What do we do to protect our schools? Is this one of those
questions that have no real answer or at least not one definite answer?
What can we propose that does more than give in to the predictable
shouts and demands of the irrational and angry and fearful and
uninformed? What can we do that isn't something that has already failed
to have any effect or that we're already doing? What can we do to calm
the irrational, the ill informed, the hysterical and fear ridden?
Certainly
none of the solutions we've so passionately offered and instituted and
defended against criticism have done anything we can point to as having
helped: the three day waiting period, the background checks, the late
"assault weapon" ban, the ban on "Saturday Night Specials," the ban on
sending guns through the mail without a Federal license, the ban on
automatic weapons that's been here since 1937, the restrictions on how
many guns you can buy in a year, how much ammunition. . . the need for
criminal background checks and fingerprinting -- how short a barrel can
be and even whether a sporting gun can legally be made to look
like a military weapon -- Sure, the overall rate of violent crime may
continue to decline and perhaps some of that is due to these measures or
to more people being in jail, but there will be more incidents as there
are in countries with draconian gun control laws. At every one we can
be sure there will be calls to make murder even more illegal, to somehow
confiscate all guns from the 175 million people who own them -- and the
same mouldy arguments will be trotted out again and discussion of
whether experience anywhere has given us a reason to be hopeful, will
not be heard. Still I have a good idea what will happen.
The
media will chew on this for days striving to raise the discussion to
the point of mania, because it's good for ratings. As I watch, the
network nitwits are prattling about whether we should go back to that
fraudulent "Assault Weapon Ban" which really only banned newly made fake
assault weapons made overseas and left millions already in circulation.
It made us liberals feel good. It made nothing better.
People
will be afraid to send their kids to school. When heads begin to cool,
there will be a search for heroes and the folk psychoanalysis of
perpetrators by the usual hired opinionators. The same old axes will
be ground.
There will be more earnest insistence that
banning things make them go away, even if there are 200 million in the
country, perhaps much more. More idiocy about making psychotics "just
say no" by passing a ban, a restriction, a law.
What
we should be asking is what I asked just now -- how do we protect the
innocent, the helpless without increasing helplessness? How do we
protect our schools? How do we keep the dangerously insane off the
streets and how do we keep them from acquiring bombs, guns, crossbows,
knives and yes, airplanes? How do we do this without harming those
people who need guns: farmers, for instance and people who use them to
feed their families. Do we need to argue for weapons with smaller
magazines? Shorter barrels, longer barrels, longer waiting periods,
sanity checks? All I can say is that we'll argue and in a fashion no
more or less likely to produce an answer then in the past. There will be
all or nothing parties and neither will make any sense. The NRA will
act as though Obama is going to take all our guns, Fox will imply that
he already has. Bumper stickers will appear on cars and trucks.
Will
anyone ask that we calmly assess how much danger must be seen as
unavoidable in a free society and how much authoritarian control and how
much less liberty we will or can accept in the interests of safety.
One side will say arm the kids and blame Obama, the other will insist
that the theoretical saving of one life justifies anything at all.
Anyone in the middle won't be heard and the extremes won't listen.
I've
always thought that the outcomes of a policy are the necessary test of
it's effectiveness, but we're talking about America the hysterical and
ill informed. It's about believing in a policy and if it doesn't work,
it's because you didn't believe or didn't make it authoritarian or even
Draconian enough. And so I have to ask again -- what can we do to
protect the weak, the helpless, the innocent that works and doesn't
unnecessarily tread on the rights of all? I fear, given the way we are,
that the answer is nothing.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteYes, I'd say it's unlikely things will improve anytime soon. The media talkers will call the jackwad who committed the crime a "shooter" as if that were some goddamned celebrity category or a proper career path for the disgruntled, and the public will follow suit, unwittingly all but validating the sick choice he made by granting him a perverse fame.
But more significantly, this kind of horrible event has become part of the culture; slaughtering innocent people en masse because one can't come to terms with one's own problems has become a subculture in the USA, and that sort of thing isn't easy to change.
It isn't so much about guns, though obviously keeping them out of unstable hands to the extent possible under the Constitution would be a good thing to do, but the problem really is the twisted, savage subculture that has been spawned. Our society seems helpless to understand it, let alone do anything about it.
Not to spoof another site. However, the extreme loonies are already at work and politicizing today's tragic and evil events over at Libertarian Republican. Dondero's post so pissed me off I actually had to do a post today. Something I had originally decided not to do until a day or so had passed.
DeleteSometimes just can't understand the right mentality. Whatever became of the Goldwater and Buckley conservative and libertarian type?
