XPost: talk.politics.guns, talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.media
XPost: tn.general

On 09 Apr 2023, Michael Ejercito <MEjercit@HotMail.com> posted some news:u0unov$1pavn$1@dont-email.me:

https://ethicsalarms.com/2023/04/09/the-sandy-hook-ethics-train-wreck-j umps-the-rails-in-tennessee/

APRIL 9, 2023 / JACK MARSHALL

It’s understandable that people of good will lose their minds,
perspective and good judgment over the emotion-packed problem of
school shootings, but someone has to stay rational and ethical. It
might as well be me.

There are three major public affairs sagas currently occupying the
media’s efforts and the public’s mayfly-like attention: Donald
Trump’s indictment, Clarence Thomas’s betrayal of his sacred
obligation as a Supreme Court justice, and the messy aftermath of the
latest school shooting, this one by a transsexual with a history of
mental health issues. The first is the culmination of one of our most
long and continually-running ethics train wrecks. The second is a
dangerous, Titanic-leval gash in the side of an American institution
crucial to the survival of our democracy. The third is arguably more
noise and angst than substance, but a more spectacular example of the
ethics train wreck phenomenon that either of the other two. As the
genre requires, everyone boarding the thing is acting unethically,
including the journalists covering it.

I am going to, for once, only lightly touch on the mainstream
media’s unethical handling of the shooting and the reactions to it
by pointing out this: The New York Post’s Alexandra Steigrad
reported last week that CBS News ordered its staffers to avoid “any mention” that Tennessee school shooter Audrey Hale was a transgender individual. The apparent theory is that doing so will undermine the
cause of transgender activists, so the news must be scrubbed to
advance the greater good, or something.

Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!

After the tragedy, the mindless took over. There has been a powerful, passionate anti-gun movement in the U.S. for as long as I can
remember. When I was a child, it was handguns that the activists
wanted to ban. Now it is semi-automatic weapons. The immovable object
then and now was the Second Amendment; it just isn’t going anywhere,
and that increasingly drives gun-haters crazy with frustration, as
banging one’s head against a steel wall will do. This became a
full-fledged ethics train wreck in 2012, when a mentally-ill 20
year-old man, Adam Lanza, stole his mother’s guns and attacked the
Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, murdering 26
people, twenty of them children between six and seven years old. It
was a previously unimaginable act of pure evil, and it propelled the
anti-gun crusade into hyperdrive by adding the pure emotion of the
“Think of the children!” rationalization (#58) to what was already
a witches brew of propaganda, bad facts, bad civic literacy,
historical and cultural ignorance, hysteria, incompetent ethical
analysis and cynical partisan exploitation. In the intervening 20
years, every active shooter on a college campus or in a school has set
off another intense outburst of the vile “Second amendment
supporters care more about guns than the lives of our children!”
mantra. (more about that shortly.)

On March 30, Democratic state representatives Justin Jones, Justin
Pearson and Gloria Johnson joined demonstrators in the statehouse who disrupted the legislature with a boisterous protest to demand
“stricter gun control laws,” despite there being no evidence at
all that any such measures would have prevented Hale’s rampage. The
three House members assisted in the disruption in the chamber, even
leading chants of the ever-popular “No Justice, No Peace!” through
a bullhorn. Jones held up fatuous a sign that read “Protect kids,
not guns.”

***

Ethics Check #1: The behavior of the three (Democratic, of course)
state reps was indefensible. No one has explained why Republican
members of Congress who supported the January 6 protest against what
many believed was a rigged election were threatened by Democrats with
a Constitutional ban from running for office as punishment, but the
Tennessee legislators who actually participated in disrupting the
government were pronounced by the same news media and party that
condemned the Republicans as heroes. This is because it can’t be
explained: it’s mind-blowing hypocrisy and a flaming double
standard. What the Tennessee Democrats did was clearly worse: no
Republicans too part in the January 6 attack on the Capital? No riot
in Nashville, you say? That’s because, and only because, of moral
luck. Police did not try to force the Nashville demonstrators to leave
and didn’t have the numbers to even try. The anti-gun protesters, as
you might expect, did not have a contingent of wackos prone to
violence, though they might have. The news media’s near unanimous
position is that people disrupting a Republican-run legislature in the
midst of doing government business is admirable, but disrupting a Democratic-run Congress is an “insurrection.”

