Our common enemy, you and I, dear reader, is anyone that wants us to be enemies.
It’s a terrible thing to do to young people, to tell them that they are unavoidably surrounded by enemies on all sides who hate them because of who they are, what they are, what they look like, or what their skin color is. In addition to being almost certainly false, it is a sinister and harmful illness to install into the minds of the young.
The reality, according to an unreleased report by the US Department of Commerce, is summarized best on page 24 under “Conclusion,” emphasis mine:
“But, our conclusions remain the same — and are consistent with leading scholars and researchers of free speech. We found no evidence linking electronic communications to hate crimes. As Erwin Chemerinsky states, there is ‘no reason to believe that censoring hate speech will make hate crimes less likely.’ Rather, regulating hate speech on electronic communications platforms, as experts such as Nadine Strossen have concluded, is ‘at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive’ in combating hate crimes.”
The internet makes us forget that few people in real life are prone to truly, actively hate. Like Edward Norton said in the otherwise overwrought 1999 movie Fight Club, regarding Tyler Durden’s instructions to start a fight with a stranger and let them win: “This is not as easy as it sounds. Most people, normal people, do just about anything to avoid a fight.” What he meant in today’s terms was, “in real life.” The problem is, our current social media diet throws off our threat detection instincts, and we end up assuming that even the most mundane of disagreements is synonymous with violence.
“I didn’t know police officers had kids”
A young child once asked a police officer during a protest: “Are you going to shoot us?” The officer responded no, he had a child of his own. The little girl replied, “I didn’t know police officers had kids.”
Why are we allowing our media landscape to exist in such a state? How is it permissible to us that our entire communications apparatus is seemingly unified in causing young people, including literal children, to have pathological levels of anxiety?
The media is systematically terrorizing everyone, particularly society’s most frightened and most vulnerable, and it is causing most of us to believe that the world is, in some way or another, out to get us. This affects minds to a pathological degree. This terror-propaganda can be found at any time on any screen. In combination with insufficient focus on the truth of the science behind mental health, it is creating a climate that inspires violence, including mass shootings.
It is absolutely not compassionate to drill into a person over and over that they’re constantly a victim, that everyone is a bigot, that the system is stacked against them, or that the cops hate them and will kill them with immunity. It is a hateful and destructive notion, this idea that we all need “fight back” against the very structures that we ourselves are currently standing on, and are held up by. These are the lies that break down trust in communities, and that hurts everyone.
This is what inspired the shooting in Boulder, Colorado by a Syrian-born immigrant: neurotic, psychotic media hysteria and nu-bullying. The shooter was convinced that Islamophobia was rampant against him personally, that the President of the United States prior to January 2021 was an actual white supremacist, that his phone was being hacked by racist Islamophobes, that bigoted people were watching and following him, and generally, he was very much a BlueAnon type. People who knew him said he was bullied, antisocial, and paranoid. I’d add that he was nu-bullied through all of his screens, all of the time, and that made all of his other problems far worse by race-baiting him and injecting hyper-personalized social shame into his existing issues.
Meanwhile, Meena Harris, the niece of Kamala, tweeted immediately after the shooting that “violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country.” Kurt Eichenwald mused that, depending on how the details of this shooting shook out, this may be an episode of “anti-masker violence.” If we want to talk “accountability,” who is responsible for brainwashing an entire generation of young Americans to believe that the world is almost certainly about to end, and most everyone around us is almost definitely out to get us because of who and what we are? The sad thing is, neither of these prominent people will pay any sort of social or professional price for how quickly they pounced on an opportunity to spew vile, hate-filled, race-baiting rhetoric.
Worst of all, the underlying untruths will persist by default in the collective unconscious, and we will keep assuming our worldview on the matter was accurate to begin with, despite the fact that everything that led us to draw that conclusion so far has been wrong. “No, no,” we say to ourselves, “they’re still all out to get us, we’re sure of it… Just not this time.”
The constant barrage of negative stimulus from the media leads to low-trust communities; We’re all convinced that our friends and neighbors are out to get us in some way. The media keeps younger people wound up so tightly because it encourages them, in their youthful energy, to engage in violent social activism, which makes media corporations more money in the short-term. As a bonus, it crumbles once-trusting communities which ensures both less self-sufficiency and more violent incidents in the future, thereby improving corporate media profits long-term.
