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Wednesday 15 August 2012

The murderer wasn’t alone in a society that worships violence on screens of all sizes. Hollywood was standing with him when he started shooting. And so were most Americans, who keep sending money to Hollywood’s gore factories. I live in Hollywood. Every day I see huge images of the lone gunman, in his many costumes, plastered against the sides of skyscrapers. The media industry is too greedy and lazy to create a better myth, and we’re too complacent to demand it of them. Murder is a social phenomenon. Yes, we bear individual responsibility for our actions. But really, nobody acts alone. We are social creatures. Even what we call the “self” is socially constructed. The US has a murder rate over 3 times higher than Canada’s. That’s no statistical accident. But we don’t want to believe that there is something fundamentally sick about our society. Our politicians are afraid of offending voters by lifting up the mirror for us to look at ourselves. But yes, we can deal with it! It’s just another public health problem: a complex, tough one, but we are up to the task. We eliminated polio. We stopped smallpox. There’s no reason we can’t dramatically reduce the murder rate, and particularly the incidence of mass mayhem, in this country. Tougher laws helped reduce smoking, but even more effective was the change in our national culture. Through long-term, smart media campaigns, we made cigarettes socially unacceptable. We can do the same with guns. The Myth of the Lone Gunman

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