Post Punk Kitchen Forum

Didn't you guys know that there were no men in Aurora, VT, Clackamas, or Columbine? They've cracked the code. All we have to do is install a Manly Man in every public place and we will all be safe.

No, no no!!! All we need to do is instal 2 - 3 unemployed military men sitting around not buying school supplies, new books or paying teachers fairly! This $$$$ needs to go to these military men!!!

Honestly when people post that damn military thing on FB I am calling them out on it...

I still think Meghan McArdle at The Daily Beast had the dumbest Newtown article, suggesting that even small children should be taught to charge an attacker, but it's hard to top "huskier 12-year-old boys" when it comes to memorably dumb soundbites.

I can't believe anyone would victim blame dead children. Everything about the National Review article is dumb.

The part about how the men on Flight 93 tackled the terrorists, and that's what men at this school should have done, kind of shows that she really doesn't understand the difference between a gun and a knife. Tackling a knife-wielding man is possible. He can't hurt you until you're close enough to hurt him. If you try to tackle a gun-wielding man, then he can shoot you long before you're anywhere near him.

Was this gem already posted?

"Wasn’t the Connecticut killer just doing what abortionists do every day?" - Victoria Jackson

Oh Victoria Jackson. Your 15 minutes of fame called. They're up.

She's a boat of crazy.

i can never quite place why she is "famous"
she was on SNL a long time ago maybe?

yeah, she was on SNL in it's heyday. (particularly toonces)

I thought this article about how Americans seem unaffected by the deaths of Muslim children in drone strikes was worth a read.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ren-deaths

I don't think people are unaffected by Muslim children's deaths as a rule (and the same for every other group of innocents we have killed overseas). I think we mostly don't know about them and when we do, the media certainly doesn't sensationalize them the same way and how we feel about things has so much to do with how we're told to feel about them. It's a worthy conversation to talk about how we don't have enough exposure to the carnage our policies inflict and if we had more exposure, we'd develop the sympathy to stop it. But, in this moment, it feels like a) piling on and b) exploitative of a particular tragedy in order to promote his pet tragedy.

I also don't think it's that we don't care--we just don't force awareness. When there are publicized natural disasters in places around the world, Americans care and respond in a big way; even the military does since it's usually the US Navy purifying water in mass quantities and providing hospital ships.

Drones are remote by their very nature and our news reporting doesn't help. If we had all news stations focused 24/7 on drone deaths, children in conflict areas of Africa, and other horrendous situations, we would see people care.

This is one reason I am requiring each of my students to do current event related projects for each unit, following one country for the whole year. I love when it overlaps with student ethnicity because they have so much to share: I have students from Ghana, US VI, Peru, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Guatemala, and a bunch of other places. My Ghanaen student is so shy, but he is such a sweetheart with so much to share when he comes out of his shell enough (he won't do oral reports).

Of course, the end result is the same, but it is easier to fix awareness than uncaring.

i agree that the tone of the reporting has a huge effect on the public conversation about the event, but i think with these particular examples there's a loop of public sentiment feeding into media coverage informing public sentiment, and so on. with something like this shooting, everyone tends to talk about how senseless it is, whereas casualties of military engagements are rarely if ever portrayed (at least by the country responsible) as victims of a causeless or unjustifiable crime. if you are in america and you don't say you feel awful about the innocent schoolchildren killed in a nice american town, people will accuse you of being heartless, but if you do say you feel awful about the innocent schoolchildren killed by u.s. drones in a foreign country, undoubtedly, some people will accuse you of heartlessly hating america. it's not right or good, but i think even if these events received equal coverage, they would never receive the same public response. i don't know whether the root of it is a truly different reaction or an unwillingness to get in an argument. i'm not sure how i feel about taking advantage of a tragedy to highlight something else that's similar or parallel; i guess it would depend on how sensitively it was done (i didn't read that guardian article). i think forcing people to face a contradiction can be useful sometimes, and maybe that can work well when they're already thinking about the subject, but it can just as easily backfire if the approach is wrong.

