Consuming Violence

Once again dozens of people have been shot by a single gunman, this time in Las Vegas, and we are left wondering why we continue to see this kind of carnage. Those on the political left blame lack of sufficient gun laws to prevent someone from acquiring weapons with the capacity to inflict such devastation. Those on the right point to mental health as the problem, noting that people do the killing, not the guns themselves.

But solutions to such complex problems are never that simple. We should consider tighter gun control and better mental health safety nets, but we also need to address our culture of violence and the way our 24/7 news cycle grants such shooters the attention many crave.

The violence we find in action movies and video games can be described as “happy violence,” where heroes mow down enemies to save the day. One such scene is the shootout in the lobby from the original Matrix movie. Neo is pummeled with gunfire, but armed with guns in both hands, he coolly mows down all the assailants and emerges with hair and sunglasses intact.

The actor Michael Moriarty once defended violence in media by noting that violence is a primary element in Greek tragedies, and those of Shakespeare. But the violence in classical dramas takes place off stage, and the play goes on to address the impact of that violence on both the victims and the perpetrators. In today’s culture, we witness the violence, we cheer it on, but we rarely see the consequences.

Violent video games go even farther, letting us pull the trigger ourselves, racking up points as the bodies fall. A witness to the massacre in Las Vegas remarked that it was just like a video game, except that these were real people. A sniper with fully automatic weapons, the shooter rained a hail of bullets on the crowd below without seeing any of their faces, making them as anonymous as the images in a video game.

It is unlikely that the media will stop covering such atrocities and deprive the assailants of the notoriety they seek, but more news outlets should focus on the victims, as NPR is doing with profiles of those killed in Las Vegas, and as Time Magazine did with its extensive profiles of the nine people killed at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, SC, in 2015.

The motivation of each shooter may be different, and figuring out the riddle of this one may not help to identify the next one, before it is too late. But unless we quit consuming recreational violence, we will continue to see it played out in reality. And until we lose our voracious appetite for sensational news stories, someone who craves the spotlight will find a way to top the latest slaughter with an even more outrageous crime.