Guns and Minds
E. James Lieberman
People come in many shapes, sizes and strengths but no one is born bulletproof. If that makes the gun an equalizer then our country, with some 200 million firearms, is democratic to a fault. Guns enable children to qualify legally as grownups: Too young to vote, drink, or sign a contract, they can be tried as adults if they shoot someone. If there is a collective insanity defense, it seems to apply not to kids who kill but to politicians and parents who make it too easy.
At bedtime, Americans watch the day’s carnage on TV: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Why this nightcap? The homicide rate has fallen 20 percent in a decade while news media coverage of murders has increased six-fold. Why? Otto Rank offers some answers.
First, we gain from a stranger’s spectacular death even while deploring it. Witnesses from a safe distance, we confirm our good luck in surviving another day in a world full of lethal danger– storms, crashes, murderers.
Second, as individuals and groups we must interpret the random, the bizarre, whatever threatens. Our need to comprehend the spectacle leads to a philosophy of good and evil. TV commentators use words like “making sense of” and “getting closure.” Rank writes of the need for comforting illusions that keep us from too much death fear or life fear. We tolerate paradox better than anxiety, e.g., long life is good; but “the good die young.” Heaven waits but we must wait our turn: suicide is cheating. Sacrifice in war nobly immortalizes dead heroes.
Psychiatrists familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder know that victims of crime or disaster often blame themselves. Guilt seems better than impotence, and almost any cause seems better than none. The dominant ideology holds that we get what we deserve. Religions remind us that we are all sinners, as we struggle to make meaningful tragedy out of accidents, cruelty, indifference, stupidity and–with guns–collective irresponsibility.
Rank points out that, though we no longer sacrifice children to propitiate gods of war and weather, vestiges of “primitive” magic lurk beneath cultural rituals and rationalizations. Deaths by murder, accident, storm, war or capital punishment distract us from the fact that death is natural and inevitable. Every day most of us routinely avoid calamities that claim the unlucky few. Media reports of bad coincidence and crime both scary and reassuring: we survived. Someone else paid for us. Psychopaths, about three percent of the population, get a huge share of media time–news and drama–because we get relief of some kind from these shows. For the moment we’re immortal. If not for this stimulating combination of tension and release, advertisers and networks would change the programs.
Rank points to the compelling idea that, by killing those who want to kill us, we stop death itself. As long as we have gun-toting enemies at home or abroad, the magic keeps working. These ideas, spelled out in Rank’s Psychology and the Soul, formed the basis for Ernest Becker’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Denial of Death.
Denying ordinary, mundane death employs a lot of people and some amazing technology. Our military-industrial complex and our medical-industrial complex fight premature death, and an information-industrial complex keeps us emotionally vibrant with a mixture of shock and consolation. And we buy it.
With the notorious exception of Dr. Kevorkian, television dramatizes killing only when the victim is unwilling. Threats enhance the will to live, so murder becomes “pro-life,” an Orwellian tonic.
A real problem arises when someone wants to die. Most Americans—even psychiatrists–would hardly suspect that suicides outnumber murders by about 33,000 to 17,000 in the U.S. annually (The ratio a decade ago was 3:2, now it is 2:1.) There are 50 gun suicides in the U.S. every day, mostly by gun owners, who probably oppose physician aid-in-dying!
Extending physician-aid-in dying, now legal in Oregon and Washington, would keep many people from taking their own lives in desperation. People fear becoming helpless at the end of life more than they fear pain, but it’s murder that gets covered while suicide is covered up.
Also hidden is our moral and instinctive nonviolence. Assuming 200 million guns and 20,000 gun-related deaths annually in the U.S., only one gun in 10,000 kills a person each year–most often the owner. It will take a while for us to replace the unrealistic violent content of news and entertainment with more realism! The military came to terms, after WW II, with the fact that most soldiers were not shooting to kill a visible enemy. A new training and indoctrination program brought the shoot-to-kill ration up from 20 to 90 percent, but that was accompanied by dramatic rises in PTSD and soldier suicide.
On Killing, review
A fearful mind-set keeps the primitive magic going on television with morbid news and violent drama, yes, and even in sports with the perfect defense, medicine with the magic bullet, and ER), and lotteries– beating the odds.
–Updated essay from Psychiatric News, Sept. 17, 1999.