TPM - Josh Marshall - "My Mass Shooting Ritual"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/my-mass-shooting-ritual

By JOSH MARSHALL Published OCTOBER 2, 2017 9:38 AM

I woke up this morning, pulled my iPad off my nightstand and opened Twitter to see if there was any overnight news. There was a horrific mass shooting in Las Vegas. I spun around to get a handle on the scope of the attack, the death toll and other basic facts. Then I started thinking through what has now become a basic ritual.

Who was the suspect? I hoped it wasn’t a Muslim. I also hoped it wasn’t an African-American man. Obviously, the identity of the shooter doesn’t make anyone more dead or alive. For the particular crime, the identity and even the motive is basically irrelevant. As a journalist, I shouldn’t really ‘hope’ it is or is not anyone. It is whatever it is. Is this liberal guilt or race fixation? I don’t think so. I do so for a pretty simple reason: mass violence by Muslims or black men are immediately political – and wrapped into storylines they have relatively little connection to – whereas as mass violence by whites just is. They are individual acts and unfathomable, no more addressable by policy or societal action than the obvious and inevitable fact that we will all one day die.

If the shooter is a Muslim or even more a Muslim immigrant, the attack is “terrorism” and even more than that it becomes enrolled into the catalog of threats to justify immigrant bans, surveilling or expulsion of Muslim immigrants, various military actions in the Middle East, new wars, scraping the Iran nuclear deal.

If it’s a black man it’s only slightly less political. It’s part of the rising tide of crime (statistically slightly true though greatly exaggerated) Jeff Sessions and President Trump use to inflame racial division and reignite the drug war and 80s era policing. It’s a violent turn for the rising tide of African-American protest ranging from taking a knee to protests in Ferguson and other cities.


snip, much more to read at the link above - worth reading, as we are all trying to make sense out of more gun inflicted terror and killing and injury.

last paragraph -

But beyond guns – which are absolutely, absolutely necessary to address and dramatically restrict access to – we need to recognize that we don’t have mass violence only because of guns. We have so many guns because America is a deeply violent society. That goes back generations. We have recurrent massacres because we are awash in firearms and also because we are a deeply violent society. Nothing so deeply rooted in our culture can be easily changed. But we could change it. We cannot and do not because at the end of the day we accept it.

[dsc]

1. I disagree with the notion that we are somehow more violent

than the multitudes of countries which don't have these. Are we really more violent than Germans, British, Australians, Canadians, Swiss, Ukranians, Russians, and on and on.

[frazzled]

2. We could, and should, change our deeply violent society: both politically and culturally

Even as we focus (once again) on the absolutely necessary need to change laws about gun sales and ownership (can we please start with reinstating a ban on automatic assault weapons?), we must also look at the deeply violent culture we celebrate every day.

I know it's unpopular to say this, but it has been for many decades that I have deplored the massive amount of violence (predominantly gun violence) that is a staple of our entertainment in the movies and on television. We Americans love it. It is our primary entertainment form. I am not for censorship, and there are times where the depiction of violence has its place as a thoughtful motif in movies and tv shows. But it's not entertainment. I'm speaking of the constant, and often mindless, shoot-em-up, blow-it-up, smash-em-up movies that use violence for no other purpose than thrills and chills and selling tickets or advertising.

We've fairly successfully challenged issues of racism, homophobia, and sexism in the products of the entertainment industry (well, sexism less so), so why can't we challenge the ubiquity of violence in our films? When the representation of African Americans in Hollywood movies became an issue, we pretty much got rid of the Steppin' Fetchit version of blacks in the public consciousness. And it helped. Why can't we stand up and demand a more responsible attitude toward violence in our cultural output?

[Stuart G]

3. k and r...nt.

[NRaleighLiberal]

4. giving this a kick