Ways to end the culture of violence

When I was in elementary school, I had a radio series action hero. It was the do-gooding masked Lone Ranger bringing justice to a lawless Wild West.

The bad guys were defeated and he left his calling card: a silver bullet. Radio let me imagine what he looked like and picture the events in my mind. Yes, there were gunfights, but with six shooters, rifles, or a shotgun like my grandfather taught me to fire. Violence conveyed by radio did not show pain, agony of death, and blood. Comic books were the only visual pictures and cartooning kept the violence in the realm of fiction for young, impressionable minds.

What we see, hear, and read as children are large factors in shaping adult lives. Violent modern media glorifies the shooter and teaches young people that violence is the right way to gain power, resolve conflicts, or settle grievances, instead of negotiation and peaceful means. But America is no longer the Wild West.

Seeing violence on TV and movies is worth a thousand words. Being able to participate in violent video games is a whole new level. Especially troubling are video games that put the players' hands on the trigger of the same weapons used by our troops.

Violent media is also desensitizing. The remake of comic book heroes ... from Spiderman to Superman are masked or costumed do-gooders. But agony of death is shown in vivid color, and both heroes and villains are the perpetrators of insensitive violence, using weapons of nearly unlimited bullets, never having to pause to reload.

I stopped toting up body counts in these movies and convinced myself the carnage was only a movie. I noticed, though, that eventually the shock of bloodshed turned to numbness. While intended as entertainment, the U.S. military has used video games to desensitize soldiers to violence and reduce empathy toward their targets. Studies that show such games also desensitize civilians.

There are others with twisted minds who see villains as heroes. The bad guys become their inspiration and instructors. There is a reason the Aurora movie theater shooter was dressed as The Joker.

While rating systems give parents the knowledge to keep violent media away from impressionable 10-year-olds, there are parents who act as straw buyers and buy media rated for 17-year-olds-plus for their youngsters.

The problem with the National Rifle Association's position of having armed, trained guards in schools is that the organization treated it as a silver bullet. There are so many other factors at play: lack of mental health services, easy access to military style weapons, and violent modern media. The NRA gave only lip service to some , while ignoring the access issue.

What the NRA could do is to lead a campaign for parents to keep M rated video games out of the hands of those under 17 and to educate adults if they fear their child is potentially violent, to remove weapons from their homes. Both ready availability of weapons of war and violent video games appeared to have played roles in Sandy Hook. We adults, including NRA members, could also press government to fund mental health services.

Changing media culture is also not a silver bullet, but it can help. Government censorship is an anathema to our democratic society so the burden falls mostly on those who produce media. But media that does not police itself can be influenced by its audience, too. Adults themselves can take away their profits by not watching or spending money for uber violent films, games, and TV shows and by restricting what media their children are seeing and playing. We can personally take the pledge to boycott violent media. That is one message the entertainment industry will heed.

This is my column in the Sky Hi Daily News this week.

re NRA on Face the Nation using Israel as an example for armed guards in schools? Seriously?

The President of the NRA was on Face the Nation today. He cited the example of Israel in order to make his case as to why putting armed guards in all our schools is a good idea.  Apparently, Israel did just that in their schools and succeeded at reducing attacks on students

Israel - seriously, Israel? The analogy is absurd if not downright laughable.

Israel is a country which, through its geography and history, is in a perpetual state of war against organized external enemies.  There are soldiers with machine guns on just about every corner. Children there grow up prepared at any time for mass mobilizations of citizen-soldiers to defend their country. To be there is to sense the immediate possibility of real violence at any time and any moment. And their kids feel it too. 

Is that the kind of country that we want America to be? Sadly, that is the kind of America many kids in our urban areas have today. But also in our suburbs, in our ex-urbs, in our country and mountain hamlets, and in every single one of our kindergarten and first grade classrooms?

Yeah?? You ok with that? Does that not bother you? Do you think that that is just  way things are and you had better "man up" and arm up or be at risk of being an irresponsible father, or mother, or school principal or teacher or class psychologist? And if you are ok with that, then I reckon you are in the vast minority of parents in our country. The majority have silently let you produce ever more violent movies and video games, let you flood the streets with killing machines that can fire 100 high impact bullets without the need of reloading, and let you de-fund public mental health care.

And who are our enemies? Well...it is the kid next door. The kid who has hidden mental health issues, who, like most kids, finds refuge in his room playing video games, and who has easy access to a smorgasbord of assault weapons and high-round clips of ammunition.  It is the college or grad student who has lost the abilty to discern between reality and nightmare, who has become a "loser", who desires to extract himself from obscurity and get known. It is the otherwise good son of a single mother who sees nothing but dead ends in his life and likes the easy trappings of dealing drugs and the "brotherhood" of gang life. 

And, here is the sad truth that we ignore because we all have been guilty in allowing the culture of violence and guns to fester in our society... it could be ANYONE.

Our enemy is not the PLO, Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran...it is ourselves and our unwillingness to change. It is special interest groups who work on behalf of gun makers to sell drums of ammo and cheap handguns, it is the entertainment industry who knows that high body counts equals high profits, and it is our healthcare system that has treated mental health like it treats the poor - only to be seen in emergency rooms. 

The NRA' s position,  that everything else except guns, is responsible for Columbine, Aurora, Virginia Tech, Portland, a street corner every night in Chicago, and for the daily funerals of six and seven-year olds and their teachers and administrators the last week has brought to a small, beautiful town thirty minutes from where I live, only exposes them as an unecessary side show from the necessary discussions we should be having about real societal change.

Their evoking of Israel as a good example of what our policies should look like can only lead us to ask - who stands to benefit from us, from our kids, fearing our neighbors and fellow Americans so much that we have to put citizen soldiers in all our classrooms and eventually on every street corner in the US?    If you think that our kids will benefit, go ask someone who grew up in a war zone how "secure", they felt.  My guess is that the majority of you won't need to ask. The answer is right in front of you.  On Face the Nation this past Sunday.

Posted and written by  Ted Muftic, a Muftic Forum contributor