EDITOR’S NOTE: Visit Gary Stamper’s website Collapsing Into Consciousness
There’s a passionate outcry in America to legislate gun control. By most accounts, the major culprit in the Sandy Hook killings is the proliferation of guns in our culture, and there’s a lot of information and statistics to back up those sentiments. Fareed Zakaria just penned an article on the Washington Post Opinion Page entitled, “The solution to gun violence is clear,” where he notes “People point to three sets of causes when talking about events such as the Newtown, Conn., shootings. First, the psychology of the killer; second, the environment of violence in our popular culture; and, third, easy access to guns.”
However, Zakaria uses hard data in social science that blows these generally accepted causes out of the water, pointing the finger directly at the third cause of easy access to guns as the primary culprit. The data “strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.”
In the article he further writes, “There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide — a method that is much more successful than other forms of suicide.)”
Last, he claims that:
“The problems that produced the Newtown massacre are not complex, nor are the solutions. We do not lack for answers.”
“What we lack in America today is courage.”
And here, he is absolutely correct. However, Walter Shapiro, a Yahoo! News columnist examines how character collides with policymaking in Washington and in politics and sadly concludes that there is “no plausible remedy since we are neither going to disarm Americans nor are we going to pass out guns to elementary school teachers as a just-in-case precaution.” To add credence to his assessment he writes:
Four days after the shootings, the NRA’s official statement said, “The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again.” By the end of the week, Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre shattered any misguided hopes of NRA compromise by poking his head out of his bunker and calling for armed police officers and more guns in every school in America. “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” LaPierre said. It brought visions of a crusty Charlton Heston waving a flintlock: “From my cold dead hands!”
As difficult as it will be to actually implement meaningful gun control, we have to try, but as long as we have a government and a president who has a hit list of targets he approves and SEAL assassin teams and drones to do the dirty work. moral concerns have been suspended. The tally of CIA drone strikes just in Pakistan between 2004 and 2012 stands at a minimum of 176 children, nearly nine times the number of dead children in the Newtown incident.
American politics are enforced at the point of a gun. Our military and police agencies depend on lethal weapons for their authority; intimidation is an important aspect of military/police authority, and civilians are meant to know this. This is why the 2003 bombing attack on Baghdad was called “shock and awe.” Lethal weapons are meant to suggest opposition is futile.
Consequently, having the government tell an individual citizen that they can’t have a gun is pure hypocrisy and begs the question: Can a violent government prevent more Newton-like tragedies?
Gun control alone, even if possible, is not going to solve the immense problems we have with violence in America.
Since 1982, there have been at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii.” In forty-nine of the mass murders, the killers had obtained their weapons legally. This only includes mass murderers, not all of the gun-related murders in the U.S. Those numbers are much higher. This indicates that even if we only succeeded in taking away legally owned assault weapons, we could dramatically decrease the violence
So, who commits mass murders in America? The vast majority of them are committed by men, and the majority of those are privileged white men.
What is it about the white, male, American middle-class experience that makes it easier for troubled young men to turn schools and movie theaters into killing fields? In an online article Hugo Schyzer states:
“White men from prosperous families grow up with the expectation that our voices will be heard. We expect politicians and professors to listen to us and respond to our concerns. We expect public solutions to our problems. And when we’re hurting, the discrepancy between what we’ve been led to believe is our birthright and what we feel we’re receiving in terms of attention can be bewildering and infuriating. Every killer makes his pain another’s problem. But only those who’ve marinated in privilege can conclude that their private pain is the entire world’s problem with which to deal. This is why, while men of all races and classes murder their intimate partners, it is privileged young white dudes who are by far the likeliest to shoot up schools and movie theaters.”
But it’s not only Mass murders. It’s also the level of violence by men in America. We have raised an entire generation of young males that don’t know how to be men, and many of them feel completely lost. Sometimes they feel so lost that they “snap” in very destructive ways. Adam Lanza and James Holmes are two names that come to mind. Why is it that mass murderers are almost always young men? Why don’t young women behave the same way? Sadly, Adam Lanza and James Holmes are just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem in our society.
When our young men grow up, many of them are extremely averse to taking on responsibility. They want to have lots of sex, but they aren’t interested in marriage. They enjoy the comforts of living at home, but they don’t want to go out and pursue career goals so that they can provide those things for themselves. Our young men are supposed to be “the leaders of tomorrow”, but instead many of them are a major burden on society. When are we finally going to admit that something has gone horribly wrong?
