It’s Not A Sudden Madness

It’s Not A Sudden Madness, But A Long History Of Mass Murder Come Full Circle.

By Glen Ford,
Courtesy Of "Black Agenda Report"

As a native-born American, I grew up watching cowboy and Indian shoot-em-ups in which the highlight of the movie was when the white guys in the circled wagon train shot the Indians off their horses until all the red men were dead, and very silent. Indians didn’t do a lot of screaming in pain when they were shot; they just expired.

 Same thing with buck-toothed Japanese, line after line of them, charging into U.S. machine guns, falling instantly silent and dead. It was somehow quite clean, almost antiseptic, these cinematic rituals of death, all staged for the broadest popular consumption to demonstrate the inevitability - and cosmic justice - of ultimate white victory over the darker races.

This was mother’s milk to the white American nation - which is why Richard Pryor and kids like me rooted for the Indians. Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion, which is a celebration of a genocidal march across a continent filled with other, doomed human beings.

America’s contribution to European culture was to invite “all the nations of Europe” to come to these shores and become fellow “white” citizens, whose status was defined by the enforced inferiority of Blacks and the remnants of the Indians. Ritual burnings of Blacks were organized as great public festivals, attended by thousands, staged in order to affirm whites’ collective right to commit murder. This monopoly on violence was what made them white Americans.

U.S. foreign policy reflects the nation’s origins and ghastly evolution into a globe-strutting mob, that empowers itself to kill at will.

A million dead Filipinos at the turn of the 20th century; aerial bombing of Haitian villages less than a generation later; the totally unwarranted nuclear annihilation of two cities at the very end of World War Two; two million dead Koreans shortly thereafter; three million dead Vietnamese in the next decade,; and, since 1996, six million Congolese - all, and many, many more, slaughtered in the name of U.S. civilizational superiority - the ghastly opiate of the white American masses.

What kind of human beings does such a culture produce? To paraphrase the Bible, “By their massacres, ye shall know them.” The modern mass American murder is overwhelmingly a white phenomenon. Yet few whites ask the question, “What’s wrong with white America?” It is seems that white America lacks the capacity for self-examination. It cannot grasp the simple truth, that a culture that celebrates the annihilation of whole peoples, casually and without guilt or introspection, is devoid of human values at its very core.

In the end, it turns against itself. That is the simple lesson of Newtown, and Columbine, and Aurora. The same cultural deformity creates a huge market for games like the very popular Assassin’s Creed, whose latest version integrates individual and group murder with events of the American Revolutionary War. American kids can simulate mass murder all day long, and feel patriotic and smart while doing it. Assassin’s Creed features an inter-racial cast of killers - possibly in deference to the brown guy in the White House who owns the ultimate Kill List. It’s the modern equivalent of the cowboys and Indians movies of my youth. The same sickness.

Does The Bible Make Americans More Violent?

By Valerie Tarico
Courtesy of "AlterNet"

My friend Li is an Evangelical Christian and, in keeping with her family values she keeps an eye on what her children view and read. In the summer, she took her 12-year-old daughter to the Hunger Games. “It’s the perfect movie for her,” Li commented. “No swearing and no sex.” No swearing; no sex. Just people stalking and killing each other.

The Motion Picture Association of America agrees with Li’s priorities. So did the writers of the Bible.  Our love-hate-love affair with violence goes way back.

It goes way back, and it also appears to be changing. In his 2011 book, The Better Angels of our Nature, Stephen Pinker lined up information from a wide variety of sources to show that human societies are less violent now than ever in recorded history. Violence dropped precipitously with the agricultural revolution, and then again with the Enlightenment and more recently, with the emergence of universal human rights. In the U.S., recent decades have seen a decline in murder rates and gun ownership. This finding is counterintuitive for several reasons. We have become more sensitized to kinds of violence that once were accepted as normal, like child and wife abuse; modern weapons of war have made killings more dramatic; we forget how brutish our ancestors really were; and thanks to media, modern incidents of violence produce shockwaves of trauma that once were impossible. All of this obscures a long and vast trend line toward—it sounds weird to say it—a kinder, gentler world. A medieval British man was fifty times more likely to die at the hands of another man than is his modern descendant.

We might be even farther along this path were it not for a love affair with fantasy violence that, if anything, appears to be growing.

The Motion Picture Association of America has been rating sex, violence and profanity in movies since 1968, with the goal of limiting how much of each children absorb—or at least giving parents a tool that lets them make the judgment call. In 2006, the Annenberg Public Policy Center reviewed the top grossing movies since the rating system began.  In fact, they reviewed movies all the way back to 1950. They found that explicit sex and violence had both increased over time, but that “ratings creep” affected only violence. Explicit sex is still reserved for “R” rated films; explicit violence is not.

