Forget the Oscars. Forget the Super Bowl. School Shootings are the Trending Public Spectacle.

In the blurb for last Friday’s news feed, I composed a flip introduction to the reports about the murderous school shooting in Texas committed by a kid named Dimitrios Pagourtzis, which had happened earlier that day: “Today’s school shooting was held in Santa Fe, Texas.”

I’d used the same formula for introducing school shootings once or twice in the past. This time, however, a reader took exception to my ghoulish sarcasm, and emailed me with his reproach:

I’ve been a long time reader of your site, and I agree with the vast majority of your viewpoint. While I KNOW that no disrespect was intended, the comment hurts.

I wrote him back with this reply:

Yes, well, it’s a sardonic, sarcastic way of presenting it (which I’ve been using for a while), and it’s meant to hurt. It’s intended to remind the reader what a media circus school shootings have become. The lavish media attention and feting of the victims’ families helps GUARANTEE that there will be more — and worse — shootings in the future.

THAT’S what my sarcasm is about.

The media frenzy that accompanies school shootings these days is driven by a couple of cultural imperatives.

The first is the hoary old newspaper adage: “If it bleeds, it leads.” That was true when Caveman Og chiseled the first edition of the Neanderthal Times. It was true when everyone read at least two newspapers every day, one in the morning and one in the evening. And it’s true now, when we all have access to fourteen gazillion cable channels. The story with the most slaughter and gore is the one that grabs the most viewers.

And this is especially the case when children are the ones who are bleeding. Och, the puir wee bairns! Whether it’s the victims of terrorist violence in Chechnya, or dead baby porn on a beach in Anatolia, or high school students shot up in art class — stories about children as victims of violence are fascinating to the general public.

The second reason that school shootings cause such moist eyes in the media is their major subtext: gun control. Democrat politicians wait a decorous period of time — in Joe Biden’s case, at least two or three hours — and then their litany begins: Haven’t there been enough school shootings? It’s time to get serious about gun control!

This imperative has become even more urgent since the election of Donald Trump. A large chunk of the president’s support comes from Second Amendment enthusiasts. Even the most skeptical libertarian gun owner regards the president more favorably than he does any other major political leader. These are the people that put Mr. Trump over the top in his contest with Hillary. They are the primary wellspring of intractable American orneriness. And it is essential to the Deep State that they be quelled and subdued.

Which means they must be disarmed.

Owning firearms helps give ordinary citizens a sense of autonomy, independence, and self-sufficiency. It’s not so much that they expect to shoot it out with jack-booted law enforcement personnel who break down their front door. It’s just the feeling: “I can handle what comes up. I can take care of myself and my family. I don’t have to just dial 911 and hope we survive till the cops get here.”

This feisty independence is what the State must curb to obtain the compliant drones it desires. The larger and more intrusive the government becomes, the more it needs to stamp out independent thinking and personal initiative. It requires docile, obedient citizens who are accustomed to being told what to do by the authorities.

That’s why the guns have to go.

A news editor at CNN or The New York Times doesn’t need to be told these things. Even if he didn’t have sources in the permanent government whispering into his ear, he’d still be shilling for gun control.

That’s what my sardonic sarcasm is about when I mention a school shooting in the news feed. I’m not denying the horror and suffering experienced by the survivors — in fact, the exploitation of the families of the victims is the greatest travesty of the odious public spectacle.

School shootings are ginned up into a media extravaganza in order to generate and sustain the momentum that pushes the country closer and closer to (attempted) firearms confiscation. That’s what the 24/7 propaganda is in aid of.

And that’s what my brief, obnoxious introductions to school shootings are meant to draw attention to.

18 thoughts on “Forget the Oscars. Forget the Super Bowl. School Shootings are the Trending Public Spectacle.

  1. The Dems don’t quite want gun control yet. Dem lawyer, Lawrence Tribe, told his fellows that if they want to impeach Trump, they “have to shoot to kill”.

    That’s not a metaphor, no matter how he may try to walk it back later.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZf6bPcuh7A

    Watch him and decide for yourself.

    Silly Dems still don’t recognize the extent to which they hamstring themselves with their own rhetoric.

    ————————-

    If it weren’t for the cynical ratcheting up of terror or the huge publicity given to each of these shooters, the problem wouldn’t exist. The fact that school administrators are NOT armed is proof of our hearing-impaired politicians and bureaucrats and moussed news readers determination to get their own sweet way re gun “control”. It is also further proof of their deliberate use of these children in the attempt to have their own sweet way.

    IT WILL NOT HAPPEN IN OUR LIFETIME in the U.S. But these fools keep on beating the same tune in hopes of making it come true. Even *if* the country were equally divided on this subject – and I don’t think we are – those in favor of the Second Amendment are fiercely determined to hang onto their guns. Their fervor outweighs their numbers.

    • Hmmmmmmmmmm………

      …………..that phrase………………….

      “from my COLD , DEAD fingers…………….”

      …………..WHATEVER could they mean by that?

    • “The fact that school administrators are NOT armed is proof of our hearing-impaired politicians …”

      Public school administrators are the most docile, compliant, publicity-adverse group you’d be able to find. What would you really expect an armed public school administrator to do with a shooter in his school? Most likely, the most dangerous place in the world to be would be between this administrator and a school exit.

