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

[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.