Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Guns and Culture, Madness and Mass Murder

By (O)CT(O)PUS

(Please note: This post is a revised and updated version of an earlier article.)



Since 2006, there have been 232 rampage killings - an average of one incident and five fatalities every two weeks. All too commonplace, mass murder can strike any community without warning and claim any victim at random (source).

Every massacre elicits sensationalized news accounts as reporters, pundits, and competing stakeholders assault our senses with hype, false hypotheses, and self-serving narratives. Every massacre prompts a search for clues to explain the unexplainable and incomprehensible. Perpetrators rarely live to disclose their delusions or their motives in detail; more often they take their secrets to the grave.

Years ago, I was researching delusional thoughts for a paper on mental illness. Where do delusional thoughts come from? Are there patterns or archetypes? Should rampage killings be considered impulsive acts, copycat crimes, or manifestations of hitherto more complex phenomena as yet unidentified?

We find examples of delusional thinking across a range of mental illnesses - dissociation, bipolar disorder, pervasive developmental disability disorders, the personality disorders, and schizophrenia, as examples. Delusions are expressions of inner conflicts, drives, and memories that can take many forms: Actual persons or historical events, personifications of painful emotions or traumatic memories, revenge personae, violence in mass media, or voices in the head – all born of our culture and made manifest in shocking crimes.

My research reveals this: Delusional thoughts are as much a reflection of culture as a descent into madness.  For lack of a better expression, I call these “cultural artifacts” because they rise to the surface - not merely as dark impulses from the subconscious mind - but from the Spirtius Mundi of culture surrounding us.  Simply stated, culture shapes the way disturbed persons perceive and respond to their delusions.

If you accept this finding - this influence of culture on delusional thinking - then perhaps you might approach these murderous rampages from another perspective.

How does social stress correlate with violent crime? How do we quantify and measure privation, depersonalization, and desperation - the kinds of torments that find a path of least resistance in disturbed persons?  Recently, one of our readers commented:
Poverty does not cause crime; it breeds despair. Mental illness does not cause crime; it removes inhibitions and the ability to control dark impulses. Guns do not cause crime; they enable people who despair to attain, if only for a moment, a feeling of control, of superiority over others. That the feelings of control and superiority often result in the taking of other's property, dignity, safety and, far too often, their lives is not the result that they dreamed of. It is the stuff of nightmares.
The incidence of mental illness is constant across all population groups – as constant as background radiation in the Universe. The rate of violent crime in the mentally ill population is no different than the rate of violent crime in the general population. Yet, America has a far higher prevalence rate of violent crime, death by accidental shooting, and suicide by self-inflicted gunshot than any nation in the world (source). Why? The ubiquity of guns in America is a cultural artifact.

Doubtless, easy access to arms correlates with higher incidence rates of violent crime.  Our nation has 50% of all guns in circulation worldwide and 30 times the murder rate compared with other industrialized nations. Undeniably, gun culture is the vestigial relic of a frontier mentality deeply imbedded in the American mythos – yet another cultural artifact.

Are rampage killings the only form of violence perpetrated on the American public?  Hardly! Which is worse:

·      A crazed gunman who kills 20 children at a clip?  Or merchants who sell junk food to children and consign them to lives of obesity and diabetes;

·      Or the subliminal influence of violence in games marketed to children and represented as entertainment;

·      Or manufacturers of automatic weapons that appeal, not to legitimate sports enthusiasts, but to adult children reared on action toys who project their self-image of manhood through the barrel of a gun;

·      Or reckless speculators who crash investment markets - leaving millions of people in financial ruin;

·      Or a corporate CEO who orders massive layoffs - casting entire families into panic and debt – who then rewards himself with a multi-million dollar bonus.

Crimes of violence against people committed in the name of easy money, fast money, and free enterprise: These too have become cultural artifacts.

How often have we heard people in the news dismiss an alleged transgression with this claim: “No laws were broken.” How often have we thought to ourselves: The word ‘legal’ is not necessarily synonymous with the word 'ethical.'  Legal acts - all too often considered immoral and reprehensible - have become cultural artifacts.

