First, why do you pick the Obama care shooter freakoutery, rather than all those white supremacists being fed their clickbait freakoutery, which greatly outnumbers this guy?
It was an April 2018 article, first off. But secondly, other media outlets are doing a great job highlighting those. It’s important for everyone to remember that this crap is going on all across political and racial boundaries.
There’s a huge trend on Medium, for instance, to claim that mass shooting is explicitly a white thing. It’s not. It’s distributed across race in about the same way that our population is distributed. But that doesn’t get the clicks.
Second, here’s your distinction. You’re concerned about male suicide, which is one issue with policy implications, and seem to be irritated that people who are concerned about “violent boundary cases” like mass school shootings are urging action to stop that. So elsewhere you work to dismiss those “violent boundary cases”, and yet here you are, decrying it.
That is an interesting and nuanced observation! Yes, you’re correct, I dismiss the current level of mass shootings, but I worry about them becoming a bigger problem. Here’s why I worry:
Check the polling data in that article, and look how it’s changing. At some point the thing may very well flip to widespread violence, not isolated cases. Only 1% of the people in Syria are combatants, and they destroyed an entire country in their war. Right now we are very safe. We need to be concerned that that could change.
Ask yourself two questions:
What happens if Trump wins again?
What happens if Trump loses?
Either of those cases seem to me like they’re going to drive one segment of the country insane. 12% of our presidents have been shot, statistically speaking. It’s a very dangerous job, because assassinating our leaders is a time honored American tradition. It almost seems to me as if whoever wins is going to get shot. And then what? That could very well be a flash point for very bad things.
I’m glad you mentioned toxic masculinity as part of the problem. You’re missing a lack of basic income — we do need some way to take the edge off these media business models. Everyone’s desperate for income and devalued by the economy unless they’re pushing something. Fix that, and so many of these other problems are greatly weakened.
I agree, but I don’t have a good fix. This whole thing is fundamentally a media business model flaw. In free markets, you can only fix broken business models by replacing them with better models in the marketplace, that then overtake the broken ones. I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. Got any ideas?
On “basic income” specifically, I don’t think this helps ameliorate the media freakout engine. But I quite honestly think there’s a pretty good case to be made that part of the overall drop in homicide since the 1990s is the promulgation of welfare. Red tribers like to moan and groan about welfare queens with big screen TVs and XBoxes, but I wonder how many people who would have ended up criminals back in the 90s are simply finding it easier to eat Doritos, smoke weed, and play GTA. Maybe there’s an ROI to welfare nobody’s discussing — that we don’t have to pay as high a societal premium in crime.
That’s an article I’d love to write, but I have no idea where to begin with the math on it, and I wouldn’t want to write it unless I got the math right. Ideas there are welcome as well.
