We have been warned…

If a doctor diagnosed you with high blood pressure and told you it would probably kill you fairly soon, but you could easily control the problem and postpone your death for years by taking a prescription drug, what would you do?

After all, you were warned.

If an exterminator came to your house and told you he detected the beginning of a termite infestation that would make the whole building collapse in a few years, but he could easily fix the problem for a nominal fee by spraying the woodwork in your basement, what would you do?

Again, you were warned.

If a mechanic told you the airbag in your car was defective and could someday explode, sending shards of metal into your head and chest and killing you, but he could replace it in a few minutes at no cost to you, what would you do?

You were warned.

If a teacher told you your child would flunk out of school and have to repeat a grade unless he or she read a book and took a test, what would you do?

You were warned.

If you found out that some food you normally buy in the supermarket was making people get sick or die, what would you do?

You were warned.

And if the world’s most eminent climate scientists told you that by the year 2040, if we burn more than 30% of our known fossil fuel reserves around the globe, we will cross an environmental red line, resulting in more extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves, rising sea levels and so on, what would you do, knowing that food will become scarce, parts of the world’s coastlines may find themselves under water and millions of people are likely to die?

Further, if we were to burn ALL of our available fossil fuels, the scientists said, humans would find large parts of the planet uninhabitable out of doors.

The year 2040 is only 21 years from now. People who are in their 30s now will be 50-something then, and children who are, say, 12 years old will be 33. Does this relate to anyone you know?

The solution to this environmental crisis is not to pull out of global climate agreements or to open up national parks for more oil exploration or to legislate tax incentives to rescue coal-burning power plants or to sit back and watch as the Amazon rain forest burns to the ground. The answer is to reduce or eliminate the combustion of fossil fuel and increase our reliance on renewable energy sources such as wind, water, solar, biomass and others.

The question is, what will you do?

You’ve been warned.

That time before there were violent video games…

I was scrolling through my Facebook news feed this week and happened upon a photo of the Three Stooges. I didn’t stop to read the story, but it did make me stop and think about all the hours I spent as a kid watching those guys on Paul Shannon’s Adventure Time, which came on TV every weekday after I got home from school.

I was just an impressionable young boy back then, sitting alone on the living room floor watching Moe Howard poke out Curly’s eyes, smack Larry Fine silly and hit both of them on the head a thousand times with his fist or objects such as hammers, shovels, bottles, pipes, mallets, plates…and basically anything else he could get his hands on. I watched Moe slap Larry and Larry turn and slap Curly. These violent acts were what passed for slapstick comedy in the middle- to late-1950s, and kids like me ate it up with a spoon.

In between episodes of the Stooges, I watched the Road Runner abuse Wile E. Coyote, blowing him up with dynamite, dropping an anvil on his head, forcing him off the edge of a cliff or tricking him into slamming head-first into a fake tunnel he had painted on the side of a rock.

Other times I watched Bluto pound the bejeezers out of Popeye before the hero chewed a wad of spinach and then knocked his arch enemy into the middle of next week. So many of the other cartoons were violent, too…Tom and Jerry, Woody Woodpecker, Mighty Mouse, even Bugs Bunny and a lot of the Looney Tunes gang, including Yosemite Sam, Elmer Fudd and the Tazmanian Devil.

When I wasn’t watching cartoons, I was watching cowboy shows where the “good” white guys rode through the West killing “bad” red Indians and “bad” brown Mexicans and a whole lot of other bad people with…wait for it…pistols, rifles, shotguns, cannons and anything else that could be ignited to plant a projectile into another human being.

I watched these shows all through my formative years and yet, remarkably, after I grew up, I never walked into a school, a theater, a night club or a Walmart with a military-style assault weapon and murdered a dozen or more innocent people. Nor did anybody else I know, even though that’s what we all watched in the 1950s before anyone had invented video games or the devices needed to play them on.

Now before I go any further, I have to admit that I have never played any of the violent video games that get blamed every time there is a mass shooting in America, games such as Call of Duty, Mortal Kombat, Doom, Grand Theft Auto, Manhunt, Death Race or — god forbid — something called Super Columbine Massacre, which Wikipedia describes this way:

Super Columbine Massacre…recreates the 1999 Columbine High School shootings near Littleton, Colorado. Players assume the roles of gunmen Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold and act out the massacre, with flashbacks relating parts of Harris and Klebold's past experiences. The game begins on the day of the shootings and follows Harris and Klebold after their suicides to fictional adventures in perdition.

Seriously, I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to recreate the tragedy of the country’s first major school shooting by designing a video game that could, in practice, be played by children of all ages and mental capacity, and I probably don’t really want to know. And as I said, I have never played any of these games or any of the dozens of others that I found on Google (but have never heard of), so I can’t say definitively what impact, if any, they have on the people who commit mass shootings in this country.

But I do want to make one point:

Just like people my age were able to grow up from childhood to adult while watching violence on television without murdering anybody, I’m reasonably certain that millions of people all around the world are playing violent video games like the ones I mentioned above without killing anyone or committing any crimes whatsoever.

Why do you think that is?

I think it’s because it’s not the games alone that create mass killers but a combination of factors including the mind of these shooters, their home environment, outside influences that plant and cultivate the seeds of hatred and the need for attention and, certainly, the ability of these individuals to legally acquire the weapons needed to carry out the slaughter of innocent men, women and children.