Shaking my head...
RN,
DeleteNot wanting to ruin my day so early in the morning, I'll stay away from that site.
Dino,
"but the problem really is the twisted, savage subculture that has been spawned."
Yes, a subculture that I've been raging about for a while and a segment of our population whence so much trouble originates.
What I see happening is another landslide of paranoia spawning another lump of soothing legislation based on hollow assumptions which will accomplish nothing and further divide the country.
We've been talking about the paranoia of the right being used to exploit the nation for the benefit of the would-be ruling class. I think this will be an example of left-wing paranoia being used in the same way. The last thing that will arise is a reasoned, balanced and informed dialogue.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
DeleteCapt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteSuggesting that there are certain kinds of weapons no ordinary citizen should be able to get his mitts on, and certain people who shouldn't be able to get a gun at all, probably isn't going to prevent certain dreadful acts from occurring, but that doesn't necessarily mean we should give up and every time something utterly unspeakable happens, cite statistics to the effect that this only happened five times last year, down from six times the previous one.
People aren't going to accept that – one such incident is quite enough to tear the emotional fabric of an entire society, and people speak from a place of deep emotion when they address it. I wouldn't underestimate the power of strong sentiment regarding such issues: it should not be dismissed as the raving of cowardly paranoiacs. The basis of civil society isn't pure reason, it's a matter of sentiment, of (to use an older term) the passions. There is just "some shit up with which we shall not put," and being confronted with accounts of innocent school kids being torn to shreds by the bullets of a goddamned copycat madman is one of them.
But is this an extremely difficult issue? Yes -- that's what my comments about the "twisted subculture" that turns taking one's frustrations out on innocents into a means of gaining posthumous celebrity were meant to reference. Until we can deal with that, I don't see things getting any better.
Calling people who shoot people, "shooters" is about as economical a use of words as there is.
ReplyDeleteDescribing their weapons, apparel and other physical markers is generally gratuitous, but calling them "shooters" is right on the money. Gutless fucking piece-of-shit shooters would be more accurate but there's an element of redundancy there.
Today, I have no opinion - or axe to grind. Maybe tomorrow ... maybe next week. I can think of more uplifting things to do ... like calling family members on the telephone just to say hello and hear their voices.
ReplyDeleteDemocommie,
ReplyDelete"Economical" isn't always the way to go when it comes to language. Often it is, but not when other things are more important. You didn't catch the point I was making. I'll leave it at that.
bloggingdino:
ReplyDeleteThis:
"The media talkers will call the jackwad who committed the crime a "shooter" as if that were some goddamned celebrity category or a proper career path for the disgruntled, and the public will follow suit, unwittingly all but validating the sick choice he made by granting him a perverse fame."
is not only uneconomical, it doesn't really make much sense to me.
Why would calling Lanza a, "shooter" in any way validate his act? I mean, I'm all for calling him a sick fuck and letting it go at that but even the cable channels don't like that sort of language in their "news" segments. If he's not a "shooter" than what is he. He's a killer, of course but that's a given. So what else should he be called, if not "shooter"?
Demo,
ReplyDeleteWords can either help us understand things or deceive us. What I wrote that didn't make sense to you is very clear to me, and I don't buy the suggestion that it isn't economically expressed. Still,, I'll put it otherwise if that helps:
Current usage has created a linguistic category to describe a phenomenon. That's what we do with words -- we apply them to things and events and try thereby to wrap our heads around the things and events. (Try Nietzsche's "On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense" if you've never read that essay -- it's an early piece, but great stuff, and wonderfully insightful about language.)
Unfortunately, the category I referenced is a bit insensitive: it seems to be the preferred choice of terms on the part of the very people who do these terrible things. So if we use it, too, we are calling these evil bastards exactly what they want us to call them. Might as well put a gift-ribbon on it and mail it to them express, in spite of any good intentions to the contrary. I won't give them their damn choice of terms -- in fact, my ultimate suggestion is that they should remain nameless, ignored altogether. They should not get the cheap celebrity they obviously seek -- it only fuels the sick subculture they're participating in.
The press may have become somewhat better over the years in dealing with mass killings -- if memory serves, they used to all but high-five the monsters who committed such atrocities, telling us everything they possibly could about them and their stupid frustrations, mostly ignoring the victims, etc. There's less of that now and more focus on the victims and those who remain to grieve for them. At least it seems that way to me.
Still, people mostly use language in a completely unreflective manner. They shouldn't -- words in themselves have no necessary connection to the world around us, but they have an effect on material reality because they shape our thinking, our perception of things.
