Dexter, for example, is a very civil serial killer.
I’ve been getting emails from people nominating Mark Mattioli as an Ethics Hero for his comments before a subcommittee of the Connecticut Legislature considering gun control measures following the Newtown, Connecticut school attack. It’s easy to see why they think that is appropriate, since his emotional remarks—he lost his son in the tragedy—sounded ethical themes throughout. Insisting that more laws were not the solution, Mattioli decried violence on television, and poor parenting. “We need civility across our nation,” he said, and for “common decency to prevail.” He called for accountability, and personal responsibility. All nice sentiments; he got a standing ovation from the legislators.
Ethics, however, is not some kind of magic wand that fixes all problems, and how Mattioli thinks it will eliminate crazy teens with semi-automatic weapons is beyond me. We heard the “incivility kills” argument once before, you will recall, when the Left and the media went on a “blame Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin for Jared Loughner” rampage of their own. Mattioli’s lament had all the practical relevance to addressing gun violence as Rodney King’s “Can’t we all get along?” and John Lennon’s “Give peace a chance”…which is to say, none.
It was cheering to beleaguered gun defenders to hear the parents of one of the slain argue that more restrictive gun laws aren’t needed, I’m sure. Solutions to current problems, however, if there are solutions, must address the world in which we live in*, not the world of 30 years ago, or of President Ike or Tom Sawyer. Mattioli sounded like nothing so much as someone estranged from his own culture, whose solution is to go back to the good old days. Like most such people, nice, honorable and well-meaning as they are, he doesn’t really know much about his culture. Mattioli spoke ruefully about how R-rated movies he couldn’t watch as a teen were less violent than today’s prime-time TV shows—then he named as “disgusting” two TV shows that are not all that violent. The first, “NCIS,” is not only a military-themed show, but one that celebrates ethical values routinely. It is also less violent than shows that were on the TV before there were R-rated movies, like “The Untouchables,” with Robert Stack. The second, “Law and Order, SVU” isn’t especially violent at all, though it is frequently disgusting, being about crimes like rape, sexual abuse and worse. Neither show glamorizes or encourages criminal conduct or violence, however. They aren’t uncivil, and they certainly stand for accountability and responsibility.
There are many good things that can come from improving the basic ethical values of American culture, but stopping rampaging killers is not among them. Those who don’t respect life aren’t going to think twice before grabbing the Uzi because more competent parents taught him that shooting someone is uncivil. Criminals and killers are those who have rejected society’s values, and they will continue to be so. I hear Mattioli’s statement not so much as an inspiring call to clean up America’s values, as the complaint of a man who has lost his son, and believes that if we could somehow turn back the clock to a time when the young respected their elders, Pat Boone was crooning “April Love,” families went to church together and men wore ties to the movies, everything will be all right. No, it won’t, because we’re not going back. Those who equate ethics with nostalgia do more harm than good, for they are the ones who make ethics seem quaint and irrelevant.
We have seen the culture make major changes to enforce important values, particularly in the areas of bias and prejudice. We can work to slow, halt or reverse the steady deterioration of public manners and discourse, and should: civility is important, it is a cornerstone of respect and mutual trust. It is a virtue worth fighting for, but to argue that it can have an impact on gun violence or prevent future Sandy Hooks—that’s ridiculous.
There are enough people out there who ridicule ethics already without giving them a good reason. Mark Mattioli seems like a good, sincere man, and what he has suffered I cannot begin to imagine. Nevertheless, ethics aren’t a panacea, and claiming they are just makes my job harder, because it sets me up to fail.
That’s why Mark Mattioli is not an ethics hero.
* I don’t know why I channeled Paul McCartney’s wretched wording in the lyrics to “Live and Let Die” here. It was probably just a typo, but after my wife flagged it just now, I decided to leave it it, since I like the song and Paul, and because the title is oddly appropriate to the post.
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Sources: The Blaze, Fox News
Ethics Alarms 
No, Jack. Mr. Mattioli was addressing the heart of the issue. You’re right when you say that a decent culture alone will not solve all the instances of gratuitous violence. Nothing, in fact, will. The spectre of crazed, murderous criminals has always been with us and always will. There’s no better argument for the Second Amendment than that.
But one of the greatest root causes of this upsurge of evil can certainly be laid at the doorstep of an evil culture that immeshes young minds in the concepts of vileness for the fun of it. As the culture has deteriorated since the mid-1960s, so has the state of society. Depravity has begotten nihilism which, in turn, as begotten suicidal young killers who live only to make their final mark on society by committing the greatest outrage possible before dying.
In Mr. Mattioli’s childhood- or in our’s- would such crimes as Sandy Hook have even been conceived? That was something that could happen only in some degenerate nation overseas. Unfortunately, that disease of the mind has spread to America. And its vector is the popular culture and those who allow and encourage it, while condemning as “censorship” any attempt to impose restrictions on their “free expression”.
