Another day, another mass shooting in the United States. This is the cue for thousands of people to clamour for some sort of solution or remediation. There is a problem, and the solution is ridiculously complex and difficult. But before anyone can come to any sort of consensus of how to start approaching the issue, the entire environment of the conversation becomes polluted so that the objectives are lost, and all that remains is rancor, malice, and disrespect.
This about clouding the issue and muddying the waters of a serious social discussion.
Definitions
Douglas Adams made several references to philosophers as pure sophists, wasting time examining inconsequential shades of meaning in the terms of questions, rather than looking at the salient concepts or ideas behind any given question. His point was that because philosophy as a whole does not hold any concrete answers, it is better to evade questions that give nebulous answers.In an era where the President of the United States routinely tells untruths and challenges any contradictory evidence as being fake, it has become easy to derail legitimate inquiries by suddenly making the conversation about language. Take THIS article to see the impact that language spin has on discourse.
I will give you a prime example of what I am describing. When polled about their preferences regarding guns in the United States, there is a marked discrepancy between the numbers recorded when the question asked "Do you believe in increasing gun safety" rather than "Do you believe in increased gun control regulations?" More numbers HERE. It's much like the abortion debate, where both opposing camps sought to spin their stance positively into the pro-life and the pro-choice campaigns. Eager for popular approval, each tried to use language with affirmative connotations to market their platform.
Equally distracting and confusing are statistics, and the language associated with them. "Mass shootings" are different than "mass killings" and "multiple homicides" and "serial murders." Someone will try to express the immediacy of the issue by citing a statistic saying that there have been x mass shootings in 2018, or x mass shootings per day in the 21st century, or a mass shooting every x days. Rather than recognize the concern or the enormity of the numbers, a common deflection is to challenge the wording. How many people must be killed for it to be a "mass" shooting? Does it require an automatic weapon? A single location? Once it is established that a mass shooting involves a distinct number of deaths (in excess of three? Four?), and not just woundings (even if they later turn out to be fatal woundings), and that it must all be conducted on public property, the conversation has been sufficiently deflected to the point that everyone must spend their time recalibrating their numbers and searching for examples and counter-examples.
False Equivalences
If one can get past the smokescreen that everyone is using the wrong words to ask the questions about why the last batch of innocent people were gunned down, then one is confronted by the weird and logically convoluted maze of false equivalences. There are a variety of these, but there are four big ones that I've observed in the American "Why are so many innocent people being shot dead" debate.- America is Exceptional. And not in a good way.Gun deaths of any sort - homicide, suicide, accident, indigestion - are lower in every other country on the planet. Even the ones with civil wars. Any stats that compare the U.S. to, say, Switzerland will look ridiculous, but that's because the Swiss didn't build their confederacy on slavery, have a solid social safety net, and mandatory conscription in their armed forces. The Swiss are responsible, trained gun owners with low societal instance of poverty and discrimination. Any question that asks "Why can't the U.S. be like [insert country here]?" is foolish because the U.S. is inherently culturally flawed in ways that other countries haven't considered yet.
- Appeal to the Founding FathersThomas Jefferson was a very insightful fellow, and between him, Alexis de Tocqueville, and a pack of other enlightenment thinkers, we have documents like the U.S. Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Bill of Rights. In those documents, there are several enshrined principles like the separation of church and state, and the checks and balances on the different branches of government. That being said, these men were not infallible. The Amendments to the U.S. Constitution are testament to that. It took the American Republic almost a hundred years to do something about that slavery thing, and suffrage for women was an even tougher struggle. To speculate about the founding fathers' thoughts about modern weapons is about as useful as asking them about vaccines or marijuana regulation.
- ReligionThere are numerous dog-whistles that bring all the evangelicals baying into one's yard. Even if the discussion is about red wine with veal, religious folk will blurt out enough outrage to derail any topic if given a chance. In other words, if you don't want to discuss guns, the conversation can be easily be diverted by creating a false equivalence between gun regulations and abortion, the holocaust, or the Spanish Inquisition. I suppose that such comparisons seem relevant because they involve death and some sort of government involvement, but otherwise, they are logically unrelated. I have no idea what this sort of idiocy is trying to assert.
The logic of this argument is not even weak, it is non-existent. But because Planned Parenthood has been introduced as a villain (unfairly), suddenly the discussion has again been deflected and the problem goes unaddressed. - Racism
Speaking of dog-whistle speech patterns, there is no deflection tactic quite like the scapegoating tactic. Essentially, if a problem is identified as being immediate and dangerous, rather than looking for any sort of personal responsibility or communal involvement, why not place the blame for all of society's ills – including the most recent tragedy – on a specific group? Instead of the usual "foreign boogeymen" of Jews or gypsies, the United States of the present day is terrified of the people it has disenfranchised. The families fleeing the constant drone bombings in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, etc. join those who are fleeing the death squads in Central America that have been sponsored by the American government. If you want to start investigating, you can start by looking at Berta Cáceres and articles like THIS. In short, some people like to portray the problem of people being shot as a result of those darn foreigners.
If you can fight your way through all of this distraction and deflection, you might start to see your way through to the truth. The problem is the culture. Culture is not the product of an individual, a government program, or a linguistic trend. I will outline a larger plan later, but here is a quick outline:
- Stop desperation. Reduce poverty and property crime will decrease. I promise.
- Invest in the future. Let people know that they are wanted and then welcome their contributions.
- Let freedom ring. Stop censorship. Period. Let gory dismemberments be put in the same category as full frontal nudity. Let Nazis expose themselves as fools. Let all of the flowers in the garden blossom before you trim them (using logic and reason) rather than using authority to stifle their expression.
Meanwhile, here's a break from all the political stuff.
Shower Songlist
As always, I ask for someone to find a common thread between all of these song tracks, and although no one ever has, I ask regardless.- Never Say Never, by Melanie Chisholm
- Pretending, by Eric Clapton
- Fools, by Lightning Seeds
- Pimper's Paradise, by Bob Marley and the Wailers
- So Long To U, by Beautiful Small Machines
- Carnivale de Paris, by Dario G
And with that, I bid you all a fair adieu.
Cheers,
—mARKUS
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