As parents, we try to teach children the relationship between responsibility and freedom. Parents reward good behavior with confidence and trust and punish misconduct with more supervision and less independence. A reasonable proposition for raising children; yet we do not practice as adults what we preach to our children. Ours has become a society that fails to find balance in this relationship. Every public controversy, and every perceived loss of freedom (whether imagined or real), represents a failure of responsibility.

What preoccupies our thoughts after the nightly news? We hear about chicanery and corruption, inequality and injustice, abuse of our public institutions, the lies and deceptions of persons who aspire to positions of power and authority over us; of legislative deadlock and gridlock, and a public abused by political hacks and henchmen. How often has the public interest been held hostage by special interest groups and their lobbyists who hold our elected officials in thrall?  The legalization of what we used to call ‘bribery’ and ‘graft’ have now become cultural artifacts.

Reductio ad absurdum. After a weeklong silence following the Sandy Hook massacre, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA responded with this prescription: Fight fire with more firepower; place armed guards in every school; arm the good guys to neutralize the bad guys.  More guns!  Turn America into an armed fortress with self-appointed militias and vigilantes in every city and town.

LaPierre offers not an imaginary dystopia but a real one – like a bad Mad Max movie – creeping into our lives. Is the ubiquity of guns an acceptable vision for our children and future generations? If you understand the pervasive impact of ‘cultural artifacts’ on people, then LaPierre’s prescription for fighting fire with more firepower is akin to pouring more gasoline on a raging inferno.

We may talk about the dangers of easy access to automatic weapons; about loopholes in our system of background checks and bullet holes in our mental health establishment; about competing ideas of gun ownership versus public safety. Perhaps these controversies, grave as they are, overlook more fundamental questions.

In exploring these relationships between madness and culture, and gun violence versus the prerequisite need of society to secure public safety, I am reminded of the moral dilemmas posed by Stanley Kubrick in his dark and disturbing film, A Clockwork Orange.

It is the story of Alex, a punk, serial rapist, and murderer sentenced to prison.  Given a choice between serving time versus gaining his freedom by taking the 'cure,' Alex opts for the operant conditioning cure that turns him into a ‘clockwork’ man – neutered of all violent impulses, a dehumanized shadow of his former self. Powerless against former victims and fellow punks who savagely beat and torment him, Alex notes with sarcasm: “I was cured alright!” In this ironic turn of the story, we are left asking ourselves: “But can society be cured of its violent undercurrents?

We practice brinksmanship but not citizenship. We equate freedom with excess and excess with freedom. We facilitate overindulgence without moderation or self-restraint.  We covet freedom but spurn responsibility. With each passing year, we drive all standards of civility, community and accountability further into the wilderness. National conversations turn fractious and fragmented.  The high ideals of secular democracy no longer bind us together. Perhaps the madness in our midst reflects the accelerated grimace of a culture gone mad.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.  How will more guns or less guns keep us safe when we have fostered a culture of ruthless greed, rampant corruption, and remorseless sociopathy? Perhaps these incidents of gun violence are signs and symptoms of a society in crisis.

Columbine, VTech, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown, hate crimes against Sikhs and Jews - each massacre adds one more script to our gruesome inventory of cultural artifacts for the next madman to copy.

The time has come to talk about our broken statues and battered books – these cultural artifacts that crash in the mind. Perhaps we should start a national conversation at the very beginning by reaffirming those values of a democratic republic whose mission and purpose is to secure “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of civilization is never cheap. We demand the rights and privileges of full membership, but refuse to pay our dues.

22 comments:

  1. The last sentence really speaks to the heart of the matter. Civilization is always at risk and as much from those who advocate for it as well as from those who are uncomfortable with it and its demands or have various views of what civilization is and whom it serves - often views implanted by people with ulterior motives.

    The way we define it changes constantly. Safety, justice, protection from the powerful, protection of property and protection of those three rights and more -- and all those items are not always commensurate with the others. It's a game for pragmatists and philosophers and those aren't always friends either. Who isn't blinded by theory these days?

    I don't understand two things. Access to automatic weapons is very difficult, rare and very, very expensive and automatic weapons used in crimes are so rare I can't think of a circumstance other than the St Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929, shortly after which they were made illegal. Repeating arms go back over 150 years and autoloaders well over 100. Access to all arms is more complicated and expensive than it ever was.

