Nicely done from Ross Barkan. There is an extended discussion of fashions of violence, and the odd relationship to politics, in Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
Sobering, insightful, razor sharp and crystal clear. Something tells me your writing will help future readers try to grasp just what in the hell was going on.
Is Malcolm X much more than a historical footnote today? That might actually be a decent comparison, I’m still getting my head around the quasi-religious nature of his connection with so much of the center-right.
Your descent into partisanship is the core of the problem. Turning the tragedy into a thinly veiled attack on “the party of the gun” is the wrong approach.
The problem is the hate in men’s hearts. Those who falsely accuse people like Charlie of being fascists and racists and turn loony antifas like this into homicidal maniacs have blood on their keyboards.
The way to honor his ultimate sacrifice is to stop.
The Constitution gives us the mixed blessing of the right to bear arms. The GOP is more accurately described as the party that defends our constitutional liberties.
The Democrats argue that you can ban guns by outlawing them.
Drugs are illegal.
Murder is illegal.
Yet we have both in regrettable abundance.
Republicans are arguing for the right of self-defense from both threats. Democrats would take that right away from the law-abiding citizen.
No, thank you.
PS-I don't own a gun, never have, and have plans to do so.
Seat belts and car seats are legal. They are required by common sense federal laws. Since 2020, guns are the leading cause of death among U.S. children and adolescents, surpassing car crashes as the top killer in that age group.
So often when I drop my 9 year old off at elementary school, I worry about shootings and check the exits, realize how weak and old the school safety officer stationed at the door looks. I’m entirely convinced the land of the free can do better for the youngest and weakest among us.
Guns were illegal in Chicago and we were the murder capital of America. The black market would take over like a Generac generator in a power outage if guns were ever banned nationwide, which is constitutionally impossible in any event.
Tilting windmills will not protect your daughter.
All you can do is narrow the window of vulnerability and minimize the number of potential murderers:
-harden targets like schools and churches with off-duty police (heavily armed),
-dramatically increase mental health measures like involuntary institutionalization of the criminally insane, and
-exponentially increase law enforcement and the intensity of criminal justice including life without parole for non-violent crimes and restoration of the death penalty.
You see it’s the murderers, not their tools, that are the problem.
50,000 Romans died one day at Cannae in a gun-free world.
If you have typical reservations about the steps I propose, think about your daughter as you decide.
Its great to meet you and I appreciate you replying. I am too optimistic and love my son too much to accept this line of thinking. Hopefully Ross will take this up in all his eloquence sometime
I wonder why you used 'vilify' to describe Kirk's position on gay issues. He "vilified" the LGBTQ community (pardon me if the quote is off). The use of this word expresses the problem on the left side of things. I was accused of 'vilifying' George Floyd by factually saying that he was a criminal, that the golden casket was over the top, that he swallowed fentanyl. These are facts. Well, OK, the golden casket is an opinion. I told this guy it was like a golden calf. Which it was. He said I was 'vilifying' St. George Floyd, the only person with Covid in 2020 to die of a "murder" which that factually was not either.
Anyway. Facts are not "vilifying."
As for Kirk, being against homosexuality, however uncomfortable that might make some people, is not 'vilifying.' Do you have a vilifying quote to share?
I've changed my mind about abortion. Does that mean I'm 'vilifying' women who get them?
Some on the left side tried the old "hate, misogyny, racist" blah blah blah. I have a lot of factual observations about the crime rate of a certain demographic. Observing reality is not vilifying. It's not criticism.
I have many gay friends, but have been moving away from the idea that gay couples should adopt children. What I'm considering about that is not 'vilifying' those people, and yet the left perceives any criticism as "hate."
It's so childish.
And dangerous. I've heard what the assassin believed with his 'fascist' this and 'nazi' that. Frankly I am horrified by people I know -- in their 60s -- still talking like a bunch of dumb punk rockers who don't know much about anything. They can't argue. They don't know why they think what they do. They get nasty when you try to explain the other side to them.
The left are the vilifiers. It takes a lot of restraint to shield my eyes from the horror of their irrational behaviors.
