Is the problem Facebook? Guns, sport and macho mentality

The contretemps surrounding Olympic swimmers Nick D'Arcy and Kenrick Monk continues. First, the swimmers were brought home early, as punishment for posting images of themselves on Facebook and Twitter, posing in a Californian gun shop, guns akimbo (for D’Arcy) and holding what appears to be a heavy-weight handgun (Monk). Next, it is said they will be allowed to compete in London at the Games, but will be brought home immediately after 4 August, the date of completion of all swimming events. Further, throughout the Games they will be banned from ‘blogging’ or using any social media. These decisions of the Australian Olympic Games Committee (AOC) have been publicised widely. Now, Swimming Australia’s determination is reported: the sole sanction imposed by that body is an agreed ‘ban’ on social media dissemination by both swimmers, until the Games are concluded.

Responses are mixed. The Ageexecutive news editor Patrick Smithers decries the publicity surrounding the pair and the outcome – so far. He says the duo were ‘indeed stupid’ in posting on Facebook ‘photographs of themselves posing with high-powered weapons in an American gun shop’. However, their ‘stupidity’ for him lies in their having ‘failed to anticipate the sanctimonious, knee-jerk and hypocritical reaction back home to their high jinks’.

Jim Morton of the Sydney Morning Heraldbrands the swimmers’ activity as ‘skylarking’ while Mick Coulter, Sunday Ageproduction editor, sees the episode as ‘trifling’ when taken in isolation from D’Arcy’s history of engagement with the legal system, a ‘history of violence’. In the present instance, Coulter observes: ‘No laws were broken, no one was harmed. But the message that D'Arcy sent the world couldn't be clearer: he doesn't give a stuff what anyone thinks. It's the sort of focus and self-obsession that is an invaluable asset in an athlete, but an active liability in a citizen. The question then becomes one of what sort of person we're comfortable with representing us on the international stage. Are we happy with muscled thugs who can deliver the prestige of a gold medal, no matter how they behave?’

Somewhat predictably, a politician has stepped in to condemn ‘political correctness’ as denying men ‘the right to be men’. The member for the seat of Kennedy took to the airwaves to defend D’Arcy, a fellow Queenslander, and Monk, whom he described as ‘sporting heroes’, the ‘real crime’ being ‘thought police’ accused of ‘stripping us of the right for boys to be boys’. Why should Olympic swimmers be ‘vilified for being photographed with legal firearms in the U.S?’

Meanwhile others – including fellow swimmers – are cited as agreeing with the punishments. One is quoted as concluding that it’s ‘harsh’ but ‘fair’, stating that as the view of some fellow swimmers, too.

Is this a storm in a teacup? High-jinks in a hand-basket? Is Patrick Smithers’ view right, when he ends his Age opinion piece with a reference to shooting as an Olympic sport, with the apparent implication that because Australia sends a shooting team to the Games, this somehow is an answer to the wielding of guns in a U.S. gun shop by a pair who have no Olympic credentials in the ‘sport’ of shooting.

Is the AOC correct or being ‘sanctimonious’ - or going along with sanctimony - in ‘punishing’ the swimmers? Does this serve to detract from the more serious events in which D’Arcy and Monk have been involved: for the one (D’Arcy) conviction for a serious assault on a fellow swimmer, then declaring himself bankrupt when faced with a damages claim in a civil suit; for the other (Monk) making a false claim about an injury, originally alleging it was inflicted upon him by a ‘hit and run’ accident so as to avoid responsibility for causing his own injuries.

Yet doesn’t the entire episode raise questions far more telling than those apparently responded to by the AOC and Swimming Australia (SA)? The issue for both appears to be not that D'Arcy and Monk were in a Californian gun shop at all or that they were seemingly in thrall to the readiness with which weapons can be obtained in the U.S., nor that they were at the ready to try out their prowess by shooting the weapons in the store: a service apparently extended to prospective customers or simple sightseers. No, the concern of both the AOC and SA seems to be solely that (in an AOC representative’s words, echoed by SA) the pair have ‘poor decision-making skills’ – not because they did all that, but because they had the gall to publicise it on Twitter and Facebook.

Is social networking and Internet publicity the problem? Or have the AOC and SA missed the most crucial element in this affair?

In 2011, The Guardianreported on the latest FBI crime statistics, compiled from local law enforcement and FBI reports. Of 12,996 murders in the U.S. in 2010 (not including Florida and with ‘incomplete’ data from Illinois), 8,775 were caused by firearms. Although ‘gun crime is going down’ the figures showed California ‘had the highest number of gun murders’ that year – 1,257, being ’69 per cent of all murders in 2010 and equivalent to 3.37 per 100,000 people in the state’. That was 8 per cent down on 2009 figures.

An international comparison of gun deaths for countries including the U.S. and Australia shows that generally suicides by firearms outstrip unlawful killings, with a small number of ‘accidental’ deaths. The Gun Control Network reported that for the U.S., in 2010 firearms deaths comprised 3.98 unlawful killings per 100,000 population, 5.92 suicides per 100,000, and 0.36 per 100,000 recorded as accidental deaths. In the same year, for Australia the figures were 0.24 unlawful killings per 100,000 population, 1.34 suicides per 100,000 and 0.10 per 100,000 ‘accidental deaths’.

