Can any serious human being really argue that continual–and continually increasing–violence in our media has no effect? To my mind, it has the dual effect of making people more afraid and thus more emotionally restrained and superficial, and the following effect of making them feel more lonely, since they have shut down the pathways to the outside.
Take this basic alienation, and the ability to nurse a grievance–real, or much more often perceived–and you get this sort of violence.
How is it people who appear continually in violent movies can tout gun control? They are complicit in making violence seem to be an answer to many of life’s problems. Do not many American men idolize as badasses men like Vito Corleone and Tony Montana?
This madman may or may not have bought his weapons legally, but even if we ban them, the possibility of such shootings does not disappear. Whoever controls a monopoly on the effective use of force has accumulated power, and accumulated power is sooner or later always abused. I wonder how the referendum in Catalonia would have played out if guns were allowed in Spain? More violence, certainly, but also perhaps more circumspection in the use of force by the authoritarian regime in Madrid. I read some 800 people were injured. If that is not a species of fascism–and I will recall for you that Spain was formally Fascist until the mid-70’s–then I don’t know what would count.