William Pitt: The Butcher's Repast

[antigop]

http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/33958-the-butcher-s-repast

The year is scant weeks from ending, and already has 355 mass shootings to its name. Moreover, that number is racially skewed and paints an incomplete picture of overall gun violence: It does not take into account most of the Black men who are being shot down weekly in smaller-scale attacks that do not make it into the tally. The number does not at all tell the whole tale. As Lois Beckett of ProPublica recently wrote, "It doesn't actually provide a clear estimate of how often the country has seen shooting rampages like the one in San Bernardino. And it obscures the broader reality of gun violence in America."

After Colorado, after San Bernadino, after all the other shootings large and comparatively small, only the wind knows what blood the remaining splinter of 2015 will seek to let.

I stake no claim to any deep wisdom regarding these matters; the Smart People on TV tend to do a sufficiently efficient job explaining away our nation's annual butcher's bill to the point that we shrug and move on whenever bodies bite the dirt, even when those bodies belong to children. There's money to be made, you see, and the business of the country is business.

I do, however, know this much. According to all available evidence, the massacre in San Bernadino was an act of ideologically inspired terrorism. Nothing about that is anything other than frightening ... but what should frighten more is the body count delivered by all the other mass shootings and massacres which have happened this year alone, delivered to the Beloved Homeland virtually every day by the idea that freedom somehow means being armed to the teeth.

[Proserpina]

1. Murder gets less attention than the weather (climate change) at grassroots and highest levels

If we were "savages", that might be reasonable. But supposedly, we aren't.