Readers React: Terrorism expert: Psychoanalyze U.S. gun culture, not the Chattanooga gunman

To the editor: I had to unplug my phone Thursday because members of the media kept calling about the shooting in Tennessee. (“What we know about the Chattanooga gunman: A trip to Jordan, a blog about Islam,” July 19)

Speaking to reporters, I’ve discovered, is fruitless. No U.S. media outlet has the courage to publish the truth. They routinely wish to find a talking head to say, “Oh me, oh my, someone behaved badly. Let’s play a guessing game about his brain.”

The things I have to contribute to the understanding of this routine, typical American mass murder will never fly on network news:

- Every society has lots of angry people who, given free access to lethal weapons, will use them.

- Troubled, backward societies like Yemen and the U.S. encourage such people to get lethal weapons with little or no restriction, enthusiastically enabling lots and lots of gun-related murders.

- President Obama, Justice Antonin Scalia, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid all lack the moral backbone to heed the intentions of the Founding Fathers. Mass murders like the one in Tennessee are primarily driven by the failure of U.S. leaders to rise above the New World’s primitive, violent roots.

Jeff Victoroff, MD, Torrance

The writer, an associate professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, is editor of the book “Psychology of Terrorism.”

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To the editor: Has it come to this? Have we become so used to stories of killings, terrorism attacks and other horrible acts that when four innocent service people are killed, the story is relegated beneath the fold, behind Uber and the Emmys?

Dan O’Mara, Agoura Hills

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