Would Regulating the Media Stop Mass Shootings?

Mass shootings should be illegal, except where
the population has been safely disarmed first..

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN PRESENTS GUN CONTROL PROPAGANDA AS "SCIENCE"

A guy who commented on a Scientific American article complained that he didn't get enough of a "reaction" to his suggestion that we create laws to limit media coverage of mass shootings and suicides in order to reduce the number of mass shootings and suicide. To be fair, there is some research that seems to say that coverage of such events creates a kind of "contagion" that stimulates others to emulate the behavior. And it's true. Right after the recent Parkland High School shootings in Florida, police stopped four potential mass shootings and/or bombings aimed at high schools by disgruntled kids. The media pundrity's reaction was predictable. They covered the guns. They didn't cover the bombs. And they didn't give much time to the story if no one died. In the media, if it bleeds it leads they say.

In the wake of the Parkland High shootings, even the venerable "Scientific American" put up a pro gun control article entitled "Why are White Men Stockpiling Guns?" It was a blog to be sure but it lacked any pretense of being anything more than a politically motivated anti-white male hit piece with a lot of gun control and racist talking points. It made little effort to maintain the pretense that the article's conclusions were based on science. Some might object to my calling the article racist, since the racism was aimed at white guys. It could be considered sexist too as it absolved blame from women as well as non-whites placing the blame for gun fever directly on males. The blog was an incredible bit of white guy shaming for having been published in an ostensibly serious scientific journal. It basically intimates that white guys are (1) less intelligent (2) are fraidy cats and (3) racist and that's why they are stock-piling guns, a fact that should make you very afraid. That is to be expected. It's the progressive narrative after all. The guy who suggested muzzling the media is at least closer to a method of solving the problem than the traditional hand-fluttering gun control lobby.

The truly ironic thing about the guy suggesting that media were exploiting acts of violence to get attention was that his big complaint was that he wasn't getting enough attention for his comment, especially from the conservative right. He is, in point of fact, trying to get the same kind of attention he's complaining about the media getting. He utilizes a subtle kind of bullying hoping people will pay attention. Okay, he wanted a reaction from the right? Here I go, though not in the way that he'd probably hoped as it won't get him many likes on facebook or hits on his comments on Scientific American..

First off, mass shootings and suicides cannot be solved by making more laws. Both behaviors are already against the law. No one who commits a mass shooting or kills themselves cares what the law says about it. While I myself have railed against the media for encouraging copycat behavior with their nonstop coverage (i.e. glorification) of those who kill others and/or themselves, writing laws to prevent media coverage of these events will not solve the problem. At least it won't solve the problem without causing a whole bunch of those dreaded "unintended consequences" that central planners almost always cause when they try to create top-down solutions.

As soon as you begin to restrict the freedom of the press, you set in motion some very bad things. The rights retained by the people are not permitted to be infringed by the government. These rights are, according to the Constitution, rights we hold first and foremost. The government we formed is expressly forbidden to touch those inalienable rights. Touch one right and you set a precedent to infringing them all. Remember, lawyers and judges are very big on precedents.

Here's the deal. The US murder rate is dropping steadily in the United States (Except, of course, in stronghold Democrat Party run cities), but we are told we have a "gun problem" and need to "do something about it." In other words make some more laws. But the problem is not a legal problem. It's a cultural one, a social problem and even a religious problem.

In embracing progressivism's assumptions, we've wound up in a trap of our own making. While our attention-starved commentator is right, the media does exacerbate both suicides and mass shootings, if we as Americans (especially millennial-Americans didn't feel entitled to be catered to and paid attention to by our fellow citizens, we wouldn't feel the need to shoot them in large numbers. You could have said romantic poetry in the 17th century led to more suicides. It probably did. It's likely that Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet led to more teenage suicides. The Bard went a long way toward making suicide attractive to teenaged star-crossed lovers. 

That said, this would not have been so had the cultures of the time not embraced certain foolish ideas about the relative value of emotion over reason. The old Renaissance romanticism had a pernicious effect on culture. It made us too trustful of our own emotions and far too easily swayed by emotion-based propaganda. Emotion became a tool for adjusting the beliefs of the gullible ignoramuses that make up the unwashed masses - Marx's "proletariat". So now the propagandists are suggesting that gun control laws, which make us feel good and morally superior about ourselves for supporting them, will somehow solve the mass murder and suicide problem.

It won't!  The solution to reducing mass murders and suicides is not to change people's feelings but to restore a cultural that values reason. Restoring reason to its former glory is something today's intellectuals really don't want to do though. Most of our post-modernist intelligentsia seem to firmly believe that cultural attitudes are going the right way. All is according to the progressive plan for re-inventing America. It is no surprise we've raised millions of youth to believe their feelings are of far more value than their reason. Obiwan Kenobi even told kids to "Trust your feelings, Luke!"

Perhaps if we could somehow address the cultural imperative that says your Facebook post needs to have a lot of likes lest your feelings be hurt, maybe kids wouldn't feel so deprived if they weren't the center of attention all the time. Perhaps if we created a culture where truth was valued above approval by your peers, where work yields rewards far better than just showing up for a participation trophy, then perhaps we might eventually get to the point where we have a media that values the truth above ratings.

Take the White Men story in Scientific American. The author makes this startling statement:

• A white man is three times more likely to shoot himself than a black man—while the chances that a white man will be killed by a black man are extremely slight.

Okay, let's examine that. FBI data show that while 500 black-on-white killings and 229 white-on-black killings were reported in 2015, 2,574 homicides were committed by whites against other whites, and 2,380 by blacks against blacks. Somehow the author made it look like black-on-white killings were "extremely slight". And few of us will notice this pretty heavy shading of the truth. This is truly remarkable given that more than twice as many black men shoot white men as the other way round. The author leaves out the fact that these kill rates he dismisses as "extremely light" are not adjusted for the percentage of the population represented. Black men make up less than 8% of the US population. White men make up a good 31% and total white people more than 60% if you don't count Hispanics as white, which they kind of are.

So black men murder white men at a rate of more than two to one in actual numbers while being less than 1/4 as numerous in the population as white men. The narrative our kids are getting from the media, though is that white men are cowards (that's why they have guns in the first place), that they are slaughtering black people with their nasty guns and that they are pretty much more dangerous and more stupid than anyone else, especially if they own guns.

The truth is that it's the education system that needs to be "fixed", both at home and in schools. In CS Lewis' "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", old Professor Kirk complains, "What are they teaching in schools these days?" Lewis himself pointed out the dangers of teaching young people that truth was about how they felt about it in his essay  "Men Without Chests". In looking at "modern" education Lewis complained that while the old system was a kind of propaganda, men teaching boys to be men. The new system is entirely propaganda, substituting a subjective standard of "whatever I feel about a thing" for objective reason. “Another little portion of the human heritage," says Lewis, "has been quietly taken from them (children) before they were old enough to understand.” 

If parents and educators will not teach children to think for themselves as individuals, if we role model slavish devotion to the herd in our own daily lives, we raise children to be lemmings and not American individuals. When that process becomes complete, the proletariat will become a tool for government to manipulate as it will. We will have exchanged one form of relatively ineffective mass murder for another form far more powerful and effective at slaughtering people in large numbers. Check the history of collectivist proletariats in just the past century. It's not a pretty picture. The rate of slaughter in these progressive collectivist states puts American school shooters and mass murderers in the shade. And I bet the Russians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cambodians and Venezuelans didn't think it could happen in their countries either.*

© 2018 by Tom King

* And by the way, in all those nations the media was regulated BEFORE the mass executions got to rolling along and usually after the citizenry had been disarmed.