The "Imus" article (a piece I recently did on ZNet's main page) wasn't really "about Imus." Imus was just a prop (along with John Rocker, Jimmy the Greek, and Trent Lott) for a discussion about the dichotomy between level one racism and level two racism and for a related argument about how white America deepens its structural racism while (and in part by) continuing to excessively congatulate itself for mostly abandoning level one racism.

The "Imus article's" main problem is it has uncorrected errors - typos. I just don't see abrasive and one sided.

But let's just say it was a really bad article (and it was not my best at all...far from it; in fact I wish they'd take it down because of the errors). And so now here (above) is let's say (you said) a good article. Is this a contradiction? I don't think so.

I have published literally hundreds of articles. If one of the hundreds was good and one was bad, that wouldn't be confusion (being "mixed up"). It would be uneven execution and performance.

I used to play a lot of pickup basketball. One day I'd go to the Y and look like I must have played Division I college ball...the hoop was as big as a lake. I could close my eyes and bust NBA threes. The next day I'd go out and look like I couldn't make a junior high team and could barely buy a layup. Did this mean I was "mixed up?" No, just loose and in the zone on Tuesday and tight and out of the groove on Wednesday. Ask athletes - they'll tell you about it and it exists for musicians and writers and actors...you name it.

Your article about Imus was one sided and abrasive. This article is great. One of us is really mixed up.

In the 90s, toronto called for citizens to surrender any weapons, including automatic weapons; crime with automatic weapons was significantly reduced although the population grew at fast speed for past 10 years. the effect of the no-gun campaign as been countered by an influx of weapons coming from the states. http://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/050721/d050721a.htmime by http://www.toronto.ca/toronto_overview/location.htm last year Toronto has less crime by capita than neo-con copy-cat (reformists) trigger happy- cowboys from edmonton.. see gun happy cowboys: http://www.gunguys.com/?p=506

That's it, you win...you have posted the single most inspidly idiotic comment ever put up on this blog. Over roughly four years this blog has received maybe 3000 or so comments and that is the drop-dead dumbest comment of them all. You win the prize but I can't give it you because you don't have a name.

I am a high school student in northern virginia. I plan on attending virginia tech when i get out of high-school.

Allow me to ask all of you critics of the actions taken by the blacksburg police and the gun laws one thing...   A homicidial maniac is a homicial maniac, regardless of his weapon, correct?

The thing that bothers me the most is that people like you sit on your computers all day and bash the government and its laws, and the actions of the blacksburg PD, because you have nothing better to do. I consider myself a relativly liberal student, but i am disgraced by the people in our country who, in our nation and our states time of need, sit at thier computers and critcize the brave people who had to respond and live through this tragic incident. It kills me that you question the people who were brave enough to live through this and try to stop it, especially the blacksburg and campus police...

So next time, instead of bashing our country, our police, and our president, why cant you just shutup and respect that they those are thier jobs? and they had good motivation for their actions, even if they arnt apparent to us... and remeber... you arent perfect either   

 

REMEBER VT!!!!

NEVER FORGET!  

I'm glad this wasn't really political. It's important to look at whatever cultural factors may have played a part, but I think you understand that ultimately it's up to the actor to carry out horrific slaughter. Anyways, good post; my highest agreement goes to the media exploitation, which was disgusting but probably predictable.

There's nothing at all surprising about this, not the fact that it happened nor the reality entertainment programming on heavy rotation in the US. (On Dutch television Bowling for Columbine was on the day after the shooting.) Boy are CNN and the rest hoping for some copycats. Anyway, from Derrick Jensen's Endgame

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

More of the book here Keir The Hague

It got worse with the media vultures last night. NBC became complicit in the next one of these events by pasting the insane dead killer's face all over the national telescreen on and beyond the Evening News. 

The network was successfully incited to this provocation by the fact that the killer had sent them a big media kit/ package between his first killings and his second, bigger operations. The killer was self-consciously interacting with the ongoing death spectacle of dominant U.S. war, disaster, crime and entertainment media. His potential imitators took note of the whole spectacle.

