By Robert Jay Lifton.
The combination of mental disease and access to guns leaps out at
almost everyone in connection with the Virginia Tech shootings. But
from there ideas and advocacies tend to become amorphous and tinged
with hopelessness. There is consensus that something should be done
to intervene earlier in threatening forms of psychological
disturbance, and as a psychiatrist I agree and also recognize some of
the social obstacles to doing so. But while there will always be
mentally ill people, a few of whom are violent, it is our
gun-centered cultural disease that converts mental illness into massacre.
Indeed, I would claim that a gun is not just a lethal device but a
psychological actor in this terrible drama. Guns and ammunition were
at the heart of Seung-Hui Cho's elaborate orchestration of the event
and of his Rambo-like self-presentation to the world. When you look
at those pictures, you understand how a gun can merge so fully with a
person that a man who makes regular use of it could (in the
historical West and in Hollywood) become known as a gun.
Some years ago, the distinguished historian Richard Hofstadter told
me that, after a lifetime of studying American culture, what he found
most deeply troubling was our country's inability to come to terms
with the gun -- which in turn strongly affected our domestic and
international attitudes. Emotions of extreme attachment to and even
sacralization of the gun pervade American society, and commercial
interests shamelessly manipulate those emotions to produce wildly
self-destructive policies.
http://chronicle.com/temp/reprint.php?id=hhd082zwll82fgp4vjt4dvlmdy0nqxj6Link
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