A call to lay down arms and bring the Constitution into the twenty-first century
Rubin, Lillian B.
DAWN BROKE On April 16, 2007, as it does always, but this day would soon reveal itself to be unlike any other. For this was the day that a twenty-threeyearold student walked onto the campus...
...Yes, I know, guns aren't the only culprits in violent assaults...
...it's what they're meant to do...
...The question now is, will he have access to guns, our uniquely American weapon of mass destruction, that will allow him to kill scores of people in a few minutes...
...Never mind that the parents had tried unsuccessfully to get help for their son, and that this was widely reported...
...Although any or all of the suggested interventions may have some value, they will not by themselves eliminate the mass shootings in schools or the thirty-odd thousand deaths by gunfire outside the schoolyard...
...The school officials, obviously...
...Or with a wwerful government whose "security as a fre state" is not in question, at least not from it , own people...
...Photo: Mia Farrow 8 n DISSENT / Summer 2007...
...It has been nearly forty years since the five stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—as laid out by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross entered public consciousness to become the basis for a burgeoning grief industry, in which mental health professionals of all stripes counsel people on how to do it right, as if they hadn't been grieving without a map since the beginning of time...
...But we already know that we won't always be able to do this, that there will probably be a next person and a next who is troubled enough to exact his revenge (and it is, so far, almost always a "he") on some community for real or imagined slights...
...Sounds like a lot of teenagers and young adults we all know, doesn't it...
...Guns kill...
...Minutes later, long before anyone knew any of the facts, reporters filled the airwaves, the Web buzzed with headlines, and the show was on—a spectacle nearly as obscene as the massacre itself...
...Didn't these people talk to their son...
...LILLIAN B. RUBIN is a sociologist, psychologist, and author of numerous books, including the forthcoming 60 on Up: The Truth About Aging in America (Beacon Press, 2007...
...Because the theory to which most mental health professionals have dedicated their lives tells them that the seeds of the son's problems must lie in the family, the parents were at the top of the list...
...But that isn't true...
...That's one child killed every three hours, nine children every day, and more than sixty children every week...
...If not the family, who else to blame...
...Instead, I heard an orgy of blame...
...S0 WHAT'S WRONG with all the psychologizing if it helps us understand such tragic events better, gets us through the grieving process a little easier...
...Uncharted waters...
...I'm speaking of federal and state laws that will take the existing stockpile of two hundred million guns out of COMMENTS & OPINIONS the hands of ordinary citizens and ban the further sale and possession of handguns except for people who have some legitimate, professional reason to carry them...
...What's wrong is that it focuses entirely on the individual, with little or no attempt to put that behavior into its social context...
...But then, whether opponents of gun control or proponents, they don't know either...
...Only eliminating guns will do the job...
...Why, when two people were shot dead two hours before the massacre, didn't they lock down the campus...
...As reporters dug for the story behind the killing spree and found that the shooter, Cho Seung-Hui, had been ordered by a judge to undergo outpatient treatment after he was diagnosed in December 2005 as "mentally ill and in need of hospitalization," the din increased, and the psychology of the killer moved to center stage...
...It's as if they had a recipe: pour a little anger into the pot, mix well with violent fantasies, add a big dollop of alienation, and you'll have yourself a mass murderer...
...Meanwhile, in the midst of all the talk, the grief counselors were gathering, ready to "help" the students, teachers, and their families through the trauma and teach them to express their grief and rage "constructively...
...Ah, yes, I forgot for a moment: there's that pesky Second Amendment to the Bill of Rights that declares, "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...
...I listened to my local public radio station most of that day, then turned to various television news programs during the evening, waiting in vain for one of these experts to acknowledge that, whatever Cho's psychological state, he couldn't have killed and injured so many people if he hadn't had two semi-automatic weapons in his hands...
...This must be a seriously dysfunctional family, they announced...
...I'm not arguing for or against the idea of stages of grief, although my experience as a psychotherapist warns me against taking as gospel any notion that lays out a series of universal steps necessary to complete or resolve any psychological process...
...Yes, people will continue to kill each other even if we ban guns...
...Nearly every news show featured its very own mental health "expert"—psychologists and psychiatrists, none of whom had ever met Cho Seung-Hui and knew almost nothing about him, yet had no problem offering up instant, and often contradictory, psychological analyses to explain why he did it...
