dramatic headline, "To Live and Die in America," under which were links to news stories about each shooting. They also pointed out that, "Child gun deaths nationwide," were equivalent to, "nearly 6 Newtown massacres."
- Some parents are dashing to their computers to order bulletproofs vests and backpacks for their precious kids.
- Other parents are running out to buy more guns to protect their families. Sales of assault rifles went UP after December 14, 2012. They also spiked after July 20, 2012, the date of the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Mass shootings appear to be better advertising than gun manufacturers can buy.
- The NRA called for the installation of armed police officers in every school in the nation. Some pointed out this showed how "out of touch" they are, others figured they were just "playing to people's fears," while others thought it was a brilliant (if evil) marketing ploy, probably in service to their gun manufacturer friends. The latter seems likely since the costs for such a deployment are astronomical and unrealistic. See blogger John Shore's theoretical math.
- Within days of the shooting, more than 200 Utah teachers were receiving firearms training. Since then, an Ohio gun foundation stepped up to offer teachers firearms training in multiple states.
- Various lawmakers in Tennessee & Alabama got to work on legislation to allow authority figures to have guns in schools. Never mind that some teachers don't want guns.
- An Ohio school board approved the carrying of firearms by custodial staff.
- Most disappointingly, a year later and our gun laws are actually weaker.
Relationship between citizens and police/government/military
One theory about why many Americans think we have to have guns is a mistrust of our government and the police. There's a belief that we can't allow the people in charge to be the only people with weapons. I gather that in America we have much more of a problem with mistrust of the police than they do in Japan. Police are particularly a problem for racial minorities who are often profiled. I remember one of my college professors telling a story in class about how she was pulled over by the LAPD for "
driving while black." The "problem" was that she was an African American woman driving a very expensive car that clearly she'd stolen. Never mind that she's upper middle class and it was her damn car.
It seems there is
racial profiling in Japan, but it likely isn't a common experience for Japanese citizens, the way it is for many American citizens. Japanese people seem to generally trust the police, probably in part due to their emphasis on community policing with
kōban (small neighborhood police stations). Policemen are expected to help you with directions and to serve as a lost and found in addition to being first responders. I'm a little unclear on how most Japanese people feel about the government, especially in the aftermath of
Fukushima. Anecdotally I've been hearing there's a lot of distrust around what the government (and TEPCO) are saying and doing, but I doubt anyone in Japan would think of taking up arms to protect themselves from government mismanagement of crises.
Japan's Self-Defense Forces may have been the only government group to come out of the
3.11 disaster with a raised profile and more positive public feeling. They were widely praised for their
incredible efforts in the aftermath of the triple disaster.
Mental health
The other thing people like to call for is better mental healthcare. The state of our access to mental healthcare is definitely poor, but would improving it stop the violence? After reading an article about an allegedly bipolar woman who pushed someone to their death in the NYC subway, I wondered if there was any link between mental illness and violence or if it's just something the media likes to report because it makes a great headline: "Crazy person attacks innocent bystander!"
Bipolar disorder and
schizophrenia are frequently mentioned in news reports about the perpetrators of violent crime. It turns out that studies have shown that having one of these mental illnesses doesn't make you more violent. The real culprit is often
substance abuse. [See
Bipolar disorder does not increase risk of violent crime & Schizophrenia does not increase risk of violent crime.]
However, that doesn't necessarily mean that people who commit violence might not benefit from better access to mental healthcare. A study published a few months ago suggests that several notorious mass shooters were suffering from intense paranoia. (Read about it here if you don't have free access to the paper - Elsevier wants $19.95 for it.)
Mental healthcare in Japan has lagged behind that of other developed nations. While the US started moving away from institutionalized mental health care decades ago, it has remained the primary treatment for the mentally ill in Japan. They are only beginning to take those steps to move to outpatient treatment. There is still significant stigma surrounding mental illness that results in people failing to seek treatment, which likely contributes to Japan's high suicide rate.
Suicide
Suicide is an
epidemic problem in Japan. David Kopel, author of the article, "
Japanese Gun Control," argues that the flip side to tough gun control laws is a high suicide rate. He cites Japanese and Swiss statistics and Japanese researchers.
