For starters, these are all things people expect to eat, drink, see, hear, or otherwise experience when they visit a country. Watch football in South America, have a cozy cup of tea in the UK, see kangaroos in Australia, listen to oompah music in Germany, eat goulash in Hungary, or get shot to death in the USA? I know which one I wouldn’t want.
Also, these are things that would be on a placemat map designed for children. You can explain all these things to small children without reducing them to tears except potentially the gun.
The fact that this woman doesn’t understand this saddens me even more than the poem. The entire world sees this country as a bunch of violent mental midgets, and they wouldn’t be wrong. We have an epidemic of gun violence that literally no other country in the developed world has, and not only are we not smart enough to elect people who will solve this problem, but we don’t even see that it is a problem. Instead we just go “well what about car accident deaths hurr durr, does that mean we should ban cars” like that’s in any way a logical argument, and say “ya even mentally ill wife beating neo nazis should have fully auto weapons with hundred round clips, because it’s in the constitution!”
God fucking damnit. I’m so sick of this fucking country.
BTW I’ve spent a fair amount of time around the Oregon District where the Dayton shooting took place. I was involved with the music and art community there for a while. It was basically the only part of that town that felt progressive and accepting and a chill place to be. That was long ago, like when this shooter was ten. But if a younger me was around today, that would have been me and my friends shot and killed that night.
How long do we have to let this go on before we finally put a stop to it? Do our closest friends and family members have to be killed? Even then, would that really make a difference? “Nuh uh, they shot my mom like a dog in the street, but that’s okay just like a car accident, I still support the constitutional right of my killer to have his small penis murder toys!”
What the fuck is wrong with us that we not only fail to put a stop to this, but we actively encourage it? Fuck all of this.
I don’t know if you knew about this or not: Shooter’s sister was at the scene; she got their with the shooter. More in the article.
I don’t get, either, how this shit isn’t nipped in the goddamn bloody bud. His parents are described as “victims” by the Bellbrook, OH police chief - but they brought that monster into this world. Did they not notice he got the way he did, or just ignore it? That goes for all of them. These aren’t Mansons; they’ve had all the privileges their white maleness entitles them to in this country. You’d think they’d have the capacity and the resources, unilke the lumpen poor, to fix things they think need fixing. Including their own damned emotional/mental illnesses.
Me too. It’s a goddam nightmare, like some horror anthology on cable that I refuse to watch because it’s so violent. But I can’t change the channel or even turn the TV off.
ETA: went to the mall last week. Maybe we should just stop (well, it’s been over a year).
I understand the concerns around banning sites, and agree it should never be done lightly. Having said that, if a site is endorsing Nazism, endorsing massacres, that’s a pretty clear case to pull the plug/ban the users.
This is like the dad of one of the two nazi kids that police have been hunting across the country, claiming that his son was “a hurt kid” and “in a lot of pain”.
Naw, man. Your kid chose to be a white supremacist. He chose to kill 3 people. That is not “pain”. That is the cruelty endemic in white supremacy.
There’s a lot of cruelty endemic to WASP puritan culture too (speaking as a one of their decendents), so I think it’s more widespread than just the supremacists. They take it to extremes.
The kind of help needed is more like reprogramming from a cult, though.
I have to admit, Germany in the late 40s is something I really only know about from relatives, and they were there as displaced persons, not citizens (ie: they never went through a phase where they had to learn not to be Nazis). It would be something to learn about.
I’m even wondering if Germany has a group which can help with this stuff.
Next time someone harps on about how the human brain isn’t fully developed until the mid-20s – a fact I despise and think is greatly exaggerated – I’m dropping this on him.
How much misery how many deaths has this gumby caused?
Brennan had inherited from his mother a genetic disorder called osteogenesis imperfecta. The condition, which stunted his growth and confined him to a wheelchair, is often called “brittle bone disease”.
Of all the movies to be oddly prescient, who would have guessed Unbreakable?
Only if Nazism is treated as a mental illness (I actually don’t think it should be – again, most Germans and Japanese seemed to recover readily enough once the war was over).
And only if these men are willing to seek help, because very few of them do anything that would get them sectioned prior to killing people.
I have a book at home – I can list the title and other info when I get home if anyone’s interested – which looks at serial killers (not mass shooters, which is different but related) from a sociological point of view, not psychological.
The problem with the psychological focus is there are too many people who have gone through everything these men have and worse, and yet grow up to be upstanding, even successful adults.
People are uncomfortable with the sociological analysis because it shows up the responsibility of people who never go near guns: it’s more about what’s happening in the local and social context. And it involves more work than just locking a few people away in psych wards.
Some big hints on what can be done: what Australia and New Zealand did in response to mass shootings. They immediately said, “okay, obviously we’re collectively not as mature and responsible as we thought we were” and limited gun ownership dramatically.
That’s a sociological reaction, and apparently a successful one.