Many parents naively trust that media targeted at young children are developmentally harmless even though brain science suggests otherwise. They similarly tend to assume that a G-Rating means a movie is low on violence. In reality, it may mean simply that the violence is less realistic or designed to trigger laughter rather than fear. A Harvard study published in 2000 reviewed every animated feature film produced between 1933 and 1999, 74 in total. At the time, the findings made headlines because they were startling:

-- Every single film had at least one violent act. The amount of footage devoted to violence ranged from 6 seconds to 24 minutes.

-- Most of the films showed physical fighting as a means of resolving conflict.

-- Characters used weapons including swords and guns and every-day objects.

-- In half of the movies at least one character gave violence a thumbs-up at some point by cheering or laughing.

A follow up  in 2004 showed that G-rated movies, like all others, gradually are becoming more violent. A 2007 study sampled 77 PG-13 films and tallied 2251 violent actions, with nearly half causing one or more death.  Researchers classified most of the incidents as “happy violence” meaning it was “cool, swift, and painless.” Today, by the age of 11, the typical American kid has seen almost 8000 murders on TV. Why? Because we like it that way. Movies that are rated R for violence make more money than those that are rated R for other reasons. We are attracted to violence and we are inured to violence.  Most Americans—not just my friend Li--find murder to be more acceptable fare for children than sex or swear words.

Our peculiar hierarchy of priorities may be due in part to the influence of Abrahamic religion on Western Civilization and the unique standing accorded to the Bible in American Christianity specifically. The Bible amalgamates the mythology and legal codes of a specific kind of culture: a clan-based tribal society in which herdsmen struggling for survival in an arid and increasingly denuded environment. Males competed to control females and territory while maintaining the purity of bloodlines and inheritance; gods that were modeled on warlords competed for fealty. Consequently, while codes governing sexuality and blasphemy were strict, codes governing violence were complicated.

Yahweh himself originated as a war god. Non-Hebrews were regarded with hostility and indeed, much of the founding story of the Israelite people comprises tales of triumphal genocide. The violence in in the Bible is so extreme that it defines vast portions of the book:

[Edmund Leach] looked at the Bible through the eyes of a communications engineer and asked: what message are these authors trying to get through to the reader? The answer, Leach thought, was that they were trying to obscure the fact that mankind began through incest (Adam and Eve) and so the strategy was to compile a list of atrocities so heinous that, in the end, the original incest would come to look like a harmless act.

Whether history or mythology or some fusion of the two, the Bible stories, when tallied, include an estimated 25 million violent deaths. And yet, like any people, the internal narrative of God’s Chosen Ones is one of yearning for peace and prosperity, the dream of an idyllic past in which the lion lay down with the lamb; an idyllic future in which men will beat their swords into plowshares and the lamb and lion will lie down together again.

Like the ancient Israelites, we Americans see ourselves as peacemakers. During the midwinter holiday season, Peace on Earth is sung from choir lofts and hung in shopping malls. We complain about our role as “policeman to the world.”  And yet, if we could see ourselves as others see us, we would see a people who, like the ancient Israelites have created unparalleled archetypes of violence: the Rambo, the mushroom cloud, the Tommy Gun, the Cowboy. Hollywood ensures that, even independent of the world’s best funded military, violence is one of our top exports.

I once rode a bus to a then small town in Mexico called San Cristobal de las Casas. The ride was my introduction to a new phenomenon that would become a bane during subsequent budget travel: video on buses and trains. It was also my first awakening to the level of violence we Americans export to the world as storytellers. Real dialogue can be hard to translate; psychological or social nuance almost impossible. But sex and violence are universals, which means they are even more ubiquitous in the movies that cross cultural and economic lines than those that don’t.

On this particular bus ride, the gratis entertainment was about a serial killer who was making snuff films. As we swayed around mountain switchbacks, the sound blared. Men, traditionally clad women, and small children pressed against each other, with no option but to face the screen depicting death scene after death scene. My savage hope was that the other passengers were motion sick like me and that the pairing of the film and switchbacks was conditioning a permanent visceral aversion to sexual violence.  Later that year, on an all-night bus, I would find myself assaulted by my first movie about people hunting people. The male lead was a hunky white supremacist, a farmer by day who secretly liked to hunt Blacks.

In movies, of course, it is the bad guys who do the unprovoked killing. Any violence perpetrated by the protagonist, meaning by us at a fantasy level, is vengeance or justice. Most people are deeply ambivalent about violence. We are both attracted and repelled by it. We enjoy and fear it. It turns us on and it horrifies us. Consequently, to get the satisfaction of a good blockbuster we need those bad guys to instigate things. The violence we like best is righteous violence, and—in movies and stories--most violence is just that. It protects innocence and restores justice. It safeguards women and children and the homeland.

