This is U.S.
Let’s review. America is a gun maniacal society where there are few limits when it comes to getting weapons of war into the hands of citizens. America has a uniquely disturbing school shooting problem, and so far, none of those shootings, no matter how devastating, have altered the long term trajectory of selling increasingly deadly guns. We have decided as a nation that the need for these guns outweighs the cost of nearly 50,000 gun related deaths a year. The tone of our political exchanges is heated, terrible, and often violent. This starts right at the top, with regular incitements of and praise for violence against opponents, and even the making fun of victims of heinous crimes. This violent rhetoric has not abated, even as we’ve suffered a recent series of politically motivated attacks. With a focus on engagement and the bottom line, our social networks encourage divisiveness, hate, and fear of the other. It’s so bad that the hate, violent rhetoric, and dangerous conspiracy theories being directed toward our fellow Americans immediately increased after the latest political assassination; the bile spewing long before a suspect was apprehended—with everyone within thumbs-reach of a connected device weighing in on the broader meaning of one shot fired by one person before we even knew who that person was. And instead of tamping down this social networkization of American discourse, many of our virality-starved so-called leaders adopt it, bringing the often anonymous venomous hate speech once limited to the dark basement of the internet onto the floor of the Capitol. If you tasked a super-computer powered AI with developing an environment conducive to political violence, it’s hard to imagine it could do much better than American humans have done on their own. Like other acts of murder, political or otherwise, featuring a high-powered weapon shot across a school campus, the latest example is another tragic, and in some ways inevitable, chapter in one of America’s longest running stories. Because of our reaction to it, from the Oval Office to the bubbling social media cauldron of misinformed rage it mirrors, it’s also sadly predictive of more violence to come.
+ “It doesn’t know what side of the aisle you’re on or what your ideology might be, who your allies are or what your vision for the future includes. It doesn’t know what brand of media you consume or how many ardent followers you have. Political violence doesn’t know and doesn’t care about such things. Like an infectious disease, it simply – and efficiently – finds more and more victims. It isn’t picky about who they are.” Charlie Kirk’s killing is a tragic marker of the indiscriminate nature of political violence.
+ George Packer in The Atlantic: The Tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s Killing. “No one should feel anything but horror and dread at the murder of Charlie Kirk. And no one should use the killing of a man known for his defense of free speech to muzzle others or themselves from speaking the truth about the perilous state we’re in.”
+ Packer’s take makes obvious sense. Trump, unsurprisingly, has another view. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” Predictably, “Trump’s list goes back to the 2017 shooting of Steve Scalise, but omits the shootings of two Democratic legislators at their homes earlier this summer. It does not mention the 2020 attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or the brutal attack on former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022 (which Trump has used as a punch line to mock the victim).” The Atlantic (Gift Article): Trump’s Dangerous Response to the Kirk Assassination.
+ Trump Orders Flags Half-Mast for Kirk, but Didn’t for Melissa Hortman. (Gun violence is so prevalent in America, maybe we should just leave them at half-mast…)
+ Here’s the latest on the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk and the hunt for the perpetrator, from the NYT and CNN.
