From Columbine to Virginia Tech - the virus infecting America's susceptible young
One aspect of the Virginia Tech tragedy that makes me despair is the gruesome inevitability of it all. As Gerard Baker wrote in his superb piece on Tuesday:
It’s so familiar you could write the script yourself. Only the names change — Jonesboro, Columbine, Lancaster County and now Virginia Tech. And the numbers
Gerard believes, and it’s hard to disagree, that such slayings will keep happening again and again. But why? Maybe, Virginia Tech happened because the Lancaster County massacre happened before that and the Columbine massacre before that.
In the The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell points to a situation in Micronesia in the 1970s and 1980s where the islands had the highest rate of teen suicide in the world – ten times higher than anywhere else on the planet. Gladwell traced this rise back to the first ever teen suicide in Micronesia, which became romanticised and repeated by the islands's susceptible young.
In a now spookily prophetic post, he says:
Teenagers were literally being infected with the suicide bug, and one after another they were killing themselves in exactly the same way under exactly the same circumstances. We like to use words like contagiousness and infectiousness just to apply to the medical realm. But I assure you that after you read about what happened in Micronesia you'll be convinced that behaviour can be transmitted from one person to another as easily as the flu or the measles can. In fact, I don't think you have to go to Micronesia to see this pattern in action. Isn't this the explanation for the current epidemic of teen smoking in this country? And what about the rash of mass shootings we're facing at the moment - from Columbine through the Atlanta stockbroker through the neo-Nazi in Los Angeles?
Even the deranged learn their behaviour from somewhere – in this case, from each other.
So how does America deal with this deadly virus? Will gun control laws help? Maybe. But not if the controls are as half-hearted as they are now. Currently in Virginia, if you’re over the age of 18 you can buy an Uzi or an AK-47 assault rifle if you pass a background check into your suitability to hold such arms. Surely wanting an Uzi or an AK-47 in the first place is a bad sign? Limiting your quota to one gun a month, as Virginia does currently, is merely playing lip-service to gun control.
As Magnus Linklater concludes in his piece today:
Banning the use or possession of weapons may be a useful palliative, but it is not the solution. Any government that wants to be seen to be taking action after a violent event can reach for legislation, but it is likely to discover that the social malaise that led to the violence is more deep-seated and intractable. There are strong arguments to suggest that American states such as Virginia should begin copying the reforms adopted by, for instance, California, which has tightened up its gun laws; and they must move against the glorification of the gun, which encourages not only the ownership but the use of arms.
In the end, however, that will not be enough. What is needed is a wholesale shift in the national culture — and that will take rather longer than an arms ban.
Murad Ahmed
UPDATE: Making sense of the senseless - Why did Virginia Tech happen?