    When my dad was a kid, one could buy a machine gun at a hardware store. When I was in college, you could buy guns from a mail order catalog. At one time, world travelers often traveled with a revolver or two and nobody thought much of it. My grandmother, I'm told, used to carry a gun in her garter when she took money from the family jewelry business to the bank. The direction we're going is apparent, at least to me. There is evidence that gun sales are actually in decline.

    Legal precedent for standing one's ground instead of retreating goes back to 1895. Beard v. U.S. . As far as state statutes go, perhaps Michigan's is typical one can be excused the requirement to run away if " the individual honestly and reasonably believes that the use of deadly force is necessary to prevent" the imminent death, great bodily harm, or sexual assault of himself or another individual.

    That's really not the same as saying it's ok to shoot someone who scares you., Yes, many states law's are confusing and they indeed make it easier to claim self defense in situations where there are no witnesses, but remember that without such law, it's easier for someone to be prosecuted for murder for defending his own life. We choose not to give a damn when someone saves his life but goes to jail an suffers ruination. Maybe we need to refine the laws about self defense but we need to do it free from the influence of people who deny the right entirely and the magic thinkers at the NRA who want to arm the family cat. I think it's time to stop looking for scapegoats, listening to hyperbole and distortion and to make some sense.

    Remember that Florida woman sentenced to 20 years for firing a harmless warning shot. If SYG had been mentioned by the judge, she would have gone free and indeed she won a retrial on that basis.

    What I'm trying to say is that allegiance to political entities whether it's the Brady people or the NRA always prevents discussion of undistorted facts and group think is a big a danger to civilization as any kind of zealotry.

    I think the idea that culture determines what the voices say, how we act out psychotic delusions, but I'd add that culture today is a product and is marketed by the media. I knew several people who carried guns in high school in the late 50's and early 60's and I never heard of a school shooting. Now we get school shootings and school knife attacks obsessively covered complete with grief sessions, mourning, sobbing all in the most emotional way. Could it be that our culture makes us lean toward similar things because they sell advertising?
    Does the maintenance of civilization and order require some enlightened discretion from those who -- face it -- profit immensely from disaster and terror?

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  2. Let’s face it. For an ostensibly “free” country, the U.S. can be a damn hard place in which to live when premiums on freedom devalue the currency of responsibility. Reason and responsibility – these may be fair game for pragmatists and philosophers, but Platonic and Neo-Platonic forms of governance were rejected long ago in favor of Constitutional democracy – at least on paper.

    This is a frequent topic of conversation amongst our Libertarian friends, for whom the “enlightened self-interest’ of the individual is raised to the level of hero-worship. In my view, there is nothing noble in the “noble savage” when the default condition of human beings is rife with greed, chicanery, and corruption. With out laws, regulations, and rules of conduct, any country – especially ours – would quickly degenerate into a kind of Pottersville dystopia. In many ways, it already has; and I can’t imagine how anyone can consider themselves “free” living in serfdom.

    In this post, I avoided the controversial topics of gun control, background checks, and high capacity magazine clips because these topics have been turned into dead horses exceeded only by the rate of human carnage. If there are other countries that have the same easy access to arms and the same incidence rate of madness in the general population, then why is this country different from all other countries. Why, for instance, does this country have 30 times the murder rate compared with other nations of the world?

    That is why I think we should start asking ourselves: What drives violence within our culture? What do we value? What freedoms are worth giving up in order to live truly free? What kind of country do we really want? Perhaps a conversation starting with the “basics’ would help cut through some of the bullshit.

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  3. "What drives violence within our culture?"

    Well of course that's the question, but we're Americans and if we discuss important questions we demand that the conversation support our notions before we'll talk. We have a social problem, obviously, but for some we have to make it very clear that dealing with a social problem is Socialism if we approach it from an economic or cultural direction and Fascism if we approach it from a legal direction. In fact we have to burden any comment with being solidly within some camp and that's the second point which I failed to address above. I don't think one of those tombstones describes any state's laws any more than the NRA description of liberals as being fascist gun grabbers.

    There are certainly ways to obtain weapons - legal and otherwise. There are loopholes that need to be closed but we need to remember that making things illegal can have very little effect and sometimes a negative effect. I keep asking questions about coefficients of correlation and looking at examples of counterproductive attempts because I'm interested in results and I'm not obligated to either camp.

