You Heard It Here First: Peculiarized violence and American society. It Wasn't The Guns That Changed, We Changed (a post that does and doesn't go where you think it is)

(Note.  This is a post I thought I'd posted back in November.  Apparently not, I found it in my drafts, incomplete.  So I'm posting it now having just finished it.  As I have a pretty distinct recollection of actually having posted a completed version, perhaps this is a semi duplicate.). 

I ran this item on violence in the US back in October, 2015:

Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...

Its one of the most significant posts on this blog.  And it remains the analysis that I think continues to explain what we've been seeing, and more than that refusing to see, in recent years.

Because this is such a politicized story, in which those arguing on it basically refuse to see anything but their own preconceived notions, serious discussion on this topic is extraordinarily rare.  People just go immediately to default arguments, even when some particular examples pretty much defeat the default arguments in certain circumstances.  People then wonder why "nothing happens", by which they mean, they wonder why everyone hasn't adopted the view that they held before any incident and continue to hold after an incident.  Rarely do I see any analysis on root causes of what we're seeing, and even rarely analysis which portrays the current situation correctly, other than I dare say my own.

Which is why I'm now posting on a public speech I ran across on television by Spokane Washington Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich.  I saw a segment of it on television and intended to link it in here on Youtube, but as I couldn't' find a link to it, in any form, that wasn't just screaming out the posters preconceived notions ("Sheriff Slams Gun Banning Commies" vs. "Puppy Kicking Sheriff Makes Fascist Rant") I gave up, and finally determined exert the portions of the speech that I think really say something in the context of this post, maybe in a narrow way, on just a narrow section of it, more succinctly than I did in my prior post.  In any event, it was nice to see that somebody else, somewhere, had actually given a little thought to this issue rather than leaped to their material based default argument.

In the Sheriff's September speech he states

I can tell you, folks, I carried a gun all my life. I hunted, I shot. My friends and I…It’s hunting season back home. When I was in high school, every one of those rigs in the high school parking lot had a gun in the gun rack. Why? We went hunting on the way home. None of those guns ever walked into a school. None of those guns ever shot anybody. What’s the difference? Did the gun change? Or did you, as a society, change? I’ll give you odds that it was you as a society, because you started glorifying cultures of violence. You glorified the gang culture, you glorified games that actually give you points for raping and killing people. The gun didn’t change, we changed.

As my long prior analysis shows, I think its more complicated than this, but I think there's a lot, indeed a very lot, to this statement.

Like the Sheriff, I come from a region of the country where guns have always been very common and that would frankly describe the entire American West.  The Sheriff gives one example which I recall very much from my own teen years and which nobody would ever have thought much of.  Indeed, this still happens, or at least did happen, in some regions of the country as at least one attempted mass shooting was stopped a few years ago when two high school boys went to their trucks and armed themselves with their hunting rifles, stopping the shooter before he accomplished anything. An interesting and relevant story but one which, of course, was missed in a media environment where such things just don't occur.

And not only is the Sheriff correct about that practice, but he is about the weaponry as well.  Mechanically, there's really nothing actually new on the firearms market that hasn't been there for at least fifty, and more likely more like seventy, or even up to 100 plus, years.  I noted that in my earlier posts, just as the sheriff did, although he didn't elaborate on it.  One thing that he elaborated on, which I didn't, is that teens frequently had access to weapons of this type, at least in rural areas, as teens. That's very true, and very significant evidence that it was we that changed, not the instrumentalities themselves.

So, what did the sheriff stated changed?  Society.

The way he put it was much simpler, and perhaps much narrower in focus, than I did.  He simply stated:

I’ll give you odds that it was you as a society, because you started glorifying cultures of violence. You glorified the gang culture, you glorified games that actually give you points for raping and killing people.

I think he's 100% correct on that.

I didn't put it quite the same way, and I view it somewhat differently. But I think is point is completely correct.  In my earlier post I noted:

So, what we'd generally note is that there were a set of behavior and social standards that existed, and they generally seem to have a root in the "Protestant" ethic.  I'll note here that I'm not claiming this as a personal heritage of mine, as I'm not a Protestant. Simply, rather, it's been widely noted that this ethic has a long running history in the US, and North American in general, and has impacted the nation's view on many things.  These include, I'd note, the need to work and the value of work, and the relationship of the individual to society, all of which have greatly changed in recent decades. Again, I'm not seeking to campaign on this, merely observing that it seems to have happened. This is not a "Tea Party" argument, or direction towards one political thesis or another.

