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Gun Violence In America Anyone who studies the history of culture will note that all new cultural phenomena have been attacked as being degrading and immoral. Negative aspects of a society are often blamed on the facets of culture. The advocate of cultural freedom might point out that throughout history the media have concentrated on controversial issues of morality. The opponents of free speech will argue that the world has changed. That the media today is so pervasive that such material has become commonly available. This is true to a certain extent, though.
The unstated premise of this argument is that the average person is incompetent to make moral decisions, that the common man must be sheltered from bad ideas. The fact is that immoral art and literature have been available since the earliest days of human culture. What has changed is that for millenniums such material was the luxury of the well to do. It was only those in power or who had access to large sums of money that could afford the base and degrading literature of the day. With the rise of consumer capitalism two trends, which changed the elitist nature of art emerged.
First, mass production lowered the costs of goods significantly. The economist Ludwig von Mises noted: Capitalism is essentially a system of mass production for the satisfaction of the needs of the masses. It pours a horn of plenty upon the common man. It has raised the average standard of living to a height never dreamed of in earlier ages. It has made accessible to millions of people enjoyments which a few generations ago were only within the reach of a small elite. (Jim Peron) As mass production and specialization progressed so did the market for media and the arts. Eventually, new techniques brought the cost of books down to levels so that even the poor in most modern societies could afford them.
As the number of customers rose, so too did the demand for artists including artists who appealed to minority tastes. Suddenly the domain of the elite was the realm of the everyday man. The mass production of books increased the demand for books. For the year of 1947, there were only 357 publishers in the United States.
Within half a century that number had risen to 49, 000. The number of books in print increased from 85, 000 to 1. 3 million with 140, 000 newly published in 1996 alone. As a result to such a development in mass media, literature and art gun violence became one of the most important moral and social issues in America. The notable feature of gun violence is that it spread through the whole society and infected all its levels, from youth to old people. Here is some impressive statistics, which shows all the importance of the issue. Every day, more than 80 Americans die from gun violence.
The rate of firearm deaths among kids under age 15 is almost 12 times higher in the United States than in 25 other industrialized countries combined. The American Medical Association reports that between 36 % and 50 % of male eleventh graders believe that they could easily get a gun if they wanted one. In 1998 - 99 academic year, 3, 523 students were expelled for bringing a firearm to school. This is a decrease from the 5, 724 students expelled in 1996 - 97 for bringing a firearm to school.
In a single year, 3, 365 children and teens were killed by gunfire in the United States, according to the latest national data released in 2001. That is one child every two and a half-hours; nine children every day; and more than 60 children every week. And every year, at least 4 times as many kids suffer from non-fatal firearm injuries. American children are more at risk from firearms than the children of any other industrialized nation.
In 2002, firearms killed no children in Japan, 19 in Great Britain, 57 in Germany, 109 in France, 153 in Canada, and 5, 285 in the United States (Neahin. com). According to the facts described above, gun violence is a problem with main several causes, and media influence is only one of them. In the media, there are numerous interactive factors that have been identified as conducive to generating aggressive effects. Here are some examples of primary causes of violence, including the gun related one, which are released through the media: reward or lack of punishment for the perpetrator, portrayal of violence as justified, portrayal of the consequences of violence in a way that does not stir distaste, portrayal of violence without critical commentary, the presence of live peer models of violence, and the presence of sanctioning adults.
The picture described above puts media among the key causes of gun violence, however still there are many other factors, which lead to a gun violence development. A list of non media factors deemed significant in the development of crime and J. Wilson and R. Herrnstein can cull the number of violently predisposed individuals from Crime and Human Nature. The authors list constitutional, developmental, and social-context factors including gender, age, intelligence, personality, psychopathology, broken and abusive families, schools, community, labor markets, alcohol and heroin, and finally history and culture. As can be seen, most aspects of modern life are implicated, and only tangential factors like diet and climate (which other researchers would have included) are left out.
