Grisly Show Is Only the Latest for America’s Violent Culture

In the prime time hours after horror swept through a Colorado high school Tuesday, an American armed with a TV remote control needed only five minutes of channel surfing to sample the mayhem that invaded millions of homes:

Scenes of unspeakable carnage from Columbine High School (click) gave way to images of buildings burning in Belgrade after a NATO attack (click) followed by a hidden-camera video showing a nanny beating up a toddler (click), then a Western shoot-’em-up (click) and more scenes from the suburban campus where students were gunned down like targets at a carnival arcade.

It was just another night on American television, and a disturbing reminder of how deeply ingrained violence is in our culture. Although these images are random, they form a picture of this nation’s profoundly ambivalent relationship with guns and the use of deadly force to settle disputes.

Indeed, the Littleton tragedy raises questions not only about the dark side of U.S. culture but also about the numbing repetition of such events--and the nation’s apparent inability to do anything about them, let alone understand them. Asked to make sense of the latest shooting, historians, cultural observers and media critics peeled back the layers of American life--touching on themes of guns and hypocrisy, adolescent psychology, family tensions and media accountability.

“We are obsessed with violence as a people, and even though we wring our hands, they’re covered with blood,” suggested Richard Slotkin, a Wesleyan University history professor and author of “The Myth of the Frontier in 20th Century America.”

“We’re shocked by images from Littleton, but bombing Belgrade is OK. We’re against the nanny, but we’re entertained by the Western. There are serious moral and political issues here, and yet this country hasn’t begun to sort them out.”

To put it bluntly: If Americans do not feel emotionally responsible for the civilian damage caused by U.S. planes every night in Yugoslavia--and celebrate the fact that not one soldier has been lost after four weeks of hostilities--how different is that from the murderous indifference of students who fired away Tuesday in Colorado?

Europeans were stunned by the story, and it quickly supplanted Kosovo as the main topic in many overseas papers. The London Evening Standard, voicing disbelief over America’s weak gun control laws, editorialized: “So extravagant is the American concept of ‘freedom’ and so deep rooted is the pollution of firearms of all kinds throughout the country that there is little prospect that even this latest monstrosity will provoke a meaningful shift in public attitudes.”

As they debate these incendiary issues, Americans can only note milestones on a calendar: This month is the fourth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing; the fifth anniversary of the end of the Waco siege. The Colorado massacre echoed earlier schoolyard shootings in Jonesboro, Ark., West Paducah, Ky., Springfield, Ore., Fayetteville, Tenn., Edinboro, Pa., and Pearl, Miss.

Ironically, big city crime, including school violence, is down across America. But apocalyptic events like Waco and Littleton are increasing, and they almost invariably have taken place in small towns or suburbs--the very places that people have fled to in large numbers to escape urban disorder.

“You can say that this event [Littleton], at heart, is about very troubled youths and the fact that we don’t understand them,” said American history professor Joyce Appleby. “It may be these youngsters felt they had been taunted by other kids, and this is a very old phenomenon. . . . But what we’re seeing today is a new deadly recipe for acting these pressures out instead of swallowing them. That’s what’s disturbing.”

The shooting also brings up an old question: How much responsibility does the culture bear for images of violence and retribution, which fill movies, TV, video games, the Internet, recorded music and even the most elementary cartoons today?

“We’ve seen a steady escalation of violence as entertainment, and it reaches people in disturbing ways,” Appleby said. “Billions of people watch these pictures around the globe, but somewhere a handful of boys weren’t horrified, they were fascinated.”

Others say it’s a mistake to blame the media-entertainment culture for spreading such bloody themes, because they merely reflect the tensions and dysfunction percolating in the country at large. Scapegoating the media, they add, takes moral responsibilities away from individuals, where it belongs.

“We’ve had some very antisocial attitudes manifesting themselves in America during the 1990s, and you think back to David Koresh in Waco, Timothy McVeigh in Oklahoma City, and all of these schoolyard atrocities,” said Todd Boyd, an author and professor at the USC School of Cinema and Television.

“The media influences people, but you don’t march into a school armed with guns and grenades and kill [13] people overnight. It doesn’t come from nowhere,” he added. “Ultimately it comes from someplace broader and deeper, and we’ve been unwilling to ask ourselves these hard questions.”

If the Colorado schoolyard shooting proves anything, others say, it’s that the traditional sense of adolescence in this country as a time of growth and independence, free from the travails of adult life, may now be virtually extinct.

“We used to have that precious space for kids to grow up in, but now there are so many violent forces taking it away,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said. “Schools aren’t safe; the home isn’t safe from domestic violence; the streets are full of risk . . . and the media is filled with so much sex and violence.

“We didn’t want kids to see the arbitrariness of life. But violence is everywhere, and it’s so sad.”

In the days ahead, Americans should be asking themselves about violence in their daily lives, Slotkin said. To ignore these larger questions means that, once again, the nation’s short attention span will move on, and the trauma will recede.

“We have a long history of permissive views towards guns in America and the use of weapons to settle scores,” he added. “And even though we complain about this, we as a people are still not sure we want to give up our right to kill someone.”