Politics Gun violence in CT

we should still do it and have everyone get on TFPchat at the same time. results should be good

 

I was so wishing for an appropriate bit of irony during the speech. Something along the lines of a lone gunman tucked away in the rafters above his head.

I couldn't help myself.

 

Of course legislation has to be part of the solution. Cultures don't change much without some change to "the rules".

Regarding the NRA speech, my son was listening with me. He said, "It would be funny if someone walked in and shot him in the middle of this". I laughed. Then decided that "funny" maybe wasn't the right word. The thought of the irony was amusing, though!

 

maybe we're just getting into a chicken-egg argument here, but don't the culture changes come first, then the laws follow?

 

Culture can be changed as long as there is a good reason to do so, a will to change it, an understanding of why it is changing, a clear benefit to change, etc. It takes time, of course and not everyone will move at the same speed, but it can be done.

Hell, companies do it.

Consider the change in attitudes to smoking. Took a while, and it wasn't accidental. Gender roles? Same. A change in rules won't do it, but are necessary. There needs to a stick as well as a carrot and the law often serves that purpose.

The perceived "pain" of changing is there, but the perceived pain of NOT changing needs to be greater. It works at a personal level, too.

 

What to do when a significant and powerful force within the culture rejects the notion that anything needs changing. That feels no pain in having things go on the way they are? How to get them to accept the pain that comes with changes they feel are unnecessary?

I think it's unreasonable and dangerous to wait for all parties to perceive the pain of NOT changing equally. Actually, I think that's what we've been doing for too long.

Some states will arm their teachers and post armed guards in schools. Some may take their paranoid hysteria even further and start mandating gun ownership, easing the reins on CCW, pushing through SYG legislation. It was bound to be the opposing reaction to the Sandy Hook shooting. I can't see the Federal government attempting to override their decisions to do so. Not yet, anyway. In the meantime, the Federal government needs to move forward and start putting into effect whatever sane "painful changes" it can and force them on the American public. Sometimes is the only way to change cultural beliefs and attitudes.

The cigarette/smoking analogy was a good one.

 

one scenario is that the broad-babsed revulsion against gun-related violence triggered by newtown will be conflated with the conventional political reactions to it. that maintains the bizarre-o assumption that meaningful change is top-down and that the plutocratic regime under which we live is somehow responsive to this abstraction called "the will of the people." what will happen from there has happened a thousand times before: people will decide that it's all too big and hopeless and will shut off trying to think things out on their own and the sense of outrage will dissipate as if this sort of thing is inevitable while the television focuses on the horse-trading about the specific bills that might end up getting fashioned as if that horse-trading represents something about the revulsion, a recognition of some kind. that way people stay at home watching teevee. the result will be some trivial change in gun regulations and a p.r. campaign to make that appear to be something more than it is. so nothing will happen.

under that scenario, the nra should have simply shut the fuck up and waited.

another would have this issue into various levels of change at the cultural level. i think that this is an interesting moment in that regard, the point at which the sense of "this has to stop" is giving way to "pragmatic" steps, most of which are "pragmatic" because they're superficial and, because they're superficial, they're easy. at the same time, however, i do think that the ideological context that enabled the narcissism of the nra leadership, operating in the interest of maximizing gun manufacturer profits, may have come undone. it may be impossible to continue the separation of a metaphysics of a largely imaginary 2nd amendment to the exclusion of consideration of the consequences of making guns so widely and easily available. this is a kind of ethical shift, which would become something not transient in a discursive shift in how massacres and other forms of gun related violence are reported---this because people repeat the ways things are framed because those frames are repeated---an indication of the basic intellectual passivity of much of the american polity, just as is the tendency to repeat how very very free one is because one sees it on teevee. since there's no strict separation between the people who fashion these discourses by repeating the conventions that shape how an issue is framed and the people who consume those frames, it may be the case that this jolt to the collective system may result in a change in how the framing of violence works in its coverage. you'll see it with a move away from the tendency to treat violence as arbitrary, a move away from the tiny-attention-span approach to assembling contexts. you know, a move away from tabloid-style infotainment. without that, this jolt won't hold. with it, we could see a broader change at the level of ethics. you can't point to other institutions that may frame information in different ways--for example churches are an important source for structuring how people reflect (or don't) on what happens around them. if you assume that, for example, most christian churches are violence-adverse and have been saying as much for a long time, the fact that there remains a cultural or political environment that enabled these lunatic arguments from the gun fundamentalist set to have any traction at all is not leaning on the work of those institutions. it has to work with respect to other ways of framing the world. the obvious one, in the u.s. of a., is tv.

personally, i think that some of the broader cultural problems that feed into current levels of gun-related violence that are political. they seem to me obvious and quite-large scale--the culture of paranoia in the states, the ways in which anxiety created by a basic re-organization of the american economy enabled by an exclusive focus on shareholder returns has been channeled in fear of imaginary Others, the sense of atomized powerlessness that follows from taking neo-liberal ideology seriously. all that could be undone relatively easily by way of concerted political and policy shifts geared toward, say, using the state as an instrument to foster local or regional economies with the aim of fostering a sense of empowerment. this may appear vague, but what it would entail, under almost any of its modalities, is a rejection of the passivity assumed by neo-liberalism, a passivity that's presupposed in a situation that has seen since the 80s a reorganization of economic activity that benefits shareholders first and foremost, and regular people only indirectly through the availability of relatively cheap goods---not so cheap as to not require debt peonage to get them of course---but the standard thing that capitalism does---use economies of scale to produce cheap, standardized goods. such a move would be of a piece with a really basic recognition: that shareholder returns is an insane way to think about the economic well-being of a complex society.

