Alan Jacobs over at The New Atlantis has some brief but
insightful comments about the ways in which our militarized police ape the
aesthetics of first-person shooter video games:
I want to suggest that there may be a strong connection between the visual style of video games and the visual style of American police forces — the "warrior cops” that Radley Balko has written (chillingly) about. Note how in Ferguson, Missouri, cops’ dress, equipment, and behavior are often totally inappropriate to their circumstances — but visually a close match for many of the Call of Duty games. Consider all the forest-colored camouflage, for instance:
Read the whole thing.
AP/Jeff Roberson It’s a color scheme that is completely useless on city streets — and indeed in any other environment in which any of these cops will ever work. This isn’t self-protection; it’s cosplay.
The militarization of our police is something that should be
of concern to all citizens. But the
tendency toward over-militarization of weaponry, the emphasis on
martial-video-game aesthetics over function is not simply a police phenomenon,
but is also widespread in American civilian gun culture. Indeed, gun aficionados have even coined a
(usually disparaging) portmanteau for it: "tacticool."
The phenomenon was once small-scale and after-market: once,
the would-be tacticool operator had to purchase a plain old rifle and then do
his best to modify it until it looked something like this:
But it seems to have become much more common over the
past couple decades, with gunmakers manufacturing elaborately tricked-out
versions of their own weapons for the wannabe-militarist weapons consumer. And for a variety of reasons - the influence
of video games and other media; a kind of "arms race" with a feared
government or militarized police; the sheer desire for bigger, better toys;
etc. - a certain segment of civilian gun owners in America loves this stuff.
Which is, on the whole, not a major problem: this is mostly a "boys with
toys" phenomenon, and virtually all of these gun owners use their weapons recreationally without harming anyone.
I'd like to take this opportunity to revisit a somewhat
dated discussion. Just a couple of
months ago (millennia in news cycles, now all but forgotten) we were having yet
another debate about banning "assault weapons" in the wake of yet
another mass shooting.
The debate about assault weapons is pretty well scripted by this point. For a mix of reasons the
left perennially proposes an assault weapons ban as both a desirable policy
option and as a potential solution to the problem of mass shootings. The right in turn notes that the term is a
legal fiction, and there is vanishingly little evidence that assault weapons as
a category are necessary for mass shootings or in any way make them more
likely. They then usually go on to make
laughable counterproposals (e.g., armed guards in every school) and openly
carry rifles to Target and Starbucks to prove a point.
On the question of “assault weapons,” I think that the
criticisms of the category are clearly right.
The definition has virtually nothing to do with the functioning of a
weapon, and has almost everything to do with cosmetic, military-seeming features. Indeed, it seems that our political class is
more interested in banning “tacticool” features of weapons than actual killing
capacity. And the motivations for the
ban, while partially legitimate, seem also to arise from the cultural elite’s
alienation from and scorn for gun culture, as well as from a cyncial desire to
exploit a term that is poorly understood by both elite and commoner alike for
political advantage.
(Seriously. I have
personally had at least three conversations in the past year with
well-educated, media-literate progressive American academics who were surprised
to learn that “assault rifles” were not fully automatic machine guns. The plural of “anecdote” is not “data,” of
course, but still....)
And yet.
Prof. Jacobs’ point about video-game reenactment makes me
think about school shootings. In the
most notorious school shootings of the mid-20th century the perpetrators acted
more as snipers or hunters: think of the 1966 University of Texas massacre, in
which Charles Whitman fired on students from the observation deck of the university's Main
Building, or the Cleveland Elementary shooting of 1979, in which Brenda Spencer fired on children from her home across the street. But in recent years, the pattern of mass
killings seems to have shifted, and the perpetrators behave much more like
characters in a first-person shooter video game.
This is almost certainly the result of media influence. Indeed, there is a disturbing way in which
recent killers have acted out scenarios that previously existed in fictional
form. The similarities between the 1997
North Hollywood Shootout and the shootout scene from the 1995 film Heat. The possible influence of the classic first-person shooters Doom and Wolfenstein on
the Columbine killers. The way in which
the recent Santa Barbara killings seemed to echo the wild, violent sprees of
the Grand Theft Auto franchise. (Even the way that the escalation of violence in the latter – beginning from
killings with ad hoc and melee weapons in the perpetrator’s home, then moving
on to firearms at a discrete other location, and finally sprawing into a
townwide shooting spree – eerily echoes the escalation of weaponry common in
the semi-tutorial stages with which many modern video games begin.) I could go on providing examples, but it
would serve no real point. In no single instance is the connection beyond doubt, but the pattern seems clear.
What I am not doing here is “blaming video games” in the
usual sense. That is, I am not claiming
that video games made these people violent, or even more violent. The idea of media desensitization has some
appeal to me, but the evidence seems to be mixed at best. And I have no doubt that the perpetrators,
disturbed individuals all, would have committed some act of violence even without
watching movies and playing video games, even without access to “assault
weapons” of some sort. But media affect
(/effect) our inner narratives, and that the kinds of media we consume seem to have shaped
the violent fantasy scenarios which these individuals went on to enact. Absent the first-person shooter, it is
unlikely that the nature of our killings would be what it is.
In that light, I might be inclined to give the left the
benefit of the doubt, and might suggest that there is one possible
justification for some form of assault weapons ban, albeit not one that I have
heard anyone on the left use. Insofar as
the cosmetic features of weapons seem to be a part of fully realizing the fantasy
– you obviously want badass weapons like your character in the video game when
you go on your killing spree – there may indeed be reason for regulating the
cosmetic features of our weapons. I
wouldn’t necessarily support such a ban, any more than I would necessarily support a ban on first-person shooters, but I might be able to see a rationale for it.
The danger of “tacticool” weapons, then, may be that they
make it too easy to blur the line between video-game fantasy and the real
world, for the good and evil alike. For
a police officer, the inner impulse to protect and serve every citizen must be
in tension at times with the impulse to maintain public order through
violence. At least, it seems to me that
such a tension would exist in me, were I a police officer. And the carrying of military equipment would
make it more likely that I would act out scenarios after the manner of the
latest Call of Duty game. Likewise, for
the violent or mentally ill, access to tactical weaponry resembling what they
have used only in video-game form may make it psychologically easier for them
to channel their violent impulses into acts that, while all too real, ape the
virtual.
No comments:
Post a Comment