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Jon Stewart
I loved these quotes -- spot on:
He also expressed amazement that America, ?a nation of over-reactors to everything,? has been so reluctant to deal with such a real epidemic. ?Why is that there is no other issue in this country with as dire public safety consequences as this that we are unable to make even the most basic steps towards putting together a complex plan of action?? he wondered.
It?s not really about the Constitution, Stewart argued. ?A well-regulated militia? does not mean that individuals should be able to stockpile any and all weapons they want. There are plenty of things people can?t buy, like tanks or ?surface-to-air anything,? and few people call those restrictions a violation of the 2nd Amendment. So why should we be entitled to assault rifles?
What it really comes down to, Stewart concluded, is the fear of not being able to fight back against a theoretical tyrant like Mao, Stalin or Hitler. As evidence, he played a clip from Alex Jones? widely circulated appearance on ?Piers Morgan Tonight,? in which he warned of another American Revolution if anyone comes after his guns.
He summarized the thinking of people like Jones this way: ?Their paranoid fear of a possible dystopic future prevents us from addressing our actual dystopic present. We can?t even begin to address 30,000 gun deaths that are actually in reality happening in this country every year because a few of us must remain vigilant against the rise of imaginary Hitler.?
Re: Jon Stewart
I'm not a gun nut or conspiracy theorist but if you think about it Hitler was imaginary until he came along and did what he did so that doesn't disqualify the Hitler argument for me
I think we are being reactionary rather than analytical on this issue though. This is not new technology. Guns have been around for hundreds of years all over the world. The right to bear arms is not a new law. While over a VERY long period of time there have been some incidents that would qualify as what we call mass killings that seem have to come closer together and more common in recent years. However, they are seemingly concentrated in certain cultures and other cultures that are gun heavy per population aren't having these same issues. Weaponry hasn't changed that much. I think we need to look at what has changed so we can address the root of the issue because I'm not so convinced it is guns.
I think PP has a point. I saw this article the other day, an op-ed piece by Dr. Keith Albow http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keith_Ablow who is a psychiatrist at Tufts Medical School and an expert witness. He is commenting on the results of the American Freshman Survey. We have a foundational problem in our country (culture of death, loving the self too much, and as this survey discovers out youth have a growing problem with narcissism) which is different than any other nation. This demonstrates the deeper issue...the one beneath the mass shootings. Article below...
"A new analysis of the American Freshman Survey, which has accumulated data for the past 47 years from 9 million young adults, reveals that college students are more likely than ever to call themselves gifted and driven to succeed, even though their test scores and time spent studying are decreasing.
Psychologist Jean Twenge, the lead author of the analysis, is also the author of a study showing that the tendency toward narcissism in students is up 30 percent in the last thirty-odd years.
This data is not unexpected. I have been writing a great deal over the past few years about the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities?the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.
On Facebook, young people can fool themselves into thinking they have hundreds or thousands of ?friends.? They can delete unflattering comments. They can block anyone who disagrees with them or pokes holes in their inflated self-esteem. They can choose to show the world only flattering, sexy or funny photographs of themselves (dozens of albums full, by the way), ?speak? in pithy short posts and publicly connect to movie stars and professional athletes and musicians they ?like.?
We must beware of the toxic psychological impact of media and technology on children, adolescents and young adults, particularly as it regards turning them into faux celebrities?the equivalent of lead actors in their own fictionalized life stories.
Using Twitter, young people can pretend they are worth ?following,? as though they have real-life fans, when all that is really happening is the mutual fanning of false love and false fame.
Using computer games, our sons and daughters can pretend they are Olympians, Formula 1 drivers, rock stars or sharpshooters. And while they can turn off their Wii and Xbox machines and remember they are really in dens and playrooms on side streets and in triple deckers around America, that is after their hearts have raced and heads have swelled with false pride for ?being? something they are not.
On MTV and other networks, young people can see lives just like theirs portrayed on reality TV shows fueled by such incredible self-involvement and self-love that any of the ?real-life? characters should really be in psychotherapy to have any chance at anything like a normal life.
These are the psychological drugs of the 21st Century and they are getting our sons and daughters very sick, indeed.
As if to keep up with the unreality of media and technology, in a dizzying paroxysm of self-aggrandizing hype, town sports leagues across the country hand out ribbons and trophies to losing teams, schools inflate grades, energy drinks in giant, colorful cans take over the soft drink market, and psychiatrists hand out Adderall like candy.
All the while, these adolescents, teens and young adults are watching a Congress that can?t control its manic, euphoric, narcissistic spending, a president that can?t see his way through to applauding genuine and extraordinary achievements in business, a society that blames mass killings on guns, not the psychotic people who wield them, and?here no surprise?a stock market that keeps rising and falling like a roller coaster as bubbles inflate and then, inevitably, burst.
That?s really the unavoidable end, by the way. False pride can never be sustained. The bubble of narcissism is always at risk of bursting. That?s why young people are higher on drugs than ever, drunker than ever, smoking more, tattooed more, pierced more and having more and more and more sex, earlier and earlier and earlier, raising babies before they can do it well, because it makes them feel special, for a while. They?re doing anything to distract themselves from the fact that they feel empty inside and unworthy.
Distractions, however, are temporary, and the truth is eternal. Watch for an epidemic of depression and suicidality, not to mention homicidality, as the real self-loathing and hatred of others that lies beneath all this narcissism rises to the surface. I see it happening and, no doubt, many of you do, too.
We had better get a plan together to combat this greatest epidemic as it takes shape. Because it will dwarf the toll of any epidemic we have ever known. And it will be the hardest to defeat. Because, by the time we see the scope and destructiveness of this enemy clearly, we will also realize, as the saying goes, that it is us."
Yeah, but Hitler's rise to power is wholly tied to the devastation of post-WWI Germany. There's a reason we don't do to other countries today what happened to Germany when they lost the war.
There is no country in the world that is as gun heavy as ours, by far. So while I don't doubt that there are other issues at work (*cough*piss-poor access to health care*cough*), I don't think you can exactly rule it out as... just maybe... part of the problem with it comes to... well, violence by gun.
ML, you forgot your usual line of Godlessness.
Didn't want you to forget.
Andplusalso, almost every other country in the world has Facebook, Twitter, tattoos, and piercings. Probably sex, too, if I know anything about how babies happen.
And our birthrates are going down and maternal ages are going up. So there's that.
But yay for generalizing and stereotyping!
ML, Keith Ablow also blames battered women for being abused by their partners, so I just can't take him seriously as a mental health professional. He strikes me as completely unethical.
LOL @ congressional spending causing mass shootings!
Agree with this, especially the bolded part. We need to look at disguishing factors. The rest of the world has fb, twitter, mentally ill people, etc. I'm willing to bet that a lot of people espousing the beliefs that Americans are the most narcissistic, anti-religious people in the world have really never ventured beyond our borders because it's simply not the case. What is the main distinguishing factor? It has to be the gun issue. That's not to say that we don't need mental health reform, more community involvement, etc. but what it boils down to is guns and our refusal to tightly regulate them.
Actually, MySpace is very big internationally compared to Facebook. I bet if we switch over, gun deaths would decline.
At least until we add the 28th Amendment to the Constitution: Living a self-absorbed and delusional life being essential to the tattooed, pierced, sexed-up youth of the state, the right to log in to Facebook shall not be infringed.
LOL yes teenagers pay SO much attention to Congress and the federal budget. I know I had a poster of my Congressional Representative on my wall as a teen.
At least now we can update the respective lists:
Things that kill people:
Things that don't kill people:
love this!