These are related in this way.  No decent society would make a game of killing. But we oddly have, and in spades.  And we've oddly done it as we've become less and less personally familiar with the reality of it.  Indeed, on this upcoming Christmas a lot of people are going to receive gifts that glorify killing human beings.  That's really disturbing.

We worried, in earlier decades, that exposure to war would make young men violent. And it did make some violent.  Men in the James Gang, for example, had come straight out of Missouri guerrilla war before taking up a life of crime.  But by and large war didn't make men violent, it tended to do the opposite.

But the fascination with violence seems deeply rooted in the human heart.

In a grounded society, the depiction of violence will only be allowed to go so far.  People now make fun of things like the Legion of Decency and earlier film rating boards for what they wouldn't allow. But, rooted in a Christian world view, they simply wouldn't tolerate depictions of violence of any kind, including killing, but also sexual violence (more on that in an upcoming post) to go too far.

That started to break down when the influence of such organizations started to break down. And its all but gone now.  A film like The Wild Bunch is still shockingly violent, but even it has to show its shocking violence in context.  Perhaps only Wind River compares to it in that use in recent films.  Many other films are, frankly, just violent for violence sake.  A film like the 2012 example of Lawless, for example, is just perversely violent for no good reason at all, but its violence is so routine we don't even take note of it.

And those are just films. Games, I'd wager, are much more destructive to the long term psyche.

In earlier times, "war games" as played by children, involved running around the neighborhood pretending to shoot each other. The causalities, however, always got back up.  Now, however, people spend hours, sometimes days, doing just what the Sheriff noted, realistically pretending to kill people they do not now. For some, that's going to be horribly corrosive.  As I earlier noted:

One thing it seems that they do with their time is to play a lot of video games, or computer games, and a lot of those games are highly male oriented, and highly violence oriented.  Quite frankly, by all appearances, they appear to be highly sexualized as well.

This is one aspect of this situation that is completely new.  Violence isn't new, and the implements aren't new, but this type of cartoon active violent entertainment is.

Violent works of literature have existed forever.  Beowulf, for example, is pretty darned violent.  The Niebelungenleid is awash in blood and gore. The Iceland sagas are pretty darned violent.  But they're all written. And the written word is just a tiny evolution of the spoken word.  Both seem to serve the function of redecoration and entertainment, but neither seem to lodge in the brain in a way that comes out as "I'd like to replicate that".  Indeed, to a degree they seem related to the function of play, in which humans replicate certain scenarios as unconscious rehearsal for what we'd do in similar situations.  In other words, to use the Beowulf example, "if confronted by hideous evil I will. . . ."

Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species.  This seems, therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to excess.  It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in order to even get noticed by their viewers.  In terms of films, even violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.  Peckingpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his intent.  At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but now the violence is celebrated.  In that way, Peckinpah ended up becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence, to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography.  Ever since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to get our attention.  Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.

Recently, due to video games and computer games, both of these items, sex and violence, have crossed over from film into a type of hyperactive concentrated sophisticated cartoon portrayal.  Video games have popularized the concept of over muscled, hyperactive, amoral violent men, whose glory is their violence.  Their reward very often is an over endowed cartoonish female.  Neither portrayal is realistic in anything that it seeks to portray.

So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.  In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came, they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work oriented.  More than a few probably found a family that way.  Others never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family

Now, they're in the basement watching a make believe world glamorizing violence with M4 carbines which seems to offer them hero status and sex.  

This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type of people.  Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive.  Those societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to the group itself.  And violence has been massively glamorized in the region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.  In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very difficult.  The difference between there and here is that there, those with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting them through bombardment by violent entertainment. 

Raised in a society of relative values, and taught that killing is a fun game, that some take that as the lesson shouldn't surprise.

The Sheriff also blamed the mental health system in the country as well.

This is another example of the mental health system in this county collapsing around our ears. And perhaps those elected officials who control those monies could fund a little more to help those people out.  This is a state and national issue that they better wake up and start dealing with.  And I don't blame the local mental health either. They don't have the money to deal with this because the state has abandoned them. They have pushed this problem to the local level and the local levels are not equipped to deal with it.