    Basics indeed and that requires we leave the shibboleths in the barn and start looking at the sources of violence, types of violence and the people who cause it and I think that will become very complex. Why, for instance does it appear that we have a rash of school rampages? Is it a trend, or is it something that will revert to the mean in due course - if the media stops making it attractive for young people to go out in a blaze of imagined glory?

    Would we be satisfied if we traded school shootings for school bombings or knifings? is the object to reduce the carnage by 20% by concentrating on the tools or by 80 or 90% by keeping those tools away from the young or unbalanced?

    Can we even define freedom? For some it's safety and safety alone and no matter whose ordinary life is restricted. Should we institute a national 30mph speed limit because "even if one life is saved. . .?" Why is that associated with Liberals and are Liberals really defined as people who love obedience to regulation for obedience's sake? Does that speed limit promise big results if we learn that most fatalities occur and less than 35 mph? We've been through that as we've been through Prohibition, but those lessons are lost on the theory-blind. I think we're a theory-blind nation.

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  4. I think we're a hyperbolic nation, addicted to snark, to exaggerated reactions, to waving signs and shouting slogans and polarizing each other beyond the reach of reason. I wish it were otherwise, but modern life makes it far easier for like minds to band together even of those minds don't work well with others. And like Ishmael, "he shall be a wild man, his hand against all and everyone's hand against him and he shall be in his brothers face." Genesis 6:12

    But for starters, maybe we should discuss, instead of accepting the idea of a "gun culture" and freely ascribing attributes to it, just why different Americans want to have all those guns in the first place. Is there really one gun culture and does the Wyoming quail shooter with his handmade Purdy or Benelli occupy the same circle in the great American Venn diagram as the Michigan Militiaman?

    Does the Chicago gangbanger with the illegal revolver with the serial number filed off own it for the same reason the farmer with the bear problem or wild hog problem wants a semi-automatic rifle? Is my dad with his collection of flintlocks and who has no interest in modern weapons part of the "gun culture?" I know some people who dress up as cowboys and practice quick draw with old six-shooters, lots of people who go to country clubs and shoot clay pigeons. Hunting with muzzle loaders is more popular than ever and more of these things are made today than they were 200 years ago.

    Why do Americans love guns other than nostalgia for a pre-urban America? One reason is the hatred of feeling helpless in the face of what some see as progress and others don't. Some obviously see a benign protector of safety in government, others don't and they don't want to be left standing with a shovel in their hand when the feds start rounding up their cattle while carrying heavy military weapons. I think a lot of guns were sold the other day for just this reason just as a record number were sold when Obama took office.

    Can we do something about the public's fear of government instead of hyping the public's fear of crime because I think the first far outweighs the second. Because when we start talking about gun control without specifics and in hyperbolic fashion, WHEN WE MAKE AMERICANS AFRAID we sell more guns and more dangerous guns. Let's talk less about reducing the number of guns or making them less "available" and more about keeping them from people who should not have them. It's harder to argue against specifics than against blurry, emotional appeals.

    My own question, for instance is less about magazine size, or caliber or lever action vs auto-loading or pistol vs revolver than about allowing kids or people with mental problems access to anything that goes bang. Education plays a part in that. My question is the same one we had in 1929 - how much of what we're calling murder stems from controlled substance smuggling and distribution? Ending or changing our drug laws can play a part in that.

    It could be a start.

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  5. " Though threatened and insulted by all his neighbours, yet he shall stand his ground,"

    -John Wesley's comments on Genesis 6-

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  6. Personal responsibility, personal accountability, self respect, respect for others, understanding that rights demand responsibility and that rights and responsibility seperated creates great dangers, responsible law insures the greatest level of freedom... one certainly can go on with additions.

    Thankfully Plato's Republic does not exist in America. Or does it?

    An individual's Rights are important. So are the rights of other individuals, as well as societies rights for order. Perhaps we really all want the same rights we just haven't learned how to talk about how to achieve that which we all intuitively want to achieve.

    But I'm in over my head. Perhaps in another 10 years.

    "Philosophy, Who Needs It?' I suppose that is a question to be answered by the individual. But who has time. Right?

