The massacre of twenty first graders and six teachers in their school in Newtown, Connecticut, cast a fleeting light on several realities affecting our children, the canaries in the mine that is our teetering nation. The most obvious of those realities—and most talked about—is the ubiquitous availability of guns and the lack of an accessible mental health infrastructure for discerning and treating the Adam Lanzas of our communities. While background checks are critical preceding gun ownership, so is the need to restrict the availability of weapons to children and the mentally ill. It is essential to recognize and treat mental illness, especially in adolescence when some forms of pathology may first manifest.
Another reality illuminated by Newtown is that violent video gaming in the hands of disturbed, angry, unsupervised adolescents provides the perfect laboratory for honing the skills of mass murder. Adam Lanza spent thousands of dollars on violent games and he became obsessed with increasing his body count score. Hundreds of hours hunched over a computer, practice-shooting at human targets, stirring hostile urges, and desensitizing empathy were part of the violence equation in Newtown. A 2012 report from the Media Violence Commission confirms that media violence consumption does in fact increase the risk of aggression, but that it is only one factor.1
Many other factors are involved, including social isolation and bullying. Experts like Bruce Perry (head of the ChildTrauma Academy in Houston) point to the more powerful effect of technology—when it is misused in infancy and toddlerhood—to replace face-to-face interactions with nurturing adults. Parental ignorance or neglect can result in using the television or computer games in place of intimate reciprocal interactions with adult caregivers, causing abnormal experiences for the developing brain and altered interest in (and fluency with) human communication.2
But Newtown also casts a light on subtler realities that we saw at play in Columbine and several of the earlier school shootings carried out by white boys from middle-class families. We’ve had to recognize that violent behavior is not limited to the lower classes, nor is the inability to supervise and manage out-of-control adolescents.
In summary, little question remains that the absence of an adequate mental health system for adolescents, the ubiquitous availability of guns, violent video games, and violent imagery in music lyrics, films, and television all contribute to aggressive behaviors among adolescents. But the role they play has everything to do with deeper issues including access to a nurturing adult relationship. If we restrict access to guns, violent games, and media, but don’t wake up to the critical importance of protecting the developing nervous system from the beginning of life, we will continue to witness a tide of angry, emotionally unbalanced, drug-dependent ghosts from the nursery who will find a way to reflect back to society the violence they have absorbed.
A RITUAL TO READ TO EACH OTHER
If you don’t know the kind of person I am
and I don’t know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.
For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dike.
And as elephants parade holding each elephant’s tail
but if one wanders the circus won’t find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.
And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider—
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.
For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep,
the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
—WILLIAM STAFFORD