They stand upon the bags of gold they’ve acquired through the transmission of filth and proclaim their “virtue” to us, disclaiming any responsibility for the havoc they’ve wrought. And they get away with it. Their children, after all, don’t die. They’re protected by hired gunsels. Not so the rest of us. Not Mr. Mattioli’s precious young son, either.
Valid points and poetically worded, but not an ethics hero.
More like an ethics “not-gonna-be-pushed-around-guy”.
He deserves well-earned kudos for not being rationalizably (?) knee-jerk and joining the hysteric bandwagon of blame-the-easiest-thing-ism or blame-the-conservative-thing-ism that so permeates the Left-wing.
I’ll leave it to Jack to define an “ethics hero”, Tex. But, unlike all too many in that benighted ministate of Connecticut (or so it seems), he’s no ethics villain. To me, good citizenship, decency and truthfulness are the height of ethical living.
BTW: I very much doubt that “rationalizably” is a legitimate word, but I’ll let Noah Webster worry about that one. That’s his department!
By all means he’s no ethics villain. But there aren’t just heroes and villains.
There are people in between who do the minimum and eke by knowing they are good and get the simple benefit in return, and there is nothing wrong with this because they have done no wrong.
Then there are those who willingly sacrifice the possibility of receiving the simple benefit of a simple life and put it on the line for a greater good, perhaps it works out for them perhaps not, but it works out for others even more. That’s a hero.
I don’t know if Mr. Mattioli could be judged as an “inbetween” by those standards, Tex. It would have been the simplest thing for him to give into blind grief and start making the politically correct statements he knew the press and the politicians wanted from him. Instead, for the sake of his dead son and all the others, he stood up to them and spoke the truth. George Orwell would have defined it as a “revolutionary act” for this day and age. That it was an act of honesty against a system that redefines truth to its advantage… that’s heroic enough for me.
We’ll need a better word than an “Ethics Tweener,” that’s for sure. Mr. Mattioli is far from a villain===so were the well-meaning purveyors of peace and love in the Sixties, who could tear up when they heard the facile lyrics of the finale of “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris”: “If we only have love, we can melt all the guns, and give a new world to our daughters and sons.”
Hallmark sentiments are not serious solutions, and anyone who thinks they are is pretty useless to the cause, unfortunately…worse than useless. Because such sentiments lull us into underestimating the task at hand.
Indeed on ‘rationalizably’. I did my best at 1 am to accurately compose a new word following common suffix practices.
It’s no worse than a lot of weird terms that have been infesting the dictionary as of late. Mr. Webster’s heirs are a lot less discerning about these things than he was!
SMP, horrible attacks on school children are hardly new and are not limited to “young minds”.
http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2012/12/mass-school-bombing-in-1927-puts-sandy-hook-in-context/
I have to ask, where did you grow up ? Fantasy land? This country has always been more violent then other countries. You just didn’t notice . And now that your an old man who lay the blame on foreigners and the decadent youth.
Actually, Fantasy Land was REALLY dangerous—Captain Hook, Neverland pirates, that scary witch from Snow White, killer weasels and a train coming at you in Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride, the Big Bad Wolf wandering around…That place was a menace!
That just made me laugh out loud and freak out my boss in the office.
“I have to ask, where did you grow up ? Fantasy land? This country has always been more violent then other countries. You just didn’t notice . And now that your an old man who lay the blame on foreigners and the decadent youth.”
I don’t know if you can truly say that this country has always been more violent than other countries. For that to be true you would have to ignore a lot of history. I do think the case can be made that this country is no more violent today than it has been in the past.
Our cities were much violent than cities in Europe during the beginning of the 20th century. And this country is a lot safer then it used to be. There are places in DC that I wouldn’t have walked around during the day time without being armed in the 1980’S that I have no problem with at night now.
Because you carry that Magnum .38 now…
I had three pistols I use to carry. Either a .45 ACP, a 357 snub nose or a .45 snub nose.
I can name quite a few times in the past few years when individuals were lauded for comments they made that basically theorized that we could heal our problems if we just did one thing or another; all with the theme of going back to some romanticized “golden age” that never existed. I always thought it was nonsense, because it wasn’t reality.
Our world cannot go backward in time and to suggest that things would be better if we did isn’t helpful because it cannot happen. Technology will continue to go forward; nations will continue to have strife both within and outside their borders; groups and individuals will continue to lash out and kill innocent people; violent video games, movies and television shows will continue to be produced; and people will always lament about how life was better during a bygone era (better for whom is always an interesting question that isn’t often answered).
Would a more ethical society help? Sure. A more civil and kind society would make things better in many areas. More civility in politics would be a marvelous improvement to our society (though I fear the chances of that happening are quite slim).
But I’ve found that it’s the little things that can help society become more kind and considerate. My son, for instance, always holds doors open for others, commenting on occasion, and when called for, “Ladies first.” It always brings a smile to the person going through the door and brightens their day, even if only for a few minutes. “Please,” “thank you,” “pardon me,” “I’m sorry,” “good morning,” “excuse me,” “you have beautiful children,” “what a lovely coat,” “you look really nice today,” “how are you?”; these are just a few of the words people can utter that help humanity, in some measure.
