How Do We Respond?

In the wake of every murder and every tragedy arise terrible questions that no trial, no law, no punishment, or even looking into the eyes of the person who perpetrated the violence can answer. What forces make it possible for one human being to take the life of another, especially such young children? Murders can be solved and even explained - at least, modus operandi is the operating assumption of criminal investigation and the narrative logic behind every whodunit - but to think about a specific act with any clarity, or for very long, can be difficult, and viscerally painful. Maybe the brisk trade in lurid violence as spectacle has something to do with it. One either watches or averts one’s eyes. Either morns with tears or watches in stunned silence and disbelief. Dispassionate reflection rarely enters into it. Scholars ranging from theologians and psychologists to evolutionary biologists have offered theories about murder, but the analytic burden placed on any general discussion of murder, freighted, as it is, with atrocity, is nearly unbearable. Nothing suffices, or can.


Between the convulsive emotional response to the horrifying scenes as they where acted out on an office break room TV half way across the country, and an elusive general theory of what makes a murderer 'tick' lies another kind of contemplation that is relevant on almost every social feed. The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, beaten out in this ugly comparison by only Columbia and South Africa, and defeating by several old western countries like France and the United Kingdom.

Why?

Historians haven’t often asked this question, but in the shadow of recent events it is hard not to have the query creep to mind. A critique of the question itself makes us wonder if historians or sociologists are the better people to ask. Taking a day to reflect, and another to try, and fail, to forget, pondering if I'm even in the right to do anything but mourn the spilling of innocent blood, lead me to this conclusion; There is, always has been, and always will be, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics.

Benjamin Franklin said “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The difference of such a quote in America compared to our counterparts in Europe and other lands, is that this quote represents a founding principle of one country, and the ramblings of a rebel foreign land to another. For centuries Europe was ruled by an elite few that fealty was determined by who could and would defend you and your family. Although those days are long and gone, any approach to address violence within their society originates from at this end of the spectrum. However, in America, it is very much the opposite. Over the era of emerging democracies in western culture, concepts of gun ownership and the capacity of government to regulate all weapons has taken the approach of what the government gives up in Europe, and what it takes away in America.

Democracy requires dissent. If a high American murder rate is a function of not placing our trust in government, are we doomed to endure a high murder rate? Will a narrowing of the social divergence of European and American Culture ultimately lead to a more closely linked murder rate? Does the trust placed in a government needed to surrender a right to arms remove the need for them to be removed? Why do Americans carry so many more weapons then in other countries? Do we even have the ability to remove guns in any meaningful volume?

Most of these questions are not answered because they make most of us sick. Trying to accept what appears to be an epidemic as a mere symptom of our own freedom and liberty seems to do nothing but frustrate anyone trying to determine how we can stop the horrific scenes in Connecticut from ever happening again.

There is no good answer, someone will disagree, someone will take offence, that is the root vitality of our democracy. The horrible irony that this is also, ultimately, the closest root cause of why we, as Americans, seem to be confronted by these pernicious acts time and time again.  

So here we are. I, typing away. You, reading and drawing your own conclusions, with what seems like so little to gain from all this. Most likely, we will continue to look over our shoulder from time to time, to stay up late at night wondering if there is anything more we can do as individuals to make our children safe. People will talk of true evil and how it can never be rooted out, others will speak of the need to take action and pay whatever cost to avert such a catastrophe again. These questions have been asked before, and are all but doomed to be asked again someday.

My prayers, thoughts, and sympathies to the families in Newtown that grieve and look for answers, and to any others that have been affected by senseless violence.