Ironically, those who most relish the fantasy power of righteous violence are those who in real life are most likely to perpetrate unrighteous violence. Masculinity, the substance of action films, is defined by the Oxford Online Dictionary thus: possession of the qualities traditionally associated with men: a need for men to prove their masculinity through domination over women. Hypermasculine men hit women more, and a woman being pregnant is no deterrent. In the real world, tough guys are good guys until suddenly, sometimes, they are not. In the real world, most murders are triggered by the same motives we find so satisfying on the screen: righteous anger, a sense of violated fairness or honor, the outrage of feeling wronged, the conviction that the one murdered was the bad guy.

Most of us will never kill. These days, most of us don’t even hit. Even so, if we hope to continue the trend toward less violence, the challenge is not whether we can call up the heroism to face down villains and demons like those in our stories but whether we can continue to face away from our own dark fascinations. Alexander Solzhenitsyn posed the painful conundrum: “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Who of us is willing even, to miss the next blockbuster? In The Hunger Games, the bad people are the citizens of the Capitol who demand that outlying districts provide sacrificial contestants for their high tech version of the Roman Coliseum. Movie viewers and readers root for the kids and scorn those who give them no choice but to kill or be killed, those who watch the blood sport for entertainment. But the books and movie work only because we, as readers and viewers, ignore the disturbing obvious: we arethe Capitol. The Hunger Games were staged for us; we are and always were the only intended audience.  Suzanne Collins offered us a chance to watch kids hunting and killing each other, and we ate it up. Did she laugh we flocked to the book stores and theater, as we downloaded DVD’s and shared dog-eared copies and checked sequel release dates? Did she cry? Did she care? Do we? 

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington and the founder ofWisdom Commons. She is the author of "Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light" and "Deas and Other Imaginings." Her articles can be found at Awaypoint.Wordpress.com.

We Are A Country Drenched In Bloodshed

There are many causes of violence in our culture, but the least understood is the heavy influence of media.

By Don Hazen, Jan Frel
Courtesy Of "Alter-Net"

The horrific massacre of schoolchildren and their teachers in Newtown, Connecticut, has unleashed an unprecedented debate about how to address the problem of mass violence in our country. There is an increasing sense that American society is incapable of protecting its citizens, including young children, the most vulnerable among us.

Yes, it's important to focus attention on the increase in the size andsavagery of the murders: Six of the 12 most deadly shootings in our history have occurred within the past five years. The vast majority of the world's worst mass shootings have taken place in the United States. And there have been 65 mass shootings since Rep. Gabby Giffords was shot in 2009. Still, despite their horror, mass murders like Newtown are thankfully rare. So we must pay attention to the daily violence, too. Nearly 13,000 homicides were committed in theU.S. in 2010, 8,775 with firearms. So in addition to the most heartbreaking, large-scale killings, the problem is pervasive and the bloodshed overwhelming.

What About Violence in the Media? 

It's revealing, that amidst the millions of written words, TV discussions and proposed solutions, regulating the violence that pervades mass media -- movies, TV, the toy industry, gaming, and the Internet -- is not often seen as a productive avenue for reform of our violent culture. This seems especially true of liberals and progressives. We invest a great deal of energy pushing strongly for gun control, which is more concrete and tangible, with clearly defined targets and enemies. But we stop short of going after purveyors of violence in the media. Traditionally, this has been more of a priority for conservatives. 

But when we looked into the impact of violence in the media, we were shocked at what we found. We, like many people we know, and perhaps you reading this, had a series of wrong-headed notions about the nature of the problem. We found that the issue has been studied for well over 40 years, and has been the subject of over 1,000 studies -- including reports from the Surgeon General's office in 1972, and the National Institute of Mental Health. The studies "point overwhelmingly to a causal connection between media violence and aggressive behavior in some children," according to theAmerican Academy of Pediatrics.  

We were especially surprised to learn that researchers, as summarized by the French Canadian media activist andresearcher Jacques Brodeur, claim to have proven that "the effect of media violence is bigger than the effect of exposure to lead on children’s brain activity, bigger than the effect of calcium intake on bone mass, bigger than the effect of homework on academic achievement, bigger than the effect of asbestos exposure on cancer, bigger than the effect of exposure to secondhand smoke on lung cancer." 

Are you surprised? We certainly were. If you are like us, you probably think that the research linking steady exposure to violence in the media to anti-social attitudes and acts has not been proven, which of course, is what the entertainment industry has insisted over and over again.

