Mass shootings and intellectual dishonesty

There is an uncomfortable proximity between tragedy, and pseudo-intellectuals taking to Twitter to cite said-tragedy as proof of whatever political/social views they hold. On Saturday we saw one such tragedy— the killing of six people in Isla Vista, California by a young man who won’t be named—and we didn’t have to wait long for the ideologues to start tweeting.

Excessive coverage of these kinds of mass killings has become a staple of the opportunist 24-hour news cycle—which always takes the chance to profit from tragedy (see: CNN’s coverage of the missing Malaysian airliner). And when something becomes so forcefully prevalent in the cultural consciousness, the narcissists of the various social media outlets take the opportunity to stand atop their tiny soapboxes and manage to make something so terrible somehow about themselves.

Mass killings are not a new phenomenon in the United States, nor are they prevalent or on the rise. We are an unusually violent country when compared to other developed nations, but mass murderers are not “running rampant” as the media would have you believe. They are mathematical anomalies, and to depict them as anything more is simply fear mongering.

So why is it that people continue to bring up the same issues over and over when such a tragedy does strike? The same reason CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC cover it for days on end: eyeballs. Connecting such a widely discussed event to your unrelated political views instantly makes them far more relevant to the mouth-breathing majority of the Internet.

Individuals of all persuasions are guilty of using mass shootings to espouse their political views. The repeat offenders are Gun Control advocates and 2nd Amendment activists. You’ll see statements like, “if only we had pushed harder for reform, those people would still be alive” from the former camp. They believe that more stringent gun control would’ve stop what happened on Saturday. The fact of the matter, however, is that there are no statistics linking fewer guns with less crime. We can look at countries like England with a universal gun ban, and Switzerland where guns are widely available; both have very low murder rates compared to the United States, and it has nothing to do with the availability of firearms. Whether a legal gun is available to a murderer or not is irrelevant. If someone wants to kill, they will find a way to acquire weapons (legal or not), regardless of legislation. From the 2nd Amendment advocates you’ll likely hear, “if the victims had all been armed, they would have been able to defend themselves”. While it is probably true that an active shooter would be brought down earlier with more people armed, that doesn’t mean less bloodshed. Simply possessing a firearm does not make you psychologically ready to deal with this kind of an individual. More guns would simply change this from a massacre to the shootout at the OK corral. Both arguments are basically outside of reality, and I have to believe that theses people know this and are simply being intellectually dishonest in order to push their agendas.

Another line of argument that rises after these horrific events is “violence in [insert artform here] is to blame”. Again, I have never seen—nor will I ever see—evidence linking violence in art to violence in the real world. If anything, I see violent art as an outlet more then an inspiration. Grand Theft Auto may be frightening for those who didn’t grow up with video games, but I see it as a platform for troubled individuals to take out their aggression. You may point to the shooter at the Aurora movie theater (who claimed the Joker from The Dark Knight was his inspiration) as evidence that stories do—in fact—inspire acts of mass murder, but this ignores the most essential aspect of these kinds of tragedies: the fact that the perpetrators are always mentally ill.

These individuals develop hatred for the world because it constantly contradicts the reality that is in their minds. The people in their life are saying and doing things that don’t make any sense to their brains, and this causes a great amount of frustration. They will grasp at anything—be that art, or injustices they perceive to have been perpetrated against them—to justify expressly evil acts. In the Aurora shooter’s case, it was a fictional villain. In the case of the Isla Vista shooter, it was the women he had encountered in his life.

The most vocal group on Twitter I’ve seen after this most recent shooting has been feminists because, as I said, the shooter blamed women for his woes. He says some pretty disturbing things about women in his manifesto—mostly regarding his belief that it was his right as a man to sleep with a woman, and that he had been denied that right. These beliefs, however, stem from his inability to properly interact socially with other people. He cites casual situations that all men have been through where a woman is simply not interested, but (in his twisted mind) he saw it as a denial of some God-given right. The feminists have used the logic in his manifesto as evidence of some wider belief held by men in general, but what they forget is that this young man does not represent anyone but himself. He developed these views about women because of the specific way he internalized “rejection”. Those views do not stem from any outside source, and if he had claimed they did, it would simply be to further justify a view he had developed individually in his own deranged mind (just as the Aurora shooter did). To claim that society at large is responsible for the actions of the mentally ill is simply put—crazy.

I’m not trying to say people shouldn’t talk about the political issues they are passionate about in the wake of mass shootings, but I am saying that using that tragedy as evidence of the validity of your views is anti-intellectual. These individuals act without reason, and because of this, cannot be analyzed with reason. If you would like to present an argument with sound logic, and statistics to back it up…by all means. But if you just want to play to the emotions of the day, and preen about the views you hold, then I would ask that you keep it to 140 characters.