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 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 S