Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (18 page)
Read Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns Online
Authors: Glenn Beck
Before we get to the data, let’s first take a closer look at the commonsense side of the equation.
Guns have always been around. In the 1700s, colonial Americans “were the
most heavily armed people in the world” but
homicides involving guns were “rare.” From the early 1970s through the late ’90s “the number of handguns owned by Americans increased 160 percent . . . . Yet over that period,
the murder rate declined 27.7 percent.”
Up until 1968, there was no federal law to prevent any child from walking into a hardware store and buying a high-capacity semi-auto pistol (say, a Browning Hi-Power with a high-capacity magazine, first marketed in 1935), or buying a high-capacity military rifle (maybe a World War II–era M-1 carbine, complete with thirty-round magazines), or buying a semi-automatic shotgun (perhaps a Browning Auto-5, first manufactured in 1905), and buying as much ammunition as they could afford.
Availability of “assault” weapons was not a problem in the 1940s, ’50s, or most of the ’60s . . . yet, for some reason, no juvenile had
ever
committed a multiple homicide in a school until 1975,
when a sixteen-year-old shot and killed a student and teacher in Brampton, Canada (yes, it happened first in Canada). Four years later
the United States experienced its first double homicide in a school when another sixteen-year-old killed two and injured nine more at a school across the street from her house in California.
Think about that. Five thousand years of recorded history. Five hundred years of gunpowder combat. One hundred and fifty years of repeating firearms. Yet, despite it all, no one can find a single case, anywhere in the world,
where a juvenile committed a multiple homicide in a school prior to 1975.
Common sense tells us that maybe this isn’t about the gun after all. Maybe it’s about the person who’s holding it.
That means we have an issue with our society and with our families and our schools. We have issues with parenting and mentoring and bullying and the way we treat depression and anxiety. We have an issue with kids’ finding pleasure and solace by playing video games in darkened bedrooms and basements instead of running around outside with friends. We have an issue with kids’ spending hours on their phones and computers texting and posting on Facebook instead of having real, personal connections and conversations with others. We have an issue with kids’ having unfettered access to the worst the Internet has to offer instead of the best that our communities can provide.
We have a lot of new issues in America, but access to guns isn’t one of them.
In 1999,
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd made a claim about those who talk about entertainment violence that is still heard today. “Blaming Hollywood and the culture, the Republicans’ tired ploy,” she wrote, “is a glib solution anyway. It’s much easier than doing the hard work of financing and mounting a campaign for meaningful gun legislation, which might take years.”
In other words, Dowd believes that those who implicate entertainment
violence are only looking for a scapegoat. But, just like Stephen King, she has it completely backward. The truth is that it is those who blame guns who are the ones looking for a scapegoat. It is always much easier to look at “how” violence is carried out (that is, with a gun) than to look at “why” violence is carried out. Yet, in almost all cases
besides
those involving guns, that’s exactly what we do: We look at
why.
After 9/11, for example, people didn’t take to the media to propose banning planes or tall buildings, but there were plenty of people advocating that we had to figure out
why
these young men became radicalized.
But that’s not the way it seems to work with guns. We spend weeks talking about magazine clips and the definition of the term
semi-automatic
without ever really stopping to ask a simple question:
Why?
A Worldwide Phenomenon
Despite what the media and most gun control advocates would like for you to believe, juvenile massacres are not just a new problem in America—they’re happening around the world, even in places where gun access is significantly more restrictive.
In 2009, in Winnenden, Germany, a seventeen-year-old set a new mark for juvenile mass murderers when
he killed fifteen people at his high school and during the subsequent chase and manhunt. The German media reported that
he was an avid video game player.
Seven years earlier, in Erfurt, Germany, a nineteen-year-old expelled student murdered sixteen people in his former high school. The media reported that he too had “spent much of
his time playing violent computer video games. His favorite was called
Counterstrike
in which anti-terror units wearing masks
battle each other to the death.”
Finland has also experienced this kind of violence. In 1989,
a fourteen-year-old murdered two of his fellow students in his school in Rauma. Eight years later,
in Tuusula, an eighteen-year-old student murdered eight classmates in his high school. The following year,
a twenty-two-year-old student murdered ten people at Seinäjoki University.
Other countries have not been immune, either. In 2002,
two people were murdered by a student at Monash University in Australia.
Two more were murdered by a seventeen-year-old student in his school in Thailand in 2003.
Four people were killed by a fifteen-year-old student in their Argentina high school in 2004, and thirteen were massacred in Brazil in 2011 when
a former student returned to his old middle school with two .38-caliber revolvers. The list goes on and on.
Around the world, the generation that gave us these horrible crimes as juveniles in high school, and then as young adults in college, has grown up to give us even more horrific crimes as adults.
In 2011, a thirty-two-year-old man visited the Norwegian island of Utoya. There, in a place where his victims couldn’t escape and not a single person could shoot back, he
murdered sixty-nine people and injured at least 110—the vast majority of them teenagers at a summer camp. (He also killed eight people in Oslo earlier that day in a bombing.) This massacre was, far and away, the all-time worst solo act of gun violence in human history. Unsurprisingly, this killer also loved video games.
In the year before the massacre, he would play
World of Warcraft
and
Call of Duty
extensively, sometimes up to sixteen hours a day.
The vast majority of studies conclude that
there is a cause-and-effect relationship between media violence and real-life violence. This link is undeniable and uncontestable.
—
AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS
, 1995
Next time you go see a violent movie, take a moment before the previews start to look around the theater. How many young kids do you see? How many parents with toddlers or infants? How many middle school kids who snuck in?