...Why didn't they take more seriously the rage and violence he expressed in written assignments...
...But all the evidence, not to mention plain common sense, tells us that they can't do it so efficiently and in such large numbers without the aid of a gun...
...In the same year not a single Japanese child died of gunshot wounds, Great Britain had 19 deaths, Germany 57, France 109, and Canada 153...
...I'm not a constitutional lawyer and not qualified to join the esoteric debate about what the framers meant when they wrote these words...
...But real life doesn't mimic televiDISSENT / Summer 2007 n 5 COMMENTS & OPINIONS sion, and unlike the show in which FBI profilers always catch their prey because they can accurately assess "the criminal mind," it's virtually impossible for even the professionally trained to predict when a young person's violent and/or suicidal fantasies are anything more than an outlet for blowing off steam...
...In the aftermath of the Virginia Tech murders, we've had a litany of suggestions for prevention, almost all of them focused on individual behavior, with the exception of the favored bogeyman: television and film violence...
...And I know, too, that we need to do better in identifying people like Cho Seung-Hui before they wreak their havoc...
...What's wrong is that it assumes that if we understand the psychology, we can change the behavior and save ourselves from future atrocities like Virginia Tech or Columbine or the shootings in various post offices and corporate headquarters in recent years...
...And I don't mean just closing the loopholes in laws we already know don't work or promulgating new ones that will just as easily be subverted...
...What I do know is that the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791, when this country was still in need of its "well regulated militia" to ensure the security of its new and untried government...
...How could they not have known that this young man was so troubled...
...These twenty-seven words continue to be the historical justification for millions of guns in private hands...
...Whether they make emotional sense for all or even most people is quite another question—one few mental health professionals ask...
...Having spent over three decades of my professional life in clinical practice and knowing its uncertainties, I wondered how these guys (and they were almost always "guys") dared to speak with such assurance, as if psychology were a mathematics-like science where it's perfectly clear that if you add two and two, you will always get four...
...Never mind, either, the obvious fact that whatever our individual differences may be, our psychology is born and takes root in a social environment whose reach is well beyond the bounds of family, an environment in which it is all too easy to get the guns to carry out the violent fantasies...
...Plug grief counseling into Google and you come up with 1.2 million hits and what seems like an endless list of professionals and organizations offering what one Web site calls "the uncharted waters of the grieving process...
...Good questions, but they still avoid the central one: how is it possible to protect against this kind of mass violence in a society where such a vast number of guns circulate so freely...
...In a single year, close to 20,000 Americans suffer nonfatal gun injuries, while 34,000 more, including over 3,000 children and teenagers, are killed by gunfire...
...Kubler-Ross's five stages make some intellectual sense...
...Despite the National Rifle Association's insistence that "Guns don't kill 6 n DISSENT / Summer 2007 people, people kill people," people couldn't kill on a mass scale without guns...
...DISSENT / Summer 2007 n 7 Sudan Liberation Army member near Nyala, South Darfur, summer 2006...
...For this was the day that a twenty-threeyearold student walked onto the campus at Virginia Tech carrying two semi-automatic pistols— a Glock 9 mm and a Walther P22—and fired close to two hundred rounds, killing thirty-two people and injuring scores more in the deadliest shooting rampage in our nation's history...
...Look at the statistics...
...What does that have to do with handguns owner and used today by ordinary citizens who are tot part of any organized militias...
...it's all speculation based on the political/social philosophy that's dominant at any given time...
...I'm not suggesting that we should be complacent about the violence that's so plentiful in our media or that the incivility and vulgarity so prominent in our culture today isn't worthy of comment and discussion...
...Theory trumped fact...
...It's time to p it an end to the arguments about the meaning of the Second Amendment and come to terms with the social and political realities of the twenty-first century...
...The professors, too, got their share of blame...
...And no spin by those stalwarts who insist on our right to carry guns can change the fact that their unregulated use has unleashed a murderous plague that kills and injures far too many victims every year...
...Why didn't they intervene when they saw earlier signs that he was a troubled young man...
...But appeals to strengthening family values, more religious training and involvement in church, and early identification of potentially violent individuals are truly, as Bob Dylan would have it, "blowin' in the wind...
Vol. 54 • July 2007 • No. 3
