by Barry Glassner

About the author: Barry Glassner is a professor of sociology at the University of Southern California and the author of The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.

Some American reporters and editors have swallowed so much baloney fed to them by the gun lobby they cough up explanations for gun deaths that credit everything except guns. They even blame their own industry. A columnist in Newsweek wrote of the Dunblane massacre [in which a man gunned down sixteen elementary school children in Dunblane, Scotland], “Onanistic solitude, lived out in a fantasy world ruled by terror and thrilled by incessant gunfire, poses a lethal combination. Media moguls, enriched by promoting these fantasies, deny any blame for society’s degradation. They are...