This headline — wow: pic.twitter.com/uWfu950T2G
— David Saleh Rauf (@davidSrauf) August 26, 2015
Ben “the Virgin” Shapiro for Breitbart. Dead Andrew must be so proud.
Interesting piece in the Washington Post — “American exceptionalism and the ‘exceptionally American’ problem of mass shootings“:
On Sunday, criminal justice professor Adam Lankford stood in front of a crowd of sociologists to explain how American culture contributes to the all-too-frequent American mass shootings. It’s not just that we have a lot of guns, he said — though he does believe that the high rates of firearm ownership are partially to blame. It’s the social strains of American life — the false promise of the American dream, which guarantees a level of success that can’t always be achieved through hard work and sheer willpower; the devotion to individualism and the desire for fame or notoriety…
When an embittered former Roanoke reporter opened fire on his one-time colleagues three days later, interrupting their live broadcast to ensure that his attack made it on TV, it was as though he was trying to prove Lankford’s point.
The alleged shooter, 41-year-old Vester L. Flanagan II, embodied every problem Lankford had identified in his global review of public mass shootings since 1966. He was reported to be frustrated with his patchy career as a television news reporter. He aspired to fame — either behind an anchor desk, or, according to photos shared on his Twitter account, through acting and modeling — and he got it, in a way, via the TV and GoPro footage of the slayings.
Flanagan admired other mass shooters whose names have become inextricably linked to those of the schools where they committed crimes. And although he was the one who allegedly raised a gun and pulled the trigger, ending two lives, he saw himself as a victim…
Lankford, a criminal justice professor at the University of Alabama, is the author of a new study on what he calls the “exceptionally American problem” of public mass shootings. The study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association this week and will be published in peer reviewed journals later this year.
The United States, according to Lankford’s analysis, is home to just 5 percent of the world’s people but 31 percent of its public mass shooters. Even more stunning, between 1966 and 2012, 62 percent of all school and workplace shooters were American. At 90 mass shooters in less than 50 years, the U.S. has five times as many as the next highest country on the list (the Phillippines)…
Also, Jeb Lund, in Rolling Stone, is divided:
… There is a giant gulf between allowing events to fall down the memory hole and going balls to the wall broadcasting them for weeks until they become the unofficial incidental music of everyone’s existence. And while the jury’s still out on whether repeated images of tragedies and killers romanticize them and encourage copycatting, it’s questionable what value anyone got from two weeks of turning on CNN after the Charleston massacre and seeing Dylann Roof’s bowl-cut teen-sneering, like Peter Tork was raised with extra chromosomes and copies of The Turner Diaries. Sure, mock CNN’s coverage of the disappearing plane all you like, but at least leading with that for every hour for half of 2014 wasn’t going to inspire someone to David Copperfield an airliner or cause a frisky Airbus to vanish as a prank, just because Don Lemon was wondering if Malaysia Flight #24/7 might have been “swallowed” by a black hole. Maybe we all have a unique vision of where this point lies, but there’s a difference between honoring a historical record and trying to get someone to stop for 30 seconds to watch your ominous black-and-white photos and BREAKING: SHOOTING chyrons on their way to baggage claim…
But Alison Parker and Adam Ward died on TV, in full color, with full audio, and you can see the full scope of their death with as little mediation as possible. You can see that there was no good guy with a gun there. There wasn’t a schoolteacher or another person on campus or a sweating maniac in a Minutemen shirt holding an AR-15 scanning the horizons for ISIS and spying this tragedy in time. Wayne LaPierre didn’t sprint out of his limousine at the last second to throw his center mass between Parker and the shooter. Instead, the killer raised his gun, waiting to be noticed, for shock at the power he was capable of and about to unleash — waiting to be seen unstoppably doing what he wanted done. Notice didn’t come, and he shot anyway.
… No one should be forced to see this, and it shouldn’t lead every hour of the day, but it should be there, and acknowledged…
Doug R
I dunno. Any wall to wall deathwatch coverage has got to affect us all. Who knows what that Germanwings pilot was watching.
NotMax
Must
WatchSnuff TV.NotMax
Howard Beale: I’m gonna blow my brains out right on the air, right in the middle of the seven o’clock news.
Max Schumacher: Well, you’ll get a hell of a rating, I’ll tell you that. A 50 share, at least. We could make a series of it. “Suicide of the Week.” Aw, hell, why limit ourselves? “Execution of the Week.”
