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13 Things 2009

13 Things 2008


Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology

Search Brown

 

 

Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology & the Ancient World
Brown University
Box 1837 / 60 George Street
Providence, RI 02912
Telephone: (401) 863-3188
Fax: (401) 863-9423
[email protected]

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When is violence socially acceptable? Or rather, when considering the Tommy Gun, it's better to ask: how does violence become socially acceptable?

In a sense, the fact that the Tommy Gun is the same object in both World War II and in the 1920's makes for a sort of social experiment where the gun is a constant. The same gun model is somehow different when used by different groups of people. The most apparent way in which it is different, it seems, is the intended ends of the user. For instance, the gun in a gangster's hand is a violence-producing tool used to seek criminal ends, such as money or killing off rival gangsters. Similarly, the Tommy Gun in a policeman's hands is still a weapon meant to produce violence, but it changes in the respect that its ends are not criminal but rather meant to seek justice. Each historical user of the Tommy Gun can be analyzed in this way: the soldier uses it as a tool to kill a prescribed enemy, the citizen uses it for many possible reasons such as to protect his home.

Clearly the ends of people using the gun are important in some way to how the Tommy Gun changed. First, though, let's think about and apply some of the factors of violence that I talked about earlier: Which of these factors can help us analyze in more detail how and why the ends of Tommy Gun users affected the Tommy Gun as part of the human-thing relationship?

For one, the direction of violence certainly comes into play. A large part of defining an end is the direction of the Tommy Gunner's violence: a gangster shooting a rival gangster, a policeman shooting a criminal, a soldier shooting an enemy, and so on.

Further, we can look at the ends in terms of how the means to them are perceived by society: for instance, a criminal's act of robbing a bank, is perceived as bad by society because the end (getting money) is supported by a means that is socially seen as morally unjust (taking the money from someone who actually owns it.)

On the topic of means the Tommy Gun is especially interesting because it polarizes the means of an individual's action. When a criminal has a Tommy Gun, the means is no longer just a "stick up" in a bank where the threat of violence helps to ensure that the criminal will get the money. Rather, because a Tommy Gun is capable of continuous and unqualified violence, the criminal has less reason to merely point the gun. Instead he can simply, forcefully, and continuously shoot the Tommy Gun at anyone (guards, innocents, or otherwise) who gets in the way of the goal. (Thus, the cliche image of a gangster entering a bank with guns blazing, as opposed to criminals only pointing their weapons at people and rarely actually shooting.) In this way the violence of the means is polarized to an extreme, as is the amount of actual social wrongness of the means (ie., more innocents are killed because of unrestricted violence.) The means is similarly polarized to an extreme in other cases: the soldier "overkills" his enemy by firing too much with the Tommy Gun simply because the Tommy Gun is capable of firing that much, and the policeman worries about using the machine gun because the polarized violence may end up with the accidental deaths of innocents. (These cases and the worries of the policeman are brought up in another discussion.)

This polarization is important to a few characteristics of the Tommy Gun, such as its capacity for unlimited violence and why the gangster found the Tommy Gun so useful. Most interestingly, though, it’s a major reason why the Tommy Gun is portrayed in film the way it is—such polarization of violence lends itself well to making exciting or dramatic moments in movies, and is thus also part of the reason for society’s desensitization of violence. (We’ll cover this in yet another discussion. Funny how this all weaves together, isn’t it?)

Let’s get back to the aforementioned factors of violence, though. In a sense, the two factors in question—direction and social perception of violence—combine with a consideration of ends and means to define social acceptability as a whole. In principle, violence when considered by itself is looked down upon by society. And yet, when violence flows in a certain direction, it suddenly becomes accepted by society—the soldier and the gangster produce the same kind and amount of violence and yet one is socially accepted and the other is not. Similarly, soldiers and gangsters have different intended ends, but the same means. Thus it seems that it is the ends, and not the means, that determines the social acceptability of the Tommy Gun.

The Tommy Gun’s history provides for a context to explore these connections between direction, means and ends, and social perception. Here is a simplified chart of the history of the Tommy Gun in various contexts and uses:

GangstersDirection of Violence: To Other Gangster, PolicemenEnd: Wealth, PowerMeans: Violence towards anyoneSocially Acceptable?: No
PoliceDirection of Violence: To criminalsEnd: Justice, Peace, Citizen Safety, Protection of Legal RightsMeans: Violence ONLY towards criminalsSocially Acceptable?: Yes
SoldiersDirection of Violence: To Enemy SoldiersEnd: Power for Country, PeaceMeans: Violence ONLY to Soliders (in theory)Socially Acceptable?: Yes

We can see a few points of interest in this history chart. For one, the Tommy Gun appears to become socially acceptable only when there is a specific target allowed: in other words, when there is a qualification of the violence. This is represented in both the means to the desired ends and the direction of the violence: the violence of the Tommy Gun must be limited by ruling out who is acceptable to be killed as a means to an end (ie., a gangster robbing a bank with a Tommy Gun versus a soldier killing an enemy or a police man shooting a criminal). Thus society in some way uses acceptability to qualify violence even when the weapon itself is mechanically and physically unqualifiable.

What's worrying about this chart is that apparently when the Tommy Gun was used, the end could justify the means, even if it was massive amounts of violence, as long as the end was socially accepted. As in, the gangster is condemned by society because he uses such massive amounts of violence to take something that is not rightly his from a bank, but the soldier in World War II is free to let loose on enemy Germans because American society somehow may deem them "killable." We have to wonder how society could endorse such violence, though I suppose that's a much bigger question than fits in our analysis of the Tommy Gun.

Thus we see some of the underpinnings of how the violence of the Tommy Gun could become socially acceptable. This discussion especially relates to the Tommy Gun considering its penchant for (again!) continuous and unqualified violence, considering its strange enough that something this violent could become acceptable at all. It seems, gruesome as it is, that as much as social properties surrounding violence can qualify that violence, they are just as much the context that provides violence the ability to be accepted—after all, it is that same social context that forbids the soldier from shooting an innocent that also allows him to shoot an enemy merely because the society he lives in deems it necessary. To continue on this path of thought would be to leave the Tommy Gun behind and drift into the realm of morality and philosophy and would likely be fruitless, but at the very least the Tommy Gun provides us with some tiny amount of insight into the matter, even if it may be unresolvable.

From here you can go to:

Continuous Violence: Limitations, Adoption and Context

Media: The Tommy Gun in Film

Or if you've finished all three discussions:

Conclusion: Change and Reflection