Gun control debate on social media

The killing of twenty children and six adults in Sandy Hook School, Newtown, Connecticut on Friday has re-ignited the debate on gun control in the USA. The immediacy of social media meant that opinions on the matter were quickly raised. Many voiced their anger and sorrow at the events and encouraging President Obama to act decisively to, in some way, pull the country back from its rather entrenched position of mass gun ownership. Others were equally as quick to defend the 2^nd Amendment which gives Americans the right to bear arms, and some indeed used the tragedy to express a rather distasteful view that gun control laws should be loosened to allow schools to hold guns on site in order to combat similar threats.

The reaction on social media reflected some of the wonderful advantages of digital media but also some of its more depressing features. Genuine and considered debate was allowed to flourish on social media sites but too often it was hidden by the ill-informed bile that seems to dominate such forums. On Google+ Richard Branson added a poster from thirty years ago to his message of condolence. The poster gives some raw statistics about the number of people killed by handguns in one year with 10,728 in the US and 58 in Israel being the next highest figure. The comments made, over 500 in less than 24 hours, give an interesting insight into the quality of debate that can, or possibly can’t, take place on social media sites.

 

Some were quick to be dismissive because of the age of the poster and its rather basic use of statistics, summed up by one comment which read, “LOL at West Germany. Also do these spurious numbers take into account the drastically different population​s between each country? I guess not.” Both criticisms are fair from the perspective of a pedant who has rather missed the point of posting the image, the sentiment being that nothing has changed over this span of time despite the all-too frequent killing of innocent victims in American schools, colleges, hospitals, cinemas, shopping malls etc. Here is an example of another frequently voiced objection to Branson’s view, “Richard, natural disasters kill people, diseases kill people, gravity kills people, and people kill people. Handguns don't kill people.” ‘Guns don’t kill, people do’ has become a bit of a cliché of the pro-gun lobby in the US and strikes me as a rather weak argument, especially when it is extended to the suggestion that if guns are banned then so should cars, alcohol, bears etc. It is only after fairly careful examination of the comments that you come across some rational arguments that don’t just adhere to the simplistic for or against standpoint. For example, “Canada has very lenient gun control laws compared to the US, it's the Culture of the American's that is Killing People. Not the manner in which they do it.”

Social media allows all of us to pass comment, to a large extent, on anything that we want. These comments are immediate and can potentially be read by millions of people. This is the way in which people will increasingly make their point. But there is a danger that the views of bigots will drown out the voices of those who genuinely want to add constructive comments to issues of concern, in the same way that genuinely interesting posts of Facebook are often significantly out-weighed by the mundane. Schools have a duty, more than ever, in the unedited world of social media, to teach children about the skills of interpretation and objectivity so that they can sift through the mass of words, videos and images to find the real gems of considered wisdom and thought which can offer something positive and useful to our world.