Broken families lead to violence. The solution is to focus on restoring families, particularly by supporting fathers and fatherhood. The science is absolutely clear: homes with both a strong, capable mother and a strong, capable father lead to better outcomes across the board.
It’s as if the media is doing everything it can to make people distrustful of one another across any and every social boundary. If they didn’t, I suppose we all might realize that we really do have the power to change our own situation and help build and strengthen our own communities, which improves trust between individuals and in communities. Trusting communities don’t make media organizations any money; chaos does.
The media, from the “war on terror,” to the Iraq war, to every conversation on guns, would prefer it if the American people would trade in their constitutional freedoms for safety and security. This also explains their unified attitudes toward harmful Covid lockdowns, and the human rights abuses that occurred as a result of government overreach during the pandemic.
The United States already has “Common Sense Gun Control”
The first thing the US media does after a shooting is talk about “common sense gun control,” as though we don’t have that already. You want common sense gun control? Great! So does everybody. That’s why it’s already law.
Here’s a few examples of common sense gun control that are already in effect in the United States:
You need an ID (for the background check, which is also law)
You need to be 21 (In some states, it’s 18. Federalism!)
You need to have a gun license, which needs to stay current
To get a gun license, you need to pass a test
If you change your state of residence, you need to do the whole thing over again
No fully-automatic weapons or assault rifles allowed. That is, “machine guns” with multiple shots from a single pull of the trigger — Yep, that great grey-winged dragon, “assault weapons,” — they’re already illegal, and that’s why bump stocks were also banned, because they allow for more rapid shooting than one human finger is capable of achieving.
At this point, I’d say it’s easily more difficult to own and keep a gun legally than it is to vote in an election. I’ve done the latter, and I don’t even know where to begin on the former, without having to look it up.
Public service announcement: “Semi-automatic” is not the same thing as “assault weapon.” A police officer’s service pistol is semi-automatic. That’s one trigger pull, one shot, with no slider or reloading required before the next shot, until the clip is empty. Regardless of whether or not we own or even plan on owning a gun, it’s a good idea to gain as much knowledge on the topic as we can before we disassemble a founding document on the subject.
Why the lie?
So why does the media continually misinform the public, whipping them into a frenzy of thinking “we have no gun control and are being literally massacred”? Because it makes it more likely that the second amendment will end up being overturned by the Supreme Court in the long run.
Quick background: The US Supreme Court’s approach to guns is not about “reform.” It is decidedly all-or-nothing. The current dissenting SCOTUS opinion regarding the second amendment, from DC v. Heller, does not ask for “common sense gun control.” The opinions of those judges who disagreed with the latest ruling on the second amendment denied that there is a civilian right to bear arms in the constitution at all.
DC v. Heller was a 5–4 decision. In it, the court reaffirmed the right of individual civilians to keep and bear arms via a disputed law in Washington, DC, which was ruled unconstitutional. Of the dissenting opinions, both signed by two dissenters each, one was written by Justice Stevens and the other by Justice Breyer, and both denied that the constitution’s intent was to give citizens the right to bear arms at all. One said citizens should still have some more abstract right to “self defense” in general, and the other said that the purpose of the second amendment is to establish the National Guard, and nothing more.
It was never about “common sense gun reform.” It is about pushing small-scale, more extreme gun control laws in states, cities, and localities, some of which may end up slightly overreaching the constitution, like the Washington DC law that was in question during DC v. Heller. That way, the second amendment can be given another day in the Supreme Court when the law gets challenged. The goal is to keep the pressure on this issue in order to “keep trying” until the second amendment can be nullified, as was attempted in 2007.
Why does this matter?
Because those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Disarming a population leads to genocide. The horrible genocides of the 20th century were all uniformly preceded, directly or indirectly, by government gun confiscations, gun prohibitions, and gun owner registries. These various gun-grabs around the world from the early 20th century, repeatedly, into the 1990s. This includes Turkey before the Armenian Genocide, Germany before the Holocaust, and Stalin’s USSR. These were often enabled by the government registries that kept track of what citizens had a weapon, which is not legal for the federal government to do in the United States, and only Hawaii requires registration of guns at the state level.