When violence repeats itself, it no longer feels like isolated madness but like a signal of the age. The hardest question is whether imitation will keep spiraling or if society can find the still point to stop the echo.
Is it really true that the peak era of mass shootings is behind us, or is it just that we’re paying less attention? The Minnesota school shooting was devastating. And of course a school in Colorado was shot up the same day Kirk was killed. The mass shootings that actually live on in the public memory in a major way (either because of the scale of the carnage or some particularly memorable detail) are few and far between, which makes it hard to judge these things. And it’s notoriously hard to define “mass shooting” in a way that really filters out the noise of more prosaic gun violence happening everywhere in the US on an average day.
I say this not to dispute that this wave of targeted killings signals some new era — it does feel like that’s the case — but to question whether there’s a concomitant decline in AR-15 style public mass murder. I hope so, but … in a country filled with endless reserves of guns and rage, why not both?
While I'd prefer no shootings of any kind, it would be an incredibly positive development if as this piece speculates the energy that previously went into school shootings is now being redirected towards politicians and business leaders. Fewer, better defended, and more deserving victims...
What's the concern? As you see my first thought is being anti-violence altogether, but hopefully we can all agree that we'd rather a single adult dead than a bunch of children.
Hoping for more deserving victims? Spoken like a true liberal. Kirk's murder is bringing some of the mental defectives among us out into the sunlight of truth.
It's already obvious to prefer a single adult to be the victim than multiple innocent children, the fact that it's someone monstrously evil like Kirk just makes it a no brainer - though to reiterate far better for no one to die at all even human pieces of shit like Kirk.
Nicely done from Ross Barkan. There is an extended discussion of fashions of violence, and the odd relationship to politics, in Maguire & Westbrook, Getting Through Security: Counterterrorism, Bureaucracy, and a Sense of the Modern.
https://www.davidawestbrook.com/getting-through-security.html
Sobering, insightful, razor sharp and crystal clear. Something tells me your writing will help future readers try to grasp just what in the hell was going on.
Is Malcolm X much more than a historical footnote today? That might actually be a decent comparison, I’m still getting my head around the quasi-religious nature of his connection with so much of the center-right.
No. Malcolm X is still very famous.
Particularly compared to Bobby Kennedy, who's rapidly careening towards footnote status...
Famous, yes, if perhaps less so than 30 years ago. But he was conspicuously never a favorite of BLM, and with good reason.
Your descent into partisanship is the core of the problem. Turning the tragedy into a thinly veiled attack on “the party of the gun” is the wrong approach.
The problem is the hate in men’s hearts. Those who falsely accuse people like Charlie of being fascists and racists and turn loony antifas like this into homicidal maniacs have blood on their keyboards.
The way to honor his ultimate sacrifice is to stop.
Why isn’t it accurate to say the GOP is the party of gun access activists?
The Constitution gives us the mixed blessing of the right to bear arms. The GOP is more accurately described as the party that defends our constitutional liberties.
The Democrats argue that you can ban guns by outlawing them.
Drugs are illegal.
Murder is illegal.
Yet we have both in regrettable abundance.
Republicans are arguing for the right of self-defense from both threats. Democrats would take that right away from the law-abiding citizen.
No, thank you.
PS-I don't own a gun, never have, and have plans to do so.
Seat belts and car seats are legal. They are required by common sense federal laws. Since 2020, guns are the leading cause of death among U.S. children and adolescents, surpassing car crashes as the top killer in that age group.
So often when I drop my 9 year old off at elementary school, I worry about shootings and check the exits, realize how weak and old the school safety officer stationed at the door looks. I’m entirely convinced the land of the free can do better for the youngest and weakest among us.
Guns were illegal in Chicago and we were the murder capital of America. The black market would take over like a Generac generator in a power outage if guns were ever banned nationwide, which is constitutionally impossible in any event.
Tilting windmills will not protect your daughter.
