By Peter Moore, Editor, Men?s Health magazine
At this point in the unfolding tragedy of Newtown, Connecticut, many of us are tracing our connections to the victims.
Perhaps you have a kindergartner at home, and are projecting him or her, with horror, into Sandy Hook Elementary.
Maybe one of them even shares one of the names President Obama intoned, lingered on, and welled up over in his address to the townspeople.
Or maybe you read the profiles of the first-responders, and like them, will never forget the disturbing mental image of young, energetic bodies, suddenly inert, spilling life.
Maybe you?re a teacher, or know one, and are imagining how you might have fared during the killing spree.
I?ve got my tangents into the tragedy, as well. I grew up in Trumbull, the town just to the south of Newtown, and attended an elementary school very much like Sandy Hook. My neighbor?s sister lives in Newtown, and considered taking her kids to the playground adjoining the school last Friday. My niece is a school psychologist, like the one who absorbed a fusillade of bullets coming from Adam Lanza?s semi-automatic arsenal. A coworker?s high-school classmate lost a child in the rampage.
But I have another sad, and all too close, connection to the tragedy: I?m male.
What?s gender got to do with it? Sadly, everything.?Because when you take a few steps back from the devastation, a pattern begins to emerge. It looks like this: Men buy guns, men shoot guns, and more often than not, men are the victims of gun violence.
How rapt is our love affair with firepower? According to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, men buy 90 percent of the guns in this country. So Adam Lanza?s mother was one of the unusual women who stockpile weapons?but her fate wasn?t an unusual one. If you buy a gun, you?re much more likely to be shot by it than you are to gun down an assailant. The devastating numbers show that, every day, 30 men kill themselves with their own weapons.
It?s a quiet death toll, but a mounting one.
That means that, on Friday the 14th, Adam Lanza was likely to have been only one of 29 men who turned a weapon on themselves. Men and women attempt suicide at about the same rate, but men ?succeed? far more often. The reason: We?re the ones who own the very best killing machines, and hit the target with sharpshooter accuracy.
I?m thankful that most tortured men only have one victim, rather than Lanza?s 26. But both are unacceptable.
A piece in Monday?s New York Times makes the point that, whether the mass shooters are motivated by religious fervor or mental delusions, their primary instinct is to end their own lives, and take a lot of other lives with them. Mass killings are simply another way to ensure death; they become human targets by targeting others.
But falling in the gunsight of a deranged killer isn?t the only way men catch bullets. In fact, gun violence?homicide, robbery?is the sixth?leading cause of death for men ages 35 to 44.
We?re not only shooters, we?re bullseyes, as well.
I know this because, before the tragedies in Newtown, Aurora, and Blacksburg, we assigned Bill Gifford to explore the love-it-to death relationship between men and munitions. In his 2005 story, ?Stuck to our Guns,? Gifford exposed the ways that guns are a profound men?s health issue. For one thing, they have been so politicized that our regulatory and public safety institutions literally can?t touch them. And as a result, they fail even the most rudimentary consumer safety standards.
Jon Vernick, J.D., M.P.H., codirector of the Johns Hopkins Institute for Gun Policy and Research, told Gifford: ?My gosh, you go to the grocery store and buy a $9 disposable camera, and it tells you it?s loaded with film and how many shots you have left. With the vast majority of guns, they don?t give you any information about whether the gun is loaded.?
In an accompanying piece, we compared a range of common consumer products with guns. Hair dryers, irons, chain saws and nail guns each are specifically designed to accomplish their tasks while protecting home users from harm. The yearly accidental injuries range from 50 to 600 for those common consumer products. But the most lethal of them?the handgun, often purchased to make a home safer?routinely registers more than 7,000 accidental injuries per year. One possible reason: The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission is specifically prohibited from suggesting improvements.
So why aren?t they better designed, regulated, controlled?
Intimidation, bullying, and silence. That?s why.
Various political groups have been so vocal in their ?hands off? militancy that the guns simply can?t be redesigned for safety, and nearly anybody can get their hands on one?from troubled loners to gang bangers to toddlers. And whether they pull the trigger because of mental disturbance, criminal intent, or innocence, the bullets often target men. How often? According to CDC statistics, 30,335 people died from gunshot wounds in 2007; 26,287 of them were men.
And in pointing that out, I?m not diminishing the tragedy of the women and children who lost their lives in Newtown. On the contrary: A young, suicidal male killed them all. So male-on-male gun violence was at the root of it.
So, men. What are we going to do about it?
First, let?s own up to the problem, and our role in it.
In my experience, men are terrible advocates for themselves. Take the twin gender-specific health scourges for men and women: breast cancer and prostate cancer. Each of these diseases is equally deadly, likely to claim about 40,000 lives each a year. And according to the National Cancer Institute, twice as much money goes to researching the female-specific killer, compared to the male-specific killer. The federal government annually lays out hundreds of millions in breast cancer research, and even the NFL turns pink every fall in support of the cause. The most men can muster is an annual mustache campaign that raises more facial hair than money. Men can?t be bothered to protect themselves.
Likewise with guns.
The advocacy against weapon control and product improvement has been mostly out-of-control for the last three decades, to the point where a public figure only needs to mention restricting gun access or improving safety, and he or she will be accused of undermining our most basic civil liberties. Bullshit. If it?s freedom you want, it?s Adam Lanza you?ll get, free to plug his mom in the face, steal her guns, shoot out the security system of the elementary school, and walk the hallways dealing death to children too young to even understand the idea of mortality.
But now, the rest of us understand the finality of their deaths, perhaps better than we want to.
From the beginning of organized societies, men have fulfilled a role as protectors of their communities. Our bigger muscles and outsized aggressiveness made us naturals to counter threats to the women and children in our tribes. We?ve been good at fending off attacks from without.
It?s time we tackled one from within.
We bring the guns into our own communities, and to protect our own free and easy access, we tolerate the way they fall into the hands of the mentally unhinged. And even if you?re not a gun owner?I never have been?you have probably been allowing the louder voices to carry the day on this matter.
But to repurpose another important awareness campaign, silence = death.
So I found it interesting, maybe even symbolic, when on the Sunday following the Newtown massacre, the news-talk shows couldn?t find a single senator or representative?usually very happy to pledge allegiance to the gun lobby?who would defend their interpretation of the right to bear arms. In a delicious irony, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, begged off of a scheduled appearance, citing laryngitis.
Suddenly, this gun supporter had lost her voice.
Even the NRA website went silent for a time, shutting down its Facebook feed and suspending its Twitter feed.
In the deadly silence after Newtown, you could hear other voices for once.
They weren?t necessarily calling for swords into ploughshares, but rather, simply trying to remove the most heinous weapons?the kind useful for nothing but mowing down cops, or theatergoers, or schoolkids?from the hands of the mentally infirm, the raging, the suicidal. Finally, the mortuary monologue of gun rights had become a discussion about what might work to heal a sick society, and protect the innocents among us.
All men, selfishly, ought to encourage that conversation and the solutions that come out of it. Because more than likely, the next victims we will save may well be ourselves.
More from Peter Moore:
Source: http://news.menshealth.com/men-and-gun-violence/2012/12/18/
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