Politics and Parasites
Some of you are wondering what I’m going to say about the shootings in Virginia. The answer is that I’m not going to say a terrible lot, because there’s not a terrible lot that we know about the situation, the circumstances, or the shooter. We have the outlined sketchings of what might one day resolve into facts. And it is neither my place nor my right to fill those facts in, or to turn them into a narrative. Especially not one that just happens to further my own political opinions.
It will come as a surprise to none of my regular readers that Jack Thompson is already blaming the shootings on video games. He does this routinely, and then finds out afterwards if the shooter even played them. I don’t know if he did or not. It’s not relevant anyway, and it should be roughly on the five billionth page of the List Of Things We Should Know about these killings. I refuse to even link to him, because I don’t want to give him the Google cred. Dr. Phil apparently agrees with Jack, and this is reason enough to shun that bald headed hack like the no talent moustache transportation system that he is.
There are also a lot of people using this as an excuse to debate gun control laws. This has to stop as well. Those of you that hate me because I’m supposedly a bleeding heart liberal might be surprised to learn that I’m not in favor of most gun control laws (probably not for the same reasons as the NRA, but that’s beside the point). They are written with absolutely no logic, without an understanding of the realities of the world, and they primarily criminalize the tool that is used to carry out the crime rather than the crime itself.
The best thing I can say about gun control laws is that they give law enforcement a pretext upon which to detain or arrest a suspected criminal. The problem with that system is that it forces me to rely on law enforcement to apply those laws intelligently and reasonably. Occasionally it happens. Usually it does not. But what’s important to understand here is that gun control laws, the way they exist right now, do almost nothing to effectively keep guns out of the hands of criminals. And they do even less to prevent tragedies like the ones we witnessed in Virginia (the shooter reportedly was wielding a pair of legal-to-purcahse hand guns, though I can’t verify that with absolute certainty).
Do I think there should be laws concerning gun control? Of course I do. But they need to be reasonable and logical. In fact, I view them in much the same way I view any other prohibitive law we have in this country. I see gun control as being linked to the war on drugs in a very different way than most people do. That they both ineffectively and pointlessly punish otherwise lawful citizens by criminalizing something for everyone because our government is too impotent to actually deal with the realities of the situation, and our society is too fucked in the head to even have an open discussion about it. Prohibitive laws fail in any free society, and actually cause more crime than they prevent. They allow for a black market to exist in place of a fair and regulated market (not to mention a taxable market), and that is the source of the violence.
But no law, prohibitive or otherwise, can cut to the core issue of what happened in Virginia. It wasn’t a matter of access to weaponry or access to media. The truth is that we don’t know what it was a matter of access to, other than society in general. I’m not going to say this guy was pushed over the edge, because maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he had a perfectly normal life, woke up one morning and decided to kill thirty-two people. We just don’t know what or why right now. And all those empty suits and gaudy perms specu-punditing twenty-four hours a day add nothing to the discussion, but detract greatly from those last few shreds of what makes us a civilized society.
The people who truly make me sick (and usually it takes a few days for this to start happening, but I guess the 24/7 cycle demands stupidity at greater and greater speeds) are the ones that start holding their bits and pieces and talking about what a bunch of macho bad-asses they would have been if they’d been at the scene. Mcjoan over at DailyKos has already called out the first two hacks, and there will be more to come. What’s great about free speech is that it allows every voice to be heard. What’s tragic about it is that every voice includes a couple of blowhard back-line gladiators like these two. Whenever the Old Media starts crying about the lack of journalistic standards of the New Media, these two sad, self-indulgent shitstrutters alone should be enough to make them gag on their own shame. Make no mistake, Derbyshire and Blake are the sorts of people that I’m supposedly not as good as. I almost wretch just having to type that.
I normally allow for pretty un-moderated comments here at adennak.com but in this case I am going to make an exception. If you want to talk about violent media, I’ve got a backlog on the subject and there’s always more to come. If you want to talk about gun control, there will definitely be posts in the near future to reply to about that. If you want to talk about Old/New Media, it comes up regularly as well. If you want to use this outburst of raw violence to further your own political ideology, do us all a favor and go fuck yourself.