There is even a name for this generation of young men that does not want to grow up. It is called the “Peter Pan generation”. They want to enjoy the benefits of being grown up without ever taking on the responsibilities. But it’s not just young men who haven’t grown up. There are a lot older “Peter Pans” as well.
What is it about men?
There is plenty of blame to go around. Certainly parents and our education system have to bear much of the blame. Traditionalism says that in the old days, young men were taught what it means to “be a man”, and morality was taught to young men both by their parents and in the schools. But today, most young men have very little understanding of what “manhood” is, and our society has taught them that morality doesn’t really matter. Instead, television and movies constantly portray young men as sex-obsessed slackers that just want to party all the time, so that is what many of our young men have become. We have an enormous cultural failure around instilling values and helping young men transition into responsible adulthood.
In the introduction to my book, Awakening the New Masculine, I write about the root causes of why boys don’t develop into men:
“Western culture does not adequately support boys or men, or boys becoming men. We have completely lost touch with the concept of elders as wisdom keepers, and the elders we do have were not given the tools they needed to become those wisdom keepers. Today, elders are burdens instead of valuable resources. Our elders have not been taught how to pass on wisdom, identities, and boundaries to the next generation. And in a society without fathers, most of us have been under-fathered and over-mothered.
We’ve created a world of Peter Pans, or puers, who never grow up and want to marry trophies instead of wives, and girls who want someone to take care of them instead of bold partners. The current older generation of men, especially in the United States, has, to a great extent, not been mentored by their own fathers.
The levels of depression, suicides, drug abuse, alcoholism, and violence among men are all rising exponentially to the point of being staggering and frightening. Ninety-four percent of all inmates are male. Men live an average of seven years fewer than women, suffer far more from ulcers and stress-related disease than women, and are far more likely than women to die from the fifteen leading causes of death.
Over 80 percent of all suicides are committed by men. In the twenty-to-twenty-four age bracket, males commit suicide six times as much as females, and over the age of eighty-five, men are fourteen times as likely to commit suicide as women.”
This, and numerous other articles, books, and blogs, are all pointing at the same thing: Why haven’t we come to terms with the crisis of modern male immaturity?
It’s been reported that Adam Lanza’s father, Peter Lanza, a tax specialist with GE, is clueless as to why his son snapped. It appears that, as pointed out above, Adam Lanza had been “under-fathered and over-mothered.” How might things had been different had Peter Lanza continued investing in his son’s personal development? In the end, the tragedy speaks volumes about the capitulation of family dynamics and how sometimes a festering of resentment and hostility can unwittingly manifest itself in the most violent form when much needed redress fails to manifest itself.
Again, from Awakening the New Masculine:
“The problem, of course, is much larger than just bad fathering, although that is an issue. The bigger issue is a lack of any father or other healthy masculine influence in an age of single parents.”
Make no mistake: the solution is complex and must dealt with from a wide range of issues including gun control, mental health, socio-economic and cultural issues, government, movies and video violence, and other contributing factors. There can be no doubt that this is a problem with men.
What can we do?
In spite of what Fareed Zakaria said in the opening paragraph of this article, as complex as the problems are, the answers are even more complex, but there are few places we can begin.
We have all been wounded by our primary caretakers, by our culture, and by each other. We must begin heal these wounds if we are to begin stepping back into sanity. The difficulty of doing so is compounded by the clash of differing belief systems and worldviews that don’t agree on what should be done, and about another worldview, called apathy. We can only solve the last by somehow reconciling these other opposing worldviews. One way to do this is to create a system that recognizes the truth and values in the contrasting worldviews, understanding that they are largely developmentally organized. In other words, some approaches are correct for some, other approaches are correct for others, but some approaches are correct for everyone at their particular level of development.
In America, most young boys are at either a power or traditional stage of development. We know how to nurture healthy development in both of these stages, but we don’t seem to have the willpower to do it. Plus, our cultural and educational system is geared toward turning young people into obedient workers rather than critical thinkers. Ultimately, this is a continuing problem with cultures, empire, elitist values, patriarchal rule, and dominance of the human spirit.
