Thoughts on Gun Violence

            It is worth remembering that children in the rest of the world also watch all the same violent movies that American kids watch, and the rest of the world also plays all the same violent video games.

            In Japan, for example, sometimes the media is more violent than would be tolerated in America. 

            The movie Battle Royale was one of the biggest domestic hits ever in Japan.  It couldn’t even get released on video in the United States.  Because of the graphic scenes of junior high school students killing each other, no US distributor was willing to touch it. 

            It is also worth remembering that in every country mental illness exists. 

            Japan can be a high stress society that causes people to snap easily.  Sometimes students who can’t take the pressure of school will bring a knife to school and try to stab the teacher or other students.

            When I was living in Japan, there were a couple of different incidents where mentally ill people brought knives to crowded sections of Tokyo and stabbed as many people as they could before they were overpowered by police.

            The difference between 5 people stabbed, and 20 children gunned down in a matter of seconds, is the difference between a society that allows semi-automatic assault weapons, and one that doesn’t.

            I’m told by my British friends that in the 1990s, a mentally ill man brought a gun to a school in Scotland and shot several children.  As a result pistols were banned in Britain, and hunting guns are tightly regulated.  (If you own a hunting weapon, the police will periodically come to your house to make sure the weapon is stored in a secure place.)  There has not been a repeat incident.

            In the United States, we’ve had many many more school shootings since Columbine.

            Anyone who has lived abroad can tell you the rest of the world thinks we are insane on the gun issue.  I can’t even count the number of times a British, Australian, or Japanese person has said to me, “Really, what is it with America and guns?  Don’t you guys get it by now?”

            In Japan, it is impossible to get a hold of a gun without some sort of connection with organized crime.  Yes, the Yakuza does still own handguns, but no mentally ill teenager is going to get a hold of a semi automatic assault weapon.

            In America the genie is already out of the bottle to a certain degree, but it is not impossible to reverse course.  In Cambodia, the streets were flooded with AK-47s in the 1990s as a result of the civil war.  The government decided it needed to get these guns off the street in order to have a peaceful society, and within a matter of years they had largely succeeded in getting back most of these guns.

            Of course I say this all knowing full well nothing is going to change.  I guess I’ll just post again after the next gun massacre in a couple of months.  See you then.

            (PS—I do not for one minute believe that immediately after a gun massacre it is inappropriate to talk about gun control.  That’s like saying after a nuclear power plant meltdown it is inappropriate to talk about nuclear safety.  The reason some of us are for gun control in the first place is precisely because of this type of scenario.)

Link of the Day

Noam Chomsky--"The Machine, the Ghost and limits of Understanding