Side stories briefly noted much larger body counts (as usual) in occupied Iraq, where a monumentally illegal, mass-murderous U.S. invasion has created widely predicted mayhem and simply astonishing misery.

Some more decent media coverage shows that the V.T. killer had put up all kinds of remarkable red flags.  He was basically known to be a ticking timebomb and of course he was free to go into a gun store and quickly pick up a Glock 9 mm and whole mess of ammo....to you know, fight the British in accord with his Constitutional guarantees.   

I am grateful for your contribution Grateful Ed. There are many Indian killings, generally mass shootings with higher body counts; it's not always clear exactly how many were shot, as opposed to hacked or burned to death. 

Here is a brief statement from Simon Ortiz's book-length prose poem From Sand Creek (1981), based on the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre:

"November 29, 1864: massacre: On that cold dawn, about 600 Southern cheytenne and Araphaho people, two thirds of them women and children were camped on a bend of Sand Creek in southeastern Colorado [state of Columbine].  The people were at peace...The Reverend John Chivington and his Volunteers and Fort Lyons troops, numbering more than 700 heavily armed men, slaughtered 105 women and 28 men...By mid-1865, the Chetyenne and Arapaho had been driven out of Colorado territory."

I'm going to guess that Chivington et al. shot many more than 32/33 dead but the dead are officially unworthy and hence forgotten victims in U.S. history.  

The bloody details of the August 1832 state slaughter/mass shooting of fleeing Sauks by heavily armed ground troops and also by U.S. soldiers on the riverboat Warrior (who gleefully shot Indians trying to escape by swimming the Mississippi River) are available at the local Borders or Barnes and Noble on pages 280-293 of Kerry Trask's excellent book Black Hawk: The Battle For the Heart of America (2007).  The total death and shooting count is unclear but certainly went well into the hundreds and there were numerous incidents of just straight up slaughter.

Here is a brief passage from Trask:

"Lieutenant Cooke, who felt genuine sympathy for the women and children who were gunned down [emphasis added] that day [August 2, 1832], said he hoped they were the untintended victims of random shots.  However, he quickly added, 'But it is certain that the frontiersman is not particular when his blood is up and a redskin [is] in his power.'" ....there are numerous indications that the killing of Indian women was sometimes quite cold-blooded and malicious..." [grisly details follow] (p. 285). 

Another larger mass shooting.  Of course, we are supposed to understand CNN just meant to refer to shootings conducted by one or two deranged lunatics like Charles Whitman, Kleibold and Harris and this latest guy of course but words are words and you are right Grateful. 

There are many more such incidents, well known to anyone significantly acquainted with American history. But it didn't all happen.  Later Ortiz says that "repression works like a shadow, clouding memory and sometimes even to blind, and when it is no a national scale, it is just not good" and:

"In 1864

there were no Indians killed.

Remember My Lai.

In fifty years,

nobody knew what happened."

I should add that there were great shootings and burnings (not just isolated lynchings) and even in one case a bombing of African-American populations: East St. Louis (hundreds killed in 1917) and Omaha, NE (1919, when white supremacists actually dropped some munitious from a plane on the black Omaha neighborhood). 

I once had a history student from southern Illinois who came up to me after class to say that his older relatives still referred to the East St. Louis butchery as "the great nigger kill of 1917."  This student later identified himself as "a fascist." I imagine they shot more than 32/33 in East St. Louis.

But Big Brother says it didn't really happen.

 

 

My jaw dropped right after the shooting when CNN was headlining the VT tragedy as (and I quote exactly) "The Largest Mass Shooting in American History."  

actually Paul does not say such thing.. The US and Israel dont even compare in morality to the country you have mentioned.. Take Iran as an example, even as Hussein was using chemecal weapons provided by the US ( With US intelligence drivin the bombs) the Ayatollah is reported having refused to use same.. I dont know , I aint a muslim but it does appear that the ayatollahs and mullahs of Iran are more HUMAN than their counterpart in the US and Israel.. Iranians mullah arent interested with nukes,, they arent american mass murderers.. if u pay attention.. Iran is under attack by terrorist sponsored by americans let me put it straight, you ( the US) are the problem in the ME.In my opinion every american soldier in Iraq is a war criminal and so does anyone who support this war..

