Sometimes sick humor is the only response to the news. Here are some headlines I expect to see soon.
1. Guinness Book of Records' New Category: Most People Killed and Injured By A Mass Shooter
Sick, I know. But all the stories I’ve heard such as this one on NPR kept saying "the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history" will be a challenge for some, to set a new record. Imagine when Guinness gets on the bandwagon. There will be records for one person shootings, two person shootings, police shootings, military massacres, etc. And surely there is someone out there who wants to know about the deadliest mass shooting BEFORE modern U.S. history, so they can beat that too. Far-fetched? Not any more. List verse already has gone where Guinness has yet to go.
2. NRA Establishes 24 Hour Massacre News Channel
As I listened to NPR (letters are pretty close to NRA aren’t they) switch to all day coverage of Las Vegas Monday, I realized it's only a matter of time before we’ll need full time coverage of mass murders. They'll fill in with other more mundane murders on slower days. The more shootings, the more people will want more guns to compete for the Guinness records or they’ll think the can protect themselves.
3. Congress Takes Big Picture View To Fighting Mass Murders
This may be the least likely of these three future headlines. So far cooperation is treated by the Republicans like a fatal disease, a sign of grave weakness. But the Democrats aren’t cooperating either because they believe the Republicans’ only goal is to win, not to serve the public. I have to side with the Democrats here — the Republicans need to eviscerate Obama care is a good example. Even though most polls say people want it fixed, not destroyed, they go back to killing it over and over again.
So what might that big picture look like?
It isn’t the simple mantra of the gun and arms industry — ‘guns don’t kill, people do.’
It isn’t just the left’s call for gun control. That’s part of the path to fewer deaths, but we really need to look at this as a much bigger societal problem.
Guns AND People
It's clear to any reasonable person that both people and guns together kill people.
A person with a knife can kill a small crowd, but not fifty at once, and not from a distance. And sure, people can also use bombs and vehicles and other weapons to kill more people at once. But automatic weapons seem to be the most efficient and effective and easiest way to kill masses in a short time.
Then there's the people. The president used the word 'evil' to describe the Las Vegas killer. That's a word that is bandied about whenever there is a mass killing. Evil is a word that makes the killer seem to be inherently bad. Through and through. An agent of Satan. (ISIS claimed credit for the Las Vegas killing, but I haven't heard about Satan's claim yet.) Not someone you might know and say hi to every day.
The stats on deaths by guns , make it clear that the easy access to weapons in the United States plays a big role in the carnage here. And as we learn about people involved in mass shootings, there's always turns out to be some sort of long simmering resentment of people in general or some group of people. Mostly based on personal issues of some sort.
Society of Anger
The Declaration of Independence proclaimed ‘the pursuit of happiness’ to be an inalienable human right. In the US that has been converted to the pursuit of things and while we have more stuff than ever before, more and more people aren’t finding happiness on the shelves.
Republicans dismiss the complaints of the people of color, but Trump became president appealing to the anger of whites.
Everyone’s angry it seems. It’s a debate over who’s most justified to be angry.
My point here is that people who commit mass murders often are people with a great deal of anger about something - loss of a job, loss of a spouse, loss of status, or any real or perceived loss. But underlying it all is loss of respect, probably most importantly self-respect.
We have a society that produces a lot of angry people, from road rage, to anonymous internet invective, to mass killings. I would argue that a number of social, political, and economic factors play a part. I would argue that the extreme individualism we find in Ayn Rand’s ruthless individualism is a key cause of anger as sets up people to focus on themselves, not others. It justifies business people to mercilessly ravage human beings to make a profit.
Capitalism, which reduces everything to money and making money as efficiently as possible, squeezes more work out of employees for less money and uses much of the saved employee wages to enrich officers and shareholders. So that now we have the greatest gaps between the lowest and highest paid within organizations we’ve ever had.
Technology assists. Instead of automation providing workers good wages and benefits, while working fewer hours, it means fewer workers, working longer hours, and many workers, well, not working at all.