All you can do is narrow the window of vulnerability and minimize the number of potential murderers:
-harden targets like schools and churches with off-duty police (heavily armed),
-dramatically increase mental health measures like involuntary institutionalization of the criminally insane, and
-exponentially increase law enforcement and the intensity of criminal justice including life without parole for non-violent crimes and restoration of the death penalty.
You see it’s the murderers, not their tools, that are the problem.
50,000 Romans died one day at Cannae in a gun-free world.
If you have typical reservations about the steps I propose, think about your daughter as you decide.
Its great to meet you and I appreciate you replying. I am too optimistic and love my son too much to accept this line of thinking. Hopefully Ross will take this up in all his eloquence sometime
Sorry, I misspoke when I referred to your child as daughter.
Powerful piece.
I wonder why you used 'vilify' to describe Kirk's position on gay issues. He "vilified" the LGBTQ community (pardon me if the quote is off). The use of this word expresses the problem on the left side of things. I was accused of 'vilifying' George Floyd by factually saying that he was a criminal, that the golden casket was over the top, that he swallowed fentanyl. These are facts. Well, OK, the golden casket is an opinion. I told this guy it was like a golden calf. Which it was. He said I was 'vilifying' St. George Floyd, the only person with Covid in 2020 to die of a "murder" which that factually was not either.
Anyway. Facts are not "vilifying."
As for Kirk, being against homosexuality, however uncomfortable that might make some people, is not 'vilifying.' Do you have a vilifying quote to share?
I've changed my mind about abortion. Does that mean I'm 'vilifying' women who get them?
Some on the left side tried the old "hate, misogyny, racist" blah blah blah. I have a lot of factual observations about the crime rate of a certain demographic. Observing reality is not vilifying. It's not criticism.
I have many gay friends, but have been moving away from the idea that gay couples should adopt children. What I'm considering about that is not 'vilifying' those people, and yet the left perceives any criticism as "hate."
It's so childish.
And dangerous. I've heard what the assassin believed with his 'fascist' this and 'nazi' that. Frankly I am horrified by people I know -- in their 60s -- still talking like a bunch of dumb punk rockers who don't know much about anything. They can't argue. They don't know why they think what they do. They get nasty when you try to explain the other side to them.
The left are the vilifiers. It takes a lot of restraint to shield my eyes from the horror of their irrational behaviors.
I have hoped since Momdani won the NYC primary that he has planned his protection as well as he has planned his campaign.
When violence repeats itself, it no longer feels like isolated madness but like a signal of the age. The hardest question is whether imitation will keep spiraling or if society can find the still point to stop the echo.
Is it really true that the peak era of mass shootings is behind us, or is it just that we’re paying less attention? The Minnesota school shooting was devastating. And of course a school in Colorado was shot up the same day Kirk was killed. The mass shootings that actually live on in the public memory in a major way (either because of the scale of the carnage or some particularly memorable detail) are few and far between, which makes it hard to judge these things. And it’s notoriously hard to define “mass shooting” in a way that really filters out the noise of more prosaic gun violence happening everywhere in the US on an average day.
I say this not to dispute that this wave of targeted killings signals some new era — it does feel like that’s the case — but to question whether there’s a concomitant decline in AR-15 style public mass murder. I hope so, but … in a country filled with endless reserves of guns and rage, why not both?
While I'd prefer no shootings of any kind, it would be an incredibly positive development if as this piece speculates the energy that previously went into school shootings is now being redirected towards politicians and business leaders. Fewer, better defended, and more deserving victims...
Big, may a higher power please help us all if this is how you really feel - though I notice you don’t post with a real name. I am praying for peace.
What's the concern? As you see my first thought is being anti-violence altogether, but hopefully we can all agree that we'd rather a single adult dead than a bunch of children.
Hoping for more deserving victims? Spoken like a true liberal. Kirk's murder is bringing some of the mental defectives among us out into the sunlight of truth.
It's already obvious to prefer a single adult to be the victim than multiple innocent children, the fact that it's someone monstrously evil like Kirk just makes it a no brainer - though to reiterate far better for no one to die at all even human pieces of shit like Kirk.