Anom - are you saying that the U.S. and Israel are moral equivlants to Hamas and Hezbollah?  On grounds? Have you compared and contrasted, for example, the charters of Hamas/Hezbollah to the U.S. Constitution?

 

Why are the guns laws an issue?  Both the pro-gun lobby and anti-gun lobby use the EXACT same statistics to bolster their arguments. In otherwords, it is indeterminable if gun laws inable or prohibit gun violence. 

The VT shooter was mentally distrubed.  Should the government be so invasive as to force every prospective gun purchaser to under go therapy? 

Shouldn't you put US and Israel as terrorist nations too?
I don't think the point here is to blame some organization. The problem is that people are blind by the immediate tragedy that the initial problem (gun law) isn't fixed.

Paul, in the last two days islamofascists have killed people in both Turkey and Thailand.   We also can't forget the PLO kidnapped a British Journalist and there are reports the he has been killed.

 Will you renounce that violence?

Paul, if you won't answer Rudy, perhaps you'll answer me?  If you are against all violence, why don't you renounce all violence?  You only renounce violence that you deem to be unjustifiably created by the U.S. and Israel?  Why don't you renounce violence perpitrated by terrorist organizations like Hamas, Hezzbollah, and the PLO? 

 

Here is a link for the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. Suyi E I've been trying to set a new Guinness Book world record for Left Internet publishing but the bill collectors are not cooperating. The race/Chicago book is due out in June - that's the latest I heard.

(to Ruby) If there is one thing I agree with Bush on is that the Constitution is just a goddamn piece of parchment - one that I wasn't given the chance to chose and I probably wouldn't affirm even if I could. Rights aren't given by pieces of paper; they are struggled for and won by people in different ages and environments.

The following comments are cherry picked from the slashdot page on the VT shooting:

NB paragraphs in italics are points the poster is responding to

 

Virginia Tech not to blame

When what is believed to be a single, isolated shooting in a dorm happens on a 2600 acre public, open campus with hundreds of buildings, you can't assume that you're about to have the worst shooting incident (of any type) in US history.

Yet, people are already blaming Virginia Tech. Would we close or "lock down" a city of 40000 people if there was a shooting? Because that's exactly what a campus of this size and type is (including students and faculty/staff).

No, but people are already calling for siren/PA systems in EVERY of HUNDREDS of buildings, of varying ages and constructions, centralized door locking/control and camera systems for not just outer building doors, but ALL doors.

The University reacted in a reasonable way. Yes, a shooter was "on the loose". Someone who had shot a person in a dorm, and the University immediately sent out notifications that such an event occurred; to be cautious and aware, and to report any suspicious activity to campus police. The area was "locked down", but after over two hours elapsed, there was no reason to believe that a madman was about to go on a random killing spree across campus.

This is not an elementary school. This is not a high school. This is a massive, open research campus with tens of thousands of people spreading over 2600 acres, with private, residential, and other buildings intermixed.


The only person to be blamed here is the shooter. And yes, he's dead. But Virginia Tech is not at fault.

 

What would armed students do

He got away with it *both* times because the law emasculates the citizen from carrying a weapon at all times. If there were no restrictions on concealed carry, more people would carry. If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.

You're playing with hypotheticals here. It is certainly conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons that, when the shooting broke out, someone would have shot the nutcase. On the other hand it is conceivable that, if a large number of VT students were all carrying concealed weapons, there may have been a number of accidental or mistaken shootings at the same time.
Consider: you are carrying a concealed weapon and you hear gunfire coming from the room down the hall (or maybe from the floor below). You draw your weapon, and the next thing you know someone carrying a gun walks into the room. Is it another student from elsewhere in the building responding to the gunfire, or the nutcase? Do you shoot them before they can shoot you? Now add plenty of screaming and panic, and multiply this scenario by the number of different panicked scared students all carrying firearms.

To my mind each case (the nutcase getting shot, and a anumber of innocent students getting shot) seems equally reasonable, so given that the whole thing is purely hypothetical can you really claim, with any certainty, that lots of students carrying guns would have saved lives? I don't see that that is clear at all.