In line with arguments made by the entertainment industry, you might also have bought into the notion that violence in the media simply reflects the violence in society -- even though that is patently absurd when you look at the numbers. Or, because the First Amendment is sacred, expressions of violence, no matter how unrealistic, inaccurate or gruesome, are protected or should be protected.

But most media violence is a commercial creation, designed to addict people to violence and make billions of dollars. This has almost nothing to do with free speech.

Multitudinous Causes in the Mix

Before we go any further we want to stipulate that there is no one cause, or small number of causes, behind the culture of violence in America. There are many culprits but especially culpable are alcohol abuse, which often leads to violence; the war on drugs, which make drugs hugely valuable, increasing the violence (though much of the worst violence takes place in Mexico); the return of hundreds of thousands of soldiers from two long and brutal wars, many trained killers, many with PTSD; the militarization of police departments, with heavy surveillance technology designed to make even a normal person paranoid; mass incarceration in prisons run frequently by companies trying to make a lot of profit off crime, and where for inmates, prison is often a graduate course in more advanced crime, especially since there are no jobs and almost zero help in integrating ex-cons into productive lives after they leave prison; and high levels of unemployment, especially among the working class and those without college diplomas.

Certainly, the political climate over the past five years, with the emergence of the gun-toting Tea Party, has raised the specter of violence. There has been a marked increase in militia groups and right-wing extremists. Threats upon the president's life have increased, likely stoked by the relentless and aggressive lies about President Obama's birthplace, his roots and his intentions. Attacks on Obama get huge attention in the media, exacerbating divisions and frustrations. There have been powerful propaganda campaigns by the NRA to scare people into stockpiling massive amounts of ammo, based on the completely out-of-touch-with-reality notion that the Obama administration is going to take away their guns and ammo. (Actually, President Obama has increased the rights of gun owners, and articulated an aggressive interpretation of the Second Amendment.) It's hard to measure the levels of paranoia and fear that cloud the judgments of millions of Americans, enhanced by a number of conspiracy theories and the presence of media idiots like Donald Trump to give them exposure. That too must be factored in when it comes to understanding the ingredients of the violence. 

Then there is what is often called the "masculinity crisis." The changing roles of men, inspiring feelings of uselessness; the growing success and prominence of women and the increased maladaptiveness of many masculine traits, which are not so useful in day-to-day life in America in 2013 as they have been in the past. The end result, for whatever combination of reasons, is that virtually all the violence in America is executed by men.  

 What About Mental Illness?

Notice that mental illness is not on the above list of the most obvious causes of violence. While people who commit mass murder and suicide are obviously ill, Dr. Richard Friedman,writing in theNY Times, explains that only 4% of the violence in the U.S. can be attributed to mental illness -- and that the lifetime prevalence of violence among people with very serious illnesses is only 16% compared to 7% of people with no mental illness. Friedman adds that people who abuse alcohol and/or drugs were nearly seven times as likely as those without substance abuse problem to commit violent acts. And then, the mass murderers are not predictable: expert and psychiatrist Dr. Michael Stone at Columbia says, "Most of these killers are young men who are not floridly psychotic. They tend to be paranoid loners who hold a grudge and are full of rage."

Add Guns and Media to the Mix

Add to this gnarly mix of causes 300 million handguns in a third of American homes -- and you have a ticking time bomb. Then, you place all of the elements in the context of the pervasive violence in media, so prevalent that it's almost like the air we breathe. It starts with "killer" toys aimed at toddlers, moves to the most violent video games imaginable, then to films and television shows with numerous acts of violence, seen daily by hundreds of millions of people. Many of these depictions glorify brutishness, macho insensitivity, misogyny, racism, and barbaric behavior. According toSophie Janicke of Florida State University, who references the National Television Study (1998), two out of three TV programs contain violence, amounting to six violent acts an hour. The majority of this content is shown in children's programming (69%). It has been estimated that by the age of 18, the American youth will have seen 16,000 murders, and 200,000 acts of violence only on television."  

The end result is the mess we are in as a society. And there is no easy way out.

Because the problem of violence is so omnipresent, clouding many people's daily lives with fear, real or imagined, distorting relationships and many aspects of human interaction, we must start to seriously look at the prevalence of media violence and try to imagine how we might make it better. We must acknowledge that the media adds to the dangerous brew of violence in our culture.

Gun Control or Gun Safety

The rush for some kind of symbolic or even modestly substantive gun control legislation is understandable. There is no question that reducing the number of guns in the country, especially making them harder to access when someone has the urge to kill, will result in fewer violent deaths. However, gun control is not a quick, easy or comprehensive solution to the problem of perpetual violence. The battle for gun safety -- given the political realities and the pervasiveness of guns -- won't even begin to address the massive, interlocking and mutually reinforcing violent aspects of our culture.