Indeed, Jesse James and Bonnie and Clyde are still a bit heroic to some, but this madman wasn't trying to steal money or to finance another secession attempt for the South. He's insane. 'Shooter' may not convey the horror we feel and it certainly doesn't convey the aberration -- the difference between someone who is an Olympic Biathlon contestant or an Alaskan hunter or like half the American population owns a recreational firearm.
DeleteIt's fine to express moral repugnance and anger, but I don't think this man is part of any 'culture' unless paranoid schizophrenia is something one voluntarily joins, and trying to include him in some kind of stereotype so as to make innocent people part of the problem seems like what the "other side" does, all too often when rattling about "liberals."
The press, in my opinion, is feasting off the corpses of the victims and aren't going to stop blaring and bleating and sobbing and conjecturing and grossly misinforming and pandering until they've milked every last dollar and is forced to go back to tracking the love life of Justin Bieber and the travails of the British royals. CBS had something like 12 hours of looped shots of the school building and cops milling about and trying, yes indeed, to shape our perception of things so as to maximize the sense of panic and fear much to the advantage of those who need such emotion to push for more ill-considered, flawed and likely useless legislation.
Why is it that we think we see the problem best when we're the most emotional? Why is it that our endless efforts to solve human problems by banning things never seem to work and often make things worse: alcohol, drugs and as I remember from the 50's, Rock & roll, blue jeans, canvas shoes, Coffee, Mad magazine and breakfast cereal?
Why is it that we can't ask for level headed discourse without being labeled a "gun nut" or a "gun grabber?" Because, being the kind of ridiculous, non-scaly bipeds we are, we think in stereotypes and argue with stereotypes and twisted analogies -- when we think at all.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteIs it now the fashion on this site automatically to disagree with others to generate our own commentary? Yes, it's accurate to say these murderers are part of a lethal subculture. What else can it be when we see copycat behavior right down to the manner of dress, self-application of similar terminology, etc.? Why issue an immediate dismissal of the idea?
I was born and raised in the town next to Newtown so I know this town, the area and even some of its inhabitants even though it has been some years since I've been back. Like most other human beings I am shocked and dismayed and depressed that we can't protect our children, that we can't regulate and enforce gun laws that make us safer and that we can't remold a sick, violent, hate-filled society into one of caring and acceptance.
ReplyDeleteIf we are to create a somewhat safer environment for our children to grow up in, we will have to address all these issues simultaneously. Children and adults with mental health issues should be better monitored throughout their lifetime and provided with the care and support they need and yes, put under lock and key when it becomes evident they may harm themselves or others.
It is ironic that this little town should be the scene of such a horrific attack committed by a madman. This town was once home to Fairfield Hill Mental Hospital, one of the largest in the state. As teens we used to call it the Newtown Nut House. Not a very nice thing to say, but you know how kids can be. Sometimes rather insensitive and secure in our insular surroundings because, unlike the children of Newtown today, we went to school where the doors were not locked and there were no police at the doors and we drilled how to hide under our desks from an atomic bomb, not flying bullets. Bad things happened when I was a kid, the president was assassinated, Whitman sniped people at the University of Texas, blacks were beaten, hung and burned. It was never completely "safe" or completely innocent but certain places seemed off limits; elementary schools and churches. I don't think we were ever really safe, but I don't think that matters to the family and friends of those who died in Newtown Friday.
We are going to have conversations and most will probably go nowhere and this tragedy will fade into the past and life will go on until the next massacre of innocents because that's just the way it is, isn't it?
Discussions are always lead by people with a financial interest in them and there really isn't much said that isn't part of some political dogma. It was all politicized befor it happened. Looking over to the right I see some blogger blaring: Right wing bloggers blame everything but guns!
ReplyDeleteIs it wrong to look at all factors of a problem? When you simply want the icky, scary things to go away, sure it is. When you want to protect children, no it isn't. When you're terrified about not being able to buy a hundred round drum magazine because the next thing you know, Obama will sneak into your house through the power meter and steal them all -- the last thing you want is to risk an honest discussion.
When you want to stifle discussion, you label any disagreement with right or left wing and attack the label. No there won't be any discussion and I think this is one of the times that people who blame both sides are right. Platitudes and prejudice and anger and extremism is all we're going to hear since the closing of minds is reasonably silent.
And as the song goes, nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
Bloggingdino:
ReplyDeleteOkay. I don't have an education in semiotics or linguistics, so I'm not sure if I follow your argument.
I simply don't understand what calling someone "a shooter" does to heighten that person's stature. The media are interested in money, which is obtained by ad revenues, which are in turn dependent upon ratings and "readership". I understand why they do what they do, as repugnant as I find their actions.