 

A bit on gun control

If the students were armed...

But what if the assailant WASN'T armed?

Maybe you shouldn't say anything until you know where he got his gun. If he bought it at K-Mart at 7AM and was shooting people at 7:30 AM, that might be a pretty strong indication that the problem here wasn't the availability of guns to the other students, the problem was the availability of guns to the assailant.

Also, it's premature to blame the law for the lack of guns in the possession of the students. Not only would the law have to be different, we would also need to know if there were any students present who would have been carrying a firearm themselves if it was legal to do so.

But, the reality of the situation is we're screwed either way:

Not all gun crime is the same. Some gun crime is impulsive - people who are impulsively violent are more destructive when they have ready access to a firearm. In these kinds of gun crimes, eliminating ready access to firearms would reduce the effects of gun crime. And some gun crime is premeditated - the criminal is going to get the gun they need to commit the crime. In that kind of crime, reducing ready access to firearms creates an opportunity for the criminal.

So you can't solve the gun problem, you can just favor one kind of gun violence over another.

 

 

p.s.

Paul, you output over the past few months has been outstanding and it's hard to keep up. Have you finished your book? When is it coming out?

ABC News has just done an hour long special called "A Killer Revealed;" it appears to have been mainly just more of the the facts, with an emphasis on the shooter himself. But it gave five minutes to the gun purchase and it was a telling five minutes. Turns out Virginia makes is just absurdly easy to buy things like Glock 9 mm pistols. Nothing but a criminal background check for a license. You show two forms of ID and you are out of the shop in "less than time than it takes to get a haircut." Turns out that NYC complains about Virginia being the main source of illegal guns tied up with shootings up there. They quoted the NYPD chief Kelly calling Virginia's gun purchase process "a disgrace" and characterized by an "air of permissiveness." He said that "we pay the price" for loose gun regulations in notoriously gun-happy Virginia. ABC interviewed a smart fellow from the Coalition to End Gun Violence who says that Virginia is a very distinctive and troubling state when it comes to guns. Apparently legislators are free to carry weapons into the state assembly (they recently had an incident when one of the legislators' guns went off by accident). The anti-gun activist has no confidence that yesterday's events will lead to reform of the state's gun laws. The NYPD went down and made an undercover film about how ridiculously easy it was to buy guns in Virginia. No wonder the Virginia Governor is so defensive about the politics of gun laws. Which is not to say that the shooter had any record to find; he appears to have been clean. The gun store owner in Roanoke is sad that he made the sale that led to 33 deaths but added that college kids (usually "upperclassman") come in often to buy things like 9mm glocks and a whole bunch of ammo. The shooter paid something like $570 for the gun and a whole bunch of ammo. God Bless America and the right to use your rapid-reload Glock to fight the British invaders, to provide food for your family (Glock 9mm's are great for killing deer and pheasants) and to defend yourself against the angry natives of the Virginia frontier (a problem for the settlers at the original Roanoke). There's a student gun club at VA Tech and of course their line is that all the students should have been armed. We should all be fully armed all the time. But where does that stop? I should get into a Bradley Fighting Vehicle and be prepared to shoot my way to the liquor store and back when I want a six pack of beer. We should be an Armed Madhouse. It's like something out of a Michael Moore movie. One quick lesson is parents beware: don't send your kids to college in Virginia. What a pointless and depressing comment, sk (below my comment in one version of this blog, above in the other) Reducing gun violence and tigtening up on gun availability are well within the sphere of reasonable human agency and policy action even here in the U.S. You misuse the phrase "existential angst" pretty badly. The "emotional energies" line is odd; the post is argued in a very logical and intellectual way even if the subject (mass murder) happens to be inherently a little, well, "emotional." And of course my post is not just an argument for domestic gun control. There's this related and relevant point about the hypocrisy of being outraged and sad about senseless slaughter at home while inflicting senseless slaughter abroad and being indifferent to the murder and mayhem (is that "emotional" too?) we inflict abroad. What do you think "the chances" are of ending that imperial violence? Greater or less than reducing gun violence at home? And if it's less, then am I supposed to stop writing about it...to cease and desist from the futile investment of "existential angst" and "emotional energy" in things we (supposedly) can't really change? Your admittedly brief argument crumbles into absurdity. Maybe this is a generational issue or something but I am intrigued by how people feel entitled to just say shit without much basis. Perhaps blogs are contributing to the decline of cultural levels...or perhaps they just reflect it, or it's both (most likely) but it's a problem. And so it goes.

