by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
U.N. Visitor’s Plaza, New York, New York
A gift from Luxembourg.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last forty-eight hours, you have no doubt seen the coverage concerning the mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado. If you possess even a minimal level of empathy for your fellow human beings, twelve dead and fifty-eight wounded when their only crime was wanting to see a movie can only be properly described as tragic. Among the dead accounted for up to this point are a man who had been celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday (Alex Sullivan), a member of our Navy (Petty Officer Third Class John Larimer), a twenty-four year old aspiring sports journalist (Jessica Ghawi), and a six year-old girl. Some less responsible outlets are reporting this little girl’s name (Huffington Post, looking your direction), but other more responsible outlets are not. I will not post her name for the same reason others have declined: the little girl remains unidentified because her mother, also a victim of this horrific crime with gunshot wounds to the neck and abdomen, remains paralyzed in hospital and has not yet been told of her daughter’s death. Even in reporting on events, sometimes a little discretion goes a long way and does not impair the “public’s right to know” in any substantive manner.
Over the next few days, you will see many attempts by people with various political agendas trying to monopolize on this shooting to promote their pet causes. In fact, it has already started and in a most heinous manner. During a radio interview on The Heritage Foundation’s “Istook Live!” show, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) said Friday that the shootings were a result of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs” . . . and questioned why nobody else in the theater had a gun to take down the shooter. Gohmert in one fell swoop illustrated that not only is he a base political opportunist, but that he apparently doesn’t understand the 1st or 2nd Amendments very well – a common affliction among Texas pols. Others pols are already using this as a way to promote their anti-gun agendas, their pro-gun agendas and the Twitter-verse is filling with statements from “our leaders” about this tragic event and all of them in some way self-serving.
I urge you to ignore these opportunists for a moment and to think about something else related to the Aurora shooting.
Multiple outlets are reporting that the accused gunman, James Holmes, had dyed his hair red and told the police he “was the Joker”.
There is the fantasy of violence. There is the reality of violence. They could not be more different in outcome. This presents the issue of instances like this where the line between fantasy and reality have clearly been crossed in some meaningful manner. Does this problem exist in the individual or in society itself? I submit the answer might be “a little of both”.
Consider this: one of the elements of drama is that the hero (or something or someone the hero holds dear) must be in peril. It creates tension, it moves the story. You cannot have drama without an element of danger or risk and very often that danger or risk is portrayed in the form of physical violence. As a species, we are wired to find this entertaining. There is nothing wrong with a bit of wish fulfilment in seeing the hero overcome adversity as entertaining.
The reality is starkly different. Witness real heroes like Jon Blunk who was killed defending his girlfriend Jansen Young during this rampage. Witness Jarell Brooks, a 19-year-old from Aurora, who put himself at risk to help Patricia Legarreta and her two young children escape, but not before he and Legarreta were wounded. Witness Eric Hunter, a 23-year-old from Aurora, who found two wounded girls and dragged them to safety in an adjoining theater before blocking the door to Theater 8 and preventing the alleged gunman from spreading his gunfire in to a new room of innocent theater goers.
All three possible outcomes. Death, wounding, escape from physical harm. All three equally heroic in that other lives were saved, some of them strangers with nothing in common but a love of the same kind of cinema and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It’s a funny thing about heroism though. As F. Scott Fitzgerald famously quipped, “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” In real life, the tragedies and the heroics are real and have real consequences. The hero does not always win the day as they are prone to do in fiction.
Does our propensity for dramatic entertainment, let alone dramas involving violence, feed a propensity for violence? This is a question as old as drama itself. On one side of the argument is the catharsis argument put forth by Aristotle in Poetics; that in viewing tragic events, the audience’s negative feelings like fear and pity are purged. This line of reasoning was later supported by psychologists and psychiatrists such as Sigmund Freud and A.A. Brill. On the other side are modern researchers who have found correlations between watching violence and the rate of violence in society, but causal connections between the two in the general population have been difficult to pin down. What is clear is that “exposure to media violence does not produce violent criminals out of all viewers, just as cigarette smoking does not produce lung cancer victims out of all smokers. This lack of perfect correspondence between heavy media violence exposure and violent behavior simply means that media violence exposure is not a necessary and sufficient cause of violence.” (“Media Violence and the American Public” by Brad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson, Iowa State University, American Psychologist, June/July issue, p. 482, 2001.) That a small segment of society seems particularly susceptible to being prodded in to violence through the consumption of media violence though seems undeniable. To me, this seems to comport with the rate in society of people with mental problems revolving around empathy like sociopaths and psychopaths. People who lack empathy would naturally not connect the actuality of violence with the fantasy of violence as they don’t care about the impact of their actions on others to begin with. Correlation is not causation and the root causes of violence are more complex than just a person’s entertainment choices. There are also environmental, social, economic, and personal history to consider. Some people in certain situations are simply going to be more prone to violence. While causation in the general population has been found in desensitization toward violence and violent entertainment, causation of real life violence with fictional violence has been more elusive although desensitization in itself has been can “[increase] aggressive thoughts, angry feelings, physiological arousal and aggressive behaviors, and decreases helpful behaviors.”
