28 Feb Guns and the Media: The Not So Hidden Factor in Gun Violence
When a high school student grabs an assault weapon and fires on his classmates, we are understandably appalled. That our schools are no longer safe for our children brings us shock and dismay, and thankfully another look at our gun laws.
Hopefully each tragedy brings us closer to a sane resolution, but in fact, guns sales increase when the possibility of gun control is suggested.
Here’s some shocking statistics:
- Since 1968, More Americans have died from domestic gun violence, than all the American soldiers since the Civil War. (1,396,733 by wars, 1,516,863 by homicides and suicides. This link also contains a breakdown by war)
- In a given year, more U.S. children will die from gunfire than will die from cancer, pneumonia, influenza, asthma, and HIV/AIDS combined.
- Since 1966, 1077 Americans have been murdered in mass shootings, though they are obviously a fraction of the deaths listed above. And in case you doubt that gun laws would slow down this carnage, most of those guns were obtained in accordance with legal gun laws: of the 292 guns used by mass murderers, only 49 were obtained illegally.
- Meanwhile, there are an estimated 270 to 310 million guns owned in America, nearly one for every man, woman, and child, though due to stockpiling, ownership occurs in only about one third of the population.
But while the gun debate rages on, there’s a deeper undercurrent to this obscene violence that no one seems talking about, one that has been going on for a long time: the glorification of violence that fills our movies, television, and TV news. Unless we address this hypnotic programming of our collective consciousness, guns will continue to degrade human life.
- By the time a child is old enough to graduate from high school, he or she has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence and 16,000 murders on television alone.
- Meanwhile, the amount of gun violence in top grossing PG-13 films has more than tripled since the introduction of the rating in 1985.
- Even if you avoid violent movies, you are unwittingly exposed to dozens of gunshots and several murders in the 20 minutes of previews. Often teenagers are in the audience, even children. Their parents may well approve of the movie they’ve chosen, but what can they do about the previews?
- And the news media? Every time there is a mass shooting, every network features the gruesome details ad nauseum, to the exclusion of letting us know the hard facts about guns and violence in the US. Even the news unwittingly glorifies this violence.
Movies and television (not to mention video games) are not only violent, they overwhelmingly feature guns in that violence. And more specifically, males shooting guns
Not only that, the vast majority of directors of these movies are men, just as the vast majority of mass shooters are male, while 50 women are killed each month by guns from their intimate partners, or one every 16 hours, making America the most dangerous country in the developed world for domestic violence. But the main point is that the movies portray guns as masculine.
Can you imagine if women were creating this kind of carnage what the men might do?
Unless we want another civil war, we need to get real about gun violence, not only with sane laws and restrictions, but also diminish it in our movies and television.
In this country and most of the world, we have legally abolished slavery. When first suggested, slave owners cried that it was their God-given right to own a slave, that their freedoms were being taken away, that they were good, law-abiding slave owners (who kept their slaves safely locked up.) It took a war to change that.
If we’re not careful, we’re going to have another civil war but it won’t be outlined by geographic area. It will be a period of lawlessness that makes the Wild West seem tame.
We can do this. We can end the proliferation of weapons, simply because we are better than that. The whole world is watching through our news and movies.
Get involved. Help turn the tide. Boycott violent movies. Make your voice heard.
Here’s a site with 30 actions you can take right now. Do it.
Because, next time it might be your children.
Anodea Judith
2.28.18
No Comments