Well, I guess that we don’t have a complete monopoly on people going nuts. Using a car and a knife is fairly ineffective compared to a gun, however.
Maybe it’s always been like this, but it sure doesn’t seem like it.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Compared to the civil wars and suicide bombings raging across the middle east, Africa, and South Asia, this is all child’s play. We can’t even compete with the religious fanatics running wild over there.
Sure can! USA! USA!
I’ve been saying that it isn’t the weapon that causes the crime, but the nutcase. Guns raise the stakes, of course, but this incident shows the primary need to control violent nuts.
No, it shows that you can kill more people with a handgun in church than by driving your car 90mph through downtown Graz and then jumping out and trying to stab people.
True
Just how many could he have killed with an AK-47? Bet it would be a lot.
Stop trying to give Ted Nugent a boner.
NRA in 3, 2, 1: If folks were all armed, they could have stopped him.
But, there are over 300 million guns in America and not one hero with a gun story.
So the killer had a manifesto…and now the family is blaming the internet, FauxNews/Conserv/RWNJ are still trying to blame Obama, or war on Christians (but wait the killer is a Christian aint’ he!)
Like I said last night…It too much for some white folk to handle, that this killer has the same or close to the same attitude and views as they themselves have expressed or someone they love or “respect” has expressed. But hey, no way would their family do what this killer did…
But hey, what about that grandson or nephew or young cousin who’s listening at pop-pop’s knee, or who’s playing with their toys on the floor as ole cousin Raymon’ spouts off about “heritage and the Confederacy”…
Hate begets hate. Racism is learned/taught.
The inertia within families is not nearly as worrisome as the active institutions like FoxNews, Rush Limbaugh’s syndicated radio stations, politicians, organizations like the Council of Conservative Citizens and StormFront, not to mention the Ku Klux Klan and the League of the South. And then there’s the Sons of Confederate Veterans and some Civil War re-enactors. And the individual business owners who subsidize these groups. And one whole lot of preachers who provide the theological, er, Biblical justification for continued oppression. If all of those more well-heeled and powerful institutions went away, that family inertia would shift from social pressure.
And it is sometimes the case that cousin Raymon spouts off about a heritage he never really had. His ancestor left the state, was a draft dodger or was conscripted as a private in 1864. Heritage in and of itself might document a hateful system but it does not propagate that hate without one of these other institutions encouraging or legitimizing it.
Transcending the hate in heritage is taught as well even if it cannot completely deliver one of all assumptions of white privilege. There are a lot of people of my (civil rights era) generation who were taught by their parents to transcend that hate within the heritage but also remember the history accurately. There are also a substantial number who were taught very little at all and absorbed most of they racial attitudes higgly piggly from school and peers. Those people tend to be baffled (really truthfully at one level) by why this issue won’t go away in the second-reborn Henry Grady style New South. Why the Atlanta that was too busy to hate in the 1960s and too busy to care in the 1970s and 1980s, suddenly found it easy to hate again after Newt Gingrich allowed them to not hide it. And how it contaminated transplants who from northern cities were appalled at the hate in the 1960s South, but once transferred to Atlanta found it easy to move into a segregated suburb with racist neighbors and absorb a more blatant and hateful racism.
And it’s also the case that the young cousin today blows off Raymon’ as a FoxNews watching bigoted hate junky. High school proms in the South, especially in Southern public schools are nowhere near like they used to be. Even in rural high schools. Every now and then that fact reaches the news media as high schoolers go on strike against their parents’ hateful policies.
Helicopter parents would of course blame the internet. I found W. J. Hamilton’s description of suburban Lexington and Charleston Counties on Daily Kos fascinating in how different that society is from when I grew up in South Carolina and how similar it is to other suburban ring communities anywhere in America, communities like Columbine or Aurora, CO.
And I am more concerned about the spiritual deadening that helicopter parents have created in these communities that allows a few of the youth there to seek out their own hate with the help of peers.
Less and less is there pop-pop nearby or any cousin Raymon with enough continuity to have any influence at all. South Carolina today because of its three burgeoning urban areas and automobile manufacturing economy and increasing population of retirees is more like South Florida these days that the cotton South of my youth. The Tampas, West Palm Beaches, and Orlando style affluent problems are just beginning.
In answer to your question, it’s a lot safer than ever before, but you still need to have situational awareness, a calm temper, and an ability to see the practicalities of a situation.
Worry about militarized cops, greedy ceo’s, corporate capture of legislatures, the military industrial prison pharma healthcare complex, invasions of other countries.
In the wider scheme of things, which I assume is your viewpoint on an internet blog, a free country with free speech will have lots of well-watered crazies. Just a price of freedom.