Violent Support of Pacifism and other Contradictions

OP-ED COLUMNIST

A Flood Tide of Murder

By BOB HERBERT

Published: January 10, 2011

By all means, condemn the hateful rhetoric that has poured so much poison into our political discourse.

Thanks for your permission. I was, of course, waiting for approval from the Times’ editorial page to condemn a shooting rampage.

The crazies don’t kill in a vacuum,

Actually, the detachment from reality is a large part of what defines “the crazies,” This necessarily means that they are immune to the intervening sanity of a functional interaction with the world. Which is to say, “The crazies do kill in a vacuum.”

and the vilest of our political leaders and commentators

Frank Rich? Count it!

deserve to be called to account for their demagoguery and the danger that comes with it.

Very well, and in all seriousness: Mr. Herbert, your constant fearmongering and deplorable exploitation of a tragedy to advance an agenda that impinges upon the personal freedoms of American citizens is deplorable. Your shrieks of outrage are hollow; your anger is transparent.  Your ability to look beyond the sins of your political compatriots and willingness to ignore the well-documented reflex for vitriol of the left is beyond disingenuous. What’s more, you are a vigorous contributor to the culture you claim to disown. You are an integral part of the mechanism you condemn. You do not have the moral authority to lecture me or any of us.  

But that’s the easy part.

Given the verbal contortions of the left-wing associations between Laughner and the right, it doesn’t seem to be very easy at all.

If we want to reverse the flood tide of killing in this country, we’ll have to do a hell of a lot more than bad-mouth a few sorry politicians and lame-brained talking heads.

In other words, the people that you obsess over (“sorry politicians”) and the people that you desperately aspire to be (“lame-brained talking heads”) are irrelevant? What does that make you, Bob Herbert?

We need to face up to the fact that this is an insanely

Insanely. Where does that fall on the scale of text-message worthy adjectives from “for serious” to “OMG Becky!!!1!!”?

violent society.

Compared to what other societies? We haven’t started a World War, much less two, so you can knock off the Central Europeans and probably Japan. There has never been a genocide on American soil, so the Russians, Chinese, and most of the southeast asian countries aren’t really competitive. Africa has been a combat zone for 20 years, so we’re good there. India has massive problems with social cohesion that often results in violence, not to mention the ongoing spat with Pakistan. The middle east engages in ritualistic murder on a daily basis. Race riots in Parisian suburbs, IRA firebombings, Basque separatists. Columbian drug cartels. Mexican drug cartels. Venezuelan totalitarian thuggery. Canadian…hockey.

America’s good, thank you.

Still, let’s count the buzzwords:

The vitriol

Buzz.

that has become an integral part of our political rhetoric,

Buzz.

most egregiously from the right, is just one of the myriad

Buzz.

contributing factors

Buzz.

in a society saturated in blood.

Not a buzzword. Just hyperbolically gruesome imagery

According to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence,

There’s no one more reliable for statistical surveys than partisan political lobbyists opposed to the Constitution. We all still hate lobbyists, right? Trick question. Apparently we’re not allowed to hate anyone because hate kills puppies and nonpartisan politicians who aren’t actually dead. To be clear, I’m only mocking the posthumous glorification with which the media has adorned this congresswoman—never mind that she’s still breathing!

more than a million people have been killed with guns in the United States since 1968, when Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were killed.

Oh good. I was worried that it was an arbitrary date without any real significance. Can you tell me how many people have died baseball bat-related violence since Jackie Robinson signed with the Dodgers?

That figure includes suicides and accidental deaths. But homicides, deliberate killings, are a perennial scourge, and not just with guns.

A well regulated and well fed Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear cutlery shall not be infringed.

Excluding the people killed in the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,

Why exclude these victims unless you’re arguing that 9/11 was not emblematic of our culture, but of another culture. I’ll give you a hint: they yell “Allah akbar” before killing people.

more than 150,000 Americans have been murdered since the beginning of the 21st century.

13,636 per year. In a country of 300,000,000 people, that is a rate of .0045% for everything ranging from suicides to homicides (with various degrees of accidents in between). The statistics are not in Mr. Herbert’s favor.

This endlessly proliferating parade of death, which does not spare women or children,

Actually, considering that the statistics would take into account child-on-child and woman-on-woman crime, I suggest that we fervently reproach them for their roles in this. Especially the children.

ought to make our knees go weak.

You’re confusing gun violence with Justin Beiber again.

But we never even notice most of the killings. Homicide is white noise in this society.

Homicide is white noise in every society, except societies with primitive news-distribution mechanisms were homicide isn’t noise at all.

The overwhelming majority of the people who claim to be so outraged by last weekend’s shooting of Representative Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others — six of them fatally — will take absolutely no steps, none whatsoever, to prevent a similar tragedy in the future.

