Then and now
The Prohibition Era one hundred years ago kicked off the rise of organized crime in America. The Wall Street Crash ninety-five years ago gave rise to the Great Depression and a new wave of violence by bank robbers. Al Capone, John Dillinger, Bonnie & Clyde, were all major figures in that time. Firearms were basically unregulated in those days, and the firepower available to crooks and hoodlums left police often underarmed by comparison. Capone’s gang used “tommyguns” (Thompson submachine guns, invented during WW 1 for use in trench warfare). Bonnie Parker’s favorite gun was a BAR (Browning Automatic Rifle), one of the most devastating military weapons ever deployed as a personal weapon. Yet all the gunmen (and -women) of the era would have been insulted to be thought low enough to shoot up an elementary school.
What has changed? The lethality of what is on sale in the gun market (despite all the misleading rhetoric of the left) is much less than it was in the early Twentieth Century. You can’t buy automatic weapons on the open market anymore. For that matter, the most popular weapon sold, the AR-15-type rifle, uses ammo that is considered too underpowered to humanely hunt deer with. So the guns for sale and the ammo to use with them are less lethal than they were. What is more lethal is the people. The losers like the typical school shooter, the disgruntled, the people with their fantasy grievances, the people who think that shooting helpless people will make them Big or even some cosmic score they keep in their heads.
Sick, evil, violent people are always around. Always have been. But as one professor/pastor I once knew used to say, every society has a socially acceptable way to be crazy. For some reason, the disturbed of our society (or at least, some of them) have decided that it is socially acceptable to shoot kids in a school. It didn’t used to be that way. Even in violent times – the Roaring Twenties, the revolutionary Seventies, mass violence against kids was rare. It just wasn’t “done.” And now it is. What has changed in our society to make it so?
Two speculations.
First, our society has gone in a direction of less personal connectedness. The individual is considered not merely free (we were that before), but autonomous. Not connected to other people, like family and community. A person’s actions are not reflective of those around him. The wrongdoer feels no shame in what light his deeds put those who are connected to him. Everything is about the psychodrama in the individual’s head.
Second, despite how much we try to protect our children and how much parents hover around them, controlling their activities far more closely than parents of previous generations, our society in fact does not value children very highly. We consider them a hindrance to the proper ambitions of their parents. They get in the way. And, of course, the cavalier way many people talk about abortion shows a tendency to see them, at least at that stage of life, as less than fully human. The same could be said in some contexts of disabled people. In Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, the Queen asks the court physician to provide her with poison to experiment with on animals. Dr. Cornelius says, “Your highness/Shall from this practice but make hard your heart . . .” The way we talk about children and other vulnerable people, and the policies we demand for our convenience and support, harden our hearts toward the young, unless they are our own. And the evil or disturbed out there, whose hearts are already hard, take from that that certain persons are less valued and therefore at their disposal.
Those are both only speculations. I have no positive answers. I wish I did. But I’m sure of one thing. We have made the artifacts our society uses (guns, but also cars, housepaint, toys, etc.) much safer over the last hundred years, but the people in our society are much less securely wired and therefore more dangerous than they have ever been.
What has changed? The lethality of what is on sale in the gun market (despite all the misleading rhetoric of the left) is much less than it was in the early Twentieth Century. You can’t buy automatic weapons on the open market anymore. For that matter, the most popular weapon sold, the AR-15-type rifle, uses ammo that is considered too underpowered to humanely hunt deer with. So the guns for sale and the ammo to use with them are less lethal than they were. What is more lethal is the people. The losers like the typical school shooter, the disgruntled, the people with their fantasy grievances, the people who think that shooting helpless people will make them Big or even some cosmic score they keep in their heads.
Sick, evil, violent people are always around. Always have been. But as one professor/pastor I once knew used to say, every society has a socially acceptable way to be crazy. For some reason, the disturbed of our society (or at least, some of them) have decided that it is socially acceptable to shoot kids in a school. It didn’t used to be that way. Even in violent times – the Roaring Twenties, the revolutionary Seventies, mass violence against kids was rare. It just wasn’t “done.” And now it is. What has changed in our society to make it so?
Two speculations.
First, our society has gone in a direction of less personal connectedness. The individual is considered not merely free (we were that before), but autonomous. Not connected to other people, like family and community. A person’s actions are not reflective of those around him. The wrongdoer feels no shame in what light his deeds put those who are connected to him. Everything is about the psychodrama in the individual’s head.
Second, despite how much we try to protect our children and how much parents hover around them, controlling their activities far more closely than parents of previous generations, our society in fact does not value children very highly. We consider them a hindrance to the proper ambitions of their parents. They get in the way. And, of course, the cavalier way many people talk about abortion shows a tendency to see them, at least at that stage of life, as less than fully human. The same could be said in some contexts of disabled people. In Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, the Queen asks the court physician to provide her with poison to experiment with on animals. Dr. Cornelius says, “Your highness/Shall from this practice but make hard your heart . . .” The way we talk about children and other vulnerable people, and the policies we demand for our convenience and support, harden our hearts toward the young, unless they are our own. And the evil or disturbed out there, whose hearts are already hard, take from that that certain persons are less valued and therefore at their disposal.
Those are both only speculations. I have no positive answers. I wish I did. But I’m sure of one thing. We have made the artifacts our society uses (guns, but also cars, housepaint, toys, etc.) much safer over the last hundred years, but the people in our society are much less securely wired and therefore more dangerous than they have ever been.