Maureen Dowd, "Chris Murphy’s Crucible": Tilting at Windmills?

I don't know if Maureen Dowd has ever traveled to Israel, but if she were to visit Tel Aviv's central bus station on a Friday morning, she would be amazed to see thousands of young Israeli soldiers, armed with automatic weapons, headed home to spend the weekend with their families. Given that these young men and women see the same movies and television programs as American youths of the same age, play the same violent video games, and grew up with the same toy guns, you might think that allowing them to take their weapons home is a recipe for disaster. But it isn't. Israel has a firearm murder rate of a mere 0.09 per 100,000 people, compared with 2.97 per 100,000 people in the US (see: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list).

Now have a look at the data from the FBI on all murders from 2007 to 2011 (http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8). In a nutshell, between 2007 and 2011 clubs and hammers killed more persons than rifles, and knives killed four times more people than rifles.

In her latest New York Times op-ed entitled "Chris Murphy’s Crucible" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/14/opinion/sunday/dowd-chris-murphys-gun-control-crucible.html?_r=0), Maureen Dowd tells us of the efforts of Senator Chris Murphy to legislate stricter gun control laws. Dowd writes of Murphy:

"Gun safety was not his cause; his district didn’t include any big cities. But he was transformed by the massacre in serene Newtown of Sandy Hook’s 'beautiful babies,' in Joe Biden’s words.

'I got to the firehouse a couple hours after the shooting,' Murphy says, his voice thrumming with emotion as he recalled being with parents while they learned the unthinkable. 'I sometimes wish I didn’t see some of the things I saw. It’s not that in the past I’ve been disconnected from the issues I’ve worked on. But this is the first one in which I’ve felt an emotional imperative to deliver. These parents are my contemporaries. I’ve got two little boys at home just younger than the ones that were killed.'"

Now, as anyone who reads this blog knows, I favor a ban on the sale of assault rifles, but I also acknowledge that this is not going to make a dent in America's homicide rate.

And even if all American households were to surrender both their guns and their kitchen knives, the murder rate would probably go unchanged. Sure, after Sandy Hook everyone wants to do "something," but sometimes it is also necessary to stop and consider whether that something is in fact addressing the problem.

My belief is that there is a "rage" inherent in American society that is going untreated.

Do you remember as a child watching commercials on television against smoking? Maybe a new campaign against violence is demanded: "Are you angry? Take a deep breath and count to ten. Violence solves nothing."

But as the economy remains stagnant, unemployment refuses to fall, and frustration mounts, can anything stem the rage and the killing?