Howard Beale: “Terrorist of the Week.”
Max Schumacher: I love it. Suicides, assassinations, mad bombers, Mafia hitmen, automobile smash-ups: “The Death Hour.” A great Sunday night show for the whole family. It’d wipe that fuckin’ Disney right off the air.
– Network
jl
‘Media’? I’ve seen and heard too much media on this tragedy and haven’t heard anyone ‘blame the gun’.
In fact, at first glance I read it as ‘liberals blame the gun’, because… well, isn’t that their line?
Breitbart going soft?
Also, disgusting, as expected from that bunch.
Comrade Luke
Savannah State on lockdown tonight. Jury’s still out though.
RaflW
Breitbart is like a cancerous tumor. It will eventually kill the host (America) if we don’t excise it and take some nasty medicine.
LABiker
Time for a campaign to repeal the Second Amendment.
Cookie Monster
I guess he got a title. He’s now “Asshole” Ben “the virgin” Shapiro.
Mnemosyne (tablet)
@LABiker:
Butbutbut he still would have been black and gay even if he didn’t have a gun, so why should we restrict poor, innocent guns?
/snark, in case it wasn’t obvious
Seriously, one of our resident trolls seemed to think the primary problem was that the guy was black and gay and not that a mentally unstable person was able to get a gun. If he had just stopped being black and/or gay, this never would have happened, amirite?
Omnes Omnibus
Question: We know that the MSM has bought into stupidity. It follows the Narrative and the clicks. Should we spend our time talking about these things or are there better avenues for discussion and effort?
Cookie Monster
@Mnemosyne (tablet): Because without the gun he could have murdered them with his anti-hetero laser vision. Why must you ignore the power of the gayness and blame the poor innocent guns? Don’t you know Colt’s in bankruptcy?
Omnes Omnibus
The blog doesn’t seen to be fixed. I sort of wonder if the people with the ability to do something about it actually care. It is possible that Cole had moved on and is no longer supporting this platform.
Steeplejack (phone)
@Omnes Omnibus:
I hear you. It would be nice to get a status report from someone who knows what’s going on.
And so to sleep.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack (phone): Moi aussi.
Origuy
Four people were shot outside a Social Security office in Salinas, CA today in what appears to be a domestic dispute. Link Despite the fact that the names and ethnicities of the suspect and victims have not been released, most of the commenters are convinced that they are illegal immigrants from Mexico. One commenter, who may have local knowledge, says that the shooter was Pakistani and the victims were Filipino.
piratedan
well, when the MSM stopped being “impartial reporters” of the truth and started to treat “the news” as a business resource to be manipulated for their advertisers, something was certainly lost in the shuffle. Can we be sure that we’re not twisted by our own propaganda? Sometimes I wonder and then come to my senses with the reminder that the media is owned by someone(s) and as such, that agenda is somehow mandated from on high (as it ever was). The folks that do the manipulation are mostly faceless and work in the shadows by dictating what they perceive as news and how it will be spun, if there’s an advantage to be had by spinning it.
Let’s face it, we rarely see coverage on the Dem side of the ledger because they’re talking about issues and issues do not provide the baitclick material that is desired. When BLM was on the scene, hey, lets cover the shit outta that. As soon as the Dems took them into account and gave them their due, well… not so much. Whereas Trump is a motherjumping godsend to them, controversy 24/7, passionate vocal rubes more than willing to follow any sensationalist crap that is posed by the VSP (Very Serious People) cartel and we get the sonorous tones of “experts” whose last claim to fame was to fail miserably at their job as a politico. They spout inanities and completely miss any point or make any observation that these people are flat out freaking crazy and their well coiffed counterparts nod their heads knowingly as if there really is a debate between the merits of creamy versus crunchy peanut butter.
Let’s hope that the happy friendly people at Breitbart have their own personal epiphany,but we all know how unlikely that is because that would require some capacity for empathy and introspection and that exactly ain’t these guys long suit.
gene108
Can’t sleep. Man, nights drag on and on…and can be boring…
There’s only so much Netflix and books can do to occupy time…
JGabriel
@efgoldman:
Most likely a dismayingly large segment. We’ve all seen historical photos of massive crowds – in America, in England, no doubt elsewhere – showing up to watch, celebrate, and party at live executions. I suspect it would be much the same audience that enjoys watching Donald Trump bully women and Hispanics.
mclaren
The solution is obvious. We must arm everyone with flamethrowers.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Omnes Omnibus: Twitter seems to be Cole’s thing now.