As a society, do we have a duty to mitigate all factors that can induce violent behavior in individuals? Even if that susceptible segment of society is a very small percentage of society? With complex compound causation, this is a practically impossible task, and even if “perfect mitigation” of contributing factors was had there are a certain percentage of society that are going to be violent psychopaths no matter what their environment is like. Where to do we draw the line a social inputs that can encourage violence and personal responsibility for individual action? Consider this as well: do we have the same duty to mitigate when the violence perpetrated by sociopaths and psychopaths is economic (as in the banking industry shenanigans that birthed the OWS movement), is purely psychological (as seen in pathologically verbally abusive spouses) or is purely political (as in the religious far right attempting to trample history and the Constitution to institute theocratic laws if not outright theocracy)?
Perfection is not possible. Evil cannot be eliminated in the world for without it we have no definition of good. The perfect removal of error from complex systems is a mathematical impossibility. Does that mean we should not try?
What do you think?
Source(s): ABCNews.go.com (1, 2), NBCNews.com (1, 2), Huffington Post (1, 2, 3)
~ submitted by Gene Howington, Guest Blogger
UPDATE: The names of all the victims have been officially released by the Arapahoe County coroner’s office. These are the names it is important to remember. Veronica Moser-Sullivan, 6, Jessica Ghawi, 24, Alex Sullivan, 27, Jonathan Blunk, 26, John Larimer, 27, Matt McQuinn, 27, Micayla Medek, 23, Jesse Childress, 29, Alexander Jonathan (AJ) Boik, 18, Alex Teves, 24, Rebecca Ann Wingo, 32, and Gordon W. Cowden, 51.
A Personal Note to the Aurora Victims and Their Families and Friends:
My sincerest condolences. May your loved ones lost live on in your memories and may your memories be long, robust and full of happiness. May the wounded heal and take every advantage of their good fortune at surviving this senseless act of violence. May this harm done to you and yours not keep you in the depths of lament, but transform to a celebration of life – both theirs and yours. Peace, love and long life.
Gene H.
NOTE: For those of you waiting for the next Propaganda installment, I’ll either publish it tomorrow or publish next weekend depending upon time constraints. I thank you for your patience in the face of breaking news.
He would have been limited to ten 10! bullets under the old law, oh the horror of the thought of that!!!!!:
One of the guns that suspect James Holmes used in the Colorado theater massacre of at least 12 early Friday morning is quickly reigniting the gun-control debate.
The AR-15 is a semi-automatic assault rifle that is a civilian version of the military’s M-16. According to CNN, it’s capable of carrying up to 100 rounds. It shoots one bullet at a time that can “may go through two people” at once. And it’s legal in the United States.
After the Aurora Police Department revealed that this was one of the guns Holmes used, outrage ensued online, mostly because the gun would have been a lot harder to purchase under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004. Congress has not voted to replace the bill, which was enacted in 1994 but had a “sunset provision” that let it expire.
Here’s a breakdown of some of the more harsh restrictions it would have faced under the 1994 bill, via The Guardian:
The manufacture and import of AR-15s and similar weapons, such as AK-47s, were banned in the US in 1994. There were also limits on the size of magazines that could be fitted, limiting them to holding no more than 10 bullets.
Those prohibitions fell away 10 years later, and attempts to revive them have failed in the face of objections from the powerful National Rifle Association allowing Holmes not only to purchase the powerful weapon but also to fit it with the magazine drum holding a large number of bullets.
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/james-holmes-ar-15-aurora-colorado-theater-shooting-2012-7#ixzz21O8tPtUY
OS,
How much you wanna bet my kin knew yours way back when? The Johnson (Org. Johnston out of Scotland and Protestant) brothers were a vicious lot who liked taking politically incorrect actions against anyone not part of the clan. Guns and dogs, man, guns and dogs.
@rafflaw: The claim that we are hearing is just a refurbished, guns don’t kill people, people do.
No, it isn’t. The claim is that if the insane wish to kill people, they will find a way. That is not the same logic at all.
