The past few months have been laden with events illustrating the dysfunctional time in which we live. From Ferguson to Spokane to Charleston we have been confronted with examples of how real life doesn’t work the way we think it should.
The overwhelming reaction has been a storm of condemnation of the offending parties with a stunning lack of cures. We are angry but don’t know what to do about it. In this regard, our nation is much like dysfunctional families in that many are strongly upset by what has happened but helpless to find solutions that might actually work or choose those that merely continue or exacerbate the problem.
Thus, in the wake of the Charleston killings, it has argued that we need more gun control and hate crime designation.But NY Magazine points out:
James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and frequent commentator on criminal justice issues, has kept a close eye on the numbers, tracking mass-shooting incidents with four or more fatalities between 1976 and 2012 — the most recent year for which FBI data are available. Data he provided Science of Us produced the following graph:
It's clear that there is no major upward trend. And slicing the data differently doesn't make a difference — Fox said that since homicides are on the downswing in general, the overall shape of the graph wouldn't change much if you changed the definition of a mass shooting to, say, three victims or more. There isn't even any upswing in the number of school shooting victims, at least based on the Department of Education's own official statistics.
Why, then, is there such a powerful feeling that things are getting worse? Media coverage plays a big role. It's almost hard to believe today, but there was a time in the not too distant past when people in New York might not even hear about a school shooting that happened across the country. Today, every incident immediately explodes onto the national stage and is then amplified a millionfold by social media. It's a visceral example of the availability heuristic — the easier it is for us to think of a certain type of event (whether a school shooting or a plane crash), the higher we rate its probability. But this is an illusion; just because it's easier than it ever has been to think of an example of a shooting doesn't mean these events are more likely than they were in the past.One problem with anti-gun efforts is that they steadfastly ignore other factors involved in American's tendency towards violence. Here are a couple of examples:
- Mississippi has approximately the same rate of gun ownership as New Hampshire yet has five times as many murders per capita. The same is true of Louisiana and Maine: five times as many murders per capita in Louisiana despite roughly the same rate of gun ownership.Meanwhile, according to the Washington Post, the number of hate crime incidents the US was roughly the same in 2012 as it was in 2004. Does calling something a hate crime really help?
- The growth in school shootings is a fairly new phenomenon while guns aren't. Why is there so little discussion of other possible causes such as bad reactions to psychiatric drugs (with which many school shooters were being treated), the growth of violent video games & movies, the collapse of American culture generally and the stressful rise of test driven public education?
And, if you really want to change the way some things are done in South Carolina, is gun control and banning confederate flags a good way to start? Or is it merely a way to claim one’s moral superiority over some residents of that state?
And does anyone care that in our country the murder rate has dropped 58% since 1993?
As Dan Baum pointed out about gun control in Huffington Post, “It may be hard to show that it saves lives, but it's easy to demonstrate that we've sacrificed a generation of progress on things like health care, women's rights, immigration reform, income fairness, and climate change because we keep messing with people's guns. I am researching a book on Americans' relationship to their guns, and keep meeting working-stiff gun guys -- people whose wages haven't risen since 1978 and should be natural Democrats -- who won't even listen to the blue team because they're convinced Democrats want to take away their guns. Misguided? Maybe. But that's democracy for you. It's helpful to think of gun control as akin to marijuana prohibition -- useless for almost everything except turning otherwise law-abiding people into criminals and fomenting cynicism and resentment.”
One of the big problems with liberalism these days is that it is culturally tone deaf. It practices a political puritanism that only further annoys those it is trying to change.
One of the best rules for real reform is don’t target things people personally like – rightly or wrongly. When Howard Dean made the comment about wanting to get the votes of those with confederate flags on their trucks other Democrats like John Kerry attacked him. By any traditional Democratic standards, this constituency should be a natural. After all, what more dramatically illustrates the failure of two decades of corporatist economics than how far these white males have been left behind? Yet because they still cling to the myths the southern white establishment taught their daddies and their granddaddies, Kerry didn't think they qualified as Democratic voters.
This approach has been a disaster not only for the Democrats but for positive social change as well. If the Democrats hadn’t wasted decades ignoring the sort of economic populist agenda that helps everyone, they would have not only gotten the pickup truck drivers’ votes but improved their values as well.