Future generations may benefit from whatever we are able to accomplish now in terms of gun reforms. But there are many other factors to tackle, and solely focusing on gun control is not enough.

A Reflection of Society

You may wonder, as the heads of the Motion Picture Association have told us over and over, doesn't media simply reflect the society we live in?

The notion that media merely holds a mirror to society is easily disproven. Iowa State'sBrad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson explain: 

"Even in reality-based TV programs, violence is grossly overemphasized. For example, one study compared the frequency of crimes occurring in the real world with the frequency of crimes occurring in the following reality-based police TV programs: America's Most Wanted, Cops, Top Cops, FBI, The Untold Story, and  American Detective (Oliver, 1994). The real-world crime rates were obtained from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI; 1951-1999) Uniform Crime Reports, which divide seven major types of crimes into two categories, violent and nonviolent. About 87% of the crimes occurring in the real world are nonviolent crimes, whereas only 13% of crimes occurring in reality-based TV programs are nonviolent crimes. The largest discrepancy between the real world and the world depicted on television is for murder, the most violent crime of all. Only 0.2% of the crimes reported by the FBI are murders, whereas about 50% of the crimes shown in reality-based TV programs are murders."

What About the First Amendment?

As you might expect, given the huge dollars involved, any attempt to constrain big media, entertainment, video game and toy manufacturers, will result in screaming about "freedom of expression." And it is true that the FCC regulates indecency and offensive speech but not violence, because content regulation can be construed as a First Amendment concern as much as a matter of commerce.

However, the First Amendment, like the Second Amendment, has been substantially altered by powerful forces influencing the courts over time. As Adam Gopnick writes intheNew Yorker:

"…..  the blood lobby still blares out its certainties, including the pretense that the Second Amendment—despite the clear grammar of its first sentence—is designed not to protect citizen militias but to make sure that no lunatic goes unarmed. (Jill Lepore wrote about the history of the Second Amendment in the New Yorker recently.) Make sure that guns designed for no reason save to kill people are freely available to anyone who wants one—and that is, and remains, the essential American condition—and then be shocked when children are killed."

To many, the Second Amendment now means the freedom to carry a concealed handgun almost anywhere, including schools.

Over time, the First Amendment -- the right to free speech -- has also been distorted to serve the interests of the corporations that in dominating our media are never at a loss for the right to speak. It's not unlike the infamousCitizens United Supreme Court decision, where the courts have expanded corporations' rights to expression to include investing unlimited money in political campaigns, without even identifying themselves, and at the expense of the individual person's rights.

According to Mary Megee,in the U.S., "most cultural messages are strained through a commercial filter which uses gratuitous violence as an industrial ingredient to keep viewers tuned in, ratings high and profits up."

For corporations, the law of commerce and the market is the ultimate rule. In their highly sophisticated propaganda efforts, media corporations try to obscure the fact that they operate on the public airwaves, with licenses. The government intervenes if a swear word is uttered on air, or when Janet Jackson's nipple was exposed for a brief moment during a Super Bowl show. But the most gratuitous, destructive, dehumanizing violence is not considered worthy of focus, because of the power of the media to shape reality, as well as significantly affect the careers of elected officials and the "fear" associated with tangling with the First Amendment.

It's ironic that parents who push for less violence on TV are labeled "pro-censorship," when in fact the omnipresence of programming filled with violence often displaces more constructive material from the air. "The preference for violence, is made by somebody, elected by nobody, prisoner of a toxic culture," who knows that whomever is in charge expects them "to give priority to cruelty, aggression and hatred," writes Jacques Brodeur. 

The tobacco industry offers a relevant analogy. Tobacco companies (along with the ACLU), in the face of overwhelming negative health data about tar in cigarettes, insisted that the regulation of cigarettes, and the advertising for them, interfered with free expression. It took many years to marginalize the cigarette industry. Twenty percent of the population still smokes,falling by half from 1965 when 42% of adults smoked.  

Changing behavior and fighting corporate power is a long and arduous process, but it's possible.

Isn't Violence Going Down?

We do face a paradox in society where the hugely visible mass murders are increasing, while violence as a whole, as measured by crime statistics, has gone down -- great news. For example, violent crime in Los Angeles is four times lower than it was in 1992. The interesting thing is that no one can explain exactly why. Of course, there is no end of politicians and police officials who take credit for it. The high number of people in jail may be a contributing factor, although many are in jail for non-violent crimes, mostly drug offenses. The high number of police in some cities like New York may contribute to less crime. On the other hand, in Chicago, where the high ratio of police to citizens is second only to New York, crime appears to be out of control.

