Don't blame this on the Internet . . .
Hysterically angry, hate-filled, disturbed, abusive, elderly James von Brunn has become the newest destroyer of the public peace, opening gunfire in the Holocaust Memorial Museum and shooting and killing heroic security guard Stephen Tyrone Johns*. Within minutes, media personalities were already targeting the public discourse--and blaming the Internet.

True, the rise of hate groups under the previous administration is a grave concern, and adequate analysis of the spike in their growth under the previous administration is overdue.

True, the unbridled toxic language injected into our airways--which are owned by the public and should have been run in the public interest--has unquestionably contributed to hate crimes in the past and to the two most recent examples, the shooting today and the killing of Dr. George Tiller.

But given von Brunn's history, any thinking person should be asking one simple question: Why was this man allowed to bear arms? And we will know we have a free press--that is, news media truly independent of NRA lobbyists and their ilk--when some reporter or news anchor is free to utter those words. Once again: Why was a man like James von Brunn, why was a man in James von Brunn's condition, able to bear arms at will?

Notwithstanding the selective history of those who purport to be protecting the Constitution--i.e. the 2nd amendment--the real meaning of militias in colonial life was commonality, not unbridled individualism. The print periodicals of the time, America's earliest newspapers, bear out this luminous point. "A well-regulated militia" depended on the concept of self-governance, and there is no evidence, no evidence at all--quite the contrary--that a man incapable of self-governance would have been entrusted with either a slot in the militia or a dangerous weapon, at least while in the company of other people.

More on American history later. For now, the instant (apparently) impulse in some large media outlets to bring up the Internet must be filtered through the lens of enlightened skepticism. After all, the power of the Internet, so far as it goes, stems from two major causes: 1) the U.S. military that developed it, originally, for non-peaceful ends; and 2) the information and communications vacuum created by the over-control of the corporate media outlets. Honest and accurate criticism of "the Internet" on the networks and the cable channels alike would acknowledge that the appeal of the Net stems largely from the ways it fills in world-sized gaps left by the nominal news media.

In all the whining by newspapers about the demise of newspapers, or the demise of print journalism, or the demise of journalism, I have yet to see even one article make the central point that people stop reading the paper when they can no longer find out what's happening by reading the paper. Nor have I yet seen an article mention the damage that large newspapers have done--to the uttermost extent of their power--to small community newspapers, and even to small newspaper chains. Conrad Black is not the only big-chain thug; too many of our papers in Maryland were acquired by the Tribune company--and the Tribune company has not served the state of Maryland well. (Check the final season of The Wire for a somewhat fictionalized handling of what has happened to the Baltimore Sun, under its parent company.)

And one prime lacuna in the news media is the absence of courage--moral courage, political courage, the real kind of courage--shown by all three television networks and most of our largest newspapers, when it comes to gun control.

[Update June 11, 2009: local news reports in Washington, D.C., indicate that one of Johns' last acts was to open the door of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum for the alleged shooter, an elderly man.]