Not to offend anyone, but I wonder what good can come out of liberally sharing one's existential angst-ridden thoughts whenever such slaughters take place (and I speak as someone who went to a school where the first such shooting occured and now live in a city which was home to another famous sniper, both mentioned in this clip from a famous Kubrick film). The likelihood of guns going away from life in this country is rather slim, to put it mildly, and one might be better advised to conserve one's emotional energies for more fruitful causes, and for the time being, try to avoid getting fixated on such traumas, even if such an attitude comes across as heartless to some, undoubtedly decent, people.

(Paul would you think Rudy is off his meds?)

A short update on media coverage. Tonight I watched the News Hours on PBS. Basically the first 50 minutes or so was dedicated to the Virginian Tech tragedy- as one would expect.

It seems there was nothing at all illegal about the killer's gun purchase.  He went into a Roanoke gun shop and got a Glock 9 mm, made to kill people; lots of people.  He had to wait a month to get the 22 caliber gun..no problem. He was good to go.  A teacher who read some of his school papers noted dark alienation and violence obsession and (I think) recommended counseling.  Other students in his dorm noticed his fascination with violence and his scary personality and apparently actually wondered "if he would become a school shooter some day."

And so it goes, as the late Kurt Vonnegut used to say. 

There was a little time left for Jim Lerher (sp) to mention another story - from Japan. An organized crime figure shot the Mayor of Nagasaki dead today (or yesterday) on the streets of that city, once targeted for mass murderous nuclear experimentation by the United States. It was "a rare shooting death," Lehrer added, "in a nation that bans handguns."

The Governor of Virginia today said that he has "nothing but loathing" for those who would seek to make "political" points about gun laws today.  Well, loathe me Governor --- I'll gladly receive your hatred --- but it's an issue of public morality and safety and policy and for better or worse we mediate our policy through politics. 

Not to stray too far from the gun issue, but the two hour gap between the dorm shooting and the classroom shootings is not good; the campus should have been locked down immediately - there was a cold-blooded killer on the loose.  

I saw "Rudy" on the first comment and therefore didn't read it (his pattern of clueless absurdity is just too offensive). I'll just guess that he claimed to find something anti-Semitic in my post and claimed he was in danger of being censored.  

cyrano (below)...I literally don't read "Rudy." 

rudy quote: You shutter for the Lebanese who are complicit in aiding and abeding an Islamofascist terrorist organization that starting a war, but you shed no tears for the Jews who are victims of that war simply because they are Jewish? (Read Hezbollah's charter to find out the depths of their hatred.) You shed a tear for the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but again ignore their role in the Japanese Empire which stood for everything you proport to be against (except the U.S.). Please Rudy show me where youve seen Paul Street writings that he support islamofascist ( if that exist) or show me how you come to conclusion that Street does not care for Jews..

At the risk of my post being deleted, yes Paul, it would be nice if we chose doves over vultures. Unfortunately, I doubt your sincerity. You shutter for the Lebanese who are complicit in aiding and abeding an Islamofascist terrorist organization that starting a war, but you shed no tears for the Jews who are victims of that war simply because they are Jewish? (Read Hezbollah's charter to find out the depths of their hatred.) You shed a tear for the Japanese in Hiroshima and Nagasaki but again ignore their role in the Japanese Empire which stood for everything you proport to be against (except the U.S.). While the VT incident is truely a tragedy, the fact is, the right to bare arms is a CIVIL RIGHT as laid out in our Constitution. We don't know what was going through the VT murder's mind. If he was intent on killing as many people as he wanted, he could have used molitov cocktails. Do we then outlaw bottles and rags? By advocating a government that outlaws essentially everything that can harm, you are advocating a Big Brother form of government, and despite our differences, I don't think you want that either.