Sorry, But Don’t Expect Any Change 
After Newtown

By Buzz Bissinger

Dec 17, 2012--America is just too steeped in violence to save itself from guns.

Buzz Bissinger on our bloody history—and despite the tragedy in Newtown, our bloody future.

In 1969, an 822-page book was published with the dry title of The History of Violence in America.

It was a reprint of the report that had been made to the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence in the aftermath of the urban riots and political assassinations of the 1960s.

But The History of Violence was everything but dry.

It was harrowing, hailed as the most comprehensive and authoritative study of violence in America ever published up until that time.

The conclusions reached then still so horribly resonate in the aftermath of the shootings at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., Friday that left 26 dead.

In our country, from its founding to the present, where in the past five months there have been three mass shootings, leaving a total of 40 dead, we are a culture historically awash in violence.

But despite the copious evidence, we still refuse to believe it, with morally corrupt historians covering up our bloodlust with what the editors of The History of Violence described as “our vision of ourselves as a latter-day chosen people, a New Jerusalem.”

The belief in our perfection is at the heart of American exceptionalism—a belief we hold desperately and always will.

But the belief only deprives us from ever thinking there is anything we could possibly learn from another country or culture, such as true gun control and not half-assed measures promoted by a president and put through by a congress scared to death of the National Rifle Association.

The National Football League is doing far more to protect its players than our leaders are doing to protect innocent children.

But America, or at least a sizable segment of it, thinks that the loss of our violent legacy will somehow strip us of our American freedom.

We talk about the need for guns for hunting, or to ward off intruders, but the truth is there are too many out there who like to shoot and shoot to kill.

 “The right of the people to take care of themselves, if the law does not, is an indisputable right,” said a professor from Missouri named Bigger in 1867.

It is still our credo.

The History of Violence report was a response to riots that had erupted in dozens of cities in the 1960s, and to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.

But as the report pointed out time and time again, that dark era of violence in America was not some aberration.

The nature of the violence has changed since then, but not the violence itself, which once again has a country desperately searching for answers.

We look everywhere, except in the one place where many of the answers lie:

Our own blood-drenched past.

As then–New York Times reporter John Herbers wrote in a preface to The History of Violence, the book showed “how deeply ingrained in American life is the tradition, even the love, of violence.”