Exploring Gun Violence in Wake of Sandy Hook

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/19/arts/television/after-newtown-on-pbs-explores-gun-violence.html

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The national PBS schedule is a placid thing, sketched out well in advance and usually subject to only minor tweaking. So the weeklong programming effort titled “After Newtown,” arriving two months after the mass killings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., represents a major effort in high-metabolism reporting and producing for a network accustomed to moving at a more deliberate pace.

And it’s hard to imagine an ambitious package about gun violence anywhere else on television, with the possible exception of premium cable. It would never make it past the talking stage in the advertiser-supported realm, even though several of the broadcast networks have plenty of underperforming prime-time shows they could pre-empt. It’s painfully obvious, but let’s not miss the chance to say it: a lot of television organizations could do something like this, but PBS is just about the only one that would.

That leaves the question of whether the effort — which includes nightly segments on “PBS NewsHour,” which began on Monday, and will encompass episodes of “Frontline” and “Nova” as well as a pair of new documentaries, “Guns in America” and “The Path to Violence” — was worth it. The answer, based on the four centerpiece programs available for review, is a qualified yes.

The shows overlap and vary in quality and scope, so that the package as a whole doesn’t have the focus or comprehensiveness it might have had as the product of a network with a more unified news department. On a more concrete level, viewers could ask why three of the programs focus on behavior and brain chemistry rather than on guns.

This makes you wonder about both editorial willpower (PBS gets around 10 percent of its financing from the federal government) and editorial astuteness: why emphasize psychology when the national conversation is overwhelmingly about gun control? (At least one “NewsHour” segment as well as “Washington Week With Gwen Ifill” on Friday will address gun control directly.)

Any such doubts are not assuaged by the documentary “Guns in America” on Tuesday night. A polished exercise in tasteful neutrality, it pings back and forth like a metronome between gun-control and gun-rights advocates, leaving their arguments unexamined while laying out a history of the role of firearms in American life, beginning with colonial times.

In the end the case for untrammeled gun ownership is made more vividly, if not more substantially — its proponents include David Keene, president of the National Rifle Association, and Cody Wilson, who encourages the home manufacture of AR-15 rifles using 3-D digital printers — while the cautionary voices tend to belong to historians and law enforcement officials, who speak with an inherent reserve.

The gun lobby also wins the battle of imagery: scenes of hunters and target shooters in green fields and forests support its case, while shots of Chicago’s violent streets can argue either for regulation or for the need to own a gun for self-defense. You can divine a glimmer of liberal intent, however, in the treatment of Jim Supica, director of the National Firearms Museum, whose reverent presentations of muskets and pistols have an unexpectedly comic effect.

The focus shifts firmly to psychology in Tuesday’s “Frontline” episode, “Raising Adam Lanza,” which follows two reporters for The Hartford Courant as they investigate the relationship between Lanza, the Newtown gunman, and his mother, Nancy, who was the first of his 27 victims. Despite too many lame “All the President’s Men”-style scenes of the reporters traveling to interviews and batting around ideas with their editors — including some dangerously speculative theorizing about the Lanzas — the program has the advantage of delivering new information about the mother and son, from several acquaintances who had not spoken previously in public.

The new details are in no way conclusive, however, and we’re no closer to an answer for Adam Lanza’s motives, though the program indirectly floats a theory that his aversion to change may have been exacerbated by a proposed move to an out-of-state college.

The “Nova” episode, “Mind of a Rampage Killer,” and the documentary “The Path to Violence” on Wednesday are broad medical and psychological reports that don’t directly address the Newtown shootings. “Nova” starts out by asking whether the chemistry and architecture of the brain can be tied to violent behavior in young men — with the answer being a solid “probably” — before moving on to nature versus nurture, actuarial models for predicting violence and anecdotal accounts of depression and psychopathy among boys.

The wandering focus is frustrating (it could be interpreted as a reluctance to dwell too long on any one issue, when the entire question of physiological triggers for violence is controversial), but the individual segments are all quite interesting.

The final documentary, “The Path to Violence,” is, in the corporate vernacular, solutions-oriented. Taking as its starting point a study of thwarted school attacks — the program claims that there have been more than 120 such instances in the last decade — it talks to experts in “threat assessment” about ways that schools can be made more safe without impinging too heavily on civil liberties. Wrapped in the soothing narration of Sam Waterston, it’s a reassuring coda to an amorphous but unsettling batch of broadcasts.