Meanwhile, in my state of Maine, we are currently dealing with the second term of the worst governor in our history in part because liberals put on the ballot a referendum restricting bear traps that brought out rightwing voters who wouldn’t have otherwise showed up.
Anger, disgust and condemnation are lousy political weapons. On the other hand, doing things for people with whom one disagrees on some good subjects can be a gift that keeps on giving. It takes wisdom and courage but it pays off. Just telling someone he’s a racist doesn’t change things at all.
7 comments:
Mostly agree with you, Sam. We have to choose our battles, politics is about forming alliances to get things done, not about ideological purity, and my gun loving red state has a very low murder rate so what's all the fuss about?
That said, I disagree with you about the Confederate flag. The flag is merely symbolic and did not cause the Charleston shooting, but the flag is still sick and wrong and should be discouraged for the same reason the Nazi flag should be discouraged.
There is a culture in the South that "the South shall rise again," that the Civil War was a noble cause, and that blacks were better off when they were slaves. The Confederate flag is very much part of that culture, and the fact that it is flown at the state capital building is saying "wink, wink, it's OK if you still support the Confederacy and all it stood for." It's as if the Nazi flag were still flown at a German capital.
I'm not saying that the Confederate flag should be outlawed. It should be protected as freedom of speech just as the swastika is protected as freedom of speech. But Confederate-ism should not be officially endorsed by government!
The problem is that this problem has to be solved in the South. For northerners to get involved just adds fire to the Dixiecrats' cause.
Some of this is at odds with: http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-mass-shootings-more-frequent-data-20150618-story.html
Truth Revolt? You are citing Truth Revolt?
It's filled with white supremacists!
look at the comments. It is not the kind of
place I'd expect Sam to send us to! It's the
kind of site that inspires the Storm Roofs of the world.
So we got the same information from NY Magazine. Feel better now?
Everyone is free to identify their cause, saving whales, saving trees, privacy, peace, etc. But leaders identify the cause of the nation. There is usually only one at a time. The criminal Bush enlisted the nation into war of aggression, which remains the dominant paradigm and meaning of life. This corrupts the design of the republic which stands for human rights, in Jefferson's declaration. Any retreat from protecting the revolution itself, by engaging the business as usual of corrupt politics, faux divisive issues, signals a decline of the system. Americans tire of civil wars, but that is not the issue here, there simply is no leadership competent to lead a nation of colonized laborers that has slipped into a downward spiral of "one day older and deeper in debt", the original cause of the revolution.
There are a lot of people that agree there is too easy access to guns, especially by people of limited mental capacity. Restricting or removing access to guns would eliminate only one tool from a person intent on killing. Remove that and they will only find another tool. But to stop gun violence requires the will and courage to pass the laws; the American people don’t have the will and the cowardly politicians don’t have the courage. Look at Virginia; the last modification of the ‘concealed carry law’ was to allow concealed weapons in bars!
If there was a law to ban handguns in place in April, 1999, would Columbine have happened? If the law had been enacted after Columbine, would Sandy Hook have happened in December 2012? If the law had been enacted after Sandy Hook, would the thwarted attempt to kill attendees at a May 9 ‘Draw the Prophet’ meeting in Garland Texas have happened? If the law had been enacted after Garland Texas would the slaughter at Charleston SC Emanuel AME have happened? In every incident, after the networks made their advertising money and politicians milked the tragedy for possible votes, the reported reason for the killer’s behavior was hatred and possibly mental illness. CNN has added new spin to milk this tragedy; the confederate flag. CNN keeps showing pictures of the flag inferring that if the flag had not been flying, this might not have happened. Hatred will always find a way!
The point is, nothing is being ‘done’ to address the real problem; hatred and mental illness. The idiot talking heads on the media keep saying there needs to be a discussion. They, along with their bed buddies the politicians, have been talking about talking for years. It sells advertising and gets votes! It doesn’t solve anything. And Americans are content to nod their head in approval at CNN and the other networks pressing their personal agenda to make money off the tragedy, or some politician feigning outrage that nothing is being done?!
What happened in Columbine, Sandy Hook, Charleston SC Emanuel AME and many others that didn’t sell enough advertising to rate CNN’s outrage...tragic as they are...are only symptoms of greater problems, the causalities...that are not being addressed. Until they are, there will likely be more.
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