***

The Republican leadership stripped Jones and Johnson of their
committee assignments after the disruption. Pearson avoided their fate
by not serving on a committee. Republicans then filed a resolution to
expel the three Democrats from their seats in the state legislature
for “disorderly behavior” and bringing “disorder and dishonor to
the House of Representatives through their individual and collective actions.” Jones and Pearson, both black and now being lionized as
“The Justins” were expelled by House Republicans, who hold a super-majority. Johnson, who is white, avoided their fate by a single
vote. ***

Ethics Check #2: What the three Democrats did would lead to being
summarily fired in any other organizational context. If, just to pick
a hypothetical out of the air, Clarence Thomas joined a protest in the Supreme Court during oral argument of the same sex marriage case,
using a bullhorn to join protesters who had stormed the chamber,
impeachment would not be an excessive consequence. The expulsion is
being reported as “an attack on democracy,” which is Bizarro World
logic: it was the three legislators who actually disrupted democracy, “demanding” action that in government that functions by voting, negotiation, and due process.

***

Ethics Check #3: However, using the most severe punishment, while justifiable, was spectacularly incompetent, and thus unethical. Not
only that, letting the white, female legislator escape with a lesser
penalty neatly handed the race card to the party most fond of playing
it. Of course, they did play it immediately. The Tennessee Republicans
are morons.

***

Meanwhile, as has happened with every mass shooting over the last 20
years, the empty cries to “do something” echo across thee land. My favorite so far is the New York Times op-ed yesterday by Country music musician Keith Secor titled, “Country Music Can Lead America Out of
Its Obsession With Guns.”

***

Ethics Check #4: Read it if you want your brain to fall out of your
skull. The headline itself disqualified the column: America has no “obsession”‘ with guns: anti-gun zealots have the obsession with
guns. America’s “obsession,” as in “recognizing a cornerstone
of our national experiment in democracy,” is with individual
liberty, in which the right to self-protection is crucial and
indispensable.

Secor says he “now believes that country music has a unique
opportunity to shepherd conservative Southerners, a demographic
essential to the passage of any meaningful legislation, to the table
to negotiate gun reform.” (Sure.) Typically, he shows no sense of
what “meaningful legislation” or “gun reform” would be; these
are just place-holders for “do something.” More highlights:

“Earlier that day at Episcopal School, both of my kids had
experienced their first active shooter-training drill. My daughter
complained to me that she’d gotten an unlucky position at the desk
her teacher instructed them to crawl behind. “If there had been a
shooter, I probably would have gotten shot,” she said with a nervous laugh.”

The anti-gun propagandists along with the mainstream media are 100% responsible for scaring our children into clinical depression. The
chances that a kid will get terminal cancer, drown in a community pool
or be killed by his parents are far more likely than than the risk of
being killed by a mass school shooter, but the “Our kids don’t
feel safe!” trope is standard equipment in the anti-gun
disinformation campaign.

Now that the tragedy of school gun violence has come to Nashville, our
city is poised to help lead the nation toward effective regulations
such as red-flag and safe-storage laws, a ban on military-grade
weapons, stricter background checks and the repeal of permitless carry
laws.

None of which would have prevented the Nashville shooting. Red flag
laws are unconstitutional, and should be: they are pre-crime measures
that remove an individual’s constitutional rights through
speculation and discrimination. Criminals and madmen are not going to
be deterred by the repeal of permitless carry laws, and Secor marks
himself as a deceitful messenger by using the term “military-grade weapons.” Safe-storage laws are a good idea, as are strict penalties
for parents who let their children get a hold of their guns. If the
anti-gun lobby would restrict itself to that, I doubt even the NRA
would object too strongly. But those measures wouldn’t have stopped
the Nashville shooter, or the massacre in Uvalde either.

The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck will apparently roll on forever.

Shoot the protesters and it will stop.

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