What about television shows—do you let your kids watch prime-time TV? A 1998 study revealed that one-third of all
American children ages two to eleven see the first hour of prime-time shows on weekday evenings. I think we can safely assume that percentage has only gotten higher in the fifteen years since.
If you successfully avoid movies and television, what about computers and tablets and phones? According to a report by Common Sense Media,
American children under eight years old spend an average of two hours and fourteen minutes a day consuming digital media and television.
One of the most recent studies to be completed on entertainment violence was conducted by researchers at Brock University in Ontario and published in July 2012 in the journal
Developmental Psychology.
The goal was to determine if there was any correlation between the amount of time spent playing violent video games and the likelihood that a child (in this case 1,500 kids in grades nine through twelve) would exhibit aggressive behavior. Here’s what the researchers found:
Sustained violent video game play was significantly related to steeper increases in adolescents’ trajectory of aggressive behavior over time. Moreover, greater violent video game play predicted higher levels of aggression over time, after controlling for previous levels of aggression, supporting the socialization hypothesis.
I
In contrast, no support was found for the selection hypothesis.
Nonviolent video game play also did not predict higher levels of aggressive behavior over time.
These results should not be a surprise, considering that they
virtually mimic what has been found in other longitudinal studies (studies where researchers observe the same variables repeatedly over a long period of time) that were summarized by researchers in the book
Media Violence and Children:
• 1963: 875 third graders in upstate New York were observed for twenty-two years and studied at two separate points in time. At the first study point, eleven years in, researchers “realized that TV viewing habits seemed to have played a substantial role in the development of aggression. In other words, the findings showed that exposure to TV violence during early childhood was predictive of higher levels of aggressive behavior at age 19.”
Ten years later, researchers studied the group again and this time found that that “aggressive habits seemed to be learned early in life, and once established, are resistant to change and predictive of serious adult antisocial behavior. If a child’s observation of media violence promotes the learning of aggressive habits, it can have harmful lifelong consequences.” This study also revealed
something even more shocking: TV viewing habits as a child was a predictor of violent criminal arrests at age thirty.
• 1981: Among 141 kindergartners in Connecticut, researchers found “a significant relationship between children’s viewing of TV violence . . . and their aggressive behavior.”
• 1984: Sixty-three kids, ages four to nine, were tracked for five years. Researchers found that “those who watched the most violent programming as preschoolers displayed the most aggression at age nine, even when controlling for initial levels of childhood aggression.”
• 1986: One thousand kids from the United States, Israel, Finland, the Netherlands, Poland, and Australia were followed for three years. The report suggested that “early viewing of TV violence was significantly associated with higher levels of subsequent aggressive behavior, even after controlling for a child’s initial level of aggressiveness.” The only outlier country in this study was Australia.
The Verdict Is In
While nothing will ever be good enough for the Stephen Kings of the world,
there have been thousands of studies performed and opinions issued over the last half century, many of which were highlighted in Grossman’s book:
—1969: The National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence cited
TV violence as a contributing factor to violence in our society.
—1972: The surgeon general issued a report citing
a clear link between TV and movie violence, and aggressive behavior.
—1975: The National Parent/Teacher Association (PTA) adopted a resolution demanding that networks and local
TV stations reduce the amount of violence in programs and commercials.
—1976: The American Medical Association adopted a resolution “to actively oppose TV programs containing violence, as well as products and/or services sponsoring such programs,” in “recognition of
the fact that TV violence is a risk factor threatening the health and welfare of young Americans, indeed our future society.”
—1982: The National Institute of Mental Health issued an extensive report stating that
there is clear consensus
on the strong link between TV violence and aggressive behavior.
—1984: The U.S. attorney general’s Task Force on Family Violence stated that
the evidence is overwhelming
that TV violence contributes to real violence.
—1984: The American Academy of Pediatrics’ Task Force on Children and Television cautioned physicians and parents that
TV violence promotes aggression.
—1985: The American Psychological Association’s Commission on Youth and Violence cited research showing a
clear link between TV violence and real violence.
—1989: The National PTA again called for the TV industry to reduce the amount of violence in programs.
—1990: Congress passed the Television Violence Act, giving the three major networks an antitrust exemption so they could formulate a joint policy to reduce violence on TV.
—1992: The
Journal of the American Medical Association
published research concluding that “the introduction of television in the US in the 1950’s caused a subsequent [15 years later] doubling of the homicide rate,” and “if, hypothetically, TV technology had never been developed, there would today be 10,000 fewer murders each year in the US, 70,000 fewer rapes and 700,000 fewer injurious assaults.”
—1992: An American Psychological Association report concluded that
forty years of research on the link between TV violence and real-life violence had been ignored.
They went on to state that the
“scientific debate is over”
and called for federal policy to protect society.
—1995: The American Academy of Pediatrics (a group that, by the way, is strongly in favor of significantly increasing gun control laws) stated that, “[a]lthough media violence is not the only cause of violence in American society,
it is the single most easily remediable contributing factor.”
—1998: UNESCO reviewed studies of media violence from twenty-five countries and documented an international concern that a
“global aggressive culture” is being formed by violent television and movies, particularly violent American TV shows and movies being exported around the world.
The entertainment industry, along with people who prefer to blame guns for everything, like Stephen King and Maureen Dowd, wants to ignore this incredible body of scientific research. Through their lobbyists, they’ve spent vast sums of money on disinformation campaigns, and vicious, mocking rebuttals and attacks on every one of these scientific statements and the researchers behind them.