Nevertheless, it's important to keep in mind how the U.S., despite drops in crime, still dwarfs all developed countries in the number of guns, level of violence, number of mass murders, and number of people in jail and under supervision by the criminal justice system. The fact that violent crime has dropped is certainly good news. But we made the bar so high that we still have epidemics of violence, bloodshed and murder in our society. 

It's worth noting that in the wake of the Newtown massacre in Connecticut, TV and film executives purposefully avoided broadcasting violent programming. TheNew York Times noted thatUSA Today stopped broadcasting violent police and detective shows; Quentin Tarantino's gory new film had its red carpet event scaled back; previews of Tom Cruise's new film were canceled; and "Hollywood’s power lunches have been filled in recent days with conversations about hypocrisy."

History tells us that this momentary moral pang will dissipate and the hunt for profit through violence will continue. If we want to get serious and confront this issue, we will have to establish a framework for regulating media violence made by businesses seeking to sell tickets, ads and products to the American public. 

Time to Put TV Under Scrutiny

The ultimate trouble we face as a society is the powerlessness of most people in the face of corporate dominance. We lack responsive democratic institutions to leverage change in policy to make us less vulnerable to domination by corporate interests. The pervasive and accurate feelings that the political system is bought and sold, that most elected officials belong primarily to the "money party" or their "future million-dollar job" party in whatever industry they choose to specialize, leave many people in despair, and in some cases angry and violent. 

In a political system as out-of-whack as ours, where billionaires pour untold millions into elections to seal their outcomes, where corporations spend billions on lobbyists who promote their interests, building on citizen outrage and turning it into change is a difficult challenge. 

AsBrodeur writes, over the past 40 years there were industries polluting our air, water and food, while the entertainment industry "increasingly poisoned children's cultural environment with violence carried by TV programs, movies and video games. While society agreed to regulate the pollution of air, water, food, governments have been unable to regulate use of violence in entertainment products for children."

The executives of a handful of big media conglomerates think they own the freedom of the press and it's their right to decide what will be aired to children (and adults) in the global market. Of course, not all TV is toxic; some of it's often inspiring, but a lot of it is the opposite. 

Still we have to face the music. We need to challenge our assumptions about why our society is so violent. Yes, there are many reasons, and it's often next to impossible to separate them, as they do feed on each other. But that is no excuse for not trying to address all of the causes and not spend all our political capital on gun control and fighting the NRA. There is no avoiding that violence in the media, for children and adults, which along with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is central to our society being drenched in violence.

Television, quintessentially American, may very well be our biggest culprit. Brandon Centerwall argues thatresearch demonstrates "that crime rates more than double within 10 to 15 years of the introduction of television to any society." He points out that homicide doubled in the US after the introduction of TV in the 1950s andthat the relationship is causal. 

It's time to take a closer look at the dark side of the ubiquitous and beloved television, and ask what television programming contributes to a very imperfect society. Is your TV making you less safe? 

Mass Killings Occur In USA Once Every 2 Weeks

Mass killers target Americans once every two weeks on average, in attacks that range from robberies to horrific public shooting sprees like the massacre Friday of 27 people in Newtown, Conn., a USA TODAY examination found.

Using news accounts and FBI records from 2006 through 2010, the most recent years for which complete records were available, USA TODAY identified 156 murders that met the FBI definitions of mass killings, where four or more people were killed.

All told, the attacks killed 774 people, including at least 161 young children.

The review offers perhaps the most current, complete picture yet of a crime that is both frighteningly common and not widely understood.

"Everybody is surprised when they hear it's dozens a year," said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox, who has studied mass murders. "People don't understand them. When they think of mass murders, they only think it's random."

USA TODAY's examination did not include murders during the past two years, both of which were marked by a series of high-profile public shootings, including a rampage this year at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater that left 12 dead and 57 injured, and an attack on a Sikh temple in Wisconsin that killed six.

Without more complete records, it is impossible to know whether mass killings increased over those years — though they have become less common since the mid-1990s, according to Grant Duwe, director of research at the Minnesota Department of Corrections, who has studied mass murders.

• The killings between 2006 and 2010, however, offer a portrait of mass murder that in many ways belies the stereotype of a lone gunman targeting strangers.
• Lone gunmen, such as the one who terrorized Sandy Hook Elementary School last week, account for less than half of the nation's mass killers. About a quarter of mass murders involve two or more killers.
• A third of mass killings didn't involve guns at all. In 15 incidents, the victims died in a fire. In 20 others, the killer used a knife or a blunt object. When guns were involved, killers were far more likely to use handguns than any other type of weapon.
• Children are frequently victims. At least 161 who died in mass killings -- roughly one in five -- were 12 and younger.
• Mass murderers tend to be older than other killers, with an average age of nearly 32 years old. Like all killers, they are overwhelmingly men.