The proliferation and ownership of guns in Australia remains an issue. Gun Control Australia observes that April 2012 was the sixteenth anniversary of the Port Arthur firearms killings, setting out a brief history of efforts to tighten gun control laws: ‘In the three decade span between the mid 1950s and the mid 1980s Australia experienced very high yearly rates of gun deaths. During this period, shooter groups were the governments’ main reference advisors on gun laws.

‘In 1987 there were six gun massacres, 32 [people] were murdered with guns. Most murderers held their guns legally. Soon, most Australian jurisdictions made stricter gun laws resulting in a significant lowering of gun homicide and gun suicide rates.'

‘In early 1996 a dedicated shooter murdered six members of his family at a suburb of Brisbane and on 28 April [that year] 35 were murdered by a young man…at Port Arthur in Tasmania. In the following year or two stricter gun laws were introduced by most Australian jurisdictions resulting in further lowering of the gun homicide and gun suicide rates.’

Yet in Australia and globally, the major gun problem lies not outdoors but closer at hand.

In 2010 the first international campaign was launched to protect women from gun violence in the home. Introducing the campaign, IANSA (the International Action Network on Small Arms) noted that ‘most shockingly’, the greatest risk of gun violence to women everywhere is ‘not on the streets, or the battlefield, but in their own homes’: ‘Women are three times more likely to die violently if there is a gun in the house. Usually the perpetrator is a spouse or partner, often with a prior record of domestic abuse. Gun violence can be part of the cycle of intimidation and aggression many women experience from an intimate partner. For every woman killed or physically injured by firearms, many more are threatened.’

For this reason, IANSA launched a campaign ‘to demand policies which would keep women safe from gun violence’, the main goal being ‘to ensure that anyone with a history of domestic abuse is denied access to a firearm, and has their license revoked’.

By 2012, the ‘Global Week of Action Against Gun Violence’ was already entrenched in activist diaries and NGO campaign notebooks and calendars throughout the world: ‘Participation during the Global Week of Action Against Gun Violence (WoA) 2010 grew to 267 IANSA members in 102 countries confirming that the Week of Action is now synonymous with CSO [Civil Society Organisations] solidarity on the issue. Last year saw a wide variety of successful activities in over 80 countries, including many focusing on the UN Programme of Action on small arms, the Arms Trade Treaty and the Disarm Domestic Violence campaign…’

Returning, then to guns, swimming and the Olympics, defending D’Arcy and Monk, one team mate has queried the authenticity of the AOC and SA’s reaction in light of recent history. The charge is one of ‘hypocrisy’. What is ‘all the fuss’ about, asks this fellow swimmer, when some five years ago (in 2007) SA ‘took the team to a Canberra rifle range as part of a bonding session’. Interviewed on television, the Olympic athlete said D’Arcy and Monk ‘haven’t really done anything wrong’. In any event (echoing what others have said), the two were simply ‘boys being boys’ and 'Shooting is an Olympic sport and shooters don't get into trouble for posing in their speedos.’

The AOC responded by saying the gun range visit ‘had nothing to do with the AOC’ as it was ‘an initiative’ of SA and those participating ‘were not members of any Olympic Team at that time’. Thus, it ‘has absolutely no bearing on the decision taken by the AOC at the weekend’ in relation to D’Arcy and Monk.

That SA should see guns and shooting as a means of ‘team bonding’ may well raise questions, at least in some minds, as to the capacity of decision-making occurring within that organisation and, apparently, at its top levels. In this light, it may be unsurprising that some team members, at least, see guns as items for play and showing off, despite the dangers inherent in them. Guns are, after all, designed and manufactured for ending lives.

But what of the fundamental question, namely the way in which the matter has been addressed by both SA and the AOC. Surely the issue goes way beyond Facebook and Twitter. In his Agearticle, Michael Coulter drew attention to how sporting standards have deteriorated way below what was originally envisaged by and in the Olympic movement, effectively making an impassioned plea for a return to what the essence of sport and performance was intended to be.

Sadly, a macho mentality imbues competitive sport with the perfect setting for promoting an ethos consistent with lionising gun-culture and seeing a visit to a gun shop as ‘fun’. The contention that shouldering weapons affirms one’s manhood (‘boys will be boys’, ‘men will be men’) is not just questionable, when statistics on the use of guns are in issue. The idea that ‘manhood’ is somehow acknowledged or enhanced through gun-clutching images permeating the Internet and clogging the airwaves is not only risible, but frightening.

Ultimately, the AOC and SA have missed the point entirely. The role of social media in pubicising the swimmers’ actions is in a very real sense a plus, not a minus. After all, in this instance it allowed the public, through the mainstream media, to know what ‘our’ Olympic prospects get up to when overseas. It highlights the nature of some Olympic prospects, at least, along with their apparent lack of appreciation of the realities, and the horrors, of gun-culture.

Yet perhaps this is what the AOC and SA really have in mind: that conduct that may be publicly deplored should not be made known to the pubic – no matter what goes on behind closed doors or in gun shops.

As the U.S. feminist Gloria Steinem says, mass media dissemination of images vilifying women have at least alerted women to the depths and breadth of this woman-hating culture. Facebook, Twitter and their counterparts can equally alert us to a disturbing culture at the heart of Australian sport.