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.
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...
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.
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.
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...
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.