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    1. "Thankfully Plato's Republic does not exist in America. Or does it? "

      It does, but you can only see it from some cave in New Mexico.

      Yes, sure, we all want the same rights, but there are a few extra I have my eye on.

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  7. My natural choices of weaponry are ink and camouflage, but I admit to having entertained thoughts of purchasing a gun. What has prevented me, you ask? Perhaps a volatile temper and an admission of not being able to trust myself that prevents me.

    Have I ever needed a gun for self-protection? Perhaps once - living as an American expatriate in London, where I was ambushed and mugged by members of Fagin’s gang. Today, I live in a safe neighborhood with zero crime; but I wonder how many of my neighbors arm themselves against imaginary bogeyman?

    Last year, the town of Nelson Georgia passed a law requiring all citizens to own a gun. As for me, I resent any ordinance that requires me to carry ordinance and would have preferred to remain a scofflaw.

    Would I want to be in the position of Oscar Pistorius – on trial for the accidental or alleged premeditated death of his girlfriend? What drove him to arm himself? Living in a crime-ridden neighborhood, he claims.? Or was it his handicap and very personal feelings of inadequacy that drive him to overcompensate?

    What else has my research revealed? Called the “weapons effect,” the open-carry of firearms distorts judgment, a phenomenon in which the mere presence of a weapon stimulates all sorts of aggressive behavior. No wonder why the NRA has tried to suppress all research on the subject, or why open-carry fanatics used intimidation during a meeting of Moms Demand Action by brandishing AR-15s and AK-47s in the parking lot.

    Speaking of inadequacy and the need to overcompensate, I wonder how many of these open-carry fanatics brandish a bulge on their belts to make up for the lack thereof in their pants.

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  8. open carry is only legal in Florida when hunting legally and I think it should damn well stay that way.

    But no dick jokes please. Owners of SUV's, sports cars, off-road trucks, cowboy boots, Rolex watches and guns all get accused of such inadequacy and that doesn't explain the myriad female owners of all these lovely things. I know a lot of women gun owners, both the self protection and the shooting sports types and a couple of dwellers in remote places.

    Actually the NRA tries to suppress a whole lot of things including sanity. Paranoia strikes deep as the song goes. But that's true of groups I'm less hostile toward. Certain Feminist leaders have been furious at any research into gender differences, population genetics are a minefield and it's not easy to get some anti-gun groups or anti-tax groups to discuss statistics or tolerate research either. I'm trying to get across the idea that it's possible to be right in principle and still shoot yourself in the foot - pun intended. I'm convinced that gun control efforts are sometimes self-sabotaged by bickering and hyperbole and emotionally driven reasoning. We could all learn something from St. Augustine and I don't mean the town in Florida.

    I have no doubt that some are made pugnacious and even aggressive by carrying a weapon, Just the way they are with other tokens of machismo. But yes, I can attest that carrying a gun changes things and in odd and for me unforeseen ways. I'm - or I was, to be accurate, far less prone to road rage, less prone to be pissed off at annoying and aggressive people. From my own experience I think the difference is that rage occurs when we feel helpless -- humiliated. That's the time when we might just over-react, when the adrenaline starts.

    Why would I feel rage because that 4 cylinder beemerbozo has to prove he can pass me? Because there's nothing I can do about it. The feeling of helplessness drives people to buy Hummers and guns - neither of which really help the situation, but I've had the experience of smiling to myself and thinking, " I could blow that loser's head off" and thus just letting it go. After all I'm not humiliated if I could have blown him away, right? No humiliation for Superman or even John Wayne if he walks away from an insult.

    Humiliation is at the heart of it, I think. I think very many Americans have an intense sense of humiliation what with what modern life does to us and our self esteem. I think that for many, carrying a gun, driving a huge, jacked-up truck and dressing to look scary as hell is a way to deal with that. It's not a good way. I suspect that the talk of self protection is sometimes an excuse to carry a gun because it can feel just so good to feel invincible even if there is no threat.

    I've come to the conclusion than under virtually all circumstances I'm better off without my little friend, the consequences of self defense being so potentially dire and ruinous. Is that hulking figure only 17? Can I be accused of racism? Is an oar or a bat a deadly enough weapon? Might I make an error in judgement? fire accidentally? Could it be claimed that I could have just run away? Would I be filled with guilt and remorse? I don't want to think about it.