It doesn’t help that our nation’s leaders are encouraging violent behavior and giving a platform for white supremacists, neo-Nazis and Confederate-flag-waving cotton belt rednecks who still think the South is going to rise again; or that right-wing conservative Christian organizations are claiming discrimination against the god-fearing white man; or that anti-immigration xenophobes are adopting rallying cries like “the great replacement” theory which argues that menacing forces are trying to destroy white, Christian “homelands” by flooding them with other racial and religious groups.

(Someone please tell me how the “great replacement” differs from the “final solution,” if you know what I mean.)

And it certainly doesn’t help that the National Rifle Association and other well-funded gun rights organizations are pouring millions of dollars into the coffers of prominent politicians to ensure that no sensible gun legislation is ever passed in this country.

So while I’m conceding that a white guy who walks into a Walmart in a predominantly brown city like El Paso, Texas, and shoots a bunch of Hispanics is a product of his environment, and that our collective environment does include such things as violent video games, mental health issues, drug addiction, poor parenting, bad movies and TV shows, rap music and all of the other excuses we use (other than guns) for why someone commits mass murder in America, I’m still going to argue that all of those environmental factors exist in virtually every other country in the world, but that only in America where guns outnumber people are those factors secondary to a culture that makes mass murder so easy to accomplish.

Simply being exposed to violent video games is no more the cause of mass shootings than standing outside a school building is the cause of measles, colds and flu. 

I never watched Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto but I did watch Moe, Larry and Curly. In that regard, I’m still waiting for the day when a 69-year-old man walks into a Walmart store, slaps several people in the face, hits a few more on the head with a mallet and tries to poke out someone’s eyes. Then, and only then, will I believe that simply being exposed to violent behavior in our society is the reason why so many good people have to die. 

Gun violence statistics require a closer look

Several memes and other written posts have been floating around on social media in the past few days suggesting that there have been “more mass shootings than days of the year” in the United States during 2019.

On some level, that appears to be somewhat true, but I believe we have to look closely at these statistics to see what they really say before we start tossing them around like pure fact.

Here’s what I mean:

One source for these numbers, which I found quoted in a CBS News article, is the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which describes itself as “a not for profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun-related violence in the United States.” Note the words “gun-related violence.”

In the wake of actual mass murders in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio, in which lone shooters with military-style weaponry went into crowds of innocent civilians and shot dozens of people seemingly at random, there arises a need to differentiate between “mass murder” and “gun-related violence.”

For example, I recently wrote a Facebook post that quoted statistics from Mother Jones, an admittedly liberal magazine and online publication generally known for accurate reporting. Mother Jones categorizes “mass shooting” as any incident in which three or more people were killed. I had gone to the Mother Jones database to determine the rate of carnage that has occurred since the Sandy Hook murders in December 2012, in which young children were slaughtered at an elementary school.

Here is what I wrote:

It has been 2,425 days since 20 children, aged 6-7, were slaughtered along with six adults at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. Since that time, according to Mother Jones, America has suffered 52 more mass shootings that left 424 people dead and 900 people wounded, including two in less than 24 hours this week.

Let me say that again. There have been 52 mass shootings since the murder of 6- and 7-year-old children that was finally supposed to bring about some sensible gun laws in this country...except that it didn't. I don't know what else to say about that except these numbers speak for themselves

Now compare that number—52 mass shootings since 2012—with the 250-plus reported by CBS News in 2019 alone and you have a serious disconnect. Here’s why:

I took a look at the Gun Violence Archive quoted by CBS and discovered that it counts virtually every time someone shoots off a gun at someone other than his girlfriend, his wife or himself. A quick scan of GVA’s spreadsheet told me that in the vast majority of the shootings it reported, the number of dead victims was either 1 or 0. 

What were included—in addition to shootings like El Paso, Dayton and the garlic festival in California—were shots fired during fights in church parking lots, family feuds, drug deals gone haywire, gang violence, drive-by shootings and even a shooting during a funeral procession for a dead rap musician.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that any of the above examples of people being killed by guns is any less tragic than any other, and I’m not suggesting that America’s gun problem only kicks into play when three or more people are killed. What I am saying is that social media is notorious for throwing around rumors, speculation, political opinion, distortion, deflection, trolling, misconceptions and outright lies which are masqueraded as facts, when facts they certainly are not.

In addition, we have a tendency to look at scare headlines on Facebook, Twitter and other places and absorb them through osmosis into our daily dialogue without giving them a complete read or even thinking about what they mean. This is a dangerous way to get our news and an even more dangerous way to form our opinions.

I’d point out that Mother Jones could easily have blasted out a liberal talking point that greatly inflated the seriousness of gun violence in America but chose instead to take the more conservative, more consistent approach to the issue of “mass shooting.” I’d also suggest that GVA is probably honest in its reporting, too, but the numbers it reports and the way it records them are vastly different than the way they are being portrayed on social media.

We have known for some time that critical thinking is all but dead in this country and that many of our citizens only see, read and hear what they want to believe, and that it is only getting worse under the current administration. What I believe is that this variation in the way gun deaths are reported is one more example that proves that theory to be true.

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Don’t take my word for these statistics. Below are two links to the databases described above. You can click the links and read the numbers for yourself.

Mother Jones

Gun Violence Archive