If You’re Looking for a Scapegoat, Try NRA

Violence is part of the human condition and sometimes snaps in inexplicable and chaotic ways. Despite this, the United States--alone among Western industrial societies--lets every man, woman and child have easy access, day or night, to combat weapons and handguns.

So why need we get ensnared in yet another inconclusive debate about the “culture of violence?” In 1954, just as the baby-boom generation began to enter its preteen years, in those last moments before the days of rock ‘n’ roll, we had Senate hearings on juvenile delinquency that launched a crusade against horror and crime comic books. In the late ‘50s and early ‘60s came the assaults on rock ‘n’ roll and the attempts to censor it for its sexual suggestiveness and blame it for youth riots and juvenile delinquency (again). FBI agents actually spent more than two years analyzing the lyrics to “Louie Louie” for a supposed subliminal challenge to authority.

But apparently we’re going to let rock ‘n’ roll--and even rap--off the hook this time. So can we blame it on Oliver Stone or “The Basketball Diaries”? We may find them distasteful, but this approach is not likely to fly. As for video games, the new demon for liberals and conservatives alike, there is some genuinely unpleasant stuff out there: violence and gore and weapons as real as what those Apache pilots in the Balkans see in their visor screens. But there is no convincing proof that the games are a trigger mechanism to violence. When kids arrive at school, their classmates want to know not whether they have been playing video games but whether they are carrying guns.

But what can we do about that? A parent is not able to stop the open commerce in guns. A parent does not possess the ability to design and manufacture a kid-proof gun or mandate the use of fingerprint-recognition technology. Only governments can do this.

In Japan, Canada, Australia and, indeed, most Western industrialized nations, violent movies, music and video games are the norm but access to firearms is not. In 1996, handguns were used to murder two people in New Zealand, 15 in Japan, 30 in Britain, 106 in Canada, 213 in Germany and 9,390 in the United States.

The entertainment industry makes an easy, feel-good target, but in the end there is no clear, plausible relationship between entertainment and violent behavior--unlike the distinct relationship between Eric Harris’ TEC-9 semiautomatic pistol and some of the 15 dead in Littleton, Colo.

It is time to go way beyond ineffective measures like the so-called assault weapons ban, which is so riddled with loopholes that these guns are still legally and freely available to an 18-year-old boy with a grudge. It is time for President Clinton to get tough. Instead, he offers to “bury the hatchet” with the National Rifle Assn. This is ridiculous. The hunters and sportsmen with whom we might reason do not control the NRA; its fanatic leadership can’t be replaced by a majority vote of the membership; the bylaws appear to have been blatantly rigged in favor of a small minority, a situation that warrants investigation.

The national majority in favor of real gun control has been frustrated not only by the NRA’s ruthless use of money and fanaticism, but also by the lack of effective leadership from the gun-control movement and by Clinton’s failure to commit to this issue as anything much more than a public relations exercise. There is no making nice here; these are not nice people. Charlton Heston is unblinking in the face of the images of students fleeing Columbine High School. “Our mission is to remain a steady beacon of strength for the 2nd Amendment, even if it has no other friends on the planet,” he said. “We cannot let tragedy lay waste to the most rare and hard-won human right in history.”

The 2nd Amendment does not, in fact, guarantee to citizens the absolute right to bear arms. In 1992, six former attorneys general, Democratic and Republican, signed a statement that said, “For more than 200 years, the federal courts have unanimously determined that the 2nd Amendment concerns only the arming of the people in service to an organized state militia; it does not guarantee immediate access to guns for private purposes.”

It is patent insanity to think that art causes violence. Music doesn’t put guns in the hands of children. Video games are not the root cause of teenage anger. You don’t stop children from hurting other children by stopping them from playing with toy guns, which is essentially what violent video games are. You protect children by taking away real guns.