Monday, August 5, 2019

Politicizing Murder Isn't The Solution, The Problem Is Deeper Than Guns And Mental Illness

American ‘wild, wild West’ needs taming, but politicizing cold-blooded murder is not the way

[Only because this is in play...Nothing to do with prophecy (well, except for 2 Timothy 3) and the title doesn't reflect the contents of the article, but its the only reasonable thing I've seen so here it is:]




This weekend witnessed another politically-fueled hate-fest in the US as liberals raged against Donald Trump, blaming him for two mass shootings in as many days. Welcome to US election season.
Second only to the news of innocent people having their lives cut tragically short is the realization that there are individuals who would use those deaths to advance an agenda, invariably a political one. And so it happened with a mass shooting in El Paso on Saturday, followed up just hours later with another in Dayton, Ohio – another 29 Americans added to the growing list of victims in the most heavily armed nation in the world.
Yet the public response to those cold-blooded murders fell far short of the decorum the occasion required. Twitter, for example, our electronic town square for exchanging ideas and so much more, lit up like some kind of Stephen King amusement park where the evil clowns had locked the front gates and seized control. Thus, we were treated to a host of puerile, expletive-filled rants against Donald Trump, as if the 45th president of the United States himself had pulled the trigger in those savage attacks. Unfortunately, those sort of deranged opinions are par for the course. That’s the beauty of democracy; before you are able to hear from a single Nobel laureate you must deal with the opinions of 10,000 maniacs first.
Many of the most irresponsible comments, however, came from public officials who should know better. Mayor Pete Buttigieg, for example, took to Twitter not to promote the healing process of a country that is under siege, but rather to exacerbate the situation with a shout out to ‘white nationalist terrorism’.
“Our country is under attack from white nationalist terrorism, inspiring murder on our soil and abetted by weak gun laws. If we are serious about national security, we must summon the courage to name and defeat this evil.”
That is quite a remarkable statement when you consider that no official investigation had even begun into what motivated the suspected killer, Patrick Crusius, 21, to walk into a Walmart store on a Saturday morning and indiscriminately shoot dozens of innocent shoppers, many of whom, incidentally, were white. Perhaps there really was some connection to ‘white nationalism’. Presently, however, all we have is a lot of red-hot media speculation.
One possible explanation, which the media never considers in such events, is that Patrick Crusius was a very disturbed white kid loaded up to the eyeballs on antidepressant medication, some of which have a host of dangerous side effects, including anxiety, aggression, and suicidal tendencies. Instead of asking if the shooter was being prescribed one of these powerful antidepressants, Buttigieg opted for the most explosive explanation, and one that divides the country at a time when what it really needs is healing.
The Democratic presidential wannabe would have provided a far more dutiful public service had he just extended his condolences to the family and friends of the victims and let the investigators make the final determination.
Amy Klobuchar, meanwhile, Democratic senator from Minnesota and another candidate for the Oval Office, told reporters in the aftermath of the carnage that Trump’s rhetoric about illegal immigrants entering the country “has fueled more hate in this country.” That is a highly debatable, subjective comment. After all, many Americans – not least of all those living near the Mexican border – have been increasingly frustrated with the daily specter of illegal immigrants streaming into the country unchecked. In fact, it was this long-simmering outrage and frustration that catapulted Donald Trump, who pledged to build a wall on the border with Mexico, into the White House.
Beto O’Rourke, meanwhile, another Democratic presidential super-dud, creeped out Democrats and Republicans alike after he let out the most ill-timed laugh in the history of ill-timed laughs during a press conference devoted to, yes, the shooting rampage. I’d pay good money to know what was going through O’Rourke’s mind that he found so hilarious at a time when the rest of the nation was in mourning. In any case, I’d say that weirdly misplaced laugh destroyed his presidential ambitions forever.
And then there was the glaring hypocrisy of the left-wing commentators. While the media is heaping attention on the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, indeed, as it should, why are Democrats not creating hashtags to the city of Chicago, for example, where 1,517 people have already been shot this year. This is no idle question.
Last month, two female members of a group called Mothers Against Senseless Killings were killed in a drive-by shooting on a Chicago street corner as they protested against – you guessed it – gun violence. 
The month of August has already witnessed seven shooting fatalities in America’s third-largest city.
Yet since Chicago is Democrat-controlled real estate, the left-leaning media is conspicuously quiet about this city’s relentless shooting violence. The reason for this reticence, however, goes deeper than just party affiliation. One of the seemingly inexplicable things about the gun debate is that some of the regions with the strictest gun laws, like the state of Illinois, actually have high rates of gun violence. That may seem counterintuitive since we have been taught to believe that more gun regulations will protect innocent people. 
This lends credence to the gun lobby’s popular mantra: ‘If guns are outlawed, then only outlaws will have guns.’ There may be some truth to that statement when it is remembered that there are 270 million guns on the mean streets of America. How do you get rid of them all? And if you do find a way to get rid of them, how will Americans protect themselves from the armed criminals who will certainly find a way to arm themselves? Has the country reached the tipping point when, like in the wild west of yesteryear, citizens will be required to wear a holstered gun in public to feel safe?    
While the Democrats are certainly correct in arguing that something needs to be done about the gun problem, simply blaming the Republicans every time a shooting spree occurs will not solve the problem. After all, what about ultra-violent Hollywood films, which beam thousands of gun deaths into American homes every year? Or violent video games, which many believe condition young minds to acts of cold-blooded violence? These are issues the liberal media tends to ignore. At the same time, Republicans need to be more compromising with gun legislation, ensuring that firearms do not end up in the wrong hands.


