Mass shootings are merely the face of the truly endemic,
ingrained problem of gun violence. Mass
shootings are flashy, high-profile, graphic, shocking, and horrifying by their
high body counts in short time frames.
But they are glimpses into the more subtle culture of gun violence.
The only time that the culture of gun violence is faced in
the media is when the propaganda machine, in an effort to detract from a
Caucasian shooter, is to bring up statistics showing the amount of African
American victims of gun violence (“Black on Black”). While crucial to understanding the overall
culture of gun violence, this is only treated as a strawman fallacy: basically
it says, “Hey don’t look at the white guy slaughtering your children! The dirty blacks kill each other every day!”
However, such stories paint a misleading picture, and even
the most basic investigations would soon lead one to understand that the
problem with such crime is institutionalized poverty and lack of economic
mobility. This is part of our gun
culture, and frankly, only by destroying poverty can this aspect of our gun
culture be improved.
Yet, the gun culture in America reaches all levels. It has been reinforced in our cultural
narrative for more than several generations.
Stories of cowboys and heroic soldiers full our novels and our pulp
magazines. After World War Two, nearly
every crime novel or thriller was a tough guy who had fought the Nazis or the
Nips. The 1950s were filled with cowboy
tv shows with sharpshooters who could shoot the guns right out of the grip of
the bad guys. No blood on that, just
straight shootin’ and the town was saved, yay!
2018-0225
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