You may choose to identify the late Mr. Lanza as something other than a "shooter" and I'm sure I will, at least in the near term, still know that you're talking about the killer of 28 people in CT. Others may or may not. When I say, "the shooter" in the CT situation it is almost impossible to NOT know that we are talking about a deranged, cowardly individual who murdered 27 people before taking his own life.
Call him what you will.
I have been feeling too heartbroken and defeated to weigh in on this conversation; but it has become contentious in ways that shouldn’t be. Come on, folks, we are among friends here. There are other ways to have this conversation.
ReplyDeleteIn my psychosocial studies years ago, I was looking into delusional thoughts. Where do they come from? What shapes them? What drives them? Are there patterns or archetypes? Are killing rampages always copycat crimes?
Not necessarily. You will find delusional content across a range of psychological disorders – multiple personality disorder (dissociative), bipolar (hypermanic episodes), schizophrenic disorders (psychotic), and personality disorders (anti-social, paranoid, and schizoid and schizotypal). Delusions are often expressions of inner conflicts, drives, memories, and feelings – sometimes but not necessarily motivational in nature. For lack of a better expression, I call these “cultural artifacts” – astral entities, demon personalities, personifications of painful emotions or traumatic memories, actual living persons, revenge personae, spirit guides, beings from another universe, or simply archetypes.
What is the difference between cultural artifacts versus copycat crimes? From this perspective, the difference is in how we prefer to interpret incomprehensible events, not necessarily the events themselves. Perpetrators rarely live to tell us, and a self-satisfied smirk on the face one perpetrator does not necessarily serve as a model for all – or offer us any kind of explanatory adequacy.
If you accept my parsing of delusional content as “cultural artifacts,” then perhaps there is more to be said about the nature of our culture. What I mean by this statement: Perhaps our culture does violence to people in unsuspecting ways – and finds an easy outlet in the delusional mind. Or perhaps I can describe it this way: The worst monsters of society mirror back aspects of our society. Do you buy this?
So where am I going with the above comment? Let me start by asking you what we write about in this forum? We write about partisan bickering and political bullying, about corporate corruption of our government, about greed and abuse, about inequality and social injustice, about dirty tricks in the conduct of our elections, about lies and deceptions by persons who aspire to positions of power and authority over us, and more! Birthers, character assassins, town hall hooligans, authoritarian demagogues, and a public held hostage by partisan thugs – how often have we felt outrage! Violated!
ReplyDeleteWhich is worse: A crazed madman who kills 20 children at a clip … or a corporation selling sugar-laden junk food that consigns an entire generation of children to a life of obesity, or a maker of action games that teaches children the fine art of mass murder for entertainment! Slow murders conducted in the name of money, profit - free enterprise!
There is no more honesty, integrity, accountability, or corporate responsibility. Our culture has turned itself into a free-for-all; our people have become fractious and fragmented; and there is nothing – not even the high ideals of secular democracy – to bind us together. Perhaps this is where our discussion should start.
Octo,
ReplyDeleteYours is an interesting and productive formulation. One mainstay of human beings is that they seem to be hooked on imitation: that's an insight going all the way back to the Great British philosopher 'arry Stottle (close paraphrase from The Poetics: "We learn our earliest lessons from imitation"). That's why I wouldn't underestimate the "copycat" explanation -- it sure suits what we have long suspected about human nature, doesn't it?
The only thing I'd suggest is that in the end, we will probably never be able to "get to the bottom of things" and know in every (or even in any) case why precisely these mass murderers kill, though some conjectures and concepts may be more productive than others. The difficulty of getting people to understand anything new should be evident from the treatment of my language-based comments on this site: hostility, miscomprehension and blank indifference are the sadly predictable fate of such discussions. Probably a waste of time, so to hell with it.
At the end-product level, we're also stuck with the simple fact that the ubiquity of firearms and the sheer lethality of certain easily available ones adds to the problem. It is not a harmless fact that millions of AR-15's and similar weapons of damn-near mass destruction are to be had for the taking by nearly anyone who wants them: psychopaths, violent malcontents and Armageddonist loons included.
