[Disclaimer: This is a rant. I don't know Adam Lanza or his mother. I don't know anyone's motives; the latest I've heard is that Mr. Lanza killed his mother and wanted to destroy everything that she loved (more than him, presumably.) Facts are unknown and there are many missing pieces which may require changes to this story. I'll post a corrected story in due time if anyone is interested, but for now this is a rant.]
I get annoyed easily; news reports of the shooting in Newtown, Connecticut not excepting.
News is always asking people what they think about the events, and many people seem to have responses at the ready. I haven't heard it yet, but I fully expect words like "evil" and "coward" to be bandied about by the same people who say there's no need for stricter gun control laws.
This is where I get most annoyed and want to put the blame for the shooting - this shooting and arguably every mass shooting for the past decade - squarely on Fox News.
You may consider this a logical incongruity but in the past few years and especially in recent weeks there have been a lot of shootings. Of the most recent, people are drawing parallels to the Columbine shooting, of which there are none. But there was a recent mass shooting at a mall in Portland, Oregon and not too long before at a movie theatre in Colorado. I've heard mention of the Virginia Tech shootings. Oddly, the one shooting I haven't heard about again is the massacre of a group of Amish children in Pennsylvania. This is the only shooting even remotely similar to the one in Connecticut.
Meanwhile, Florida has issued it's one-millionth concealed firearm permit. The nation is, in my opinion, now officially gun-crazy.
But why? From where does this insanity originate?
The only news broadcasting station that I hear repeatedly harp on about guns is Fox News. Their incessant message about Obama taking away people's guns is absolute baloney and a present danger to American society. I'm not going to say that only crazy people listen to Fox, but crazy people listen only to Fox. Fox helps this along by repeating that everyone else is lying to them. It is the central repository for conspiracy theorists and paranoid schizophrenics in mainstream society.
And it's all lies. The only gun law Obama has signed has been to expand the ability of people to carry firearms into national parks. And now, because of the rash of shootings, there will come a serious effort to bring about changes regarding gun ownership in America.
I do not support additional gun control laws, but it's going to happen, and it's going to happen specifically because of Fox News and their appeals to the insane.
I briefly happened to catch the local Fox News broadcast coverage of the Connecticut shooting as well. I watched less than three minutes before the anchor suggested that public schools are too dangerous for you to send your kids there, thus promoting their alternate views of private, at-home, conservative education over, you know, actual knowledge.
Meanwhile, I think of the girl in Pakistan who was shot in the head for the sole reason that she was a girl and she was in school. I think of all the shootings over there where girls' schools are routinely shot up because their religious education teaches that women are not to be informed. And I think of all the parents that send their daughters to school anyway because it's the right thing to do. And I'm saddened for the future of America.
I'm sad because our society tolerates this Fox nonsense. I'm sad that Fox is encouraging us to be more like Pakistan: to fear public schools and turn into ourselves - just our families and our guns and our tribes and our ignorance and superstition; to believe that anything we try to do together as a society is a failure. I'm sad that there is no meaningful distinction between Fox News and the Republican Party and I'm sad that either of them still exist.
And so I wonder.
Would we be better off without guns? Do they serve a role in society? Why does a female substitute kindergarten teacher feel the need to own a Glock, a Sig Sauer, and a .223 Bushmaster M4 carbine rifle?
Can we rely on our second amendment protections to make us a more thoughtful society: not to rush to say that guns must be banned, but to peer into society itself to see the diseases within. Can it be argued that the tumult of gun violence augers a early-warning signal that society itself is deteriorating? That the deaths of a few innocents, as tragic and incomprehensible as they are, are sirens warning us to take heed, and save us as Americans from the deeper, truer threats to our civilization?
Or are we content to just say that this is what evil cowards do and that guns are both the problem and the solution?
