The terrorists of 9/11 won by not destroying the country, but by instilling a paranoia in American society that entails those excruciating TSA lines to board airplanes that involve taking off shoes and belts. By millions of us, every day. That has gradually eroded civil trust in the 20 years since, and arguably has contributed to the political divide in this country. Now the gun nuts — er, second amendment absolutists — are doing the same, by undermining the confidence ordinary Americans have to participate in ordinary, traditional civic events. It’s only going to get worse.
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Washington Post, Paul Waldman, 6 Jul 2022: Conservative media try to divert blame for Highland Park massacre.
A nice summary of the various excuses conservatives offer for the preponderance of mass shooting in the US. Only a month or so ago I gathered separate links to many of these excuses (about the *last* big mass shooting), here. Waldman:
Whenever there’s another horrific mass shooting, conservatives experience cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable feeling that occurs when two beliefs come into conflict. On one hand, they feel strongly that it should be easy for almost anyone to purchase military-style weapons designed to kill large numbers of human beings. On the other hand, they agree that mass shootings committed with those weapons are a bad thing.
They resolve this by deciding, and trying to convince others, that the guns have absolutely nothing to do with the carnage. This requires diversion, delusion, and dissembling, to a degree that seems to ratchet up in intensity with each mass shooting.
And so the conservative media offers up any number of reasons other than guns.
Examples in this article:
- Tucker Carlson (Fox): women nagging young men
- Laura Ingraham (Fox): marijuana
- Greg Kelly (Newsmax): leftists; antifa
- Mark Levin: cultural decay, especially abortion and infanticide
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Salon, Abigail Goldberg-Zelizer, 6 Jul 2022: Republicans react to another mass shooting with another round of deflection from guns, subtitled, “Following a mass shooting at a Fourth of July Parade in Highland Park, the right blames drugs and mental illness”
This piece repeats some of the above points, and adds:
- Marjorie Taylor Greene suggesting it was a false flag attack by Democrats to push forward gun reform. Citing a mass shooting in Denmark.
- Tucker Carlson: prescriptions and anti-depressants
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And yet there’s this. Title says all.
HuffPost, 5 Jul 2022: Rep. Lauren Boebert’s Terrible Take On Denmark Shooting Slammed As ‘Deadly’ Stupid, subtitled, “The U.S. has had more mass shootings in the past weekend than Denmark has had in a decade.”
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These Republican politicians are just not very bright. (Like the % receipt from Nikki Halley in yesterday’s post.) Or are deeply cynical, sure that their constituents aren’t very bright. Why are these politicians — celebrities and dimwits — the best Republicans can do? I’ve always wondered about this.
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Slate, Henry Grabar, 6 Jul 2022: Guns on Parade, subtitled, “Weapons of war are throttling American public life.”
My comments: While it probably is true that the number of people killed in mass shootings is objectively small in terms of the number of deaths per year from other causes, e.g. auto accidents, the shooting events themselves are so horrific and so widely covered that they have a disproportionate effect on public response. (This is how conservatives can shrug these shootings off, saying tut tut don’t worry about it you don’t stop driving your car just because of all those traffic accidents do you?)
So if it hasn’t happened already, I won’t be surprised if this continued trend begins to dissuade people from attending public events, whether parades, sporting events, concerts, or whatever.
That’s my thought on reading just the headline. Now let’s read the article…
Philadelphia mayor Jim Kenney:
“We live in America, and we have the Second Amendment, and we have the Supreme Court of the United States telling everybody they can carry a gun wherever they want. This is what we have to live with.”
You’d think the second amendment was *forcing* people to go out and buy all those guns. How about applying mental illness concerns to those who *choose* to buy all those guns, especially the high-powered ones. What are they thinking? Do they have nothing better to do?
It feels like an inflection point in the balance between the right to bear arms and the right to, well, do just about anything else. The triumph of guns is throttling American public life, chipping away at our experience of school, shopping, protest, celebration, debate, electoral politics, and even the writing of laws.
You’d be hard-pressed to find an institution in this country that isn’t buckling under the weight of a gun fetish that has seen domestic firearms production triple since 2000 and a steady rise in mass shootings, as right-wing courts and state legislatures repeal rules and politicians and gunmakers stoke fears of tyranny and civil war. America now has more guns than people, according to one estimate.
For some people, the growing presence of guns in American community spaces represents the very essence of freedom. For many of us, though, they’re an assault on the social contract, a threat that undermines our freedom and confidence to go about our lives long before anyone pulls the trigger. The ubiquity of guns, and the we way contort ourselves and our institutions to accommodate it, is debilitating enough.
In some cities and states, conservatives (white men) love to strut around showing off their guns — but if black men do this, conservatives freak out.
During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, the Louisiana Republican Congressman Clay Higgins said the quiet part loud, posting a photo of armed Black men on his Facebook page and writing, “If this shows up, we’ll consider the armed presence a real threat. … I wouldn’t even spill my beer. I’d drop any 10 of you where you stand.”
Another passage in this piece reminded me about the observation that every time you go through TSA at the airport, especially having to take off your shoes, belt, etc., means that the terrorists did, in fact, win. They have eroded our civil society.
Now, the gun nuts are doing the same:
…what the Washington Post architecture critic Phillip Kennicott called the “repeated, humiliating and demeaning encounters” with security personnel that are required to enter every public building?
Perhaps this is part of what the MAGA people want to escape from? Returning to a simpler past? But they don’t realize they’re actually making matters worse.
