Underlying Issues

A gunman kills one girl and self, threatens 5 other girls in Colorado. A gunman
kills the school principal in Wisconsin. A gunman causes 2 schools in Las Vegas
to shut down. A gunman kills 3 girls and wounds 7 others before killing himself
in Pennsylvania. 7 deaths by people who can only be described as psychotic in a
week. It’s not the guns, or the ownership of the guns that’s the problem,
although I have absolutely no doubt that these incidents will increase the hue
and cry to make gun ownership illegal. There are too many problems with banning
the object without addressing the underlying cause.

Guns do cause damage and can kill, in the same way cars do. Or knives. Or
canned goods. Banning all fluids because someone claimed they could make a bomb
with it was ludicrous. It’s not the fluids that are at fault. Banning fluids
or guns or canned goods won’t prevent people from killing one another. It will
only make them more determined and creative in the methods they use to do the
killing.

Why aren’t we addressing the underlying problems? The gunman in Pennsylvania’s
wife said her husband killed those girls as an act of revenge for an incident
that happened 20 years ago – before these girls were ever even born. The wife
knew he had issues and ignored them until the man killed those innocent girls
and himself. 4 people dead because no earlier action was taken. The drifter
who killed the girl and himself in Colorado – where were people to help the man
before he was driven to desperation and killed?

We need to ask ourselves some seriously hard questions about where society as a
whole is heading. We’ve seen that banning doesn’t stop the killing. Banning is
the least effective method we have to deal with this – and yet, it is the one
method our society and governments choose to use over all others available to
us. We need to eliminate banning objects as a first response (or even a last
response, really – it just plain does not work) for any assumed threat.

What other methods do we have available? There are lots to choose from. The
easiest to change would be the commercials aired on TV or are placed in print
media. Too many of them use themes of selfishness, revenge, violence, and sex
to sell their product. I’ve been boycotting the products whose ads convey a
negative social image for their product – particularly the ones that attack
their competitors and resort to namecalling. It’s really a 2 way street here –
people need to boycott the products that have negative ads and the ad agencies
need to rework the ads so they still have the hook without the negative images.
Once ads aren’t reinforcing images of selfishness and revenge, the message that
it’s OK to grab all you can at the expense of others will ease. It won’t go
away because these images are coming from multiple sources.

News reporting of violence needs to be less glamorous and more factual. There
should be a stronger emphasis on why the act is wrong, what the punishment for
it is, and a showing of community support – and not the “man on the street”
advocating more violence. That’s not support, that’s sensationalism. Support
is showing what the community is doing to repair the damage, clean things up,
and what their plans for the future will be – and those plans should not include
banning objects, setting up barricades, or limiting the freedoms of the
innocent. The ones who commit the acts of violence should be shown being tried,
convicted, and punished.

There needs to be a more visible presence for small charities. I’m not talking
the mega charities but the little ones like Modest Needs and Sandwich Saturdays
and Happy Bags. These are family and small community driven charities – 100% of
the effort goes directly to the people being helped; none of it is sidetracked
into the advertising costs, employee wages and benefits, overhead expenses, or
layers of governmental reporting that suck at the mega charities.

Early intervention for problems also needs to happen. When a child reports they
are being bullied, the adults need to pay attention and see what can be done to
reduce or eliminate the bullying, from finding out who is doing the bullying and
why to protecting the bullied with adult supervision. Too many of our children
are growing up today knowing they can’t depend on anyone else to protect or help
them when they most need it – and that makes them bitter timebombs just waiting
for the opportunity to exact the revenge for which they shouldn’t have to feel a
need. The man in Pennsylvania took the lives of 3 children and maybe more,
because he wounded 7 others, for feelings of anger and frustration that should
have been addressed years earlier; not allowed to fester until this tragedy.

Perhaps the biggest and most effective change we need to make is to listen to
our neighbors, friends, family. We need to pay attention to how they feel,
what’s happening to them, and work to take care of one another long before
anyone has a chance to dwell so long on a hurt that they build the pain or
humiliation or terror so far out of proportion the only remedy is violence and
death.

When someone can die in their home, and no one knows for a week or more – that’s
a sad reflection on society. When someone speaks up about a hurt and is ignored
for years and the hurt and pain build up until no other alternative is seen
except violence – that’s a dangerous reflection of a society. It is by paying
attention to one another, by caring, and by acting on those caring impulses that
we can shift society from the dangerous edge.

One reason the Amish portions of the country have such a low crime rate is
because they know one another and they take care of one another. Crime still
happens, sometimes extremely violent crime, but it’s reduced, and the community
gathers together to heal the wounds of the crime.

What do we do when a crime or a disaster happens now? We blame the victim, shun
the family as if crime and bad luck were contagious, and we isolate ourselves
one from the other. When people do ask what they can do, or try to do
something, they are rebuffed. Or told to do things so totally outrageously
unrelated there’s this major disconnect, like when the president told us to buy
more stuff when people asked what we could do to help with the war in Iraq. No
one could figure out how buying things could help our soldiers. We still can’t.
That’s not a community building and bonding activity. It is what you tell
someone when you want them to go away or to be distracted from the real work.

Without a community cohesiveness, of course violence will increase. When
society as a whole doesn’t model caring for one another; when the hurt and the
damaged seek and are refused validation and help, they will extract it in any
way they can. There are always warning signs that an individual has reached the
end of their ability to cope. Always. And if we, as a society, as family, as
friends, even as co-workers, paid attention to these details and cared about one
another, we could intervene before tragedy struck.

The boys at Columbine. The drifter most recently in Colorado. The man in
Pennsylvania. The terrorists, suicidal or not. Each of them shed clues about
their pain and damage, and was ignored. And each of them decided to make a
statement with their own deaths – a plea we are still ignoring because the truth
of the matter hurts. We don’t want to fix the problem; we want it to go away.
And if we can make the problem invisible by banning the objects used and
imposing ever greater restrictions upon the innocent and formerly free, so be
it. Just so long as we don’t have to face any ugly truths and take any
difficult action, as a society, we are content.

It doesn’t work that way, though. It never has. At some point, the lump under
the carpet will grow so big it b ages and benefits, overhead expensecomes a
serious obstacle. We will have no choice then but to deal with it, whatever it
will take. And by the time it’s that bad, it will mean making a lot of
difficult decisions and take a lot of hard work and time to fix.

We can’t go through life with blinders blocking out unsavory sights, a pomander
strapped under our nose to block out bad smells, and earphones blocking any
undesirable noises with our hands tightly bound to our sides and our feet
shuffling through a deep rut. At some point, we will get jostled, or knocked
down, or trip – and then we will see, hear, feel what is happening.

A lot of violence can be averted simply by listening. Banning objects, placing
restrictions, imposing curfews, conducting strip searches, making people walk
through metal detectors – these things don’t work. We’ve seen they don’t work.
Yet we keep using these ineffective methods.