I went into that as well, but frankly I've gone a lot further and feel that this problem not only exists, its growing deeper.  As I've noted we've now marginalized an entire large group of people that we once employed and basically forced into being members of society, for their own good it turns out. People with mental conditions that rendered them socially marginal were none the less included, as I"ve previously noted.  People with mental conditions that made them dangerous or totally incapable of being in society weren't treated as if their misery could be abated by not noting that they would never in this life be normal.  Neither group was warehoused in their parents basements for years and years pretending that Johnny will get it some day, poor soul.  

Okay, all stuff I've said before, but should we stop there. That's all the changes, right?

Well, not.  And I touched on this the other day as well.  Here's probably where all the folks who  are to the right of the NRA and have been cheering so far as they read this get mad, and here's something that the Sheriff didn't note.  While the guns didn't change, one of the things that changed about us, as a culture, is that somehow we became fascinated with a different set of guns than we were in prior decades.  It's quite odd actually.

Just as we've moved, as a society, from one in which most men, then many many men, and now few men, have seen actual military service, let alone combat, while the games young men play have become more and more combat oriented, that same thing has expressed itself in the firearms that people are fascinated with.  it's truly remarkable.

I focused on that a bit the other day in discussing the AR15.  The AR15, as I noted, has been around since the very early 1960s. But it didn't have very much respect in the firearm community until at least the 1970s.  It's become absolutely dominant since the early 1990s, and now is to a ridiculous extent.  At the present time, the M4 carbine and clones of M4 carbines are absurdly dominant in the firearms sector.

Now, there's nothing that's really new about the M4 carbine itself.  The M4 carbine is a development of a carbine version of the AR that goes all the way back to the origins of the AR.  First sold on the civilian market as the CAR15 the first military use of the little ineffective carbine was during the Vietnam War, at which time it was the XM177.  What's new, however, is that you didn't see ARs, let alone the carbine variants, every time you went to the sporting goods store or the range until the last fifteen or so years. Now, they're everywhere.

That's something that's significant, as something has changed that makes them that popular. And it isn't that they're all that. The AR isn't that good of design. The folks at Springfield Armory waged a rear guard action against it until they lost their place of work, and real marksmen in the service then carried that battle on for decades. The Army is really up front about its desire to dump it as soon as a new cartridge can be found to replace the existing service round, and the old complaints about its jamming keep on keeping on.  The AR15 of course did have a following right from the first moment it was first offered on the civilian market, but it was never simply everywhere and at least for the first couple of decades after it was introduced it wasn't a rifle that dominated every issue of every sporting magazine and which you'd see at the range every time you went.  It was there, but it isn't there like it is now.  And that tells us something.  It's something in the minds of the purchasers.

Now, military rifles have always been popular with certain shooters. But traditionally, they were very serious target shooters.  Achieving long range results with military type rifles has always been a shooting sport, and there have always been a class of very serious shooters that seriously studied and admired military rifles, including modern semi automatic military type rifles.  And there still is.  Indeed, this makes up a strong segment of the AR base as this class, if they shot National Match, were forced into AR type rifles when the rules were changed to require them.  Before that, M14 rifles dominated.  When the AR rifles became mandatory a vast amount of attention was then given to them by this sector which worked on creating a large number of target variants, some of which depart significantly from the military basic model.  Today they're used by lots of lots of target shooters and lots of precision civilian sporting shooters of all types.  And that's absolutely legitimate and fine.

And there have always also been serious gun collectors who like military type rifles and therefore are likely to have M16 and M4 variants as part of their collections.  Some, I suspect, would regard as nearly being mandatory to their collections. 

So neither of those demographics are new.  But what is new is the casual, and not really terribly serious, shooter who must have a M4 type rifle or some military rifle. That's new.  

Some time ago I happened to be at a range (I'll leave the location unmentioned for reason that will become apparent) that I regards as sort of the less than serious shooter's range.  It's always packed with guys who have AR variants, some of whom just seem to blaze away to blaze away.  On the range on this day in question was a class.  At the class a man dressed in military clothing was yelling, drill sergeant style, to a collection of men wearing mixed military clothing and equipped with a mixed variety of military inspired weapons.

Now, I have nothing against these weapons at all.  A lot of serious marksmen take a serious interest in semi automatic rifles that have military inspiration.  But when you see guys dressed like soldiers and taking a class from somebody  yelling at them like they're in boot camp, well, that's a bit different.

