Amidst all the journos, constitutional experts, gun-fetishists and gun-phobes wheeled on by the news corporations this morning, perhaps there should have been room for an anthropologist or two.
Clearly the ability to purchase a semi-automatic rifle at Wall-Mart makes killing a lot of people in one stint a whole lot easier. But the basic phenomenon where a young man with no previous inclination to violence suddenly takes up a weapon and attempts to murder just about everyone he comes across, is a fairly common in a number of primitive societies. What US cops today call going postal has been known in Malaysia for centuries as running amok.
In terms of why this keeps happening, Wikipedia cites that "the explanation which is now most widely accepted is that amok is closely related to male honor." Perhaps the root problem isn't the constitutional right of Americans to bear arms, but a cultural debility within a supposedly modern society, where primitive mentalities are apparently able to resurface with some degree of regularity.
No comments:
Post a Comment