Friday's massacre in Newtown "has turned a whole new page" in the nation's long-running debate over guns, said Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., a leading proponent of tighter gun laws. "Parents and grandparents, dads, gun owners are thinking that their children at any time at any place could have someone come in and do this kind of massacre."

But for all the attention they receive, mass killings still accounted for only a tiny fraction — about 1% — of all the Americans who were murdered over those five years. During those five years, more died from migraines and falling out of chairs than were murdered by mass killers, according to death records kept by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Three times as many people perished from sunstroke.

Via: USA Today

A Timeline Of Mass Shootings In America

On Friday morning, 27 people were reportedly shot and killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, CT. According to sources, 18 of these casualties were children. This is the second mass shooting in the US this week, after a gunman opened fire in an Oregon shopping mall on Tuesday, killing 2. ABC News reports that there have been 31 school shootings in the US since Columbine in 1999, when 13 people were killed.

Below Is A Timeline Of Mass Shootings In The US Since The Columbine High Massacre:

* December 14, 2012 - Adam Lanza 20 years old, extinguished the lives of 20 children and 6 adults, at the Sandy Hook elementary school, in Newton, Connecticut.  All six adults killed at the school were women. Of the 20 children, eight were boys and 12 were girls. All the children were 6 or 7 years old. 

December 11, 2012. On Tuesday, 22-year-old Jacob Tyler Roberts killed 2 people and himself with a stolen rifle in Clackamas Town Center, Oregon. His motive is unknown.

September 27, 2012. Five were shot to death by 36-year-old Andrew Engeldinger at Accent Signage Systems in Minneapolis, MN. Three others were wounded. Engeldinger went on a rampage after losing his job, ultimately killing himself.

August 5, 2012. Six Sikh temple members were killed when 40-year-old US Army veteran Wade Michael Page opened fire in a gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Four others were injured, and Page killed himself.

July 20, 2012. During the midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, CO, 24-year-old James Holmes killed 12 people and wounded 58. Holmes was arrested outside the theater.

May 29, 2012. Ian Stawicki opened fire on Cafe Racer Espresso in Seattle, WA, killing 5 and himself after a citywide manhunt.

April 6, 2012. Jake England, 19, and Alvin Watts, 32, shot 5 black men in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in racially motivated shooting spree. Three died.

April 2, 2012. A former student, 43-year-old One L. Goh killed 7 people at Oikos University, a Korean Christian college in Oakland, CA. The shooting was the sixth-deadliest school massacre in the US and the deadliest attack on a school since the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre.

October 14, 2011. Eight people died in a shooting at Salon Meritage hair salon in Seal Beach, CA. The gunman, 41-year-old Scott Evans Dekraai, killed six women and two men dead, while just one woman survived. It was Orange County’s deadliest mass killing.

September 6, 2011. Eduardo Sencion, 32, entered an IHOP restaurant in Carson City, NV and shot 12 people. Five died, including three National Guard members.

January 8, 2011. Former Rep. Gabby Giffords (D-AZ) was shot in the head when 22-year-old Jared Loughner opened fire on an event she was holding at a Safeway market in Tucson, AZ. Six people died, including Arizona District Court Chief Judge John Roll, one of Giffords’ staffers, and a 9-year-old girl. 19 total were shot. Loughner has been sentenced to seven life terms plus 140 years, without parole.

August 3, 2010. Omar S. Thornton, 34, gunned down Hartford Beer Distributor in Manchester, CT after getting caught stealing beer. Nine were killed, including Thornton, and two were injured.

November 5, 2009. Forty-three people were shot by Army psychiatrist Nidal Malik Hasan at the Fort Hood army base in Texas. Hasan reportedly yelled “Allahu Akbar!” before opening fire, killing 13 and wounding 29 others.

April 3, 2009. Jiverly Wong, 41, opened fire at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York before committing suicide. He killed 13 people and wounded 4.

March 29, 2009. Eight people died in a shooting at the Pinelake Health and Rehab nursing home in Carthage, NC. The gunman, 45-year-old Robert Stewart, was targeting his estranged wife who worked at the home and survived. Stewart was sentenced to life in prison.

February 14, 2008. Steven Kazmierczak, 27, opened fire in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University, killing 6 and wounding 21. The gunman shot and killed himself before police arrived. It was the fifth-deadliest university shooting in US history.

