Simons: Look to a deeper social crisis.
The saddest, sickest, bleakest comment one can make about the latest school spree shooting — this one in Sandy Hook, Conn. — is that such events have become so common that they’ve developed their own cliché pattern of responses.
Even before the authorities release an official body count, our social and mainstream media spaces fill up with commentary about America’s culture control laws, and America’s gun culture, from those demanding stricter gun-control laws to those vehemently defending the right to bear arms.
Next come the reports that the killer was obsessed with something such as death metal or Batman movies or violent video games, and a rush to blame such pop-culture tastes for mass murder. And of course, there are the inevitable scenes of the media swarming the shooting site, followed by the rote condemnations of the media for providing the very coverage that everyone is consuming so voraciously.
But if North Americans thought they’d become numbed to spree-shooting violence, something about Sandy Hook shook even the most cynical. There was the reported death toll, which makes this the second-worst school shooting in American history. There was the very young ages of the victims. Then there was the timing, so painfully close to Christmas. This was a latter-day slaughter of innocents, on a scale to make King Herod blush.
This is the fourth spree shooting in the United States this year. According to the 2007 Small Arms Survey, published by the Cambridge University Press, the United States, which is home to less than five per cent of the global population, is home to between 35 and 50 per cent of all the world’s civilianowned guns. Americans own more guns than the citizens of any other country — an average of 88.8 weapons for every 100 people. Seventeen states allow people to bring guns to work, and another four states are considering similar legislation. According to Business Week magazine, gunmakers Smith & Wesson reported record sales last quarter, up 48 per cent from the same period last year. In a year in which Canada sees 173 gun homicides, the United States, with nine times our population, has more than 9,000.
But it would be dangerous for Canadians to feel too self- righteous. We’ve had far, far fewer spree shootings in Canada, with far less deadly results. But the students killed in incidents in Taber and Montreal are every bit as dead.
We can’t ignore the deeper social crisis, one that goes beyond gun control.
In almost every instance, such spree killings, whether carried out in the United States, or Canada or Norway, have involved young men with mental-health issues, young men who showed abundant signs of needing psychological help before they struck, whether they were suffering from schizophrenia or bipolar mania or depression or paranoia.
Most people who are mentally ill aren’t violent. And not every killer is mentally ill. But there’s a qualitative difference between the kind of gunman who shoots a rival drug dealer and the kind who shoots up a mall or movie theatre or gurdwara or elementary school. And if we ignore that reality, we make the risk of another attack that much greater.
In our society, we marginalize those with psychiatric problems. We dismiss or ignore or deny or simply fail to recognize their symptoms, because those symptoms often make us uncomfortable. We stigmatize mental illness. That, in turn, makes people hesitant to seek treatment, whether for themselves or for their sons and friends and brothers. Even when people do turn to the health-care system, it can be hard to get timely help.
The answer isn’t to ban midnight movies, or video games. It isn’t to lock down our schools, or arm our teachers.
What we need, even more than sane gun laws, is a culture that recognizes and treats those struggling with mental illness and social alienation, before they fall into a deadly daze of psychosis, or a black fog of rage and despair.
We don’t yet know much about Adam Lanza, the 20-year-old identified as the Sandy Hook shooter. We don’t know what drove him to commit this atrocity, then take his own life. We probably won’t find answers on his Facebook page or in his Twitter stream. We certainly won’t find them by writing him off as an evil aberration.
We need to ask ourselves, instead, why so many young men are so angry, so alienated, so afflicted, that they strike out in such terrible fury, and leave such unimaginable grief in their wake.