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Facing up to violence in America

By Jonathan Zimmerman (Christian Science Monistor)
Updated: 2007-04-19 09:07

New York - "Turn on your TV," a friend instructed via e-mail. "Right
now." So I did. And then I saw the murder and mayhem at Virginia Tech,
where more than 30 people were gunned down Monday morning. I watched
police officers storming buildings, rifles ready. Medics carried away the
wounded and the dead. Dazed students embraced each other or looked
blankly at the scrum of cameras, wearing empty stares of shock.

But I wasn't shocked. Upset, yes �C but not shocked. And that should
shock all of us.

We have been here before, of course. The sites of prior school massacres
are etched on our minds, a symbolic shorthand for the violence and
malevolence that none of us can comprehend. Paducah, Ky. Springfield,
Ore. And, most of all, Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo.

So it's hard to be shocked when you see it all again, unfolding in real
time on television and the Internet. And it's hard to avoid the same
facile questions �C and the same superficial answers �C that followed the
other tragedies.

Whenever something like this happens, of course, everyone wants to know
why. So they seize upon the particulars of the case, probing the killers'
backgrounds and psyches: this one was bullied, that one used drugs, and
so on. Or they make enormous generalizations about American culture, to
suggest that we're all going to hell in a handbasket.

In the wake of Columbine, for example, prominent conservative Tom DeLay
linked youth violence with the teaching of evolution in schools and
"working mothers who take birth control pills." No less absurdly, some
commentators tried to make violent video games the culprit, as if playing
a few rounds of Grand Theft Auto makes you shoot up a school.

It's hard to know why a specific killer acted in the way he did. Rather
than focusing narrowly upon this awful event, then, we should declare a
National Day of Mourning and Reflection on Violence in America. Besides
memorializing the dead, at Virginia Tech and elsewhere, this annual
federal holiday would also seek to spark a national conversation about
Americans as a people: who we are, and who we would like to become.

Why, we should ask, are the gunmen in school massacres almost always
male? What does that tell us about the ways we socialize boys in America?
About relations between the sexes? About the relationship between
violence and manhood?

Second, why are most of these gunmen also white? (Yes, reports indicate
the Virginia Tech gunman was Asian; but almost every other mass shooter
has been white.) Black and Latino boys commit plenty of violence in
school, of course, but they're more likely to assault an individual whom
they know. White shooters more often kill en masse and randomly: They're
aiming for high body counts, not for a particular target. Why?

Third, why do so many American men �C and, increasingly, many American
women �C own guns? Between 40 percent and 50 percent of American
households own a gun, one of the highest percentages in the Western
world. We can and should debate the best ways to regulate guns, but we
simply cannot deny their prevalence in our society. And even though
Virginia Tech was nominally a "gun-free zone," the shooter had no trouble
bringing weapons there. Why do so many Americans own guns? Which
Americans choose to purchase them? And how do guns influence the nature
of violence in America?

Fourth, what messages do our various mass media transmit about men,
women, and violence? In the recent imbroglio over racist comments by Don
Imus, many commentators observed �C correctly �C that similarly bigoted
language suffuses America's mainstream media. But US airwaves are
saturated with violence, too, ranging from shoot'em-up movies to rape and
torture. And most of this on-screen violence is committed by men, as
well. I'm not saying that the mass media cause violent behavior, because
we can't be sure of that. But these images do make violence more "normal"
and acceptable in US society. And that can't be a good thing.

Last, and most important, what can we do to change? How, as a nation, can
we become less violent? Is it even possible?

I'd like to say it is, because I believe deeply in our nation's potential
for renewal and transformation. But in darker moments, I'm not so sure.

And, surely, the Virginia Tech massacre is one of the darkest moments of
all. That's precisely why we need to shed light, right now, upon the
larger patterns of violence that surround us. We must transcend the
particulars of this awful event so that we can see it in its wider
national context. And we must not look away.

So I propose this Thursday, April 19, as National Day of Mourning and
Reflection on Violence in America. That day marks the 12th anniversary of
the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, where 168
innocents lost their lives to a homegrown American fanatic. As I said,
we've been here before. And none of us should rest until we're all
shocked by it.

--- Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at New York
University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in
the American Century."

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