a short rant on the media and the virginia tech shootings
Thursday, April 19th, 2007I promise what you are about to read will be largely unpopular and, most likely, absent from the media circus that is currently doing back flips over the Virginia Tech shooting.
I should first mention that the shooting, like any shooting anywhere in the world, is a tragic loss for everyone involved. Sincerely, my heart goes out to everyone affected by this horrific event. That said….
The media loves school shootings. Anytime something like this happens, it seems as though it is the only thing happening in the world for weeks at a time. Everyone, again, is asking, ‘why’? Why did this happen? But nobody is questioning the larger social framework that produces this kind of atrocity.
At first there was a lot of talk about how ‘disturbed’ the shooter was, and that he was, most likely, mentally ill. This might be true to a certain extent, but of course ultimately functions to separate him from us. If he is mentally ill, further, there is no need to understand his situation from a rational point of view. We have to create this separation so we don’t ask questions about the systematic, endemic violence from which our own culture is based. If someone afar kills Americans, he’s a terrorist; if an American kills Americans, he’s crazy. Either way, the media accepts this as some kind of justification, which results in a lack of constructive dialogue regarding the way in which violence is viewed as an acceptable response to, as Cho repeated “being backed against a wall.” The age old mantra, ‘he was crazy, so that explains his behavior’ is a cop out. Plain and simple. They talked about the killers at Columbine in the same way.
Then the blaming began: why didn’t his roommates know he was depressed? What kind of music was he listening to? Why didn’t the university move forward with hospitalization if he was that ill? Now the debate is, as to be expected, on gun control: Where did he get the guns? Why are guns available? Guns kill people!
For the record, I don’t support the NRA, but I also don’t like the idea of the police and government as the only ones allowed to have guns either. If someone wants to kill people or act out in the way that Cho did, they are going to accomplish that task whether or not guns are available. Pipe bombs are easy to make, knives can be just as affective as bullets up close…..as Ani DiFranco says, “anything is a weapon if you hold it right” (though of course she wasn’t talking about any of this…).
I’m just tired of the same old useless arguments that keep us all in denial. Why is nobody talking about the fact that, once again, the shooter was a male? Why isn’t anyone talking about how men are encouraged to keep in their emotions, and encouraged to be aggressive? Why isn’t anyone talking about how violent our culture is….that if we’re bombing and torturing people afar, why are we so shocked to have that same violence visited at home? Jackson Katz brought up the same problem with boys and school shootings in the following passage regarding the Littleton, Co shootings (though whether we’re talking about Littleton or Virgina Tech, I still think it applies):
This is not a case of kids killing kids. This is boys killing boys and boys killing girls.
That these school shootings reveal is not a crisis in youth culture but a crisis in masculinity. The shootings - all by white adolescent males - are telling us something about how we are doing as a society, much like the canaries in coal mines, whose deaths were a warning to the miners that the caves were unsafe. Consider what the reaction would have been if the perpetrators in Littleton had been girls. The first thing everyone would have wanted to talk about would have been: Why are girls - not kids - acting out violently? What is going on in the lives of girls that would lead them to commit such atrocities? All of the explanations would follow from the basic premise that being female was the dominant variable. But when the perpetrators are boys, we talk in a gender-neutral way about kids or children, and few (with the exception of some feminist scholars) delve into the forces - be they cultural, historical, or institutional - that produce hundreds of thousands of physically abusive and violent boys every year. Instead, we call upon the same tired specialists who harp about the easy accessibility of guns, the lack of parental supervision, the culture of peer-group exclusion and teasing, or the prevalence of media violence.
Cho was Korean, but I’m not sure that matters in terms of male violence.
Further, (and most importantly to most of the world) there are millions of people who live under the threat of death every single day. Not a day goes by, it seems, that we don’t read about a bombing or a massacre or a shooting that takes place in other countries. Why do we not morn those dead as we morn our own? Are they not just as human? Are their lives not as important to them as ours are to us? What is it about our culture that makes someone truly believe that killing a bunch of people is forced upon them?
Why are we not looking at this and other shootings as a symptom of a much larger problem?