Of the many reasons suggested by researchers for the high Japanese suicide rate, one of the most startling is weapons control. Japanese scholars Mamon Iga and Kichinosuke Tatai argue that one reason Japan has a suicide problem is that people have little sympathy for suicide victims. Iga and Tatai suggest that the lack of sympathy (and hence the lack of social will to deal with a high suicide rate) is based the Japanese' feelings of insecurity and consequent lack of empathy. They trace the lack of empathy to a 'dread of power'. That dread is caused in part by the awareness that a person cannot count on others for help against violence or against authority. In addition, say Iga and Tatai, the dread of power stems from the people being forbidden to possess swords or firearms for self-defense.[122]
Stated another way, firearms prohibition is part of a culture that subordinates the individual to society. When the individual finds himself not fitting into social expectations, self-destruction may often seem appropriate, since in a conflict between the individual and society, society is, by definition, always right. It is interesting to note that the overall violent death rates (counting both murders and suicides) in many of the developed countries are approximately the same. America has a high murder rate, but a relatively low suicide rate. Japan and Switzerland have very low murder rates, but suicide rates twice the American level. Seymour Martin Lipset notes the high suicide rates in Japan and western European countries and speculates that 'psychopaths there turn it on themselves'.[123]
It's an interesting theory to consider, but Kopel's paper was written 20 years ago. More recent statistics show that Switzerland now has a slightly lower suicide rate than the US while Japan's suicide rate is twice that of Switzerland's.
The only area in which we're ahead of Japan on violence is that our suicide rate is statistically much lower, although it's still too high. Teen suicide in the US has been in the spotlight for the past few years due to a rash of
LGBT suicides that the media decided to focus on, even though it wasn't a new phenomenon. Since kids pretty much live on social networking sites there's often a very sad digital trail of the abuse that led them to the point where they took their lives.
Threats of suicide should always be taken seriously, even if you believe the other person is merely seeking attention. Most likely you are not a professional and not in a position to assess their state of mind. If you believe that someone is in imminent danger, 911 can and should be called. I only learned this last year. You don't have to bear the burden alone. Seek professional help even if you are asked not to.
The blame game
We also love to point fingers and say "not it!" The following things/people have been blamed for mass shootings:
- People. As in that old chestnut, "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." (Never mind that if people didn't have guns, it would be more work for them to kill people.)
- Mental illness. We fear the mentally ill or even the idea of the mentally ill. The press often reports shooters as being mentally ill even if it's just speculation or rumor. After Newtown, many people seemed to be confusing Asperger's Syndrome with mental illness (never mind that it hasn't been proven the shooter even had an Asperger's diagnosis and even if he did, it's not a mental illness, it's a developmental disorder that does not make someone more likely to be violent).
- Parents. Not moral enough, not loving enough, not involved enough, should have known something was wrong with their child and gotten them help... the list of accusations goes on and on. Sometimes, love and attention aren't enough. Sometimes the parents aren't to blame. Very rarely do parents bear some of the responsibility.
- Violent video games. In another Washington Post piece, Max Fisher compares the US with other countries where video games are popular. Guess what? No link.
- Hollywood. The NRA had the nerve to lay the blame at Hollywood's feet. Never mind that the NRA loves having guns in movies. Free advertising. Director Michael Moore points out that, "Kids in Japan watch the same violent movies." Hollywood alone isn't making anyone more violent.
- Gays. A favorite scapegoat for crazy right-wing pastors everywhere, LGBT people are also blamed for natural disasters, 9/11, Benghazi, and other mass shootings.
- Atheists. God bless Newt Gingrich & Mike Huckabee. Terrifyingly, they are both former elected officials.
- God. 6 & 7 actually would not be on the list were it not for God, since what they're usually saying is that this is God's punishment on the good cisgender heterosexual Christians of America for allowing our country's values to be trampled by the godless queers. Conveniently, the student who shot up my college said God told him to do it (though he's since come to believe it wasn't God after all). (I find it interesting that when a shooter says God told them to do it, we think that's crazy, but when religious people say it's God's punishment, some people think it's a valid explanation.)
- Evil/Satan. By blaming the devil it's out of our hands.
- Jon Stewart. Seriously? Sadly, yes.
Possible causes
So, who/what's actually responsible? Earlier this year I ran across something completely out of left field: "
America's Real Criminal Element: Lead," by Kevin Drum that blames America's violent crime problem on leaded gasoline. After being
called out by someone at MIT's Knight Science Journalism Program for seeming to suggest that leaded gasoline is the root cause of the "rise and fall of violent crime" in America, Drum posted a
follow up. He also clarified why he didn't talk much about lead paint in a
separate follow up.
