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Acala
12-17-2012, 10:28 AM
The Sandy Hook murders are tragic for the victims, the community, and also for the Nation. But the
murders should come as no surprise to us, if we are really honest. America embraces violence like a
lover. We seemingly can't get enough of it. We pay hundreds of millions of dollars to the entertainment
industry to give us a steady diet of lurid fantasy violence in our theaters and pipe it into our homes into
our televisions for daily consumption. Our news media elevates stories of violence above all else
- because we WANT it that way. The amazing technology of the video game is harnessed primarily to
allow the players to have more participation in violence because movie and television violence is,
apparently, too passive. We want to pull the trigger ourselves and see the victims die. It isn't the fault
of the game makers. They give us what WE want. And we WANT violence.

Our form of government is based on violence. We demand that our government create endless volumes
of arcane rules for our neighbors to follow and then enforce them at gunpoint. Even when we dispatch
our government to provide compassionate care for the downtrodden, it is based on violence because
every penny the government spends on such projects has been extracted by threat of violence from
someone else. And that is why those efforts always fail to accomplish the goal – they are corrupted by
the violent coercion that lies at the heart. Charity and violence are incompatible.

Nowhere is our National love of violence more starkly evident than in the way we relate to foreign
countries. Our foreign policy amounts to: "do what we say or we will starve your families with
embargoes and if you still will not obey, we will bomb you all into submission, women and children
included."

The President makes his statement of official condolences for Sandy Hook victims and then returns to
his office and continues to order the deaths of thousands of innocent people through drone attacks and
embargoes. Recent evidence indicates that our drone attacks are often "double taps", where the initial
missile attack is followed shortly by a second attack to kill the people trying to help the victims of the
first attack. Did you vote for this, America? Of course you did. We love violence so much that "less
violence" wasn’t even a choice on our ballot.

Yet we are in shock that some deranged young man has acted out violently? The real surprise is that
such acts are not more common in the stew of violence that is American society.

Oh, you will certainly have good reasons why some violence is necessary to do this or that. I think I do
as well. But is it really so? Have you really thought about it? Does it really work to create the kind of
world you say you want? Or does it just exchange one type of violence for another?

So now, in the aftermath of the Sandy Hook murders, some people are demanding MORE laws to
control public access to guns. More laws for your neighbors to obey or die. More laws controlling
peaceful people to be enforced by squads of para-military government agents with guns. Did you think
the new laws would be enforced by fairies with magic wands? How sad that even when we want to act
to reduce violence, our knee-jerk response is to try and do it with violent means. More violence to cure
violence. More controversial laws to further divide an already fractured nation.

Violence is not a hardware problem. Violence is a software problem. But we don't want to face it. We
don't want to examine our own society or our behavior as a nation. We don't want to look in the
mirror and ask ourselves how WE contribute to the culture of violence in our own lives. We don’t want
to ask the HARD questions, or change the way we live, or try a social operating principle other than
violence. We want an easy solution. We want to solve the problem of violence with a familiar
tool - more violence. It won't work.


Comments?

CaptUSA
12-17-2012, 10:38 AM
I'm not sure I buy the "culture of violence" argument except in how these events are played in the media. In the media, they know that, like the movies, violence and sex sell.

But as a cause for these types of incidents? I'm not really seeing it. Let's face, we are bombarded with more and more violence each day, but overall, violent acts haven't been going up. They stay at roughly the same percentages going up and down a little depending on economic and societal milieu. I agree with your final thought about more violence won't solve anything; I just don't see this as an increasing problem.

To me, this is an isolated incident where a sick individual did some horrible things. I have no idea why some people do things, but I like the fact that they are very rare. I don't think you can apply a rational explanation to an irrational act.

Kotin
12-17-2012, 10:40 AM
Rather a culture of violence is being created and fabricated, in my opinion.

Acala
12-17-2012, 11:04 AM
My goal was to deflate the idea, among democrats primarily, that the solution to this problem is MORE violence by the government.