February 7, 2008. Six people died and two were injured in a shooting spree at the City Hall in Kirkwood, Missouri. The gunman, Charles Lee Thornton, opened fire during a public meeting after being denied construction contracts he believed he deserved. Thornton was killed by police.

December 5, 2007. A 19-year-old boy, Robert Hawkins, shot up a department store in the Westroads Mall in Omaha, NE. Hawkins killed 9 people and wounded 4 before killing himself. The semi-automatic rifle he used was stolen from his stepfather’s house.

April 16, 2007. Virginia Tech became the site of the deadliest school shooting in US history when a student, Seung-Hui Choi, gunned down 56 people. Thirty-two people died in the massacre.

February 12, 2007. In Salt Lake City’s Trolley Square Mall, 5 people were shot to death and 4 others were wounded by 18-year-old gunman Sulejman Talović. One of the victims was a 16-year-old boy.

October 2, 2006. An Amish schoolhouse in Lancaster, PA was gunned down by 32-year-old Charles Carl Roberts, Roberts separated the boys from the girls, binding and shooting the girls. 5 young girls died, while 6 were injured. Roberts committed suicide afterward.

March 25, 2006. Seven died and 2 were injured by 28-year-old Kyle Aaron Huff in ashooting spree through Capitol Hill in Seattle, WA. The massacre was the worst killing in Seattle since 1983.

March 21, 2005. Teenager Jeffrey Weise killed his grandfather and his grandfather’s girlfriend before opening fire on Red Lake Senior High School, killing 9 people on campus and injuring 5. Weise killed himself.

March 12, 2005. A Living Church of God meeting was gunned down by 44-year-old church member Terry Michael Ratzmann at a Sheraton hotel in Brookfield, WI. Ratzmann was thought to have had religious motivations, and killed himself after executing the pastor, the pastor’s 16-year-old son, and 7 others. Four were wounded.

July 8, 2003. Doug Williams, a Lockheed Martin employee, shot up his plant in Meridian, MI in a racially-motivated rampage. He shot 14 people, most of them African American, and killed 7.

September 15, 1999. Larry Gene Ashbrook opened fire on a Christian rock concert and teen prayer rally at Wedgewood Baptist Church in Fort Worth, TX. He killed 7 people and wounded 7 others, almost all teenagers. Ashbrook committed suicide.

July 29, 1999. Mark Orrin Barton, 44, murdered his wife and two children with a hammer before shooting up two Atlanta day trading firms. Barton, a day trader, was believed to be motivated by huge monetary losses. He killed 12 including his family and injured 13 before killing himself.

April 20, 1999. In the deadliest high school shooting in US history, teenagers Eric Harris and Dylan Kiebold shot up Columbine High School in Littleton, CO. They killed 13 people and wounded 21 others. They killed themselves after the massacre.

Via: "AlterNet"

Damage Control: Run, Hide and Fight

Surviving An Active Shooter Event

What would you do if you found yourself in the middle of a mass shooting? 

“Your survival may depend on whether you have a plan.”

This is a $200,000 training video that has been developed to help people survive what the US calls an ‘active shooter event’.

The Mayor’s Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security Department produced the video, which offers a three-step guide on confronting such an unthinkable scenario: run, hide, fight.

The key to survive such a live-or-die scenario is mirrored in the video’s title: run, hide and fight. The video may be viewed online at: www.readyhoustontx.gov

“Anything you can put together to try to disarm the attacker,” Storemski said. “Whatever you can find, whether it be a hard object or a pointed object, can be thrown at him. It’s even better if multiple people are available to do that, working in tandem against the attacker.”

Via: The Houston Chronicle

The Lifesaving Tips Include:

RUN:

(When an active shooter is in your vicinity)

- If there is an escape path, attempt to evacuate
- Evacuate whether others agree to it or not
- Leave your belongings behind
- Help others escape if possible
- Prevent others from entering the area
- Call 911 when you are safe

HIDE:

(If evacuation is not possible, find a place to hide)

- Lock and/or blockade the door
- Silence your cell phone (ringer & vibration)
- Hide behind large objects
- Remain very quiet

FIGHT:

(As a last resort, and only if your life is in danger)

- Attempt to incapacitate the shooter
- Act with physical aggression
- Improvise weapons
- Commit to your actions

A) Try to be aware of your environment
B) Always have an exit plan

911:

(When law enforcement arrives)

- Remain calm and follow instructions
- Keep your hands visible at all times
- Avoid pointing or yelling
- Know that help for the injured is on its way

A) Your actions can make a difference for your safety and survival
B) Be aware and be prepared