Bullets, Bullets, Bullets

[womzilla]

Since March 29, there have been four separate mass shootings in the United States, killing a total of 31 people. There were three more in the three weeks before that.

Media critic Eric Boehlert has been pointing out since mid-March a curious pattern in the press coverage of these events:

The press now covers shooting sprees the way it covers killer tornadoes: They're one-day stories, they're acts of nature, and all people can do is try to stay out of the way.

It's getting worse. It's going to keep getting worse; there's a lot of misery around (U6, the broadest measure of unemployment, is at nearly 16%) and a lot of people out there deliberately stoking rage. Do you think it's an accident that Friday's shooting in Binghampton, New York, targeted an immigration center, or that Saturday's shooting was an ambush of police officers by a man who apparently feared that Obama was going to seize his guns?

It's getting worse, and it's going to keep getting worse. And I have no idea what to do to make it get better.

ETA: Well, the Binghamton shooting is definitely not easily shoehorned into "nativist attacks immigrants", since the shooter was himself a recent immigrant. Though he was a victim of the current recession/depression/AUUUGH!, whichever you happen to call it.

Comments

[ferret-herder.livejournal.com]

I thought the Binghamton shooter was an immigrant himself. That shades any potential meaning around his choice of targets.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Amended my post to reflect that. I hadn't been listening to the news today.

[shelleybear.livejournal.com]

Bottled water and shotgun shells.

[bibliotrope.livejournal.com]

My understanding is that the Binghamton shooter had immigrated with his family when he was a kid but was a citizen now and had been for quite awhile.

The shooter in Pittsburgh seems to have been warped by listening to too much right-wing looneyism -- a friend of his told one of the local TV stations that he'd often complain about Zionists ruining the world and such -- but he'd also been unemployed for awhile and I'm sure that didn't help his worldview any. I got the impression while watching the coverage (which was of course all over our local news, especially the Pittsburgh stations) that it was an attempted "suicide-by-cop" in which too many cops died instead while the kid himself just got injured.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

I think there's a serious question of social psychology here, which I am so unqualified to answer I don't even know how to frame the question very well. There are catastrophes that happen infrequently. When they happen, they kill dozens of people and terrify hundreds of witnesses and rescuers. I'm talking about catastrophes like the crash of a modern commercial aircraft, or somebody who shoots dozens of people. They appear to be more common than they once were...but they are still quite rare. If you spent more time worrying about random mass murderers appearing in shopping centers, I'm sure it would affect your emotional state, and it might affect your behavior (you might do more of your shopping online. You might hurry through your errands to get home as quickly as possible, which is hardly good for building community.) Extensive media attention to plane crashes is known to make travelers fly less and drive more, even though car accidents are still much more common than plane crashes.

I don't know what to do to make it better, either. I'm not at all sure that more media attention to shootings as they happen is helpful. I don't know of such attention can inspire copycat crimes, in the sense of nudging a marginal person over the edge. I have a strong suspicion, but no evidence, that intensive media attention to uncommon but dramatic catastrophes gives people inaccurate ideas about relative risks, which leads to bad decision-making.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I'm not actually particularly concerned by the risk of mass shootings affecting me or those very close to me*, which I realize is quite low, but just by the increase in general misery that they cause, and the misery that they reflect. I do see the danger of copycats. But I'm really concerned about the fact that the eliminationist rhetoric of the radical Right has driven at least two of the shootings in the last year (the Pittsburgh police shooting and the Unitarian church shooting in 2008) and worry that it's behind more of them.

*I will note that I was two degrees of separation away from the Virginia Tech shooting by two different routes--as I noted at the time, one of the victims, assistant professor Jaime Bishop, son of my friend Michael Bishop, was also friend and co-worker of my mother's at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. So it's a small world.