The Republic of Stupidity
Media blames the gun?
Ya know, when some poor psychotic freak goes berserk and kills 6 or 8 or 10 people w/ a frying pan or baseball bat, mebbe then I’ll blame something other than a poor, innocent gun…
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
@BillinGlendaleCA:
My take as well.
Kropadope
So, were we supposed to blame his gayness? Oh, wait, we’re definitely supposed to blame his blackness, duh!!!
Seriously, I haven’t seen anyone blame anyone or anything other than the shooter. True, some people took this as an opportunity to talk about gun control, but shouldn’t we do more to keep guns out of the hands of unstable PEOPLE? And if we can’t talk about gun control in the aftermath of a shooting, then we can literally never talk about it.
P.S. All those other shooters, don’t blame their whitey-white-whiteness or their neo-Confederate-spectrum ideology.
Keith G
@Omnes Omnibus:
Blogs such as this, and other digital communities create their own atmosphere. So while media obsessions are understandable, since I hear clicks can lead to income, I am not sure of any justification for these stupidities in the actions of those other communities – except that maybe strife of all kinds can be very alluring.
Baud
Not just the media blaming guns
Zinsky
I don’t think we need to repeal the 2nd Amendment- we just need a SCOTUS that interprets it properly and without conservative bias. The Heller decision threw out the prefatory clause and shortened it to “the people’s right to bear arms shall not be infringed”. It has a much different meaning with the contextual addition of, “A well-regulated militia….”. People do NOT have an absolute right to any firearm they want in any context they choose. If we just had some intelligent, non-ideological Supreme Court justices, this would have been made clear. Instead, we have carnage.
Baud
http://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europe
WereBear
I hope someone is working on the blog. These things can take time to fix. And I can only imagine the bandwidth costs: mine are bad enough and I’m sure they are not in the same tier as this blog.
Perhaps if our blog host would see us as abandoned puppies or kittens we would get a reassuring word :)
I am definitely a kitten. Some kind of long haired mix. Probably a tabby.
raven
Betty, or someone with the keys, said there was some re-design coming soonly.
WereBear
There’s no question our problem is cultural. Combined with high access to guns and low access to mental health services.
Helping your brain is a high stress activity at a time when this most important organ is not working properly. It is incredibly difficult to do alone. It requires high levels of organization: finding the right doctor and therapist and medicines and dosages and timing and discovery of factors contributing to one’s distress and then the revamp of one’s life that is often required to address these factors.
And our society offers no support. None.
Oh, there’s sympathy and some accommodation but there’s also incredible pressure to just fget on with it. Do your job. Handle your responsibilities. Be finished in six weeks or less.
I often wonder how many of these terrible stress issues could be handled the way they used to be: letting a person rest for months until they felt better. Lifting the burdens and letting them pick up what they felt they could handle. Slowly getting stronger.
If someone was badly hurt in an accident there’s all kinds of support compared to someone whose brain is struggling.
Barney
If you haven’t seen it, it’s worth looking at this from Charlie Brooker, on how coverage of mass shootings may encourage the ‘I’ll be famous for 15 minutes’ idea:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PezlFNTGWv4
(Brooker is the rough British equivalent of Jon Stewart – since we didn’t realise we had the equivalent in John Oliver and lost him to the USA).
Joel
Breitbart does have a point — men are responsible for close to 100% of these mass shootings.
Oh, wait, that wasn’t their point?
debbie
@WereBear:
The problem is the loss of any sense of community (now a dirty word). Placing oneself and one’s interests above anything else has destroyed this country. Thanks, Reagan.
Chris
@WereBear:
And even if services are available, you’re not supposed to avail yourself of them. That’s what wimps and weak people do. You don’t want to be a wimp. Real Men take care of their own problems. Rugged Individualism says so.
gratuitous
@WereBear: Nicely said. In my own pithy way, I often blame our culture in that we make guns more available and easier to get than mental health care. And wouldn’t you just know it? We get all these mass shootings!
Let’s cast about for what could possibly be a commonality in all these shootings: The shooter had a bad brain? The shooter was gay? The shooter was black? The shooter was white? The shooter was mad at a society that didn’t lavish him with fame and fortune like it has others? What could they all have in common??? I mean, besides the gun, because we’ve decided that’s not any part of the problem.
