Fifty-five years ago, to the day, The New Yorker published the last part of Hanna Arendt’s ‘Eichmann in Jerusalem’, an opinion piece on Adolph Eichmann’s trial, held after he had been captured and smuggled out from Argentina by a team of Jewish secret service agents. The article, which appeared spread over five successive weeks from 16 February 1963, and the book that followed, will always be associated with the phrase “the banality of evil” [i]. Arendt’s account of the trial is sobering, and the tenor is well caught in a comment towards the end, “The trouble with Eichmann was that there were so many like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, but were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal”. [ii]
What did that mean? It meant the mass extermination of Jewish people in The Second World War was seen, by at least some of the murderers, as prosaic, commonplace, just another job to be done. Reading the account, two themes stand out with vivid and awful clarity. First, Adolf Eichmann and many like him did what they did because they were told to do so: he, and they, referred to dutifully “obeying orders” from a superior officer. Second, they treated the task much like running a bakery. There were logistics to be addressed, buildings required, equipment needed. Bottlenecks would occur, and the efficiency of the operation was always an issue. Eichmann was notably ‘ordinary’ and unemotional about what he had done; towards the end of the war, he admitted he had felt satisfied, even relieved, that he had done a good job.
Following orders, doing a good job, and killing people. How is it possible to view murder as something banal, another unremarkable feature of our world? As part of our culture? Are we brought up to think like that? Today, how have we come to the banality of death by shooting?
As I thought about these questions, I remembered when I first confronted the sight of one person shooting another. We didn’t have television in our house. However, for two or three years in the early 1950s I went to ‘Saturday Morning Pictures’ at the local cinema. It is hard to convey what a chaotic, noisy and ultimately enjoyable experience this was. For a few pence (not even 20 cents) you gained entry with some 2-300 other youngsters. Over close to three hours, there would be a mixture of cartoons, Mickey Mouse, Popeye, Tom and Jerry, Bugs Bunny and more; old cowboy films, Roy Rodgers, Gene Autry, The Lone Ranger and Hoppalong Cassidy; British (boring and worthy) and American (just plain exciting) adventure films, Flash Gordon, Batman, Zorro, most of these over several episodes ensuring each week you returned to see the resolution of the cliff hanger of the week before. In some ways the films were incidental (they were often hard to hear!), as children screamed at each other, and then, at the interval a team of (very brave) young women came out to sell ice cream (in tubs with a wooden spoon) and frozen lollipops.
Up there on the screen were gun fights, lots of them, and space battles with strange x-ray guns. People died, but, on the cinema screen it was all very distant. The gun fights were set in the past, ‘cowboy and indian’ adventures based on stories from ‘over there’ in the USA in the pioneer era; war stories from a decade or so ago (focussed on the Germans, who were almost always portrayed as cruel and remorseless); and space adventures all taking place in galaxies far, far away from home. It was unrealistic, most set in alien worlds, and we knew the films were acted, the violence as meaningless as the extraordinary cartoon travails of Tom, Bugs Bunny or Bluto.
For me, all that changed with the realism of cinema in the 1960s. The first extraordinary shock came with ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ in 1967: the film was exciting, at times funny, certainly very violent, but all that was nothing compared to the closing scene when Bonnie and Clyde’s bodies are riddled with bullets, shot by the police in a shocking, mesmerising blood bath. Death became real and immediate, the more so because we wanted, at some level, for them to survive. Bad enough, but that experience culminated, two years later, with ‘Easy Rider’ and another horrific final scene, two meaningless murders on a southern highway.
It wasn’t just me, however, there was real change taking place. For years, films had been fairly strictly censored. The Motion Picture Production Code (the Hays Code) of 1930 was adopted by the film industry and was largely followed up to the end of the 1950s. Too vast to reproduce here, some highlights included: “the principle that no picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it … brutal killings are not to be presented in detail … the use of firearms should be restricted to the essentials … pictures shall not infer that low forms of sex relationship are the accepted or common thing … excessive and lustful kissing, lustful embraces, suggestive postures and gestures, are not to be shown … obscenity in word, gesture, reference, song, joke, or by suggestion (even when likely to be understood only by part of the audience) is forbidden … complete nudity is never permitted … dancing or costumes intended to permit undue exposure or indecent movements in the dance are forbidden. [iii]
By the late 1950’s the movie industry was facing competition. First was television. Hollywood needed to offer something people couldn’t see on television, itself subject to an even more restrictive censorship code. But there was also increasing competition from foreign films. [iv] By the late 1960s, the Code had been abandoned. Films moved on, to ‘Straw Dogs’, 1971, ‘Salo’, 1975: extreme violence, rape, sexual perversion with young people, nothing was excluded. The twenty first century has continued the trend, with such horrors as the degrading rape and beating up of a woman in ‘Irreversible’, 2003, and the non-stop unrelenting killing in ‘Rambo’, 2008.
