On Mon, Dec 17, 2012 at 3:20 PM, Jordan Hayes <jmhayes at j-o-r-d-a-n.com>
wrote:
things about efficiency and training. Clearly training and planning are important - the Bath School attack was news to me and I imagine most people in this country. Always good to have a different frame of reference.
And I hadn't thought as much about efficiency as a marksman - clearly he wasn't a good marksman and I guess that's sort of what I meant: he didn't need to be well particularly trained or well planned. Just know enough about the assault rifle to hold and point the trigger and you can mow down a crowd of first graders easily. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the functionality of this weapon, but it seems like it democratizes the massacre in some way that makes the absolute psychopath a little more able to carry it out. As I've just said, I am sure I could be persuaded even that is up for argument. But even taking it as given, I definitely see Jordon's point below - it makes a lot of sense and calls much of what I just wrote into question. The last point is especially important.
>
> I'm bumfuzzled by that one. I don't think it's worth considering what
> kind of firepower would be necessary to stop an attack like this. My
> position is that basically if someone is determined enough, no amount of
> arming teachers, locking down schools, etc. is going to stop this kind of
> thing from happening. It happens. It's incredibly rare. But it happens.
> It also happens that large areas of urban US are effectively controlled by
> gangs who are engaged in black market economies that require turf control
> through the pervasive use of violence, but we're not wasting dozens of
> lbo-talk posts talking about that tragedy.
>
>
I disagree - IIRC we have had a lot of discussions in the past on urban violence and the like. But it is only rarely that we have an object of such broad cultural attention on which to converse about this. Maybe we talked about it in relation to The Wire once.
> Why are those the only options? Why do we need "deadly accuracy" on this
> accounting of rare behavior?
>
>>
I agree. This is a good reminder of what I was trying to read into this
event. I suppose it is good to call this the anti-anti-gun position since I
am sure much of my response to this is a reaction to the response of the
NRA. That is a hard reflex to imagine since it doesn't really have an
outside. I'm not completely on board with what you are saying, but it
certainly provides an unsettling vantage point.
> I'd rather think about the "craziness" (cue: Carrol for the misuse of the
> word) in the US that leads to having a crumbling economy that costs us
> individual misery among millions of people due to vast inequality and
> greedy policy decisions.
And, really, I would to - so it is a good reminder. I was saying something about how glad I was my kid wasn't dead in this fashion, but quickly remembered how many terrible and disturbing acts of violence take place in that regular, systemic violence Zizek (and surely many other people, beginning with Marx) of capitalism. 20% of kids in Texas live in poverty, and I have a much more everyday fear about that possibility for my children. It is easy to get caught up in the viscerality of it.
> It is, after all, a big world, with a lot of other societies not
>> plagued by gun violence to the degree the US is. That can't be
>> a complete coincidence can it?
>>
>
> *shrug*
>
> You call it a plague; I call it anomolous. There's a big gap there. We've
> been over this before, but the "plague of gun violence" in the US is
> completely dominated by suicide; followed by violence commited in the
> service of another felony -- such as a drug deal gone wrong, or a
> retribution or turf war killing. When it comes down to it, there's very
> little worth looking at here that qualifies as being the same as what
> happened with Adam Lanza.
>
>
I've actually been thinking about this a lot - not only because I've only
recently ever had actually suicidal thoughts largely caused by my basic
fear of capitalism as a lived reality (e.g. future employment to support
said family). It is very interesting to note (as you also did in the other
post) that suicide ranks so highly in the gun violence. I actually think
that makes Ames argument even more compelling. Suicide by gunshot is one of
the most efficient methods for successful suicides, so it stands to reason
that might a salient feature in terms of US suicide levels - something like
the position staked by Marv in this argument, if I'm keeping people
straight. Durkheim is actually the originator of this - the whole idea of
anomie and social dislocation caused by what is effectively capitalism. But
it looks increasingly like little of that had much to do with this case
either.
>
> I'll close by recommending Adam Kotsko's book, "Why we love
>> sociopaths," which is a fairly thorough collection of the recent
>> swath of sociopathic characters on TV programs, including Sopranos,
>> Breaking Bad, Dexter, Weeds, Mad Men, House, and many more.
>> Again, provocative but not foolproof.
>>
>
> Yeah, tens of millions of people watch TV shows, and one or two of them
> now and again go into a school or a shopping mall and kill a bunch of
> people as their last desperate action in their life.
>
> I see clearly the connection.
>
My apologies to both you and Dennis. This really isn't Kosko's argument. He never says anything about a direct effect - and in principle I wouldn't agree with him if he did. He is doing something far more literary and thus open to great interpretation, but I found his arguments compelling. It is more that he looks at the popularity of sociopaths as a sort of cultural index for what we take to be heroes (or anti-heroes) today. In many ways it is just another take on the political economic argument, but he makes it more artfully by dissecting the fantasy this sociopath represents vis a vis contemporary capitalism. It is also much better use of media in a sustained, accessible argument that it is much better than someone like Zizek on the topic. Lacan is very useful in his own way, but this book has the potential to read a broader audience - which is why it is commendable that Zero Books did so. It is almost completely unrelated to this except in so far as he discusses what the sociopath increasingly represents in the American psyche.
Sorry. No more posts...
Thanks, sean