That's true and I don't know how inappropriate it is to be more distressed about American children being killed by a deranged person in a place where they had every expectation of being safe than foreign children being killed as a result of what people consider a justified war.

Part of "equal coverage" would have to also mean no justifications.

I do think more awareness could held. I'm not sure that people want to be more aware.

also, it's the monkeysphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number) and (http://www.cracked.com/article_14990_wh ... phere.html)
the farther away people are from you, the more of a faceless mass they form. and we have a limit of how many people we can associate with before they all congeal. (it's appx. 150)

also, because it's in this country, we are more likely to know someone who knows someone directly affected.

Which is why stories which focus on one foreign child/adult/non-human are much more effective at soliciting sympathy. People have certainly been sympathetic to Malala Yousufzai, for example.

I'm going to jump in here with something that's been swirling around in the back of my head...and my apologies if it's been brought up earlier. (I have not read this thread at all...)

Has anyone read any coverage of solutions that the people of Newtown have called for? Specifically, I am wondering if there has been a local call for a gun ban or a general laying down of weapons? If the town members feel very strongly that this type of tragedy should never happen again in their borders, then I would expect to see a peace movement arise where the people voluntarily self-regulate themselves and agree, say, to turn in their assault weapons. I think the town has the potential to set the tone of the federal solution that Biden's task force is crafting.

I know, I am a naive and optimistic person. And maybe it is not fair to expect anything from a town so badly ravaged.

I don't really know what Newtown is like, except that it is heavily conservative, and I think I read that it has a very active gun club and hunting community.

That won't happen. Every single time there is a mass shooting, two things happen:

1) NRA types dig in their heels and cite the 2nd, usually along with crepe about Jesus
2) everybody else talks about gun control

The merry go round continues.

What won't happen - federal legislation or a group reaction from the community?

Also, I just found this article...
LINK: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/17/nyreg ... tions.html



So it will be interesting.

I mean, we assume that a shooting like this would make the town band against guns. It just doesn't happen.

People polarize more strongly to whatever side they were already on. The gun people talk about how if person x, y, or z had been armed everyone would have been saved. They go buy even more guns. The rational people talk about gun control, but may veer over into unhelpful rhetoric about banning all guns, which inflames the other side to levels of sheer lunacy. It all reminds me a lot of the Butter Battle Book only not really.

I saw it in Blacksburg. Happened after Aurora and Arizona. What was interesting I B'burg, however, was the large corps of cadets, people being well trained to use and respect firearms. THEY were usually the most rational voices of all since they knew full bloody well that being armed wouldn't have made a sandwich of difference.

Three articles worth promoting in my opinion:

Wayne LaPierre, NRA want armed guards in schools but Columbine had one

Will Media Fact Check Misleading Claims From NRA's Question-Free Press Conference?

Do Armed Civilians Stop Mass Shooters? Actually, No.

Another thing I don't understand:

How many guns does one person need?

According to what I'm finding, there are around 270 million guns in America and (maybe?) 89 million gun owners. That means that the average gun owner has 3 guns.

NPR has had several specials on guns in the past week. On one of them, they talked extensively about how gun ownership has changed in the past few decades. It used to be that it was common for people to have a single gun in the house, usually for hunting or sport shooting, and usually not ever used. Now the "average" gun owner is building an arsenal on purpose. They attributed at least part of that to the NRA (and Tea Party) messaging about needing to be ready to defend your home and start a militia to overthrow the government. So fewer people own guns, but each gun owner owns more guns and more deadly ones.

ETA: They also said that the NRA messaging has changed significantly. The goal of the NRA is to bolster gun sales more than anything else, so they will say whatever leads to fulfilling that goal.

ETA some more: My brother lives on a ranch in wooded area in SW Oregon and grows medical marijuana. For funsies he gets super drunk and shoots his AK-47 (and other guns) into the woods. So I don't go to his house. He's 25. He's as mentally well as your average alcoholic drug abuser, basically. It scares the crepe out of me that he's allowed to own guns, even though I have no fear that he would ever hurt another person on purpose, I often fear that he'll hurt himself.