Technology not only displaces workers, it also foists work onto the customer. It started, in my experience, with self-service elevators, then gas stations. Now travel agents are almost gone as travelers have to go online to book their own tickets. Receptionists are gone as we spend a minute or more listening to simulated voices giving us choices of buttons to push until we finally get to what we need — if we’re lucky. We have self service lines in the grocery now. ATM’s replace tellers. Each of these changes cuts out jobs. Our aggregated unpaid time, saves companies billions.
Capitalists don’t like unions either. It seems, somehow, unfair to them. Buying up all their competition, well that’s ok, but workers grouping to fight companies isn’t.
With fewer employees represented by unions, workers’ rights and wages and benefits erode and erode. Lots of people work long hours for less money. A smaller number of workers get good wages and benefits, but they often have longer work hours in exchange. And a few people own a huge portion of the wealth.
And the corporate leaders sponsor ‘think tanks’ and marketing firms to convince those most disadvantaged workers and anyone else gullible enough — like their bought national and state legislators — that the problem is with the people whose wages still are high enough to pay the bills. Teachers’ wages are too high and their benefits too generous. The same with other government employees, with union employees. Instead, of trying to equalize people by making everyone minimum wage (something they think needs to be gotten rid of too), we should be bringing everyone up to decent wages and benefits and working conditions.
Pluralism is a political theory of governance that stems from the idea of separation of powers and the competition of interest groups to influence policy decisions. It’s the political equivalent to capitalism. The collective result of people fighting for their own self interests results in the greatest good for all. But just like monopolies take the competition out of the economic market, great disparity and inequality of wealth takes the competition out of the political market.
We end up with gerrymandered districts that essentially disenfranchise people. We end up with lobbyists for the powerful who monopolize the attention of politicians whose campaigns they’ve paid for.
So naturally we have lots of angry, frustrated, resentful people who feel they don’t have control of their lives and that they don’t get any respect. What’s amazing is that we don’t have more mass killings.
Media’s Silence On These Issues
I don’t see these issues being discussed much in the media. I don’t see these issue discussed after mass killings. We have societal structural problems that are more taboo than taking a knee. There are plenty of reasons. These don’t make simple black and white stories with clear good guys and bad guys. (Notice how many news people use those terms “good guys” and “bad guys”?) These stories have more complicate visuals. (Maybe data visualization in journalism will help here.) And these stories challenge our myths about America and freedom. Just as important they challenge those people in power. But we have to find ways to cover them. And I suspect much of white anger comes from the fact that these taboo stories are getting covered more and more. That may be the silver lining.
I'd argue this spreading sense of loss of economic and political power plays a huge role in the anger Americans feel these days. If we don't address that, we won't affect the people who not only are angry, but are also unhinged enough to commit suicide through spectacular mass murders which give them some sort of attention. And bad attention is better than being invisible.
These shooters know that their lives will be the center of national, if not world, attention for at least several days. They will get their revenge 'glory.' This isn’t an attempt to condone their behavior. Though many who buy into the ‘evil’ argument instantly reject any attempt to portray shooters as humans with problems. How long has it taken to destigmatize explanations like PTSD? Too long. But without an explanation that explains the behavior, there is no rational way to prevent future mass killings. Calling them 'evil' essentially puts all the blame on the shooter and doesn't allow for reflecting on how our society helps to create so many angry, bitter people with access to weapons that can kill fifty people in a few minutes.
Vapid News Coverage
As I listened to NPR, I kept hearing the same stories over and over. They simply did not have enough information to fill the time with meaningful new news. Perhaps they feel that to compete with social media, they have to immediately report each tidbit of new information - whether confirmed or not - because otherwise people won't listen. I'd argue that people would like to hear more reasoned thoughtful stories and can wait a few hours for serious updates on the current crisis. Only people who might have a direct connection to the story - people whose friends and family might be involved - have a compelling reason to stay closely tuned in. And they'd probably do better with social media outlets where they can set up two way communication.
But we all have a responsibility to let the media know we want more thoughtful coverage. We want complex analysis of complex issues. We don’t want platitudes.
It may well be that people like me are in the minority. That we have become, as a nation, sensation junkies. That news, for most people, is entertainment that also confirms of our own biases. Again, that may be the superficial reality, but my experience is that when people learn to really think and grow intellectually, they get very excited.
I’m pushing for the headline: “Congress Takes Big Picture View to Fighting Mass Killings.”