In Friday's Washington Post, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) writes of the <a title="Joe Manchin op-ed" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sen-joe-manchin-between-obama-and-the-nra-another-path-to-stopping-mass-violence/2012/12/21/181d4e94-4adc-11e2-9a42-d1ce6d0ed278_story.html?hpid=z4">comprehensive approach</a> that must be taken to solve the problems that we as Americans have with gun violence. He suggests that any approach that only targets guns and gun owners and ignores mental health and our violence-soaked culture is doomed to fail.

I tend to agree, but I think the problem lies much deeper -- and is much more difficult to solve -- than anyone is saying.

Let me illustrate what I want to discuss with an anecdote. Back about 1998, when a lot of people with home computers were switching first to DSL and then to cable modems, my wife and I were still using dial-up Internet at home. Our modem was pretty good for the time -- 57,600 baud -- especially considering the fact that the first modem I ever used as a journalist was 300 baud. My 500-word stories to five minutes to send to my newsroom. Of course, that was 1980. Still, it made me appreciate 57,600.

My son didn't have that experience, so all I heard from him was how deathly slow our modem was.

And that is the root of our problem. Most of us know that Marshall McLuhan said "the medium is the message," but how many people understand what McLuhan meant by that? McLuhan wasn't much concerned with whether people chose to watch "Masterpiece Theatre" or "Gilligan's Island." He knew that within reason, it didn't matter what you watched. What mattered is that watching did to your brain.

In his wonderful book "The Shallows" (we'll get to it in a minute), Nicholas Carr wrote that McLuhan understood media aren't just channels of information. "They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought." Numerous studies have shown that watching large amounts of television affects our brains in a way almost nothing else does -- it makes us more passive. We sit in the dark and absorb information without having to think about it at all.

<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/images-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1855" title="images (1)" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/images-1.jpg" alt="" width="225" height="225" /></a><a title="The Shallows" href="http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/shallows-nicholas-carr/1100207475?ean=9780393079364">"The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains"</a> is an expansion of an Atlantic Monthly cover story titled "Is Google Making Us Stupid," and it's pretty obvious what Carr's take on it is. He has interviewed numerous people who say -- as he says for himself -- that it has become much more difficult to read for any length of time. "Whether I'm online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles," Carr writes. "Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski."

<!--more-->I hope that's enough background for you, because I do want to get back to the subject of this column -- the causes of gun violence in our country.

Can we go back to a simpler culture, where we don't have to see heads explode or watch people writhing nakedly on screen? I doubt it, and those aren't even the biggest problem. The biggest problem in the culture -- and one reason I mentioned "The Shallows" -- is the quick cutting and choppy editing, two things designed to keep people in a constant state of anxiety. Unless you go into a quiet, dark room, it's almost impossible to maintain any real level of serenity.

You might as well be Frank Costanza, screaming out "Serenity now!" as his blood pressure rises.

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So is there any serenity in our culture?

One of the first video games I ever played was Tetris. I wasn't great at it, but I was pretty good. Still, after I played for an hour or so, I would find Tetris patterns going through my mind later that night as I tried to go to sleep. I played games like Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Burger Time and Zookeeper, none of them violent but all of them reducing my own personal level of serenity.

[caption id="attachment_1856" align="alignright" width="267" caption="NRA Gun Club"]<a href="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/images.jpg"><img class="size-full wp-image-1856" title="images" src="http://mikerappaport.net/onevoice/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/images.jpg" alt="" width="267" height="189" /></a>[/caption]

Of course, there were plenty of other games -- ones I didn't play -- that were a lot more aggressive. Games like Doom, games like Mortal Kombat, games like NRA Gun Club.

In Mortal Kombat, for example, the right sort of punch or kick could actually drive the opponent's skeleton out of his body.

And that's a game that would be regarded as impossibly primitive in 2012. We're not even going to take our culture back to Mortal Kombat or Doom, let alone to the days before video games. Our country has changed too much. In the '60s, movies by Sam Peckinpah pushed the envelope for violence. These days Quentin Tarantino and others make Peckinpah look like Walt Disney's tender-hearted brother.

We don't even have the same values. A <a title="State of Our Unions" href="http://www.stateofourunions.org/">University of Virginia study</a> looked at the 60 percent of Americans who graduate from high school but not from college. In the 1980s, 13 percent of children born to mothers in this group were born outside of marriage; by 2010 that number was up to 44 percent.

Since we know, all politics aside, that the optimum situation for a child is to be raised in a stable home with two loving, committed parents, the numbers from the report show a real decline in one very important respect.

We're never going back to the '50s, not that we even should. But that doesn't mean there aren't problems that need to be addressed, ways to make our country a better place to live. Manchin is correct in saying that this is a complex problem, but we should always remember that the heart of the problem is guns.

People who are happy, successful and yes, mentally healthy, are not stockpiling weapons of war. They're not living in fear that the government will come after them. People with military-style weapons, the people who say the Founding Fathers intended private citizens to have the firepower to protect themselves from the government, these people are the ones standing in the way of sensible reform.

If I take a minimalist view of the Second Amendment, it's because I believe sincerely that the Bill of Rights was never intended to be a suicide pact.

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