The facts are clear. Research has shown a clear and steady increase in violence in films, tripling between the late 1960s and 2010. [v] Results show gun violence in PG-13–rated films has more than tripled since 1985. “When the PG-13 rating was introduced, these films contained about as much gun violence as G (general audiences) and PG (parental guidance suggested for young children) films. Since 2009, PG-13–rated films have contained as much or more violence as R-rated films (age 17+) films.”
The research report goes on to note: “Even if youth do not use guns, these findings suggest that they are exposed to increasing gun violence in top-selling films. By including guns in violent scenes, film producers may be strengthening the weapons effect and providing youth with scripts for using guns. These findings are concerning because many scientific studies have shown that violent films can increase aggression. Violent films are also now easily accessible to youth (e.g., on the Internet and cable). This research suggests that the presence of weapons in films might amplify the effects of violent films on aggression.” [vi]
But here’s the rub: in commenting on the research, Common Sense media noted: “The MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) claims its ratings have simply evolved to accommodate changing audience and cultural standards.” [vii] Translated, that means films are just a mirror of the society in which we live. Society is more violent, so shooting people becomes commonplace?
How many people die from shootings in the US? Excluding suicides, at least 15,549 people were killed by guns in the United States in 2017 (compared to 15,088 in 2016), according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks media and law enforcement reports of shootings. [viii] That’s over 40 a day. The trend for non-suicide gun deaths shows a slow but steady increase.
But is the US so different? Just one more set of figures, this time coming from a comparison of shootings between countries. Overall, the US has some 270 million guns: to put that differently, Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. [ix] America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. In Canada and Britain, it was 5 per million and 0.7 per million, respectively, corresponding with differences in gun ownership. What’s going on?
One theory put forward is there is an underlying problem with crime in the US, ‘evidenced’ in films portraying urban gang violence in the early 1990s. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries according to a 1999 study by Franklin E. Zimring and Gordon Hawkins of the University of California, Berkeley.[x] In fact they found in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, American crime is simply more lethal. A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process. They concluded the discrepancy, like so much else in US violence, comes down to guns: in fact, to handguns, which predominate in firearm murders. [xi]
More gun ownership corresponds with more gun murders across virtually every axis: across countries, US States, town and cities. Gun control legislation tends to reduce gun murders, according to a recent summary of 130 studies from 10 countries. [xii] A New York Times report argued the difference was culture. “The United States is one of only three countries, along with Mexico and Guatemala, that begin with the opposite assumption: that people have an inherent right to own guns. The main reason American regulation of gun ownership is so weak may be the fact that the trade-offs are simply given a different weight in the United States than anywhere else. After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society. That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.”
Two years ago, Dan Hodges, a British journalist wrote about the 2012 attack that killed 20 young students at an elementary school in Connecticut: “In retrospect Sandy Hook marked the end of the US gun control debate. Once America decided killing children was bearable, it was over.” Prophetic words, and now we are praying, after Sandy Hook and many other massacres since, that the students from Parkland, Florida might be able to do what no-one else has done, which is to introduce some basic, obvious constraints on access to guns and the types of guns for sale.
For three hundred years, owning a gun in the US has been commonplace. This is not only about the Supreme Court’s 2008 reading of the Second Amendment; this is about the American way of life. To change that is to try to change how many Americans see themselves, free, independent, with the right to protect themselves from the government and from other people. Using your gun to kill another person is what happens. Prosaic, commonplace, banal. The banality of shooting.
It’s going to be very hard to change a deeply embedded culture, but perhaps, just perhaps, a group of frightened, angry, vocal, honest and very determined young people might make a real difference: for sure, the 17 minutes on Wednesday were a compelling start. But they can’t do it alone. They need our help, at the ballot box, in meetings, in what we write and say. They’re courageous, and we have to be courageous too.
[i] I haven’t been able to find it in The New Yorker pieces, but I think the term was first used in the book: Eichmann in Jerusalem: a Report on the Banality of Evil, 1963, page 252 in the Penguin 1994 republication.
[ii] The New Yorker, 16 March 1963, page 132
[iii] < http://www.artsreformation.com/a001/hays-code.html>
[iv] < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Production_Code>
[v] Brad J. Bushman, Patrick E. Jamieson, Ilana Weitz, Daniel Romer, Gun Violence Trends in Movies, Pediatrics, November 2013.
[vi] Ibid
[vii] < https://www.commonsensemedia.org/violence-in-the-media/have-movies-become-more-violent-over-the-years>
[viii] The Trace: New York Times, The First Estimate of 2017 Gun Deaths Is In, January 9, 2018, Updated March 7,
[ix] Except where separately noted, these figures come from a report in The New your Times < https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shootings-us-international.html>
[x] < https://www.amazon.com/Crime-Is-Not-Problem-Violence/dp/0195131053>
[xi] All lot of current press coverage is about semi-automatic rifles in massacres, but hand guns are more important overall. FBI statistics show around 90% of firearm murders are by handguns (with incomplete data in 25% of cases) < https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2011-2015.xls>
[xii] < https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26905895.