WALSH: It’s Not Guns Or Mental Illness. The Problem Is Deeper Than That
In reaction to the horrific mass shootings in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas, this weekend, many people on both sides have been engaged in the same game of slogan-shouting and cliche-spewing that always follows these kinds of things. One side says guns are the problem. The other retorts that mental illness is the real culprit. Both agree that extremist ideologies are partially to blame, but they disagree on which extremist ideology is most to blame. Round and round we go. Nothing is accomplished. Nothing changes. And lost in the fog of talking points is the hard reality of these tragedies — the fact that actual, real people are dying.
It is indeed an epidemic. Mass shootings are still exceedingly rare, but the fact remains that 20 of the 27 deadliest mass shootings in American history have happened in the last 15 years. Since the Virginia Tech massacre in 2007, this country has seen 9 of the 13 deadliest shootings in its history. The worst one ever was two years ago. The second worst was the year before that. It's true that the media tries to grossly (in multiple senses of the word) inflate mass shooting statistics by counting gang violence in the total, but the numbers are still extraordinary even without being manipulated to prove a political point. For some reason, shootings like El Paso and Dayton are way, way more common today than they were 20 years ago or anytime previous. That is not debatable. The only debatable question is why.
As for that question, we never get close to answering it because we are determined to focus the conversation around guns, mental illness, and extremism. Yes, guns obviously are part of the picture. But our existing laws, if enforced, would have prevented many of these slaughters already. We don't need more laws. We need, rather, to utilize the ones that are already on the books. The Dayton shooter apparently was caught keeping a hit list of classmates he wanted to kill in high school. I think we can all agree that people with hit lists shouldn't be able to obtain firearms. But that, again, is a matter for better enforcement, not additional laws. Besides, there have always been guns in this country. There have not always been this many mass shootings.
The same could be said for mental illness, racism, and ideological extremism. All of these things have existed in America — to a greater degree, in the case of racism — since our nation's founding. If this were simply a problem of crazy people with guns, or racists with guns, or ideological extremists with guns, we should observe a relatively consistent rate of mass shootings. We do not observe that. What we observe is a smattering through the first 220 years of our country's existence, a noticeable uptick in the late '90s, and then an explosion of some of the deadliest mass shootings in history right around 12 years ago. Clearly the standard explanations do not account for this. What, then, does account for it?
At bottom, the answer is that we have become a country filled with numb, detached, and desensitized people. Mass shootings are the ultimate manifestation of that detachment. Our reaction to them — rhetorically slinging dead bodies at each other to score points in a political argument — is a slightly less severe but very much related manifestation. A survivor of the El Paso shooting reports that the shooter casually smirked before unloading on a crowd of innocent people. This echoes many other reports from many similar shootings. The killer is always smirking like he's slightly amused, or else he's blank-faced and emotionless. Rarely do you get a picture of someone running around enraged and screaming. We call these acts of "hate," but they are much more acts of brutal, murderous indifference. These are empty, numb, detached people slaughtering their fellow humans because they are bored and frustrated with their meaningless lives.



But this only kicks the can another mile down the road. If it is detachment and desensitization causing these attacks, the next question is, what causes the detachment and desensitization? The culprits here are manifold, but the internet has to be one of the first places we look. Though it has of course existed for several decades, the internet has only been ubiquitous for the past two. The rise of social media is even more recent than that. As with any massive societal shift, we will not fully understand its effects until we are a good distance from it. But it's already fairly clear that our cyber space obsession causes us to be increasingly detached from the physical world and each other. It's a cliche to point out that our connectedness has made us disconnected, yet there's truth to most cliches, and this one is no different.
A fascinating and disturbing article from Robert Evans details how the users on the message board where the El Paso shooter liked to spend his time not only cheer on these killing sprees but discuss them like the innocent people being butchered are just characters in a video game. Evans calls it the "gamification" of terror. You could just as well call it the "internetification" of terror. Mass shooters are simply translating their internet personas into the real world. People on internet forums, social media, YouTube, and other sites routinely wish death and worse on each other. "Kill yourself" and "I hope you get cancer" are almost standard greetings at this point. But what's often lost in all of this mundane vitriol is that actual human beings are saying this stuff to other actual human beings. After a while you get so used to being treated this way, and maybe so used to treating others this way, that you no longer appreciate the dignity and beauty of human life. It is not hard to see how someone who spends hour upon hour and year upon year wallowing in the darkest and vilest corners of cyberspace, treating other humans like filth, wishing violence and death on anyone who crosses them, may eventually become the monsters they already appear to be online.

A man who thinks he can be a despicable, stupid sociopath in cyberspace yet remain a basically decent guy in the "real world" loses sight of the fact that the internet isthe real world. It is technology used by people in the real world to communicate with other people in the real world. Who you are while using the internet is simply who you are. However you act on the internet is simply how you act. If you're a dirtbag on Twitter, you're simply a dirtbag. The idea that internet is a morality-free zone where grotesque behavior somehow "doesn't count" not only encourages people to be despicable but numbs them to the impact their behavior has on others. And this is all to say nothing of the fact that the internet gives disturbed and violent people the chance to congregate anonymously and egg each other on.
The internet isn't the only source of our cultural emptiness. 24-hour cable news gets us accustomed to watching human tragedies as entertainment. Broken homes foster emotional confusion and feelings of hopelessness in children. Psychiatric drugs, while necessary in some cases, can also create a chemical numbness and detachment, as evidenced by side effects like "suicidal thoughts" listed on the packaging. And underlying all of this is our dwindling sense of the transcendent — our rejection of a higher purpose to human life. All of these factors accumulate as the snowball rolls down the mountain. Eventually the snowball is an avalanche, and more innocent people are buried underneath it, and all we do is stand on the pile flinging little clumps of snow at each other.

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