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  9. The NRA of my childhood was vastly different from the NRA of today. Growing up in a rural community and having a neighbor who took me hunting, I had an average interest in guns for a child of the times. The NRA I remember distributed literature on gun safety, marksmanship, and sportsmanship. BTW, did I mention “gun safety” and the responsible ownership of firearms!

    During its history, the NRA supported the National Firearms Act of 1934, the first gun-control law passed in the U.S. Again in 1968, the NRA supported the Gun Control Act (also supported by gun manufacturers Colt and Smith & Wesson), which created a system of Federally licensed gun dealers and restrictions on categories and classes of firearms.

    What changed? The “Cincinnati Revolution” of 1977 when a radical insurgency hijacked the organization and seized control. In due course, the NRA morphed into a lobbying and political advocacy group promoting the commercial self-interest of manufacturers and a radical legislative agenda of the insurgents. Now engaged in full-time lobbying, the NRA is less interested in promoting gun safety, marksmanship, or sportsmanship, but does publish a list of “public enemies” which includes the AARP, American Psychological Association, League of Women Voters, YMCA, United States Catholic Conference, Union of Hebrew Congregations, the United Methodist Church, and Kevin Costner (actor), as examples.

    To be perfectly fair and even-handed, the NRA also publishes a “Friends of the NRA” list, which includes such prominent celebrities as Adam Lanza, James Holmes, Timothy McVeigh, and Jared Loughner.

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  10. McVeigh indeed. Many lifetime supporters of the NRA like George Bush, to his credit, left and slammed the door behind them after NRA Pres. Tom Washington essentially condoned the act of terrorism calling federal agents "black-suited, masked, massively armed mobs of screaming, swearing agents invading homes of innocents." Does that ever happen? - yes it does. Is it massively armed distortion? Yes it is.

    Bush's published letter of resignation is a masterpiece.

    Wayne LaPierre issued an 'apology' that further portrayed federal agents as "jack-booted government thugs" and said that "in Clinton's administration, if you have a badge, you have the government's go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens."

    A fund raising flyer signed by LaPierre, since promoted to president, talked again of armed resistance to "jack-booted thugs" who wear "Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms" and "attack law abiding citizens,"

    Although it was widely believed that the descent into paranoid and dishonest extremism signaled the end of the NRA 20 years ago, they're still here and there is no alternative spokesman of any kind much less one with the original NRA mission. People who agree with this anti-government insanity call themselves "patriots" and not only did the descent into insanity not signal the end of the NRA as was widely predicted, their support seems to have grown.

    I often caution not to blame the NRA for America's fondness for guns, but I obviously have to blame them for the toxic mythology that divides our country as much as anything has since well before the Revolutionary War. It's totally behind Cliven Bundy's elevation to folk hero. It's behind the neo-anarchsm and the Obama-hate and the Liberal Witch hunt.

    Extremism is too kind a word to describe it, but their descent into the moral black hole from which nothing good can emerge only encourages other, further extremism, because no sane and rational alternative can exist or resist. There is no possibility of a rational and informed dialog much less one productive of solutions or improvements and the NRA is the major reason. They are the Nietzschean monster that can't be fought without risk of falling into the abyss.

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    1. THIS STORY did not receive the media attention it deserved, and almost no mention within our respective blogging communities. I mention it here because this incident is becoming all too commonplace – with very dark and disturbing implications. Briefly:

      A gun control activist group called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, or MDA for short, held a membership meeting at the Blue Mesa Grill in Dallas, Texas on Saturday. Not a protest or a public rally, just a meeting over some Tex-Mex and beverages. Harmless enough. A group of moms, activated by last year’s gun massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, gathered to discuss ways to boost membership and popular support for gun control legislation.

      (Skip)

      Oh, and did I mention there were only four MDA members in the meeting? Yes, four moms who were gathered at a luncheon were confronted by 40 gunmen brandishing AR-style assault rifles
      ."

      Here is an ANOTHER ACCOUNT of the same story:

      The sudden appearance of about 40 armed men outside a Dallas-area restaurant this weekend was the latest confrontation between an open-carry gun-rights group and a mothers group advocating gun control that was meeting inside.

