Guns and Minds*
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
as grownups without aging. Too young to
vote, drink, or sign a contract, they may be tried as adults if they manage to
shoot people, hardly a sign of maturity.
To whom does the insanity defense apply, kids who murder or politicians and parents who make it possible?
At bedtime American grownups
watch selected carnage on TV, the newsroom guideline being, “If it bleeds, it
leads.” Why do we imbibe this
nightcap? While the homicide rate has
fallen 20 percent in this decade, news media coverage of murders has increased
six-fold. Why? Although he died before the television era,
Viennese-American psychologist Otto Rank (1884-1939) has some answers.
First, we gain from a stranger’s violent death even while deploring
it. We the audience, by witnessing,
confirm that we survived another day in a world full of lethal danger: killers, storms, crashes.
Second, as individuals and groups
we must interpret the random, the bizarre, whatever threatens. We need to make sense of it with a theory of
good and evil. But our theories may be
comforting illusions, ending in
paradox: long life is good; but
“the good die young.” Sacrifice in war
is noble and immortalizes heroes.
Heaven waits but we must wait our turn:
suicide is cheating.
Psychiatrists familiar with
post-traumatic stress disorder
know that victims of crime or
disaster often blame themselves. Guilt
seems better than impotence, and any causality seems better than none. The dominant ideology holds that we get what
we deserve. They—we all—struggle to
make meaningful tragedy out of
accidents, cruelty, indifference and stupidity and, regarding our gun
culture, collective irresponsibility.
Rank points out that, although we
do not sacrifice children to propitiate gods of war and weather, vestiges of “primitive” magic lurk beneath cultural
rituals and rationalizations. In this
sense we sacrifice many innocents in order to indulge a paranoid interpretation
of the Second Amendment, the clear intent of which is to have a “well-regulated
militia.”
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.
The media barrage fuels our sense of superiority, our survivorship, our
need to be told that we don’t have to worry about dying for a long, long time.
Rank’s fourth and last point
concerns the primitive idea that, by stopping those who want to kill us, we can
stop death itself. As long as we have
gun-toting enemies at home or abroad, the magic keeps working. No wonder 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. We have our military-industrial complex and our
medical-industrial complex to fight premature death, and an
information-industrial complex to keep us emotionally alive with a strange concoction
of shock and consolation. And we buy
it.
With the notorious exception of
Dr. Kevorkian, television dramatizes killing when the victim is unwilling. Threats enhance the will to live, so murder
becomes “pro-life,” a jolting tonic. The real problem arises when a person
wants to die.
Most Americans—even
psychiatrists--would hardly suspect that suicides outnumber murders by about
30,000 to 20,000 in the U.S. every year.
Of course guns are often used in suicide, mostly by men. Legalizing physician-assisted suicide would
probably prevent many sick and disabled people from taking their own lives in
desperation. Studies show that 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 covered up
is our tendency to be nonviolent.
Assuming 200 million guns and 20,000 gun-related deaths annually in the
U.S., just one gun in 10,000 kills in a year.
A silver lining, but the cloud is still ominous: murder becomes child’s play when guns are
plentiful.
We know that
“criminal” and “law abiding” are not
hard-and-fast, unchanging categories.
We cannot predict who will break into the news as the “fellow who kept
to himself,” who had no criminal or psychiatric record before unleashing a
deadly attack.
Calming paranoia, individual or
social, is difficult. It is impossible to be protected against any imaginable
attack. But the fearful mind-set keeps
the primitive magic going on television with morbid news and violent drama, yes,
but even in sports (the perfect defense), medicine (the magic bullet; ER), and
lotteries (beating the odds).
Most countries control gun
ownership strictly and have practically no gun deaths. It remains to be seen
how long it will take us to prevent needless carnage so effectively. It may take longer for the nightly news to
realistically dramatize the overwhelmingly nonviolent conduct of most people
everywhere. For that we can wait: nobody is forcing us to watch.
-----------------------------------
E. James
Lieberman, a Washington, DC psychiatrist and clinical professor at George
Washington University School of Medicine, is co-translator/editor of a new
translation of Psychology and the Soul by Otto Rank (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press,
1998).
*Published in Psychiatric
News, Sept. 17, 1999 (American Psychiatric Association).