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InvisibleBlack -> RE: Arizona Democrat Congresswoman and 11 others shot (1/9/2011 4:32:15 PM)
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- FR -
Some days, I'm appalled. Reading this thread is almost brain damaging. This poor woman is in the hospital, others are dead and it's an endless tirade of people looking to score points on the political forum of a BDSM board for their own specific point of view. You are walking examples of the very things you claim to despise.
As far as I'm aware, there is no evidence providing any motive for this shooting. Anything you are claiming as a cause reveals far more about yourself than it does about Jared L. Loughner. All I can determine from his semi-coherent postings is that he had issues about literacy and the currency. I, as with many others, suspect that he was, quite simply, crazy. As trite and awful as this sounds - it happens. On August1, 1966 Charles Whitman got on top of the Clock Tower in Austin and shot over 40 people, more than a dozen died. On March 13, 1996 Thomas Hamilton walked into a school in Dunblane, Scotland and open fire on a Primary One class, killing sixteen five- and six- year olds and their teacher. On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh detonated a fertilizer bomb outside an FBI office in Oklahoma City and killed 168 people. On June 27, 1994 the Aum Shinrikyo detonated a sarin gas bomb in the subways in Tokyo killing 7 and hospitalizing over 500 in an attempt to install the group's founder as emperor of Japan. I could go on and on for hours.
If the kernel of your argument is that you can prevent all senseless tragedies caused by dysfunctional individuals if only your set of laws gets enacted - I think you should be locked up. You can't. If your first thought on seeing this awful occurence is that some other group you disagree with is to blame for it - the problem is not with them, it's with you.
I would say that the level of violence is rising - not just in American culture but universally. A valid discussion would be what the cause of this increase in the level of visceral anger people are feeling and their need to lash out with it and what can be done to reverse or prevent it - not at the level of "let's ban guns" or "let's make everyone register to buy fertilizer" - that's treating the symptoms - more at the level of "what is making people feel either so frustrated or so oppressed or so whatever they believe their only recourse is psychotic acts of violence".
I would also say that there is a simple reason why the level of angry rhetoric has been steadily increasing. It's because it works. Fear-mongering is a hugely successful tactic. The ranting demagogue defeats the calm intelligent debator. You might not want it that way, but that's the way it is. Joe McCarthy's anti-communist screed is looked down upon now but it was hugely successful. He won office. He got re-elected. You don't think the big political thinkers noticed this?
When Jack Kennedy ran for the Senate and later for the Presidency in 1960 he hammered on the "missile gap" - that the Soviets were way ahead of us in stockpiling nuclear weapons. That Nixon, who was part of the previous administration, was weak on defense for allowing the Russians to pull head of us. This was fear-mongering, plain and simple. Kennedy later admitted he was well-aware that there was no missile gap. When Lyndon Johnson ran against Barry Goldwater in 1964 he used the famous "Daisy Girl" ad showing a young girl atomized by an atomic bomb to demonize his opponent. I could go on and on with this, too. It's not unique to any political party or group.
They do it because it works. You don't like it - stop voting for them. Stop repeating their vitriol. Stop running their attack ads for them.
This isn't unique to politics. It's pandemic. Movies are more violent. Television is more violent. Talk shows are more violent. Jerry Springer drove the calm rational talk shows off of prime-time. The entire culture has shifted. A better line of inquiry would be why, is there any benefit to it at all and if not, what can be done about it?
If all you want to do is score some talking points any time someone dies tragically, you're definitely not part of the solution - you're part of the problem.
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