If you don’t read anything else today, please do check out this post on my cousin’s blog, ClutterMuseum.com (“Into the heart of whiteness and gun violence“).
Leslie Madsen-Brooks is a fine writer and an astute cultural observer (and her other half is no slouch at the keyboard, either). Here’s part of what Leslie says about herself.
To my great surprise, I live in Idaho, where I am an assistant professor of history. I specialize in U.S., gender, and public history, with extra-special emphases on women in science, the democratization of public history practice, and the history of museums, zoos, botanical gardens, and the like.
We’ve never met, at least not as adults. Her mother and I are first cousins, so I guess that makes us 2nd cousins. I highly recommend her Clutter Museum blog, and several others she maintains, as well.
Her post on whiteness brings her own analysis together with a review of some of the best being written by others in response to the Newtown, CT shootings.
Her selection of sources is enlightening, for me at least.
Michael Kimmel and Cliff Leek, writing in the Huffington Post:
In the last 30 years 90% of shootings at elementary and high schools in the U.S. have been perpetrated by young white men. And, 80% of the 13 mass murders perpetrated by individuals aged 20 or under in the last 30 years have also been committed by white men. There is clearly something happening here that is not only tied to gender, but also to race.
Leslie calls it “the white elephant in the room.”
She also quotes an article by Richard Florida in The Atlantic reporting on surprising findings from a statistical study of gun violence. This finding is a shocker.
It’s hard to quantify political rhetoric, but we can distinguish blue from red states. Taking the voting patterns from the 2008 presidential election, we found a striking pattern: Firearm-related deaths were positively associated with states that voted for McCain (.66) and negatively associated with states that voted for Obama (-.66). Though this association is likely to infuriate many people, the statistics are unmistakable. Partisan affiliations alone cannot explain them; most likely they stem from two broader, underlying factors—the economic and employment makeup of the states and their policies toward guns and gun ownership.
In a state where using the term “haole” can generate waves of hostile reactions, the idea that whiteness and white culture may have its darker side is challenging indeed.
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What does Brian Uyesugi say about Japanese males? What does Seung Hui Cho say about Koreans? What does the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis say about Africans? 19th century racialism made white males the heroes. This new racialism makes them the villains. I say nuts to both.
I also just read in a psychiatrist trade journal that mass killers are linked to ‘cold’ mothers (this was because they were not exposed to examples of empathy. Most gays I know don’t lack for empathy (no stats I confess).
And then I read that violence is linked to lead (see below).
I’d suggest the cancer theory, based on the Emperor of All Maladies. The author there argues that it takes a string of mutations before your cells go over to the dark side and try to kill you. One or two mutations is usually not enough.
Many boys play video games, go hunting, or have distant mothers or fathers. Some are abused, some are Eagle Scouts (Charles Whitman, Univ. Texas) . Some are raised in cultures that are macho (Scots Irish, African American, Latino, Italian, etc, etc). A vanishingly small number become school shooters, perhaps because environmental insults have to interact with the appropriate genes. I hope that someday we will discover the deadly cocktail that leads to such shooters, but I doubt the answer will involve race, religion, heritage, parents etc.
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/lead-crime-link-gasoline?page=1
“Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes.”
You don’t need cherry-picked statistics and squishy soft sociology to determine that white culture has a dark side. You only have to read history. But every culture made up of humans has a dark side. Humans have a dark side. White people aren’t all that special.
The sociologist Pierre Bourdieu claimed that good social science tends to provoke a certain kind of awkward and incredulous denial. Sociology, he claimed, was a form of ‘socio-analysis’, comparable to psychoanalysis, and the insights of the social scientist are bound to be resisted as much as the statement by the psychologist. For example, if a psychoanalyst claimed that a certain patient exhibits behavior remarkably similar to that of the patient’s parents, the patient might freak out. The corollary to that in Hawaii would be Ian’s recent observation that the State government and political culture are remarkably similar to that of the plantation era, in terms of the starvation of basic services and the focus on lavish patronage. Some of the responses to this assertion would exhibit denial in an almost panicky way. The same is true on the linkage of certain gun violence with white men.
On a national scale, there is a kind of massive lacuna or blind spot on the part of Americans regarding the origins of the country. The American political system basically derives from that of the English. For example, here is a summary of the English Bill of Rights, written in 1689.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_Rights_1689
Here is the exact language of the English Bill of Rights:
In bold is the original ‘right to bear arms’, later reflected in the US Bill of Rights as the Second Amendment.
However, the wiki article for ‘Right to keep and bear arms’ provides a more exact understanding of the English version.
That is, it’s not so much a ‘right’ in the English understanding, than it was a repeal of an earlier restriction (on Protestants). In the UK, gun ownership – even knife ownership – is all heavily regulated. Also, in Australia and Canada, there is NO recognized right to bear arms.
Now here’s the Second Amendment to the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights.
In the American context, this is a huge matter of contention.
Does the amendment refer mainly to the bearing of weapons within a militia for national defense, or to keeping weapons for personal defense?
Most recently, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), No. 07-290, that “[t]he Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
This has significance for the type of guns in question. It would be expected that the 2008 decision would validate the possession of weapons ideal for home defense, namely, handguns and shotguns. But it does not address the possession of assault rifles, which are not ideal for home protection.
However, historically there seems to be a divide between the right to keep weapons in the home (which the 2008 decision addresses) versus the right to bear arms within a military. “Some historians have argued that prior to and through the 18th century, the expression ‘bear arms’ appeared exclusively in military contexts, as opposed to the use of firearms by civilians”, and that “the Second Amendment was the codification of the six-centuries-old responsibility to keep and bear arms for king and country that was inherited from the English Colonists that settled North America, tracing its origin back to the Assize of Arms of 1181 that occurred during the reign of Henry II.”
In this interpretation, the Second Amendment all about the militia (and the duty of the citizen to belong to a militia).
On the one hand, this throws the Supreme Courts 2008 validation of guns for home protection into some doubt.
On the other hand, it would validate the possession of assault rifles and battle rifles within a militia. In fact, such weapons are widespread throughout the population of Switzerland, since Switzerland still has a militia system. But the US no longer does.
It also raises the question of why the Second Amendment, meant to support the citizen’s duty to protect the country, would be (mis)interpreted to mean home defense. After all, other English-speaking countries — even countries like Australia, which still have a very strong hunting tradition — do not claim any ‘right’ to keep and bear arms in their legal system.
The following New Yorker article by Jill Lepore, “BATTLEGROUND AMERICA: One nation, under the gun”, might help explain why.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/04/23/120423fa_fact_lepore
In a nutshell, she claims that all this controversy is very recent.
For example, take the NRA. Up until the 1960s, the NRA focused mostly on teaching gun safety to youngsters. In fact, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination in 1963, the NRA supported measures to limit the possession of military-style rifles.
According to the article, the lone advocate back then for the right of individuals to own guns for home protection was the black radical activist Malcolm X. He argued that blacks (specifically, black men) needed to arm themselves to protect themselves and their families from white people, from the white government and from white police officers. He argued that the Second Amendment was a guarantee for this self-protection. This argument was later taken up by the Black Panthers.
Then desegregation happened. Later, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in 1968, and every American city erupted in rioting. This confirmed white people’s worst fears about blacks, and white people started arming themselves (and moving into the suburbs and to the sunbelt). The idea that the Second Amendment is all about self-protection then went mainstream.
That’s where we still are today. The themes of race, masculinity and guns all run together in this respect as well.
I would agree that sociology and psychiatry are equally hard sciences.