At what point do we declare that the near saturation media coverage of the Newton massacre, however understandable initially, has become not just politically opportunistic on the part of a nearly unanimous gun control bloc but also voyeuristic?\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps any coverage of such a tragedy inevitably contains elements of voyeurism from the very start\u2014humans compassionately grieve for and sympathize with the victims, but also are drawn to look upon\u00a0 others\u2019 suffering with a horrified fascination.\u00a0 That fascination includes some element of \u201cPhew, I\u2019m glad that wasn\u2019t me\u201d (as well as: \u201cWhy him and not me?\u201d).\u00a0\u00a0 The Greek tragedians understood the mesmerizing effect of other people\u2019s travails.\u00a0\u00a0 The Newton coverage to me is starting to enter the realm of arguably gratuitous detail regarding matters best left to private sorrow.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The media also have an interest in selling their wares, obviously, and so will symbiotically exploit their audiences\u2019 voyeuristic tendencies as long as they can.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0Part of the answer to how much coverage of the massacre is justified\u2014and by extension, what the public policy response should be–requires precisely defining what happened there.\u00a0\u00a0 If we categorize it narrowly as belonging to the subset: schoolyard massacres, those are incredibly rare.\u00a0 The New York Times reports<\/a>:<\/p>\n Research on mass school killings shows that they are exceedingly rare. Amanda B. Nickerson, director of a center that studies school violence and abuse prevention at the University at Buffalo, said studies made clear that American schools were quite safe and that children were more likely to be killed outside of school.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n How much should we change our laws to prevent an event that almost never happens, especially in comparison to the number of school days logged by American children each year?\u00a0\u00a0 Gun control advocates thus want to put the Newton massacre in a broader context of gun violence more generally.\u00a0\u00a0 I have almost no gun rights instincts, so my knee-jerk response to the tragedy was: \u201cEnough is enough.\u00a0 The NRA\u2019s got some \u2018splainin\u2019 to do here.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0 Nevertheless I well understand the substantial arguments of the gun lobby against further regulation.\u00a0 Homicides have dropped enormously over the last thirty years, and not just because of better emergency care treatment.\u00a0 Gun violence is not getting worse, it\u2019s getting better.\u00a0 And as Steven Pinker has shown, violence in general has plummeted over centuries.\u00a0 Further restrictions on gun purchases will be greatly overinclusive, especially if we define the problem we are trying to avert as school massacres.\u00a0 Almost no one buying semi-automatic weapons and ammo will go on to murder school children.\u00a0\u00a0 But the proportion of legal gun owners who go on to kill anyone is also very low.\u00a0<\/p>\n The extent to which one tolerates over-inclusion and under-inclusion in a law depends on your preexisting world view\u2014if you\u2019re already inclined towards gun regulation, for example,\u00a0 you won\u2019t care so much if the proposed solution would burden many innocent gun owners and would not necessarily have prevented the current tragedy.\u00a0 Because I don\u2019t personally value gun rights, I am easily prepared to support a potentially infinite range of further restrictions on ownership.\u00a0 But I realize that such a position\u00a0 is purely idiosyncratic, if not selfish.\u00a0 Suggest something greatly overinclusive about something I do care about, and I will be much more insistent on a tight fit between the law and the alleged problem.\u00a0 When Al Sharpton proposes to shut down proactive policing in New York City after an officer mistakenly shoots an unarmed man, for example, I do rebel, and will argue the utter rarity of such shootings compared to the tens of millions of officer-civilian contacts a year and the costs of further restricting officers\u2019 ability to prevent crime.\u00a0<\/p>\n Short of disarming everyone, it\u2019s hard to see how to prevent such unusual tragedies like we just experienced\u2014especially where the gun user was not the lawful gun owner.\u00a0 Perhaps I\u2019ve missed something, but nothing seems to suggest that Adam Lanza was within the range of even greatly liberalized involuntary commitment laws, so the safe harbor of hoping that stricter mental health laws or even more treatment would have prevented Sandy Hook seems unavailable.\u00a0<\/p>\n Of course, the greatest victims of gun violence proportionally are blacks; there are more black homicide victims each year than white and Hispanic victims combined, even though blacks are only 12 percent of the population.\u00a0 Even the liberal media doesn\u2019t care much about them.\u00a0 Blacks are also the greatest perpetrators of gun violence.\u00a0 In New York City, blacks commit 80 percent of all shootings, though they are 23 percent of the population.\u00a0 Whites commit 1.4 percent of all shootings, though they are 35 percent of the population.\u00a0 Blacks are underrepresented among gun owners.\u00a0 Policing, not gun laws, brought gun violence down in New York City since 1994.\u00a0 The one root cause that I would go after to lower black crime would be illegitimacy.\u00a0 But the New York Police Department managed to decrease homicides by 80 percent since 1993\u2014twice the national average\u2014without changing family structure one iota.\u00a0<\/p>\n Left to my own devices, however, and reacting purely emotionally, I swing back into the gun control camp.\u00a0 There simply is no dispute that the U.S. is miles more violent than other advanced countries.\u00a0 Are guns a symptom or a cause of that violence?\u00a0 I don\u2019t know.\u00a0 But in any case, do we really need all those guns?\u00a0 Taboo question in many circles, I know.\u00a0 If something is question of rights, \u201cneed\u201d does not come into the question.\u00a0 And conservatives preach that we should be nonjudgmental about other consumer preferences.\u00a0 I am not supposed to question whether you \u201cneed\u201d five SUVs or 63 pairs of Jimmy Choo stilettos.\u00a0 Still, I will not mourn if it gets harder to buy guns.\u00a0 The sounds of the machinery of the federal government cranking into gear must be terrifying to many a libertarian, but is a federal response really so inappropriate?\u00a0 I am agnostic on this.\u00a0 Legislation serves a symbolic as well as a technocratic function.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n (However rare mass shootings are, Islamic terrorist shootings\u2014or any kind of domestic Islamic terror event–are even rarer.\u00a0 Conservatives have been just as quick to jump on the policy bandwagon to prevent Islamic terrorism, an exceedingly unusual occurrence, and in so doing to impose far greater costs and consequences, as liberals are with regards to highly publicized shootings.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At what point do we declare that the near saturation media coverage of the Newton massacre, however understandable initially, has become not just politically opportunistic on the part of a nearly unanimous gun control bloc but also voyeuristic?\u00a0\u00a0 Perhaps any … Continue reading