      “Silly Dems still don’t recognize the extent to which they hamstring themselves …”
      The Democrats are not looking for a constituency that cares about consistency, reason, or natural consequences. The “coalition of the fringes” is alive and growing. The fringe votes as a group of whatever they identify with. A reliable laugh can always be gotten by someone like Jesse Waters asking a black what they think of Trump. Invariably, the answer is “he’s a big racist”, and just as invariably, when asked to provide one example, they stumble and get uncharacteristically quiet.

      But, the college-graduate, progressive supporters of Bernie Sanders are just as ignorant and just as dogmatic. They simply are able to cite talking points from the newspapers they read, but are essentially just as ignorant and impervious to actual facts.

  2. Baron–

    You might be interested in the following essay by Malcolm Gladwell from the 2015 New Yorker (yes, I did consider the source!) on the increasing frequency of school shootings. The author refers to the work of Mark Granovetter, a sociologist who has worked on the issue of thresholds in regard to such phenomena as riots. The author of the New Yorker essay essentially applies Granovetter’s theory to school shootings: “Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?”

    I can’t do justice to Gladwell’s essay here (it includes a detailed account of a would-be 17-year-old shooter who was stopped and questioned by the police before he could carry out his plan– which included Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs as well as a rifle and shotgun) but I will suggest that Granovetter’s threshold model applies to the ever-intensifying push for gun control too. If you’d like to read Gladwell in full, here is the URL: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence

    If the link doesn’t work for you, let me know; I copied and pasted the essay into a Word file and could send it to you as an e-mail file attachment. It’s not easy reading but it does offer much to think about.

    • I can’t find the link, but I read an article suggesting (no empirical evidence) that the feminisation of schools and playgrounds has made it impossible for a bullied male to fight against those bullying him. It used to be the last recourse of the bullied male was to punch the bully which, even if the bully were a better fighter, would cause the bully to conclude it was too costly to bully this particular kid.

      But, with female teachers watching kids like hawks for any sign of physical aggression, the bullied outcast, without his own social network, has no options at all to get away from being bullied. Bullying has evolved from physical measures to social picking.

  3. Why not install metal detectors and armed guards at the gun free zones: it would save people’s lives, create jobs and end the annoying debate.
    And yes, you need a license to drive a car, it only makes sense to get training and obtain a license before you can handle a weapon.

    • So, making sure shooters are trained in weapons will lower the death rate in shootings?

      Also, note the Las Vegas shooter was not actually in the crowd, but was in an overlooking hotel. He did not violate any laws up to the time he started shooting.

      • Las Vegas shooter wasn’t, many others were. Anyway, if the hotel had a metal detector, wouldn’t it raise a question what a guy with a machine gun and tons of ammo is up to?

    • Hell Awaits:..”it only makes sense to get training and obtain a license…”

      There are 8-year-old kids who know how to handle and shoot a firearm safely. These kids have usually been “trained” by their very responsible parents. Remember how that used to work? No license required.

      Training, definitely. Licenses? We have those, too, although they do not really accomplish anything except the raising of revenue.

    • “And yes, you need a license to drive a car, it only makes sense to get training and obtain a license before you can handle a weapon.”

      Wrong. You need training and a license to drive on public roads. You can drive a car on your own property. You don’t have to register it. It can be as big as you want and/or drive as fast as want. It can also have a “high capacity” gas tank.You don’t need a background check, waiting period, or garage to lock it up inside. YoYou’re also required to have a suppressor (muffler) on your vehicle. Not to mention a driver’s license is valid no matter what state you’re in….

      • Fine, I am not objecting to it. To continue with a vehicle analogy, you can absolutely buy a gun, but to fetch it from a shop you need to have a license, since you obviously will be handling it in a public place, right?
        That is the point, to keep unlicensed gun “owners” out of public places.

  4. These school “shootings” and the like media circuses are all staged with crisis actors for the purposes of obtaining gun control. Didn’t you know that? And if not, why not?

    In the UK we had two faked school attacks, Hungerford and Dunblane and lost rifles and handguns respectively. We are now defenceless.

  5. In the 19 years since Columbine, school shootings continue to occur because politicians and the American Left want them to continue in order to achieve their dream of abolishing American’s Second Amendment rights. The simple solution to school shootings was evident immediately after Columbine: Have trained, vetted and armed personnel on scene at the schools. People would volunteer to do this for free. I would.
    Think about how ruthless the American Left is to allow 19 years of slaughtering children to occur because they want to achieve a political and social goal. Imagine what they will do after we are disarmed.

    • Trump’s solution is even cheaper: allow qualified teachers who wish to do so, the right to carry guns on campus, as long as they’re concealed. A school shooter could not count on being able to have a free hour or so before any real opposition develops.

  6. Maybe I am getting to be an old codger but NOTHING infuriates me more than every public flag in America at half-mast because some psycho butchered his classmates. I remember when a flag was flown at half mast in HONOR of the death of a president or of a great hero. As for a half mast flag in the face of Jihad terror attacks – if you know Muslims…. they take it as us groveling.

  7. “Stories about bleeding are what fascinates the public.”

    You’re absolutely wrong!

    It’s the Mass News Media that sticks these stories in our faces whether we want to or not! THey do this over and over and without our permission!

    We’re NOT fascinated or wanting to hear about shootings!

    What we want to hear are / is good news. Where is the Good News….about Humans helping each other, and helping poor animals?

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