Editor's letter: Our dysfunctional romance with violence

last updated 8 January 2015

Newtown, Conn., is an affluent, family-friendly town with a Main Street straight from Norman Rockwell. Until last week, there had not been a murder there for seven years. Nancy Lanza, divorced and alone, nonetheless felt sufficiently fearful that she bought five guns, including a semiautomatic AR-15 assault rifle designed to mow down scores of people, and practiced shooting at local gun ranges—sometimes, with her disturbed 20-year-old son, Adam. “She was prepared for the worst,” her sister-in-law Marsha Lanza told a reporter. The worst, she said, included the day “when the economy collapses,” the government and police can’t protect you, and only your own firepower will keep you safe.

Lanza’s fears are not uncommon in this country, but they did not make her safer. Her son turned her own weapons on her, and then made a killing field of two elementary school classes, rapidly firing hundreds of shots into 20 children and six adults. Once again, at the end of a year scarred by massacres in a movie theater, a Sikh temple, and a mall, our nation is confronted with the consequences of our long, dysfunctional romance with violence and firearms. Every year, more than 30,000 people (the equivalent of ten 9/11s) die of gunshot wounds; 55 percent of these are suicides. Another 60,000 are wounded. Perhaps, as Jeffrey Goldberg recently argued in The Atlantic, it is “too late” for any law to stop the slaughter in a nation with 300 million guns. Perhaps we should simply accept some collateral damage as the price for individual liberty, and insist that vigilant civilians carry Glocks in every kindergarten, college classroom, church, workplace, and mall. Surely then we’d be safe.