      Chris Barton, the CFO of Blue Mesa Grill, said that the manager called 911 at 11:35 a.m., shortly after the armed group arrived.

      "When the manager called, he told them (the police dispatcher) what was going on," Barton said. "They said that if they are having a peaceful demonstration, they are within their legal rights
      ."

      Now consider the actions of Oathkeepers and other lawless militias terrorizing a ranching community in Nevada. Same tactic, different controversy.

      Is this the dystopian future of America wrought by new Open Carry laws? Any controversy in any village or town across the land settled by armed hoodlums and thugs? Democracy via bullying and intimidation, democracy by brinksmanship at the barrel of a gun, democracy via insurgency and insurrection?

      This not democracy but a form of neo-fascism wrought by extremists and sanctioned by the NRA. This is not the kind of future I want for my family and future generations.

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    2. You've got to ask yourself why anyone would be so afraid of a handful of women? What's changed? Why is the display of weapons so important to these people?

      I went to school in a tiny New York State town where everybody hunted. It was quite common and quite legal to carry your shotgun or sometimes a rifle as you walked to and from the woods and hills or even on campus as you hiked up to the quarry where there was a shooting range. One carried it with the breech open, of course so that no one would mistake your intentions. My landlord in one of those years, used to go out hunting most weekends. He would walk of course, shotgun over his shoulder. I preferred the rifle range and my single shot Ithaca .22 and I would walk several miles through town and across the campus to get to the range. No one, the police or otherwise ever looked twice or asked me any questions even in those days of campus unrest. This was a time when you could buy all sorts of guns anonymously through mail order catalogs, from military surplus M1911 .45ACP pistols to the rifle Oswald used to shoot Kennedy.

      What's changed? I think the President said it all when he talked about insecure people in small towns clinging to guns and religion, ill advised as it was to say it. The insecurity in America is so much more intense than it was even at the height of the Cold war, only it's turned inward. We're told to be afraid of losing our freedom and our livelihoods not to godless Commies, but to American Liberals who want to take our "hard earned" money and give it away to bums and lazy minorities and we're convinced that the program to enslave us is not the transparent efforts of the plutocracy, but the conniving of the "Liberals" and it will begin with taking away our guns.

      The emblem of freedom for millions is not the flag or the constitution, but the AK-47, much as it is for murderous rebels, terrorists and insurgents around the world.

      It's hardly just the NRA. I get e-mail every day addressed to "Patriots" like me who equate freedom with being well armed at all times. Armed against a nebulous enemy within, from the EPA, to FEMA to Rahm Emmanuel to Barack Obama to the Jews to Jesse Jackson to migrant farm workers. Got one addressed to "fellow patriot" yesterday from a 'prepper' group called Readiness Plan claiming FEMA had banned their video entreating you to stock your bunker full of food and weapons. People believe FEMA bans videos and these people are heavily armed. Tens of millions of Americans are totally insane.

      This, perhaps like the anti-Communist, anti Semitic insanity of Weimar Germany is completely manufactured for political reasons. These paranoids, these "Patriots" in places like Texas aren't Alaskan elk hunters or gulf coast gator hunters and they aren't bona fide or even bourgeois cowboys in the mold of the Lone Ranger or Gene Autrey. They see themselves as patriots, and defenders of freedom and their weapons look like military weapons and their clothes suggest guerilla warfare.

      I don't see at as having anything whatever to do with the traditional American gun culture but the traditional secessionist culture reanimated by cynical right wing entities for their own benefit. They're intentionally destabilizing America the way Putin is destabilizing the Ukraine and and the way Hitler destabilized Germany and for similar reasons: money and power and CONTROL. You can relegate a man to subsistence and penury and helplessness but as long as he gets to walk around like Pancho Villa he feels like he's in control and of course it intimidates the real threat to the reign of Mammon - us.

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  11. With bullying, spit, stalking, and threats of rape, gun extremists are targeting women.

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    1. The very idea of hating women still seems inhuman and improbable to me. It is simply against my better nature. I will never understand it. Our mothers, sisters and daughters are the very soul of beauty and creation. Kind nature's gentlest boon.

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    2. They will attack anyone they perceive as weak and vulnerable and they've been doing it forever. Humans are irredeemable.

