When I was a kid, I was always aware of guns. It was the south, the 60’s, and most people I knew had a gun, or several.
My grandfather wore a pistol in a shoulder holster. My older brother used to take me and my younger brother out shooting. My great-grandmother had a .22 rifle she kept handy. Guns were all around us, everyone had access to them, and you never heard of some crazy loon walking into a school and shooting up a classroom full of kids.
Guns, or access to guns likely have very little to do with Columbine, the Aurora Theater, the Fort Hood shooting, the Newton school incident, the Westside Middle school shootings, or any of the other 62 mass murders committed with guns since 1982.
In fact, when I was a kid, the mass murders that made the news rarely even involved a gun. There was Charles Manson, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Albert DeSalvo (Boston Strangler), David Berkowitz (Son of Sam) and Richard Speck. None of these horrific criminals used a gun to wipe out dozens of victims at once; instead they took out their victims one at a time, over months or years, using strangulation, or knives.
Guns were no less available 40 years ago than they are now, so I would ask the question as to why we have seen such a spectacular rise in kooks committing these crimes with guns.
While I am certainly no scientist, I think there is one main factor. Television.
Yes, Television. Every other TV show has taken the art of “grisly” and compounded it. From CSI to Grey’s Anatomy to Bones – the art of depicting blood and gore has become so common that we are desensitized to it. We think nothing of seeing human entrails, gaping wounds, vast pools of blood, and because it happens on TV, it’s easy for us to forget that when this happens to real people, the effects are deadly.
The other reason I believe that TV is a root cause of our rise in spectacular mass murders is that the news media has turned into this huge piranha like machine that simply devours anything and everything in order to fill the 24×7 news feeds necessary to keep the machine running. The ultimate goal of every 24×7 news channel is to fill those 1,440 minutes of every day with something that makes their viewers stay tuned in.
Covering the local PTA meeting may be something we need to see and hear, but covering a 
shooting six states away in a town no one ever heard of before will be something that causes viewers to stand up and notice.
Couple this with the fact that a lot of these mass murderers have a drive to be noticed, to go out at the peak of their 15 minutes of fame, and you have a rather unscientific cause-effect scenario.
It works for me. When I was a kid, TV shows wouldn’t dare show what they do now. Even movies were cautious about what went on screen. How did Alfred Hitchcock make his movies so scary with so little blood? Could he be successful today?
Apparently kooks feed off one another. They see someone getting their name in bright lights, and suddenly we have all these gun incidents.
It isn’t the guns.
OK, I’ll admit, there is absolutely no reason for a private citizen to have a high-powered military grade assault weapon. Just as we don’t allow private citizens to have nuclear bombs or a stash of grenades in the basement, we should ban all assault weapons.
Mind you, it won’t stop the criminals, and it won’t eliminate all the ones already out there, but it will make a lot of soccer mom’s feel better about it.
I feel badly for all the affected families. I had just moved to Colorado when the Columbine school shooting happened, we could almost see the school from our office windows, and even though I didn’t know anyone who was affected, it felt like a blow to the gut. But, even though I felt so badly, even then I knew that guns weren’t the problem.
Mental health care in this country is practically non-existent. Many employers who offer health insurance either don’t include mental health care, or have such a tight limit on what is covered and how much can be spent annually that it is near useless.
Then there is the stigma. As a society, we act as bullies to anyone who shows a need for mental health care. It’s right up there with having AIDS – something not to be discussed, and often left untreated rather than suffer the embarrassment.
We can make ourselves feel better about this by letting our legislators pursue some useless bit of legislation that bans private citizens from possessing a few really dangerous weapons, or we can really address the problem by insisting that mental health care is as important as going to the dentist or being treated for cancer.