It's hard to imagine that lead poisoning could be to blame for mass shootings, but it's interesting to ponder the role it might play in inner-city violence. Growing up I was taught that you always have a choice between right and wrong and that if you're a morally strong person, you choose the right path. If you happen to choose the wrong path it's because you're weak, perhaps due to stubborn free will or perhaps due to Satan whispering in your ear. I was taught that everyone is on an equal playing field (because everyone can come to love Jesus and therefore be saved by him), but what if that's not true? What if environmental factors such as lead put some at a disadvantage in figuring out which path to take? What if you have parents or older siblings who bring weapons into your life? What if you're bullied to the point of breaking?
Michael Moore wrote the
most excellent piece I've seen thus far about what he thinks causes violence in America. He thinks it boils down to:
- Poverty
- Fear/Racism
- The "Me" Society
Using these criteria, let's examine Japan's comparative lack of mass violence:
1. Poverty
I was surprised to learn that the poverty rate in Japan is much
higher than I'd thought. I remember my parents telling me back in the day that there were no homeless people in Japan. While this may have been the case in the 1970s (this
paper says that homelessness first became noticeable in the 1980s), Japan's
homeless population has been
growing over the past three decades. Something Moore doesn't address is the degree of
inequality we have in the US.
Japan's wealth distribution is considered pretty equal.
2. Fear/Racism
Japan is a pretty homogenous society, but there is racism against people from
other countries (usually non-whites, from what I've heard),
hāfus (multi-ethnic Japanese), and ethnic minorities (
Ainu,
Okinawans). There's even discrimination
against nikkeijin (people of Japanese descent from other countries) who return to the motherland. A few years ago the
UN reported that they think racism in Japan is a big problem, mainly because the government doesn't acknowledge it and does nothing to combat it.
Although I haven't lived in Japan as an adult, my sense is that while racism in Japan may be a serious problem, it doesn't fuel violent conflict in the same way that it does in the US, although I have no statistics to back that up. Here in the US racial profiling has become so commonplace that it's now the
law in Arizona.
3. The "Me" Society
Michael Moore on the US: "I think it's the every-man-for-himself ethos of this country that has put us in this mess and I believe it's been our undoing. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps! You're not my problem! This is mine!"
Japanese society is much less individualistic than American society. In Japan, it's all about the collective. A lot of Japanese etiquette is based on being considerate towards others and God forbid you should fall out of line. I still remember my parents telling me about the
Japanese proverb, "The nail that sticks out gets hammered down." This is a society where people from Fukushima who've left their homes are
facing discrimination because people elsewhere in Japan are upset that they've abandoned Fukushima (good Japanese people should stay there and face the danger and the future together) and also because some people believe they're bringing their contaminated belongings and selves to other parts of Japan.
As I was writing this, I remembered something I was reading about during the
Toyota recalls that started in 2009. It's the Japanese philosophy of
kaizen, which translates as "improvement". One thing we're not particularly good at in America is introspection. We tend to do a whole lot of finger-pointing and passing the buck instead of asking what we've done to contribute to a problem and how we as individuals can make it better.
I was planning to just present all the facts and leave it at that but after spending more than a month researching and writing this post from December 2012 to January 2013 I felt that wasn't enough. I would love to have better gun control and mental healthcare, but even with those things I think we would still have a problem with violence. I've been seeing reports for several years that
knife crime is on the rise in the UK and Japan, which shows that even with strict gun control, people will find ways to be violent. The big question no one seems able to answer is, "Why is American society so violent?" Professor
Jennifer Browdy de Hernandez of Bard College at Simon's Rock, contemplates this in a
piece for Common Dreams.
The U.S. is the largest arms manufacturer and exporter in the world. We have by far the largest military. We are also by far the most heavily armed civilian population in the world, with some 300 million guns circulating among our population of about 300 million people. Americans, we need to acknowledge that collectively, as a nation, we have been responsible for hundreds, and probably thousands of deaths of children worldwide through the weapons we sell abroad.
There is not a conflict in the world today that has not been fueled by American weaponry.
Last week at
JREX/Tewassa's screening of Hideki Ito's
X Years Later they showed an extremely unnerving animated short by
Isao Hashimoto titled "
1945-1998" which showed nearly all of the nuclear detonations worldwide during that time period (according to
this YouTube user, the animation is missing a few). The final US count: 1,032 (317 more than the next highest count - Russia at 715). We talk a good game about peace but as a nation, we've inflicted violence on so many other countries.