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  12. Which is worse? Senseless gun violence, or senseless gun accidents:

    "A woman pushing her newborn son in a shopping cart was injured in a freak shooting incident at a Walmart store in Columbus, Ind., according to local media reports.

    Police say a .22-caliber pistol fell from the pants of Tony E. Ward on Saturday evening. When the gun hit the floor, it discharged. The bullet missed the baby, but hit a bottle of soda in the cart, then ricocheted and struck the woman in the upper arm -- and it all happened while the local chief of police was in the store, according to WBIW.

    Police chief Jon Rohde called for help for Virginia Thompson, 26, who was treated at the scene but she did not wish to be taken to a hospital, WHAS11 reports.

    Ward, 56, had a permit for the weapon and will not be charged with a crime ...
    "

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  13. She can easily sue - and will certainly win damages for criminal negligence. I don't know what kind of weapon it was, but you don't keep the hammer on a loaded chamber with a revolver and if it was a pistol, you certainly ought to know what a safety is before you get that permit. criminal negligence. An open and shut case.

    I wonder what percentage of all the freak accidents that happen in any given day this represents.

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  14. Again, it's called denominator neglect and it's why we are afraid of unlikely things more than likely things. a study back in the 90's shows about 480 serious shopping cart accidents a week. The people doing the study recommended a ban on shopping carts. Statistics. It's like firearms, not everyone uses them wisely.

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  15. The Error of Mystification. There is an article of faith in science that everything is knowable, or at least potentially knowable. People who invoke The Error of Mystification may claim that some things are beyond the reach of human understanding and are therefore unknowable, that some phenomena occur at random, that certain lines of inquiry are off limits, that what we now know is all we need to know, and recursive studies will not improve our knowledge and therefore constitute a waste of taxpayer money. The Error of Mystification is merely another error of logical reasoning; and the people who invoke it often have a bias or special interest agenda. Often what they really want is a premature closure of inquiry to keep us in a permanent state of mystification ... and ignorance.

    The NRA trades on errors of mystification and wants to keep it this way by blocking serious research into gun violence. The NRA ...

    Punished the Centers for Disease Control for publishing data on major causes of death including death by firearms - stripping $2.6 million from the CDC budget (the amount spent on the death by firearm study);

    Successfully outlawed Federal research grants with this provision: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control;”

    Introduced bills in the state legislatures of Alabama, Florida, and North Carolina to ban doctors from asking their patients if they owned or kept a gun in the house (with no exemption for patients who are depressed, suicidal, or seriously disturbed).

    The NRA wants the American public to believe that the issue of gun violence is an intractable problem with no possible legislative solution, and that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” In other words, the NRA wants to keep us in a permanent state of mystification because ignorance breeds fear, and fear means more guns.

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  16. According to CDC figures from 1992 up until 2010:

    Firearms used in school-associated homicides and suicides came primarily from the perpetrator's home or from friends or relatives not from dealers at or away from gun shows or subject to waiting periods and background checks.

    Total violent deaths of students, staff and bystanders in 20210 was half of that in 1992 and yearly totals have ranged between about 30 to the high 50's

    Homicide is the second leading cause of death among youth aged 5-18. Those individuals spend a lot of time in school yet:

    Data from this study indicate that only between 1% and 2% of these deaths happen on school grounds or on the way to or from school. As the vast majority of killings of juveniles occurs outside of school, I suspect they are safest there. Yes, the NRA is terrible, but are we overstating danger and if so, why?

    Data indicates also that there was a 50% decline in school shootings between a peak in the '06/'07 season and the '09/'10 season and that since 1992 there has been no upward trend that does not regress to the mean. If the 100 figure is accurate and not spiced up for rhetorical purposes the number alone still suggests little taken out of context. Is there some suggestion of a trend or that it correlates to some other changes in our country, like a change in numbers of guns or gun laws? I see no conclusions to be reached without other observations.

    I have some question as to whether many of those 100 shootings are comparable to the Sandy Hook incident.as the article implies anyway. Indeed, Incidents such as Sandy Hook or Columbine in which the shooter intended to commit mass murder: seem to number 10. College shootings made up nearly half.
    Incidents related to criminal activity (such as drug dealing or robbery), or personal altercations were 34. I smell fish -- or politics. The odor is similar.

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