The world has always been a rough violent place and only in America could people believe otherwise. The America of white middle class Americans of the 1950’s was an illusion. While Pat Boone was singing sappy little pop songs there were people in this country fighting for their physical survival both because they were poor or because of the color of their skin. This yearning for a better America is a joke. America is better now then it was 50 years, 100 years or 200 hundred years ago.
“The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.”
Mr. Mattioli is assuming that the perpetrator of the crime was an average person subject to reason and understanding. From what little we know about this man, that is almost certainly not the case. Even with our ‘violent’ society and influences, it is almost uniformly the case that perpetrators of such crimes have serious mental issues, which is comforting. Normal humans DON’T do such things. The best upbringing in the world most likely would not have prevented the Newtown tragedy. The most restrictive society would not have kept him from finding a weapon that would kill people. Rather than face that uncomfortable fact, however, we would rather punish the population at large.
This is somewhat similar to our airport screenings, where we don’t want to even admit that some people are higher-risk for being terrorists than others. We waste countless money, infringe on people’s rights, and we aren’t one bit safer. We won’t get safer unless we actually analyze the problem. No one wants to do that, though. It is too uncomfortable to think about classifying someone as ‘high risk’ to commit mass-murder because the next logical step is to decide what you do about it. So, we will keep passing laws against bayonets and assault weapons and not be one bit safer. We keep taking the advice of random strangers because we think being the victim of a tragedy makes you an expert on how to solve the problem. We take the advice of pretty celebrities because being under TV lights makes you understand how to solve complicated social issues. Until we grow up and use our brains, we won’t be a bit safer. We will be less free and poorer, but not a bit safer.
“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
We have to remember that this is a very young country, and though founded by intellectual giants was forged and settled by pioneers who had to have guns to survive. The right to bear arms in George Mason’s Bill of Rights was in direct response to the Founders’ experiences in Britain, along with freedom of religion, speech, etc.
To blame the entertainment media for the occasional, and I really mean occasional, acts of demented people is ridiculous. (Especially, for example, “NCIS,” in which honor is always at odds with pragmatism, and can make people actually think about that…) In fact, the surge of information/data/opinion — good, bad, indifferent, or sick — that everyone can find on the Internet is a problem our social mores have not caught up with, and THAT is where we can teach our children to analyze, fact-check, and employ the values that we presumably are teaching in our homes.
Laws have not stopped and will not stop the psychotic on the streets who has access to guns. And they will not stop the criminals who gain access to illegal weapons. If the lawful are estopped from having guns, then who will have them? The crazy, the criminal, the police and the military. Take a look at Britain with its thousand year history: did their strict gun laws stop the carnage and terrorism of the Irish rebellion not so long ago? Does it help that, if you have a shotgun and shoot an intruder (in Britain), you as homeowner can be prosecuted (it’s true!)? In contrast to so many other nations, we are still sorting out a lot of moral/ethical questions, and still trying to put the Declaration of Independence and Constitution into the context of both our history and the unimaginable (in 1789) challenges of the 21st century.
To ask for civility in day-to-day actions is something everyone should do – and act on. To state that publicly does not make you a hero. It shows that you are a good, ethical person who understands that civility is the grease that helps the cogs of society work well.
To the issue at hand: there are many “personal” murders every day across the world, since the dawn of history. A person is upset with another and kills him/her/friends/bystanders. Lack of a gun will likely not stop many of those crimes.
However, serial, spree and mass murders have also existed for many decades, across the world. They typically use guns, and often, lots of them, in large caliber, with lots of ammo.
This has happened throughout US history. We only think Europe does not have this problem — they do. It’s only because the US media rarely reports it unless it is truly horrendous (or a slow news day). The public conscious tends to erase these horrendous murders after a few weeks. Sure, you remember them when someone mentions it to you — but how many of these awful murders in the last 20 years could you mention offhand? How about the mass murder of 20+ youths at a camp in Oslo in 2011? The 1989 murders of 14 people by a gunman in Luxiol, France? The 2001 murders of four people at a railway station in Tours, France. Unfortunately, there are so many…
There is no one answer as to why this seems to happen more often. Is it due to a greater population? Overcrowding? Higher incidence of mental illness? Access to weapons? Access to extremely violent games/movies? Abandonment of mentally ill persons (i.e. not institutionalized)? Desensitization? Unstable family groups/loss of moral upbringing? Over or under prescription of drugs?
There is no one answer. And, for all the criteria I listed above, it will take time, effort and a willingness for everyone to perhaps accept certain restrains on their assumed freedoms for the public good.
There’s a can of worms for ya.
Mark Mattioli’s last name is the same name as the discoverer of Cat allergy, Pietro Mattioli. Relatives? We honestly don’t know.