i still think that people snap and turn to readily available weapons systems in a general context of pressure. they do this in a context that rarely provides coherent views of where that pressure comes from, simply because that presupposes a critical relation to capitalist firms, the same ones that own the dominant media outlets. my personal sense is that a change in overall system orientation would have interesting and potentially beneficial effects on the mental health care system by reducing entire dynamics rooted, at one level of another, in a sense of powerlessness and impotence in the face of a broad situation that changes to their exclusion and about which they cannot imagine anything can be done.

thing is that none of these things are particularly massive to undertake. neo-liberalism was a project. this could be as well. the results of neo-liberalism are not necessarily intended consequences, but they are consequences nonetheless. and alternate way of seeing the social world would generate different consequences, some intended, some not---but i think they'd be far less pathological than what we have in the united states right now.

so i am not at all sure that tightening gun controls are the point (i agree with alistair's position outlined earlier in this thread---it seems to me eminently sensible). broader changes are required. the potentially good thing about recognizing this is the obstacles that appear to be in the way. thinking them out, connecting them together, can make them quite surmountable. but the discussion is already being focused on "pragmatic" matters of detail, and those "pragmatic" matters, while maybe useful in limited ways, don't get to the broader problems. and addressing those broader problems won't issue into a perfect, violence-free world. just, i think anyway, a better one.

 

One of the key symbols is the 2nd amendment. Without real discussion of its meaning and purpose and continued validity (or otherwise) it will be difficult to bring about meaningful change. I'm not convinced that the US public is ready for that debate.

However, other shifts could come first. Media balance, for example. Tackling inequality, for another. Healthcare. These may not appear linked, but I think they are.

It will take a long time to change attitudes but it can be done if done purposefully and thoughtfully. This is as big a change as the Civil Rights movement became.

Quick fixes (which I agree are the most likely short-term outcome) will be largely cosmetic and, at worst, could lead straight back into the same problems they are designed to fix.

 

One thing is for certain. Not much is going to change overnight. In twenty years, thirty, fifty, one hundred years, we may be able to look back and breathe a sigh of relief that we are no longer where we are now but for now, we are a citizenry so divided in opinion one wonders if we are actually two different species. We are at the mercy of a third world mental health system, a Supreme Court with a majority of conservative justices, a few of which are beholden to corporate friends who like the 2nd amendment the way it is, thank you very much, a bungling and emasculated Congress and an economy still on very shaky ground.

Even a pair of rose-colored glasses can't improve the view.

An apocalyptic event would be a blessing but it appears to have missed us once again.

 

interesting. on the one hand, it's encouraging to see obama advocating organization. this is the obvious way in which to mitigate the tendency of this sort of collective energy to dissipate. i don't see a down side to banning the sales of military-grade weapons and ammunition, personally. the obsequiousness with reference to gun owners is curious, but i get why it would be tactically necessary to emphasize it.

i am bothered by the narrowing down onto "the children" as the fulcrum of this response. i understand it, but it bothers me nonetheless because it functions to separate newtown from the broader range of problems linked to gun-related violence. i am not comfortable with the emphasis on "school security" largely because i don't know what it means...lapierre's insane idea of putting armed people in every school (to the ongoing profit of weapons manufacturers) seems to actually be on the table. seriously?

 

Not only that, but it fails to match with the reality of gun ownership. Based on this study, "[guns] kept in the home are more likely to be involved in a fatal or nonfatal accidental shooting, criminal assault, or suicide attempt than to be used to injure or kill in self-defense." It would seem that good guys with guns, at least according to this study, are four times less likely to stop bad guys with guns than they are to be involved in an unintentional shooting, seven times less likely to stop bad guys with guns than they are to be involved in criminal assaults or homicides, and eleven times less likely to stop bad guys than they are to be involved in attempted or completed suicide.

I can find some measure of respect in my heart, so to speak, for gun owners, but the NRA's line today is as flaccid as it is offensive. I cannot respect that organization, to any degree, and neither should gun owners and gun enthusiasts.

 

The NRA seems to think every gun owner is the hero of an action movie just waiting to jump into the fray. I foresee a lot of collateral victims in our future

 

for now, the nra, gun fundamentalists and right more generally has lost control of framing.
the question of what is acceptable in ongoing levels of gun-related violence in the united states is being posed on other grounds.
it'll be interesting to see how this plays out, whether it continues and what, in the longer run, it does.

 

I thought this was a pretty interesting take on the whole gun control topic.

 

I've had my civil war scenarios and likely catalysts. Same-sex marriage, prayer in schools, Black man in the White House, abortion, US slap down of Israel, single payer health care. Sort of like a game of Risk I've played with myself.

I've moved all my pieces into the gun-control camp.
--- merged: Dec 23, 2012 at 5:32 PM ---

It is a very good article. There's been a slew of great articles written since the Sandy Hook shooting providing factual data and making reasonable arguments for more regulation. Unfortunately, for those opposed to gun-control, facts and reason are ineffective. For them the issue is religious, or moral, or fear-based, or control-based. It's difficult to break though those defensives with reasonable arguments.

 

this article is a few months old, but on the back of the CT shootings, its a sobering reminder of the gun violence that sweeps the US.

PolitiFact N.J.: Frank Lautenberg says gun violence claimed more American lives in U.S. than in Iraq and Afghanistan | NJ.com