Everybody agrees that there’s too much violence in
the culture. There’s even wide agreement on three major instruments of
the violence – guns, the mentally ill, and the entertainment media.
Gun
owners, usually defined by liberals as “gun nuts,” are most tempting to
blame in the wake of shootings like those at a high school and then at a
movie theater in Colorado and lately at an elementary school in
Connecticut.
Not so easy to blame is Hollywood, purveyor of wholesale violence,
usually rendered as a romantic pursuit of justice. People like movies,
even bad movies, and Hollywood’s chief customers are the young, the
restless and the easily impressed. The shooters are nearly always found
walking around in this market, looking for trouble.
The mentally ill, or at least mentally disturbed, are the hardest to
identify, and the shooters are almost invariably the young men who ought
to be safely locked away in a loony bin where they could do no harm to
themselves or others. It’s just not fashionable in the salons of the
left to say so.
The First, Second and Fourth Amendments, which guarantee free speech,
gun ownership and freedom from illegal search and seizure, remain
formidable obstacles to the government, which by nature seeks to
restrict and control the freedoms of everybody. Who can say which of
these guarantees is most important? Therein lies the dilemma of a free
society where everybody wants to talk, just not to each other.
After the tragedy in Connecticut, President Obama quickly named the
inevitable task force, theoretically to listen and then to report what
it heard. He put Joe Biden in charge, which may be a clue to how much he
thinks the panel’s own conclusions will be worth. It won’t matter,
anyway, since we already know what he thinks about guns and what he
would like to do about them. We know what his constituency thinks, too.
“To be fair to Obama,” writes John Cassidy in New Yorker magazine,
“nobody should underestimate the hatred, ignorance, baloney, mendacity
and borderline lunacy that would confront him if he were to . . . take
on the gun lobby.” So why talk to “the other side?” Mr. Cassidy is only a
little more hysterical than average.
So good luck with that “national debate.” Good luck, too, in
Hollywood. Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer who has pumped more
trash and gore into the bloodstream than almost anyone else, in a fit of
pretension called a “filmmaker summit” in the wake of public outrage
after the Columbine shootings. “I think as filmmakers,” he said, “we
should sit down – the Marty Scorseses, the Quentin Tarantinos and
hopefully all of us deal in violence in movies – and discuss our role in
that.”
Not that violence in movies has anything to do with inspiring
impressionable young men copying the violence in real life. “If we
don’t get gun-control laws in this country we are full of beans. To have
the National Rifle Association rule the United States is pathetic.”
Alas, this is the level of Hollywood’s understanding of how America
works.
How to control the crazies, certified and uncertified, is difficult.
We’re paying the price now for dismantling public psychiatric hospitals
50 years ago, which made civil libertarians feel good about themselves
but which is judged now to have been a public catastrophe. Thousands of
unstable men and women were set loose on the streets with a bottle of
pills and told to swallow them on schedule.
The three largest mental-health hospitals remaining, write E. Fuller
Torrey and Doris A. Fuller in the Wall Street Journal, are the
psychiatric wings at Riker’s Island in New York, the Cook County Jail in
Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Jail. The feds, who can’t run
public housing, public health care and education, observes the Wall
Street Journal, can’t be trusted to identify and deal with crazy people,
either, but several of the states have established effective outpatient
programs.
Quentin Tarrantino. Photo by Georges Biard
The First Amendment protects Hollywood’s gore machine. The first
amendment guarantees even irresponsible speech but does not require it, a
distinction often lost on those who abuse it. Getting crazy people off
the street would be difficult. The Second Amendment protects the right
of the law-abiding to own a gun. That’s the target of the gun-control
hysterics.
Wesley Pruden is editor emeritus of The Washington Times.
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