A quote from Snopes (who dishonestly still marks this as “mostly false” because the quote they picked says gun control, and that’s different from gun confiscation or prohibition — they know exactly what they’re doing, and they won’t get a link from me):
“Mass killings of civilians by military dictatorships in the 1900s were more often than not preceded by the confiscation of firearms from targeted populations, a task made easier by laws requiring the registration and/or licensing of privately-owned weapons.”
The fact is, if fascist jackboots are going to keep an entire populace oppressed, they’re not going to do that with tanks and missile launchers and drones; They would need soldiers on the streets, stopping and harassing people, asking for their papers, and keeping the populace afraid. A totalitarian regime would send soldiers house-to-house if they hoped to keep the people oppressed. People would “disappear” occasionally. If any old fool could possibly have a gun, that gets far more complicated.
That’s why the second amendment exists: you can’t oppress a responsibly armed populace. It makes arbitrary detention and release impossible.
How is any shooting brought to an end?
The only way a mass shooting stops is when somebody with a gun brings an end to it. Either the shooter turns his weapon on himself, or someone with a gun (usually a cop, occasionally an armed bystander) brings it to an end.
There are between .5 million and 3 million successful defensive uses of firearms per year (according to the CDC, of all sources) many of which don’t involve firing the weapon at all. That means potentially 3 million prevented mass shootings, and any number of other violent crimes that might cause injury or the loss of life. Millions of times per year, according to the CDC’s note that personal firearm ownership is “an important crime deterrent,” attacks are stopped by the responsible and defensive presence of a gun, even if it isn’t fired.
The more gun laws we have, the more it will be true that only criminals, the most chaotic and least compassionate people in our society, will have guns, or other weapons. In a world of strict gun control, the only violent crime will be the super-crime by the most hardened criminals who are still willing to obtain weapons. Like the bacteria that resists the antibiotic, only the most horrific and destructive can get through, and in a disarmed country, there’s no defense for when the super-crime starts to get out of control. For a real world example, see London, where there is a serious ongoing problem with knife attacks, and the police aren’t allowed to carry guns in England.
Black Lives Matter
In addition to the obvious fact that disarming law-abiding citizens would hurt communities of color just as much as any community, if we also refuse to acknowledge the problem of gang violence, or if we call it racist to point it out, this hurts American communities of color the most. If we care about ailing communities of any color combo, we need to acknowledge reality so that we can fix the problem compassionately and truthfully. If we want to help, we have to examine the facts first, without shying away. Otherwise, we don’t take our principles seriously.
Why are we socially disallowed from helping ailing communities? Impoverished black men, for example, end more black lives in one week of gang violence than mass shooters kill in a year. Poor black men end more black lives than cops do. Why can’t we talk about it? Why continually gaslight black communities into believing that someone who is there to protect them is actually their enemy, against whom they must fight for survival?
As we sweep the facts under the rug, as though we are embarrassed to face them, this awful status quo is hurting Black Americans most of all. Why splash blame around while ignoring the real problem?
Our stance on this matter comes down to whether or not we are willing to face unpleasant facts in order to stay true to our conviction to remain compassionate, and strive to reduce suffering as effectively as possible. To reduce suffering, you have to face a lot of suffering head-on, and look it square in the face.
Broken families lead to violence. Hysterical fearmongering in the news and on social media excuses and worsens real problems. Scapegoating, piling all of the world’s ills onto the backs of “violent males,” or “racist whites,” or “hateful older people,” or any other convenient Pariah Of The Week, in order to re-frame our problems so that we can continue to ignore them, is both pathological and bigoted.
The solution to the violence is to work on restoring the Western-style American family unit, not out of fear, nor out of obligation, or by exercise of power and authority*, but because of mutual trust and understanding within and between communities, including due focus on supporting fathers and encouraging a culture of active and engaged fatherhood. All of this must be considered irrespective of race. Don’t trust me, trust the science.
And please, can we stop the media race-baiting for clicks and views? It’s now destroying more than minds — it’s destroying communities, and lives.
*It is an awful (and, at a large scale, a genocidal) way to think about the world; as a bunch of power games played between social groups.