With such a large number of factors coming into play, the levels of interactions and complexity of relationships are obviously enormous. Moreover, the research on gun violence by Wilson and Herrnstein suggests that certain factors are basic to violent crime. None of these factors dominates, but none are without significant effects. Accordingly, the research clearly signifies the media as only some of many factors in the generation of youth violence and that media depictions of violence do not affect all persons in the same way. The media contribute to violence in combination with other social and psychological factors. Whether or not a particular media depiction will cause a particular viewer to act more aggressively is not a straightforward issue.
The emergence of an effect depends on the interaction between each individual viewer, the content of the portrayal, and the setting in which exposure to the media occurs. This gives the media significant aggregate effects but makes these effects difficult to predict for individuals. There is no doubt, however, that violent children, including those who come to have significant criminal records, spend more time exposed to violent media than do less violent children. The issue is not the existence of a media effect but the magnitude or importance of the effect. In summation, despite the fact that the media are among many factors, they should not be ignored, regardless of the level of their direct impact. Because social violence is a pressing problem, even those factors that only modestly contribute to it are important.
Small effects of the media accumulate and appear to have significant long-term social effects (R. Rosenthal). The research strongly indicates that we are a more violent society because of our mass media. Exactly how and to what extent the media cause long-term changes in violent behavior remains unknown, but the fact that it plays an important, but not independent, role is generally conceded. What public policies are suggested by the knowledge we now possess about media and violence?
Not all of the factors discussed above are good candidates for public intervention strategies, but there are three sources of youth violence that government policy can influence. In order of importance, they are: extreme differences in economic conditions and the concentration of wealth in America; the American gun culture; and, exacerbating the problems created by the first two, the medias violence-enhancing messages. Family, neighborhood, and personality factors may be more important for generating violence in absolute magnitude, but they are not easily influenced by public actions. The magnitude of economic disparity and the concentration of wealth in the United States is greater than in comparable (and, not surprisingly, less violent) societies.
Our richest citizens not only earn vastly more than our poorest, but, more important, the wealth in the country is increasingly concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. The trend during this century, which accelerated during the 1980 s, is for an ever-shrinking percentage of the richest Americans to control greater proportions of the countrys wealth, while the poorest have access to increasingly smaller proportions. The burden of this economic disenfranchisement, both psychologically and fiscally, falls heavily on the young, and especially on the young who are urban poor minorities, as is shown In Elliott Curries 1985 study Confronting Crime. In a consumerism saturated society like the United States, hopelessness, bitterness, and disregard for moral values and law are heightened by this growing economic disparity. The second area that government policy can immediately address is the gun culture in America.
Our culture of violence, referred to in the opening quote, is made immeasurably more deadly by the enfolded gun culture. The availability of guns as cheap killing mechanisms is simply a national insanity. The mass production of these killing toys and the easy access to them must be addressed. The most recent statistics show that one out of every ten high school students report that they carry a handgun.
Gun buy-back programs should be supported, and production and availability must be reduced if a positive net effect is to be expected. Irrespective of the difficulty of controlling the sources of individual violent behavior, the implements of fatal violence should not be ignored. The third area of policy concern, the mass media, exacerbates the gun culture by portraying guns as glamorous, effective, omnipotent devices. The mass media also heighten the negative effects of economic disparities through their consumer messages in advertising and entertainment. Although both of these effects that add to the problem of youth violence are sometimes discussed, the debate about the media remains tightly focused on measuring and reviewing violent media content.
Within this focus, the emphasis has been on counting violent acts rather than on exploring the context of its portrayal. Deciphering the medias moral and value messages about violence has been mostly ignored. Bibliography: Jim Peron, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Media, Markets and Morality, 2000 James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein, Crime and Human Nature, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1985. R. Rosenthal (1986), Media Violence, Anti-Social Behavior, and the Social Consequences of Small Effects, Journal of Social Issues 42: 141 - 54 NEAHIN.
com statistical information about gun violence For a listing of examples see S. Pease and C. Love, The Copy-Cat Crime Phenomenon, in Justice and the Media by R. Surette (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1984), 199 - 211; and A. Schmid and J.
de Graaf, Violence as Communication (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1982). T. Cook, D. Kendzierski and S.
Thomas (1993), The Implicit Assumptions of Television Research, Public Opinion Quarterly 47: 191 - 92.
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Research essay sample on Gun Violence In America
