Shooting in Connecticut

glennmagusharvey

Goes to prove the obnoxiousness of the media circus.

ClockworkUniverse

To me it always seemed clear that the point was that it gives the right to own weapons for the purposes of serving in the militia.

It's clear that that's their reason for doing it, but the phrasing is such that you don't have to be in the militia to own weapons.

That said, I don'g give a crap about the second amendment. My main problem with gun outlawing is that the cat's out of the bag. There's not really anything you could feasibly do about the crapload of guns already in the US. So the solution has to be something else. Probably a number of other things, such as making it harder for certain people to get guns, or restricting certain types more heavily.

As for the news media, if my attitude wasn't already clear from the video I posted, they can go fuck themselves.

Malkavian

Ebert has a quote about how he feels the media obsession with school shootings has way more to do with making them more likely than any movies or video games do.

ClockworkUniverse

Oh, yeah, my dad actually linked me to that this morning. Here, I'll drop the quote:

Let me tell you a story. The day after Columbine, I was interviewed for the Tom Brokaw news program. The reporter had been assigned a theory and was seeking sound bites to support it. "Wouldn't you say," she asked, "that killings like this are influenced by violent movies?" No, I said, I wouldn't say that. "But what about 'Basketball Diaries'?" she asked. "Doesn't that have a scene of a boy walking into a school with a machine gun?" The obscure 1995 Leonardo Di Caprio movie did indeed have a brief fantasy scene of that nature, I said, but the movie failed at the box office (it grossed only $2.5 million), and it's unlikely the Columbine killers saw it.

The reporter looked disappointed, so I offered her my theory. "Events like this," I said, "if they are influenced by anything, are influenced by news programs like your own. When an unbalanced kid walks into a school and starts shooting, it becomes a major media event. Cable news drops ordinary programming and goes around the clock with it. The story is assigned a logo and a theme song; these two kids were packaged as the Trench Coat Mafia. The message is clear to other disturbed kids around the country: If I shoot up my school, I can be famous. The TV will talk about nothing else but me. Experts will try to figure out what I was thinking. The kids and teachers at school will see they shouldn't have messed with me. I'll go out in a blaze of glory."

In short, I said, events like Columbine are influenced far less by violent movies than by CNN, the NBC Nightly News and all the other news media, who glorify the killers in the guise of "explaining" them. I commended the policy at the Sun-Times, where our editor said the paper would no longer feature school killings on Page 1. The reporter thanked me and turned off the camera. Of course the interview was never used. They found plenty of talking heads to condemn violent movies, and everybody was happy.

Ironweaver

If anything, I believe that the prime cause of the shootings, and rampant crime in the USA in general, is the overwhelming alienation and dehumanization in society - a byproduct of capitalism.

But Ebert's theory makes a lot of sense of why there are so many school shooting in particular.

ClockworkUniverse

Well, obviously media sensationalism can't cause all of them; there have to be initial ones. It just turns shootings into strings of shootings.

InsanityAddict

Crime rates aren't that rampant, anyway: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/06/11/12170947-fbi-violent-crime-rates-in-the-us-drop-approach-historic-lows?lite

I think overall, alienation and dehumanization are compensated about equally by social progressivism for decades now. It's taken a turn for the worse with the whole crisis, but overall, we've been having that feel of ennui for centuries now.

glennmagusharvey

The reason random mass shootings get so much attention is because they're random and unexpected and because they're random and unexpected everyone becomes fearful and tries to make an informal risk assessment and if people feel it could happen to them they engage in tons of chatter about how they can change other people's lives to prevent these tragedies.

Not changing their own lives, changing others' lives.