Mass Shootings and other violence - Alternative Perspectives

**scivian** · December 17, 2012, 02:44 PM

This thread is reserved for alternate discussions concerning solutions to these events. Not Gun legislation.

Anyone remember Marilyn Manson's response in Bowling for Columbine?
-What about our fearful, repressed, violent culture?

Hidden tragedies in every city
"...470 have been murdered in this city this year, as of early December. Simple arithmetic reveals that the same number of people killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School have died in Chicago every three weeks over this year."

**Larkin** · December 17, 2012, 02:50 PM

I don't see why it's a surprise. A huge part of Bowling for Columbine was how the media chooses what to report. They want to keep the people living in fear and, most importantly, watching their shows to know what to be afraid of.

That said, you can't report individual homocides or even war in comparison to a school shooting. While mass shootings happen far too often in the US, one on this scale - and against this age range - is all but unheard of save for Virginia Tech 07.

**scivian** · December 19, 2012, 03:02 AM

http://www.timwise.org/2012/12/race-...ege/#more-2316

“This wasn’t supposed to happen here.”

Or perhaps, “No one could have imagined something like this happening in our community.”
Or even worse, “This is a nice, safe place,” which of course was the same thing said about Springfield, Oregon, Pearl, Mississippi, Littleton and Aurora, Colorado, Moses Lake, Washington, Jonesboro, Arkansas, Santee, California, Edinboro, Pennsylvania, Paduchah, Kentucky, and pretty much every one of the dozens of places where the things that never happen appear to happen regularly enough to constitute something well North of never; indeed quite a bit up from rare.

To have said merely that these things are not supposed to happen, at all, anywhere, to anyone’s children would have been both appropriate and more to the point, true. Six year old children are not supposed to die, whether from gunfire or untreated asthma, whether from violence or inadequate nutrition and medical care. Parents are not supposed to bury their children. Period. And yet every year millions upon millions around the world do, including untold tens of thousands across the United States.
But it is not enough, apparently, to simply remark that there is something tragic and unexpected and uniquely unacceptable about childhood mortality, and to leave it at that, to punctuate this most obvious and banal truism with a period and be done. No, it is that additional four letters, that one hanging syllable, that modifier of our shock and amazement, which localizes its unacceptability in a particular space — here. Not there, but here.

Still, after all these years, and all these sanguinary calamities, there remains the utter surprise that yes, evil can visit the “nice” places too. What’s that you say? Childhood death isn’t just for the brown and poor anymore? Not merely a special burden to be borne by the residents of South Chicago, West Philadelphia, or Central City New Orleans? There is dysfunction and pathology and general awfulness where some of the beautiful people too reside? Yes precious, yes indeed. This time would you please write it down? Perhaps make it your Facebook status forever, so you won’t forget?

I don’t mean to be callous, and indeed I have shed plenty of tears for the families in Newtown, as I do every time one of these massacres takes place, and as I sadly know I will again. But Goddammit, it is the denial, the cocoon-like innocence of the bleary-eyed denizens of these communities that drives me to distraction. Precisely because I do care, and I know that that very innocence — which now for the umpteenth time we get to hear has been shattered — is more than just maddening, and far more than an academic point. It actually helps to make these kinds of gut-wrenching catastrophes more likely.