In fact I subscribe to the idea that readily available firepower results in the deaths of more men, women and children than if guns were better controlled. I freely admit that, and I am an advocate of gun control, waiting periods, mandatory safety training and the prohibitions on military grade firepower.
However it is STILL true that if the insane wish to kill a lot of people they will find a way. Guns are the most convenient method at this point in time. Take away their guns, and they will use something else. Including fire; and there are forms of chemical fire in which the sprinklers would be ineffective; in fact sprinklers are often ineffective if the fire is large enough, fast enough. They could use a homemade binary gas grenade; two liquids separated by a thin glass sheet that shatters upon impact to initiate mixing. If personal killing is the goal, use the gas to knock them out and then slit their throats.
Proper gun control could help keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the mentally incompetent, it could help reduce the number of emotional homicides or gun accidents in the home. Unless you outlaw guns altogether, you could not stop this particular guy from owning them or buying thousands of rounds of ammunition. You could not stop a garage machinist from modifying a legal gun into a fully automatic gun. Even with just a backpack full of standard hand guns with standard clips, this guy could have opened fire from a protected corner with a gun in each hand and squeezed off a few hundred rounds before he was stopped.
I see no reason to believe this kind of insane mass murder could have been prevented even a complete ban on guns. The insane would find a way. Mechanically speaking, it is not very difficult to kill people.
Blouise, ID ought to look up my username. It is the Cherokee name for the Blue Ridge Mountains. My family was one of the first to settle these hills well before the American Revolution. Major Patrick Ferguson found out the hard way there are consequences to coming into these hills and threatening people. The culture back in the hills has not really changed very much since the Watauga settlement got Ferguson’s nastygram back in 1780.
I do not know a single family, and I mean absolutely no one (convicted felons excluded), who does not have at least one firearm in the house. The majority have multiple firearms. You might as well be the guest of honor at your own hanging as go back on our backroads and tell people you have come to get their guns.
Study saying that states with assault weapon bans , that vote in trigger locks and have safe storage laws have fewer gun deaths.:
http://news.yahoo.com/analysis-geography-gun-violence-182527529.html
“Residents, protesting what they say is an increased police violence against them in the community, started the near riot after the shooting on nearby La Palma”
. _yea, after the police attacked them and shot at babies and let a trained attack dog LOOSE to attack a mother holding her baby.
Crystal Ventura, a 17-year-old who witnessed the shooting, told the Register the man had his back to the officer. She said the man was shot in the buttocks area. The man then went down on his knees, and she said he was struck by another bullet in the head. Another officer handcuffed the man who by then was on the ground and not moving, Ventura said.
“They searched his pockets, and there was a hole in his head, and I saw blood on his face,” she said.
(They executed this man in cold blood in public in the daylight.)
Dunn said he could not comment on these allegations because the shooting is under investigation.
(of course)
Residents told Jackson that police overreacted and created the disturbance.
One man said, “They just started shooting.”
Police also set a K-9 officer on one woman and a bystander they said were agitating the situation.
Said Susan Lopez, “I had my baby with me. My baby! The dog scratched me and then grabbed me.” She added, “They shot at me while I was holding a baby!” Another woman yelled, “They just shot at us, they shot at a little kid, too.”
Blouise,
It was a mistake to write a letter asking for proofs of the contentions of two different persons.
That there is a different culture there is patently true.
So am forced to apologize for that damnation based on your congenial assent to OS contention by defining it loose terms which can be said about any part of the USA.
As for relatives, I come from that stock, although mine were closemouthed about their heritage. My maternal grandfather was the first chiropractor in Tennessee (Knoxville). Scotch-Irish all. Or black-Irish as some said.
Many studies have been made of the feud and fun group.
I have read of a short modern one, where college students at Harvard were subjected unwittingly to an personal affront test. Our gang went sky-high in their hormonal responses. Proof’s value? Your choice.
Knowing my mom, you must be related to her. Small tongue, sharp as a knife. Glad you don’t carry a gun here. Don’t need to of course.
I could suggest a program, in fact several different ones to get them out of those hills. None of them legal unless we call them terrorists. None of them involving boots on the ground. I remember one which brought them out. And if your memory or contacts are good enough you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Of course getting out the last ones would call for several Rambo, but drones might do it. Let’s see first how it goes in Pakistan NWTA.
Guess our folks have a lot in common with the Afghanistans and the Kurds. Only the mountains are their friends. So say they about the Kurds anyway.