Ultimately, the best thing to do is to revamp our mental health care approach and not be so damned stingy about caring for those who are in need of help. Another good thing would be to confront the NRA boldly and not be cowed by their irrational blowhardistical garbage. They need to get the message that "we the people" DO NOT GIVE EVEN SO MUCH AS HALF AN UNSATISFYING NUMBER TWO WHAT THEY OR THEIR BATSHIT-CRAZY LEADERSHIP THINK ABOUT ANYTHING -- ANYTHING AT ALL. Our right not to have our kids gunned down by semi-military hardware in the hands of psychopaths trumps their need to feel like "real men" or "cowgirls" or whatever they're claiming to be. Basic self-defense? Hunting purposes (loathsome though I find such)? Well, can't take that away. Modified military weapons and lots of paraphernalia designed expressly to add to the capacity of an ordinary gun or rifle? Absolutely not, and to hell with everyone who thinks otherwise. A person who demands the right to own something that could easily kill a hundred people in two minutes flat belongs in a padded room simply for making such an assertion because to do so shreds the very concept of a civil society, and only a lunatic would want to reduce us to a Hobbesian War of All Against All.
Look, I want to keep schools safe as much as the next parent and grandparent, but one of the biggest impediments to doing that is the refusal to look at this as a security problem and the deliberate misinformation we're clinging to so desperately. I would find it odd if we tried to make the roads safer by banning those plastic wings kids bolt on their Toyotas because that makes it "modified racing hardware" but we're happy to believe that adding a plastic stock to a hunting rifle makes it more dangerous. The hyperbole is not helping here, because it makes us sound ridiculous to the informed and makes for smiling faces at the NRA.
ReplyDeleteTHE APPEARANCE OF A WEAPON DOES NOT AFFECT ITS ABILITY TO SHOOT PEOPLE and we've already made real assault rifles illegal and every gun owner knows it. Aren't we trying to keep ANY weapons out of schools? Anyone with a pair of John Wayne 6 guns could have killed as many people and in fact a pair of Colt percussion revolvers from the 1840's could have killed twelve which is twelve more than is acceptable. Sure, mandate smaller magazines, but be aware that changing one can take less than three seconds and that the last ban did not actually ban them.
Why aren't we talking about keeping ALL guns out of schools entirely? Are we tripping over our own fears or wearing blinders to keep from looking at scarey stuff?
Because I want to do something that works, because I mention that despite the last 50 or 60 years of tilting at one windmill after another, putting our trust in one dearly beloved and clearly flawed bit of legislation, we're having a rash of shootouts in a place that should be at least as secure as the local bank. And speaking of banks, why is no one talking about locking the doors and making people entering go through a security check? We're happy to bear the cost when it comes to protecting lawyers at the county court house, why not our children?
I have to give weight to the copycat idea. After all, after the rash of post office shootings, it died out. I want to know if some of that had anything to do with the measures the Post office took or that anyone else did and apply it to what's happening now. I want to know why the murder rate in New York City is at an all time low even without any new bans or controls before I get all excited at some new quick fix some activist is offering.
What I'm reading this morning is that polls show the greatest interest in requiring background checks at gun shows and re-instituting a ban on "high capacity" magazines. I agree with these approaches, but since the statistics seem to show that the guns used in the rash of rampages in the last few years were either stolen or bought legally at a gun shop, I don't look for significant results there.
Is it possible, that the loudest voices are more interested in making weapons disappear than making crime disappear? I'm suggesting that since no one wants to look at this as a school security problem and propose things like closing the school to visitors during class hours unless one passes through a security check. Isn't it easier actively to keep ALL weapons out of the buildings than it is to ban them or keep them out of private hands entirely? Just a suggestion, but calling for pragmatism isn't anywhere near the call to do nothing and objecting to reiterating past failures isn't the same either.
Let's not put all our hopes and efforts into one one idea please or close our minds to a larger solution. Nothing I see being proposed is going to stop people from running amok, even though an infinitesimal number of people ever will. And please lets try to seem rational lest we feed the irrational, paranoid and angry God, Guns and Guts crowd.
Thinking about it, I can't recall any incident in the last hundred years where hundreds have been shot to death by civilians in two minutes flat by anyone using anything legal -- or at all, in point of fact.
ReplyDeleteBlown up by fertilizer bombs, perhaps, burned alive or poisoned by religious fanatics, sure, by suicidal terrorists with airplanes -- but why is this entering into what should be a rational discussion about protecting 8 year olds? We're talking about a couple of pistols that shouldn't have been where they were even if they were 16th century matchlocks or muzzle loading Philadelphia derringers or Ginsu knives.
If a Glock can be carried by some security guard to protect a bag of money, why is it so vastly dangerous that nobody can protect his home and family with it?
And of course I agree that 100 or even 40 round magazines should at least require a special license as it is with silencers or true military rifles, but maybe we shouldn't blindly pass legislation written by lobbyists and so full of loopholes the way we did last time. Can we talk about it? Is such theatrical language helping us get to that stage?