Year in and year out we have
mass shooting after mass shooting. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Aurora. Newtown. Plus the ones you've never heard of (many are domestic violence) and the ones you forget the details of after it falls out of the news cycle. And then there are the shootings that didn't qualify as mass shootings like the one at my college (4 or more people need to be killed to qualify). Read op-eds after
any shooting and they pretty much all say the same things and could have been written after any one. The same conservative crackpots come out blaming gays and Jon Stewart and meanwhile the gun manufacturers are raking it in. A month after Newtown, Bloomberg released a graph showing that
in three years, firearms deaths will surpass traffic accident deaths.
I used to believe a lot of the propaganda and misinformation about the causes of mass shootings. I've spent a lot of time reading about them in an attempt to understand the student who shot up my college. I was glued to my computer for weeks after Columbine reading anything and everything I could. [I only recently learned that most of what the media reported after Columbine was hogwash. I recommend Dave Cullen's book
Columbine. Probably the most thoroughly research thing ever written about that shooting and the people involved.]
Last month I came across this fascinating
article by author Colin Woodward based on his book
American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North American suggesting that each region can trace its' attitudes about violence and personal protection back to colonial times. The article didn't propose any solutions, but it's interesting to see the degree to which deeply-rooted violence may still affect
legislation today. So often Japan looks to the US for solutions to problems. I think in this case, we should be looking to Japan. Modern Japan shows that it's possible to let go of a violent history, but doing so does mean the supposed sacrifice of individual rights. Personally, I don't see it as much of a sacrifice if not having the right to own a gun would mean that more people would live. But instead, we
sacrifice the lives and bodies and psyches of thousands.
More Americans die from firearms-related violence in the US every year than have died in the war in Afghanistan. Who needs terrorists? We're killing ourselves.
People in other countries with stricter gun control and fewer firearms deaths
think we're completely daft. I agree. The average American doesn't need military-style assault weapons. I'm not even sure we need handguns or hunting rifles unless we're actually hunting our dinner or live in areas where we need protection from wild animals or need the ability to put down sick livestock. For the average American who gathers their food at McDonald's or Whole Foods, when is a gun useful in every day life? People say it's so we can protect ourselves but when do you actually get to use a gun to protect yourself? How often are we the victims of home invasions? How often do we have to pull a gun on a would-be rapist (who is
likely our friend or partner)? It turns out that owning the gun only gives you the illusion of protection. In reality, it
increases the odds that you'll be shot by more than 5.
It's far more likely that owning a gun means
your kid will shoot their friend or sibling in the face or
you or someone in your home will commit suicide, than it is that you'll be able to successfully protect yourself from a threat. The accidental deaths get me the most, especially when there are children involved. Those deaths are totally preventable. In Japan you have to lock your guns up. Period.
The police even come by to make sure they're locked up properly. There's no excuse for people dying from accidental shootings. Yet would you believe the NRA
opposes legally mandating safe storage of guns? Because here in the good ol' US of A we're all about individual rights, and we care more about parents' rights to not be legally required to store their gun(s) safely than we care about the rights of children to live.
I have no idea what it will take for change, but clearly the problem lies within our attitudes as individuals and as a society - not only about firearms but also about the sanctity of life, about freedom, about how we feel about our neighbors and our government. While the gun companies lobby and the politicians argue,
30 lives are lost to firearms violence every day. More than 5 times that number are injured
every day. As a society we've failed everyone - victims and perpetrators alike. I would imagine that most people who commit violence are very angry and/or in a lot of pain (emotional or
physical). Emotions like that don't develop in a vacuum. Many people who commit violence aren't getting the help they need (the student who shot up my college
believes that if he'd been prevented or delayed from purchasing his gun, the shooting never would have happened). We've also failed ourselves since violence affects exponentially more people in the aftermath. Even when individuals and communities find ways to move forward,
it can be difficult to truly move on. It creates ripples in communities and the effects can reverberate for decades afterwards and affect even those of us who weren't actually present for the violence. We all bear responsibility for violence, even if it's only because we look the other way or bury our heads in the sand or declare ourselves "not it."
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| Cobblestones at the Episcopal Divinity School - December 14, 2012 |
"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Will there never be any more Newtowns? No. Sadly, there will always be Newtowns because of the creatures that we are. Some small proportion of us do this. But can we make it harder for them to do it? Yeah. And should we try? Yeah. We should try. Good God, look around. Look what we’re letting happen and look how we’re reacting to it. It’s like we’re crazy. We’re crazy as society, crazy. If we let this happen. Because we don’t have to."
- Greg Gibson, father of Galen Gibson, who died at Simon's Rock on December 14, 1992 at the age of 18 [Source; Video]
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