I'm pretty sure that at the time that I went through boot camp you could  not have offered such a class and had anybody show up.  A large percentage of men my age had been in real basic training and; 1) we'd been paid to do that (let's be honest, no matter how patriotic we may have been, we weren't doing it for free); and 2) it wasn't fun and we had no desire to pay somebody to go through that against, even if only for an hour.  Indeed, for those of us who stayed in what was then a very male, and very foul, and very rough organization and who, because of their career path would endure that treatment again, they were doing it for other reasons.  Not because they liked to receive verbal abuse.

I note this experience as there's some atmosphere out there now that is sort of relevant to this story just a bit.  Back when I was young, and back in the years prior to that, there were a lot of men, and a few women, who shot military inspired weapons for all sorts of reasons.  And that's 100% fine.  But I don't recall very many people for whom the weapon was ancillary to something else.  And maybe that's what I'm trying to define here.

Now, a lot of firearm users in fact regard the firearms as ancillary.  There are many serious hunters for example who like their hunting arms, but they're ancillary to the activity.  Indeed, I've seen guys who normally hunt with the finest rifles or shotguns borrow something on the border of being junk if a hunting opportunity came up suddenly they found themselves without their normal arms.  Many of these people are also firearms enthusiasts, but their enthusiams has a particular application its very closely tied to.  This varies from person to person but for example I've known men who knew all about shotguns in great detail but who knew next to nothing about any other firearm.  It didn't meet their application.  Conversely I knew men who knew all about all arms, but loved one class that they used.

This certainly wasn't limited to hunting arms.  There were target shooters who were the same way. And there were collectors who shot examples of their collections.  Those latter men, and this is very important to note, often shot military inspired weapons, including semi automatics, but their interest was different from what I noted above. Some were basically historians of a fashion, interested in the history of warfare, which is much of history, and whom sought to experience the material history directly (the same guys often found other material items very interesting).  Others were sort of like applied engineers, and found the mechanical nature of the firearms interesting.  Some, many, were both.

This differs it seems to me to what I'm sort of seeing on many ranges today.  But it's hard to describe.  I'll try an example to lead into it.  I once knew a fellow who had a vast detailed knowledge of the AR rifles in every sense.  He owned at least one, and probably more than one, over the years.  He didn't like them as a military weapon, or even in general, but he owned them as he had a historical and engineering mind and found them interesting.  Now, in contrast, I'll speak to people who have a tricked out M4 type carbine and are completely ignorant on all of that.  They really only know, in some instances, that it seems cool in a "tacticool" sense.

Am I saying that there's something wrong with that?  No, I'm not, if it leads to a greater interest in firearms and shooting and outdoor activities in general.  But if we focus on an imagined world of battlefield glory, well maybe there's something wrong with that.

Now, I'm  not saying that most of the owners of these rifles imagine themselves taking on the Taliban in some heroin infested sinkhole in Central Asia.  But I also think the popularity of these rifles has been undoubtedly fueled by a "cool factor" that has emphasized their military role. It's pretty interesting as in contrast what we used to see is an emphasis, when we sought it, on the sporting nature of military weapons, which is undoubtedly there.  So, we'd see artifices on "using the M1 Carbine for turkey hunting", or "accuraizing your M1 Garand for the match".  Now it's not unusual to read articles about using your M4 carbine for a personal home defense weapon.

Now, by all means, if you need a weapon to defend your home, find one that suits your needs, if you have the knowledge and capability to use it, and do what you think is right.  But the big emphasis on this we see in some quarters that glamorizes an imaginary world of local combat is something that is new and which we should really re-assess.

Again, I'm not saying that these weapons don't have a place in the civilian world.  Indeed, a sporting writer for Rifle who normally writes on hunting rifles recently wrote an article about shooting submachineguns, of which he apparently has several, as plinkers.  He says they're fun to shoot.  Perhaps they are.  But he wasn't writing about how you need one to defend the neighborhood from some big coming crisis.

So going back, what changed?  It's pretty clear we did.  We really lost our values in a real sense, replacing a set of values that was deeply grounded in Christian ethics with one that assumes we can all create or own individual secular Heavens, and as we became more remote from violence, we oddly glamorized it, including a bit in regards to the things we use. We can fix all that, but it takes some action and thinking.