From Awakening the New Masculine:
“We have surrendered to a hero image that we can’t possibly attain and the accumulation of wealth, disregarding everything but our own ego and power. Patriarchy is the consciousness of greed, the conqueror, and moves forward willfully, throwing its weight around and bending all before it to its will. The patriarchy is the bully … and worse. Patriarchy is the enemy of the healthy masculine.
As men, we are the product of all that has come before us: the Mesolithic hunters, gatherers and Neolithic farmers of matrilineal culture (7000–2000 BC); the Indo-European warriors emphasizing the male sky gods in the centuries of the Bronze and Iron Age (2000–800 BC); the turn of the millennium with the advent of Christian mythology and its concepts of dualistic division between body and soul, world and spirit and Original Sin; and finally the age of scientific rationalism that allows for nothing supernatural or spiritual and reduces the universe to a language of numerical abstraction―mathematics.
We are also the wounded warriors.
Centuries of patriarchy have numbed our souls, our feelings, and our spirit, and we are beginning to awaken to the need to love and work in ways that heal our lives, the lives of those we love and the lives of those we want to love and want to be worthy of.”
Joseph Campbell states that it takes a “hero’s journey” for boys to become men and for men to revitalize themselves within the context of our twenty-first century culture and immediate life circumstances. Postmodern man, by and large, has been lulled to sleep, and it both is and isn’t their fault. Men either have succumbed to the pursuit of things or have gotten stuck in overfeminization rather than learning to feel, followed by owning those feelings and reclaiming their masculinity. Both the pursuit of objects and the overfeminization of men are at fault. We must learn to pass on our own healing to our sons and to all of the sons of the world. It will require creating a new world, and it will be hard, but what choice do we have?
To not engage with creating this new world means that the stunted masculine will remain fixated at immature—and possibly pathological— levels. This “boy psychology” shows up as abusive and violent acting-out behaviors against each other, women, the planet, and in the cultural and social organization of patriarchy that has ruled much of the planet for thousands of years.
In Creations Magazine, author Robert Moore points out, “Patriarchy, in our view, is an attack on masculinity in its fullness as well as femininity in its fullness. Those caught up in the structures and dynamics of patriarchy seek to dominate not only women but men as well. Patriarchy is based on fear—the boy’s fear, the immature masculine’s fear—of women, to be sure, but also fear of men. Boys fear women. They also fear real men.”
If men can begin to take on the task and responsibility of their own processes and those of young men moving from boyhood into mature manhood as seriously as our tribal ancestors did, then maybe we can move into new ways of being and beginnings instead of the beginnings of the end of our species.
All of this, of course, depends on how well and how fast we can step into facing our own immaturities.
Last-minute addendum: While getting ready to send this out, new developments emerged that are seemingly connected to both the Connecticut and the Aurora, Colorado shootings. CNN Money is “reported to have reported” that the LIBOR banking scandal is growing as the fathers of Adam Lanza and Colorado movie theater shooter John Holmes were allegedly expected to testify “before the US Senate in the ongoing LIBOR banking scandal. The London Interbank Offered Rate, known as LIBOR, is the average interest rate at which banks can borrow from each other. 16 international banks have been implicated in this ongoing scandal, accused of rigging contracts worth trillions of dollars. HSBC has already been fined $1.9 billion and three of their low level traders arrested.” Still fairly unknown to the general public, it is the biggest banking scandal of all time that almost no one has heard of.
I could not find a CNN Money article to verify the claims above.
This article from Talking Points Memo by Benjy Sarlin states, “This rumor is 100% false,” a Senate Banking Committee aide, who asked not to be named, told TPM by email. “The Senate Banking Committee does not have any LIBOR hearings currently scheduled, and has never considered either of these men as potential witnesses.”
The biggest banking scandal of all time and the Senate Banking Committee has no hearings currently scheduled? No wonder the conspiracy elements are out in full force.
About Gary Stamper: Gary Stamper is the author of Awakening the New Masculine: The Path of the Integral Warrior, and the creator of the Integral Warrior Men’s Process. Gary holds a PhD in shamanic psychospiritual studies and is the founder and creator of a brand new website and forum premiering in January of 2013 called Collapsing into Consciousness. He lives in intentional community in the Smoky Mountains of Western North Carolina.
