“Addiction is a pathological relationship to any mood altering substance, experience, relationship or thing that has life damaging consequences.” – John Bradshaw
The latest in a seemingly interminable string of school shootings has stirred a noisier than usual debate over what to do, what to do… We are disturbed that our national daydream of indifference is regularly interrupted by the inconvenient news that, once again, a murderer with a gun has slaughtered children. What to do, what to do?
The palliative narratives generally take two tacks. The first is gun control: longer waiting periods, regulate or eliminate “assault rifles,” raise the legal age, ban handguns, etc. The second is mental health: more money for treatment, diagnosis, and earlier identification so that we can keep weapons out of the hands of the mentally ill. The irony (no, the age of irony hasn’t even started yet) is that both sides are right, and both sides are wrong.
Let’s start with the obvious: in a country of 350 million people, over 300 million guns. This last could be a Larry-the-Cable-Guy statistic; however, empirical observation confirms that we are awash in a sea of firearms. It would be irrational to assume that there is no connection between our world leadership in school shootings and our world leadership in per capita gun ownership. Or, as Eddie Izzard says:
They say that “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Well, I think the gun helps. If you just stood there and yelled BANG, I don’t think you’d kill too many people.”
As for mental health, it is equally apparent that many, if not most of the perpetrators (euphemistically called “gunmen”) are suffering from varying degrees of mental illness. Hard to know when the murderer dies in the act. Still, we have examples such as the Colorado Planned Parenthood shooter, who now resides in the state mental hospital, having been found incompetent to stand trial.
So, what is it, too many guns or too many mentally ill men? Again, both and neither.
Okay, BH, you say, enough doubletalk, what does all this mean? It means that the proliferation of guns and the issue of mental health intersect in one place: addiction. Addiction is the single most powerful force driving American behavior today. A bold statement, you say, prove it.
All right, let’s start with America’s addiction to violence. It has been said that baseball as we were, football is who we have become. Tens of millions of us spend days and evenings watching our modern day gladiators beat each other to a pulp. For our entertainment. And, if somehow the games, lovely diversions like Ultimate Fighting, and endless replays don’t sate our bloodlust, there is always the war. Which war? Pick one. For now we can choose amongst Afghanistan, Iraq, and seemingly just about any place in Africa. (Niger? Really? How the hell did that happen? Guess we took our eyes off the real ball while watching football.). We are the most warlike society in recorded history (and probably unrecorded too). But we are still not satisfied: our PGP (pussy-grabbing president) now rattles the saber across the Pacific. We just gotta make war, for the economy, to be sure, but also for the entertainment value. And speaking of entertainment…
Television, movies, video games, all are saturated with repetitive, realistic, gratuitous violence. In first-person shooter games, for example, the more you kill, the higher you score.
So, using war as an example, it’s a heavy-duty mood-altering experience. Our politicians use it to control us with fear. BTW, they are not immune to the addictions of war. We whip ourselves up into patriotic frenzies over the war(s). We fall over ourselves fawning over our military, which we then proceed to misuse and overuse in service of our declining empire. We watch in fascination (from a distance, of course) as our billion-dollar weapons inflict terrible destruction on military and civilian targets alike. We are enthralled, terrified, entertained, horrified, saddened, and elated, sometimes all at the same time. Gets to be hard to tell what a normal mood is.
This constant warfare certainly does have life-damaging consequences, not only for its direct participants, but for us as a society. The toll, in human suffering, never mind treasure, is staggering. Never fear, though, one night a year we’ll get together and sing about peace on earth. Then we can go back to watching the war while flooding the world with weapons, and using those left over from the sales to make our own wars.
So we are addicted to violence, not just the solo school shooters amongst us, but all of us, as a society, and a culture. We are sick. Addicted. And not just to violence.
We are addicted to religion, which Bradshaw describes as the most pernicious addiction: “The feeling of righteousness is the core mood alteration among religious addicts.” He should know, as a former Jesuit. Life damaging? How many wars have been fought over the issue of whose god is the true one? How many arguments, how much anger, frustration, grief and general mischief has religious strife caused?
We are also addicted to entertainment in all forms. We value our professional sports more than our educational system. As a result, we pay professional athletes and movie stars many millions of dollars; our teachers, well, a little less. It would appear that we also secure our professional sports venues better than our schools. When was the last time you heard of anyone shooting up the Super Bowl?
And our addiction to entertainment has ruined our politics, not that it had far to go. We now demand only that political debates be entertaining, and care more for their mood-altering effect than about the fact that our system of self-government is broken.
Food addiction? Not much analysis needed here. Food porn ads featuring gigantic portions are followed by Jenny Craig commercials. It is widely recognized that there are all sorts of disorders around eating, and mood-altering with food leads to obesity, anorexia, bulimia, diabetes, and all sorts of other problems.
What else ya got? Sex, drugs, (rock ‘n’ roll?), work, cell phones, other electronic devices, the list goes on forever. We are a society of addicts. And we are addicted to our guns.
Our addiction is based on fear, which is in itself a mood-altering experience. Even emotions themselves can be addictive. Ironic, isn’t it? Fear is not necessarily life-damaging, as it is often necessary to spur us into protective activity. It becomes life-damaging, however, and thus addictive, when we fall victim, for example, to the constant fearmongering of both the government and the media. Groundless fear becomes a substitute for genuine emotional experience. Gotta buy more guns to protect me from the gov’t, intruders, immigrants, any bogeyman will do. Be afraid, very afraid.
Bradshaw identifies toxic shame as the basis of addiction. His book, Healing the Shame that Binds You, explains in more detail. He points out that addiction is rooted in denial: that there is no other disease where the worse it gets, the more the patient denies it. He also posits that it is rare for an addict to have only one addiction.
Does any of this sound familiar? If not, perhaps denial is not just a river… At any rate, addiction is, according to Bradshaw’s broad definition, unquestionably a mental health problem.
“Paranoia strikes deep in the heartland…”—Paul Simon
So we, the addicts, #1 in school shootings, weapons suppliers to the world, and serial warmongers, continue to buy and sell millions of guns, and countless tons of ammunition, all the while indulging our other addictions, especially those to violence and entertainment. And here is where the gun-control and mental health people have got it wrong: it’s not the guns, and it’s not the mental health of the shooters. It’s the “addiction society,” its lust for weapons, violence, entertainment, sex, drugs, and acquisition getting worse and worse while it wallows in denial.
This is precisely why it is so difficult to address the problem of school shootings. The greater the grip of our addictions, the greater the denial. It may be comfortable to believe that the only mental health problem is that which afflicts the murderers, or that all we need do is control the guns. But it is a comfort born of denial of the greater problem. We must all look inward to find the root cause: addiction. So far, a sufficient introspection eludes us.