That’s because most Americans reflexively understand that the steps that are proposed to “prevent a similar tragedy” are almost always counter-productive and necessarily infringe upon our deeply cherished liberties. I guarantee that before this column is finished, Bob Herbert will advocate impinging upon the Bill of Rights.

And similar tragedies are coming as surely as the sun makes its daily appearance over the eastern horizon because this is an American ritual: the mowing down of the innocents.

Get off your damn high horse and stop trying to project the sins of one deranged lunatics onto our entire society. I don’t blame you for Krugman’s meandering gibberish.

On Saturday, the victims happened to be a respected congresswoman, a 9-year-old girl, a federal judge and a number of others gathered at the kind of civic event that is supposed to define a successful democracy. But there are endless horror stories. In April 2007, 32 students and faculty members at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute were shot to death and 17 others were wounded by a student armed with a pair of semiautomatic weapons.

On a cold, rainy afternoon in Pittsburgh in 2009, I came upon a gray-haired woman shivering on a stone step in a residential neighborhood. “I’m the grandmother of the kid that killed those cops,” she whispered. Three police officers had been shot and killed by her 22-year-old grandson, who was armed with a variety of weapons, including an AK-47 assault rifle.

Sad, but irrelevant. What’s more, the motivations of the shooters in each instance was wildly different. This is why conservatives advocate harsher prison sentences including the death penalty. Punishment is a deterrent to all freedom-loving, prisonrape-fearing would-be assailants.

I remember having lunch with Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, a few days after the Virginia Tech tragedy. She shook her head at the senseless loss of so many students and teachers, then told me: “We’re losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days.”

Not to pull out the statistical card, but the Virginia Tech shootings were included in that total, so statistically, one bad day at Virginia Tech meant about three other violence-free days…or at least diminished violence spread out over the rest of the year. Just saying.

If we were serious, if we really wanted to cut down on the killings, we’d have to do two things. We’d have to radically restrict the availability of guns

By which you mean “circumvent the Second Amendment.”

while at the same time beginning the very hard work of trying to change a culture that glorifies and embraces violence as entertainment,

By which you mean “circumvent the First Amendment.”

and views violence as an appropriate and effective response to the things that bother us.

By which you mean disowning a fifty-year legacy of violent civil disobedience faithfully cultivated by the left? Please.

Ordinary citizens interested in a more sane

FYI: more sane = saner.

and civilized society would have to insist that their elected representatives take meaningful steps to stem the violence.

Still no mention of prison sentencing?

And they would have to demand, as well, that the government bring an end to the wars overseas,

Oh that’s relevant. Should we also surrender in the “War on Poverty?”

with their terrible human toll, because the wars are part of the same crippling pathology.

The courage to take a stand for virtue? That’s not crippling. That’s liberating. What we need is not regulation; it’s freedom.

Without those very tough steps, the murder of the innocents by the tens of thousands will most assuredly continue.

Even with those steps, the murder of the innocents by the tens of thousands will continue. Outlawing guns is not productive. The surprising part of this story is not that the gunman had a gun—he would have found one regardless—it is that no one else did. Even in Arizona, with its relatively lax conceal carry laws, apparently not one of the bystanders was armed. That was probably because this was a meeting for liberal Democrats who think like Bob Herbert, but it’s difficult to believe that the body could would have been as high had someone in the crowd been armed.

I wouldn’t hold my breath. The Gabrielle Giffords story is big for the time being, but so were Columbine and Oklahoma City.

Both related only in that they were big stories.

And so was the anti-white killing spree of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo that took 10 lives in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C., in October 2002. But no amount of killing has prompted any real remedial action.

True. A liberal’s disdain for harsh prison sentences never dies.

For whatever reasons, neither the public nor the politicians seem to really care how many Americans are murdered — unless it’s in a terror attack by foreigners.

Is this an argument that we should care less when we are attacked by foreigners? And they wonder why the American people still don’t trust them to keep the country safe.

The two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are to ignore it or be entertained by it.

Really? I assume that you can back that up. I contend that the two most common responses to violence in the U.S. are grief and anger. Both are productive.

The horror prompted by the attack in Tucson on Saturday will pass. The outrage will fade. The murders will continue.

Thanks a lot, Nostradamus. Really? Murders will continue? And here I was hoping that we were ushering in the Minority Report dystopia of “thought crimes.”

Gabrielle Giffords and the others killed and injured in this shooting are tragic figures. Our condolences to their friends and families are heartfelt and sincere. But that doesn’t mean that we’re going to cede our God-given liberties to sniveling cretins shouting “it’s society’s fault.”

We have guns for security, for sport, and for our livelihoods. We have guns. That is non-negotiable.