This is an interesting article but light on the serious problem of absentee fathers in this country and no mention at all that almost all of the mass murderers in the past twenty years were on mind altering psychiatric medications. The Columbine shooters, the Aurora shooter, and the Connecticut shooter were all taking meds: http://www.naturalnews.com/038353_gun_control_psychiatric_drugs_Adam_Lanza.html
It’s true that mind-altering meds are a factor in societal mass violence, but mind-altering meds are the product of a patriarchal mentality—a mentality based on power and control. If mind-altering meds aren’t about power and control, what is? Most of what is killing us and the planet is the product of a patriarchal mindset.
Also, there already IS a substantial amount of ‘gun control’ in this country; which does nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and psychopaths. The fact is that the only thing that stops a bad man with a gun is a GOOD man/woman with a gun-like in these instances: http://www.naturalnews.com/038404_massacres_gun_owners_defense.html
Guns aren’t going away, even if totally banned criminals will get them via the Mexican border. Isn’t it time we stop doing the same thing over and over (more gun laws) and expect that this time the result will be different? Criminals will never obey those laws, that’s why they’re criminals! Taking guns OUT of the hands of law abiding citizens IS the problem. ONE teacher with a CCL could have made the difference in Connecticut, as it has in other places.
KaD, you’ve got to get away from falsely believing that there are a substantial amount of gun laws in this country, or that this is just a gun law issue. The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population and own 50% of the wworld’s guns.
Clearly more guns is not the answer.
The vast majority of shootings in the U.S. are not committed by hardened crimials. They are perpetrated by our husbands, our relatives, the neighbor, the boy down the street.
Both sides of the gun argument mistakenly make guns the only issue when it is actually just a part of a larger problem, and the problem is, as Carolyn and I both point out, a problem with a worn out system that no longer serves us.
Really? Gun FREE Chicago just had their 500th murder of the year, including 440 school age children shot: http://www.theburningplatform.com/?p=46389
KaD, passionate article with lots of name calling, and a narrow focus. Your article actually proves the point I make in my article and in my first response to you, and goes on to say, “…the school where Rahm’s children attend to their education has an armed security guard”…and yet, it apparently doesn’t help. We need aa bigger vision.
KaD…could we please go deeper here? Gun control is the tip of an iceberg that has to do with the psychological and spiritual fibers of this culture that are completely unraveling as we speak. Please try to expand your understanding of the problem beyond CNN. I am not willing to discuss gun control any further because it is one of myriad symptoms of an enormous terminal cultural illness. If you really want to be useful in this cultural unraveling, please study its origins. You may want to begin with Morris Berman’s book “Why America Failed” and end with my book “Navigating The Coming Chaos: A Handbook For Inner Transition.”
http://www.naturalnews.com/038511_gun_sales_crime_statistics_Second_Amendment.html
Statistics show that increased LEGAL gun sales result in substantially lower crime rates. Historically, one of the biggest dangers to an unarmed citizenry is its own government. As Ghandi said:
Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest.” – Mohandas Gandhi, an Autobiography, page 446.
When I was a youngster in the early ’70s [that dates me for sure :)] the word was “Liberation”. The two big ones were Womens’ lib and Gay lib. Gay lib wasn’t made visible to the eyes an 8-10 year old boy but Womens’ Lib was all over the media. But that is another story.
However you cut it both made major advances and changed the societies that were open to them. Women changed but we didn’t. Gary’s list of social dis-function ring true here too. It’s definitely not just about guns.
Not wanting to grow up? If this means taking responsibility then we have a problem. Older cultures would initiate its young men at puberty with ritual, marking, separation and mission. When did this happen? I don’t recall it. We we turn 21 we have a 21st birthday party involving lots of drinking from cans , bottle and yard-glass [for the birthday boy] we might loosely be called an initiation albeit a devolved one.
More recently, since the 1990’s we have seen a schism of the generations. Men have not felt empowered to enter junior levels of education after a raft of sex related moral panics. Hell! all my primary school years I only had one male teacher, headmaster and deputy don’t count. Consequently we have the degraded, alienated apology for a society we have created.
Martin
I wrote extensively on this topic here: http://integrallife.com/node/203532 , but to recap my main points:
The arena for aggression in our modern world is the economic realm of work and the corporation where both men and women have become gladiators on that field of battle. Women have developed their masculine side, and have or are in the process of achieving outward equality, but what of the feminine principles themselves? Many of these less quantifiable feminine values are being marginalized as society pursues and competes for the external and material.
