Call it gun murder, not 'gun violence' - New York Daily News

If we are at a turning point in our national relationship with guns, then it will be useful to start talking about them in more effective ways.

Language can be part of starting, shifting and even controlling a conversation.

For example, before the 1990s, there was barely a term for what we now call sexual harassment, other than winky ones such as calling men "mashers" or "all hands." Language helped call attention to something that needed serious attention.

Perhaps more controversially, the very phrase "gun control" is, in its way, deft in how it controls the debate. It implies that those suggesting it be more difficult to purchase a gun are potential King George 3rds, denying people something as fundamental as a "right."

If people who feel otherwise are to have a lasting impact at this pivotal time, they need to refresh their own terms.

Calling ourselves opponents of "gun violence" is weak tea. In everyday use, "violence" lacks the stark potency of its original meaning, something that happens to most words over time.

Especially in our society , we hear "violence" and think of it as something pervasive and unexceptional. Amidst that, the violence accomplished by guns can seem like just one patch in the quilt.

"Violence" is also too vague and general in itself, hardly capturing the specific and revolting horror of what the Jared Loughners and James Holmeses of the world do. More to the point, "violence" carries an implication that the subject of it survives to suffer from it.

Adam Lanza squeezed a trigger again and again and ended 20 children's lives within minutes. Surely this is something more than "violence."

So we need something new.

But we have to make sure we choose a term that will stand the test of time. The history of language tells us that expressions created to change thought have a way of taking on the same unhelpful associations as the ones they were coined to replace.

Think of what a wise, solid term "affirmative action" was, in itself, when it was coined. Yet today we barely consider the meaning of its individual words, just as we don't think of ice cream as creamed ice. Instead, whether we like it or not, affirmative action is today a deeply loaded term, reviled by many.

Note the same kind of associations many have with "pro-life," initially positively intended but now often spat out within the epithet "pro-lifer." Note also how "sexual harassment" has accreted a certain patina of suspicion among some who consider it charged too often. I'm not saying any of this is great — but it's real.

We need something 1) stronger than "violence" and 2) that will resist decay. Even the staunchest of terms start to crumble in effectiveness after the foibles of human cognition and bias eat away at it — "feminism" is another one.

I suggest that the proper object of concern be not "gun violence" but gun murder.

Murder is so primally horrific that the word is unlikely to fade into irony or quaintness the way "All in the Family"-era terminology like "male chauvinist" and "prejudiced" have.

Murder also refers to what actually concerns us. Why be coy about it and speak of "violence"? What has moved the nation to action is not people getting shot in the butt, not even gun suicides, per se, but massive numbers of human beings mowed down.

Let's have that always be front and center.

"Gun violence," the current term of art, sounds euphemistic and even bureaucratic, like one more thing sitting in the in-box as always. Those are hardly the associations we need when addressing in a real way, at last, the epidemic of senseless mass murders in this nation.

jmcwhort@gmail.com