SFAW
@debbie:
I thought it was Obama that did that. You know, the most divisive President now, and for all time.
He’ll politicize anything – just look at how his actions forced
Marcia Marcia MarciaBobby Jindal to write that politicizing letter telling Obama not to politicize the Katrina 10th Anniversary observance.SFAW
@Joel:
Of course not. Gay men are the ones causing problems. Real men, on the other hand, are our saviors, waiting with their locked-and-loaded weapons (if you know what I mean, heh heh) to save the wimmins folk and other panty-waists from the Teh Evul Gheys, ans thus only use their Guns for Goodness.
It’s times like this I wish that Breibart’s entire staff would try to emulate/imitate Dead Andy Who Is Still Dead.
donnah
Anger is a problem. Our society, for all the aforementioned reasons, cannot handle anger. Maybe we should introduce anger management and social acceptance classes starting in elementary school now.
I’m serious! We have made very little progress in taking guns out of the picture. People can now flaunt them with legal backing in half the states in the country. There isn’t a way to turn back that clock.
People with unresolved anger issues react to situations by acting out. And acting out is more satisfying with guns, apparently. It’s road rage, it’s marital problems, it’s bullying, racism, humiliation…whatever causes people to get angry and stay that way.
So what if we could teach people how to react differently? If we start early in their lives, recognize individual situations like the helplessness of poverty or the person who is bullied or the bully themself? I know that’s a big agenda, but what do we have left?
ET
This is not a gay on straight crime – idiots at Brietbart just because the man was gay. I don’ know if I would even consider this predominantly a race crime though clearly the killer did have issues with people that revolved around race. This is a a man with obvious mental issues and his own personal grudges striking out at a perceived enemy.
Steve from Antioch
nobody really give a crap about the dead people, this is just another opportunity for people to beat their favorite dead horse. The RWNJs will talk about gheys and the blacks and the gun obsessives will whine about the NRA.
And so it goes.
Luthe
@donnah:
FTFY. As Joel pointed out, men are responsible for 99.9% of mass shootings.
It’s a matter of socialization and patriarchy. Women are told from a young age to internalize their failures. Anything that happens to them is because they aren’t pretty enough or smart enough or nice enough. So they turn their rage inward and implode.
Men, OTOH, are taught to externalize their anger. A kid makes fun of you? Beat him up on the playground. A women rejects you? Obviously she’s a frigid bitch. Your boss doesn’t give you a raise? He’s an asshole who hates you because you are [conspiracy theory here]. And eventually that rage explodes.
We can’t talk about mass shootings without talking about male entitlement and the patriarchy.
r€nato
@Kropadope: This shooter had an anger management problem, so far as anybody could tell, and nothing more. Should all HR departments report all such people to the government in the future? That would be a very long list, and just as with the pre-9/11 intelligence that did indeed contain ominous communications about an impending terrorist attack, the needles would get lost in the haystack.
I really do not see how any kind of legislation could have stopped this from happening, short of a MUCH stricter regulation of handguns (which would be exactly what the NRA has been saying all along that the gun safety crowd wants).
The problem is our sick society and I think the sociologist quoted in the original post was beginning to approach the answer. So did Michael Moore in “Bowling For Columbine”. I would place a good part of the blame on our winner-take-all culture.
Skippy-san
You should see how this stupid meme has taken off on Facebook. Especially after assrocket said that because the guy was black it is a racial shooting, but liberals won’t say that.
There are some pretty stupid people in America.
Kropadope
@r€nato: I didn’t say there was an easy solution to gun violence. I was arguing against the right-wing politically correct taboo on discussing gun control.
tones
Is it just me or did all of these start happening when Big Pharma started fine print like:
“If you have suicidal or homicidal feelings or these feelings become worse, do not stop taking it and contact your doctor right away”
The one – ONE – thing you will never see or hear them ask about, but they know full well that they had to stop prescribing these drugs to under 18’s because of all of the suicides…
How many of these shooters were actually NOT on these drugs -that is what I would like to know.
Kropadope
@tones: In all fairness, murderous thoughts were invented long before Prozac. The thing is that these companies have to report everything that happened in their clinical trials and these drugs are being prescribed to people already predisposed to depression.
Don’t get me wrong, I think people are way overmedicated these days, but blaming the drug for murderous rages is real difficult.