And so regarding the unconscious “contents” which are overflowing the banks of inadequate containers, the image that’s coming to me right now is that of these repressed feminine principles erupting from the shadow as autonomous complexes taking archetypal possession of those who are most susceptible – troubled and marginalized young men. Archetypally this is Medea taking vengeance upon the children, and in this case using the young men as pawns (as Morgana used Mordred to bring about the end of the Arthurian age).
This also has implications for the development of young men in our society as well. If one grows up with the feminine principles being marginalized or repressed in a culture what does this shadow look like in the projections of these young men when they “see” the feminine out in the world? The resulting autonomous complexes are going have archetypal cores related to angry and oppressed feminine figures. And the resulting projections are going to be of a world where the females may look angry, hard, unwelcoming, or even penetrating, and so this can create problematic relations with women, and “mother,” as well as nurturing institutions such as church and school.
In the realm of literature and myth, they have had many names: Sphinx, Medea, Morgana, Wicked Witch, Borg Queen, Robot Diva, The Id Monster (from the movie “Forbidden Planet”) etc…, and as autonomous complexes they are alive and well in both the culture at large and in the psyche’s of many troubled and marginalized young men.
Jung called it a collective psychosis, but when under archetypal possession from an autonomous complex, a person or group can become for a period of time, a kind of zombie – capable of acting out in unpredictable and destructive ways.
The repression of feminine principles in our culture (and in the world at large) can give rise to monsters.
This article is so right on that it should be made required reading for everyone.
We exist in a cultural bubble that I believe began at the end of WWII and which has expanded since then to cause the culture itself to become essentially insane with regard to most aspects of being adult or mature.
All arguments relative to gun control must, if they are to be taken seriously, confront the experience of Switzerland. Long dependant on an army of citizen-soldiers who brought their military assault weapons home with them during their decades of reserve service, the Swiss enjoy a rate of armed violence much lower than countries that have severely restrictive gun ownership. Would any gun control advocates care to offer an explanation?
I am not a gun control advocate per se. I would like to see assault weapons banned, but I myself own guns. The explanation I offer is very simple: Americans are a terrified people with a terribly false sense of “security” in which they believe that if they have enough guns, they’ll be safe. What are we so afraid of? You can say “our government,” but the fear penetrates much deeper than that. Many Americans believe that if they can just own enough weapons, they will be safe. Rather than consciously exploring their fears (which few people know how to do anyway) they continue to arm themselves in the delusion that fire power and personal power are the same thing.
“American politics are enforced at the point of a gun. Our military and police agencies depend on lethal weapons for their authority; intimidation is an important aspect of military/police authority, and civilians are meant to know this. This is why the 2003 bombing attack on Baghdad was called “shock and awe.” Lethal weapons are meant to suggest opposition is futile.
Consequently, having the government tell an individual citizen that they can’t have a gun is pure hypocrisy and begs the question: Can a violent government prevent more Newton-like tragedies?
Gun control alone, even if possible, is not going to solve the immense problems we have with violence in America.”
Very well-stated. And, may I add, Might does NOT “equal” “right.” Never did, never will
Absence of conflict does not equal “peace,” either.
WE ARE INUNDATED WITH A SHOCKING NUMBER OF MEN IN POSITIONS OF so-called “power” who maintain that “power” through the Old Paradigm way by use of force, or the threat thereof. This is NOT “peace,” and people who subscribe to such outdated notions (why outdated? We’ve already tried this several million times and threatening violence DOESN’T SOLVE PROBLEMS– just strokes the Big Man’s little puny fragile ego, that’s why) will never accomplish what they believe they want to, because deep, deep deep down (like burying lawyers safely), they really, really reeeaally have NO intention of sharing power whatsoever with the feminine, because, like the powerless little toddlers they really are, they do not understand or even care to understand the feminine, and see it in terms of opposition to their Complete “Authority” as males, “god’s” favorite children… So whenever I see one of these Annointed Sons, like, oh, say, a lawyer, who can’t tolerate any opinions other than their own, and/or those kind who go on and on and on (bragging) about the guns they owns and can shoot, well, you see my point.
Great, thanks for sharing this blog.Thanks Again. Want more.