I used to hunt white tailed deer on my farm with a Remington model 7. I used a hunting rifle. I certainly did not need a semi automatic high powered gun with a 100 round clip. If you need that to hunt, better go back to the shooting range and practice because even hunters hate a55holes who wound animals instead of dropping them with a clean shot.
id707,
“I wonder where you both get your facts about Appalachia.
“The worst kept secret in the world is the fact there are still illegal moonshine stills, meth labs and “agricultural projects” in the mountains of Appalachia.” OS
“As to your comments about “backwoods of Appalachia” … yep, it’s a whole ‘nother culture back in the mountains.” Blouise.
Personal studies there? Internet searchs?”
In my case, id, relatives … lots and lots of relatives dating from the early 1700’s up to present times.
—————————————————————————-
“But the people of Appalachia are worth distrust, it could be said that you are supporting.”
… it could be said?! …That’s your take, your spin on my words. I was referencing the place guns have in the Appalachian culture. As to Moonshine and Meth Labs and other “agricultural projects” … no comment ’cause I ain’t exactly stupid … no sunburn on my tongue.
——————————————————————————
“I have offered no defense, just calling into question your accusations. Can you defend them?”
I ain’t no vote seeker and why would I need to defend an attack I never made?
——————————————————————————-
“I have spent some time there. They walk on two legs, had one head only. And believe, although have no facts, that they do less mass killiings than in equally populated areas.”
Do tell and back attcha … Trust to the lord and keep your powder dry.
Go ahead id, make a law that strips the men and women and children up in them thar’ mountains of their guns then go for another walk in the pines enforcing your law.
Now skedaddle briggity britches.
well said shano. The claim that we are hearing is just a refurbished, guns don’t kill people, people do. Gun control that can make it more difficult for people like this alleged shooter to get serious and dangerous weapons can prevent tragedy’s like this one. We regulate dangerous animals and drugs and chemicals, but for some reason, guns that are used to kill thousands every year are immune to societal control.
here is a comment from the intertubes:
” I see the Gun Thugs are out in force today. The point you cretards seem to be missing is this: the gun in the Aurora shootings was used for the exact purpose for which it was designed. You gun-nut ldiots who talk about all the “law-abiding gun owners” miss one important point: even WANTING to own a murder weapon makes you kind of a d-bag.
Let’s say that your hobby was make-believe rape, instead of make-believe murder, and you collected bondage gear and read “Rapist Weekly” instead of collecting guns and subscribing to Guns and Ammo. Would you really expect the rest of us to care that only a few of you ever go through with your rape fantasies?”
And this is what I say too, anyone who feels the need for one of these weapons of mass destruction has something really wrong with them to begin with.
When we get sick and tired of our gun laws, our bank laws, our governance, THEN we can look for reform. Until then, we are stuck with the crap we have allowed to continue. I’m not blaming Obama. I’m not blaming Mitt. I’m not even blaming the NRA. The NRA has not sucked our brains out of our heads and the issue is not as complicated as credit default swaps. When Americans are really sick of the killing (for longer than 48 hours), we will get up and vote and all the propaganda the NRA throws at us will be for naught. Until then we are going to get what we deserve.
And spare me those teddy bear and candle displays. Are we so easily comforted when 70 people are shot? Those displays are as pathetic as our willingness to elect a Louie Gohmert or Michelle Bachman to Congress.
Lets allow as many muskets and black powder guns as they want, but keep a tight control over these military weapons. The weapon he used would have been illegal under the old gun laws that ‘expired’.
And sure, he could have set the place on fire, but most public buildings have sprinkler systems. In fact it is required. We regulate indoor fire suppression systems more than we regulate guns. It is a religion.
@shano: I am seldom on the same side as Bron (no offense Bron) but he is right; if the shooter had no guns he could have used fire, as I said in my post he could have blocked the doors and used a lethal gas.
The fact that his gun jammed is just good luck, in fact if he had not had access to guns he might have creatively thought of something far more lethal, like an improvised explosive device. The report says he left by the exit and surreptitiously disabled the locking mechanism behind him, and brought in the guns from his car by way of that blocked exit. He could as easily have wheeled in an improvised suitcase bomb and killed three times as many people, and permanently deafened all of them.
Gun control would not have prevented this insanity, it might have exacerbated it. If the shooter had considered a route to mayhem without guns that also accomplished his escape (as the fictional Joker presumably would), he might have succeeded to kill again.
I won’t argue with the notion that better gun control would save American lives, I believe it would, but it would not mitigate this kind of insane violence for the sake of violence. If somebody goes insane and becomes intent on killing strangers, they will find a way.
Maybe it has more to do with the complete lack of mental health outreach and help for people who are suffering.
