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i have to say that i find the gun posturing here to be kinda creepy
everyone is quite sure of their potential heroics as they sit in a chair staring at a monitor.
sitting in a chair in front of a monitor, no=one would miss: everyone's a marksman.
and i do not doubt that on a firing range, having entered that kind of zen state that is aiming, that everyone who practices can shoot quite well.
but in a mall?
while panic unfolds around you?
who knows, maybe you'd have hit the target.
maybe there'd have been "collateral damage".
maybe that collateral damage would have made you famous as well, as the vigilante who mowed down x or y while trying to prevent this kid from mowing down other x-es or other y-s.
or maybe you'd be famous for having hit your target like a sherrif in a western.
either way, i am not sure i see the difference between these fantasies of vigilante action and the motives of the shooter in omaha.
nor can i imagine feeling any safer, reading through these gun-toting fantasy narratives, thinking about what might have happened in 3-d ---that is, had they not been written by folk sitting in a chair, staring at a monitor in controlled conditions physically, unspooling wild wild west stories in their imagination.
i read them and i see more chaos, more destruction, more death: multiple centers rather than one or two.
it is curious.
i happened to be near a television tuned to that endless stream of nothing that is cnn while this was happening.
the coverage seemed mostly about enabling network functionaries to use that tone they have developed to indicate commiseration on the one hand, and to present the illusion of having eliminated arbitrariness on the other.
the only trend there is is news coverage of this kind of action, which links them together because you see them in the same basic way on the same television outlets. you confuse television coverage and the narrative that is imposed simply by continuity with something that explains what happens in the world outside the reach of local news action team helicopter footage and strangely coiffed people in suits providing you with punchy little sentences as "explanation."
from the viewpoint of larger causal patterns, this mall shooting is arbitrary.
you wouldnt have been able to do much to change it were you there, were you strapped, were you locking and loading blah blah blah.
and i dont think the fact of coverage explains anything.
it just provides a complication of narrative.
there is arbitrariness.
you have to deal with it.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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