And the fact that while these people get no mental health services they have complete and easy access to military style, powerful weapons that are designed to kill as many as possible in the least amount of time and effort.
Bron,
“this has nothing to do with society or guns. it is the result of a brain which malfunctioned, nothing more. Had guns not been available he would have used soda bottles filled with gas or some other weapon.”
I agree in part. The availability of guns is largely irrelevant to a determined violent sociopath or psychopath. They will find other ways to kill people in their absence. But I think society does have something to do with it. Nature and nurture both play a role. When discussing the actions of violent socio- and psychopaths, unless they are known to have the conditions and keeping guns away from known threats, the gun control issue is really beside the point. We already have background checks and in this case, it wouldn’t have caught the shooter beforehand. He had no history. Beyond background checks and possibly some reasonable limits (like restricting the sale of high capacity magazines), anything else is just a political football that runs the risk of running afoul of the 2nd Amendment (and as you know, I’m a pro-2nd liberal).
However, if you look at the work of neuroscientists like Dr. Kent Kiehl, there are clearly structural differences in the brains of psychopaths, but when you consider the work of psychologists like Brad J. Bushman and Craig A. Anderson quote above, there is also seems to be a social/environmental component involved in turning a “functional psychopath” into a “violent psychopath”. Kiehl even goes so far as to argue that psychopathy should be equated to a form of diminished capacity in law and should mitigate (or at least inform) using death penalty sentencing.
Bron: “this has nothing to do with society or guns. it is the result of a brain which malfunctioned, nothing more. Had guns not been available he would have used soda bottles filled with gas or some other weapon.’
Yea we all hear this argument but it does not fly. The people in that theatre were extremely lucky that his big gun the semi automatic assault rifle JAMMED. and he had to use another not so powerful gun. The carnage would have been worse if this gun of his had not stopped working.
Lets see, if he went in there with a BB gun would 12 people have died? A hand gun? A hunting rifle? there is something about the fetish of gun worship that is more akin to a religion than anything else.
Today we have the President of Mexico again calling on the American Congress to put in some common sense gun control laws covering these weapons of mass destruction. they even made a billboard with the letters made of confiscated automatic rifles, 140,000 weapons seized since 2006 in a nation that has sensible gun control- all coming from the USA. Killing 50,000 people so far.
http://houston.cbslocal.com/2012/02/17/mexico-unveils-no-more-weapons-sign-made-of-firearms-along-us-border/
They have been traumatized at a Batman movie so they are to be confronted by a “real” Batman? Diabolical.
There are disturbed people who are put on meds that exacerbate their problems without getting to the real underlying problems. They create tragedies that we respond to with horror and sympathy for the victims and their families. Although it hasn’t been demonstrated in this most recent case, I wouldn’t be surprised if is eventually and it will be covered up b/c big pharma is making too much money from these meds.
We have the right to our weapons and I don’t advocate disarming “we the people” as long as there are those who steadfastly advance oppression by their use of an increasingly militant and brutal police force. There are lots of daily lots, e.g. stop and frisk of young Black and Latinos in NYC and individual events, e.g. Anaheim CA cops opening up on men, women, and children with rubber bullets and an attack dog, the OWS roustings. The spying on our every move with cameras everywhere and our words with warrantless intercepts of all phone calls, emails, internet use.
But I also think of the destruction of infrastructure, the massacres, the devastating pollution, the killing of innocent people that we are inflicting on communities around the world. Consider the trauma felt by those directly affected by what happened in the movie theater, or any of the schools that have had similar incidents. That kind of trauma is being felt by so many people because of “our” official actions against.them every single day. Lone gunmen do a certain amount of damage for their own reasons that we may never understand, but our culture allows us to sanction similar actions against whole countries on a daily basis.
The problem is bigger than wholesale availability of weapons to all comers.
I wish I had some answers but I don’t know how to deal with sociopaths and psychopaths who have the power and money to destroy those who oppose them. A good start would be the pulling of corporate charters. And when the corporations appeal the pulling of their charters we need judges in the courts that believe in the real flesh and blood people of this country rather than the corrupt no-blooded corporations. We have a long way to go but I think this would help move us in the direction of a country where people, not money, count.
WAIT WAIT — Here’s some news that should win the prize this year.
Some probably well-meaning people have formed a “movement” called “Bale Out Aurora” whose purpose it is to have Christian Bales come to the hospitals where the wounded children are — IN BATMAN COSTUME — to bring them a little cheer!
Guys, tell me this isn’t happening, tell me this isn’t real, PLEASE!