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Really, is that all you take away from the article?

• vinceguidry 11y ago
  It's a political article. It exists to make a point, not to provide take-aways. You're meant to either agree with it or disagree, and share it if you agree. Whatever information that exists there is only there in service of that point, limiting it's general usefulness. I hate it when people start talking politically at me in the guise of "teaching" me something.
• BWStearns 11y ago
  Well it's also not the title of the article (maybe it was before?) so it's a fair criticism. I clicked expecting a description of the experience, or aftermath, or something. I was however pleasantly surprised to find something I did want to read, even if it wasn't what I had intended to read.
• danso 11y ago
  What else should I take away from it? The Port Arthur tragedy is something that is cited many times in this debate -- if I had never heard of it before, sure, I'd find it enlightening. But not in the way this essay simplifies things. I haven't read much deep background into Port Arthur, but I'm going to guess that it was a lot more complicated than just "Australia collectively got its shit together" in the way that the civil rights movement, or even just the successful Montgomery bus boycott was a lot more complicated and drawn-out than just, "Rosa Parks got arrested and people got mad." When meaningful change happens, it's because people get mad and focused collective action and political strategy work together to break the status quo. The author's weak rhetorical logic undermines this concept. It doesn't even make any sense when you get past the bare surface: gun rights and privacy -- as they manifest themselves in this incident -- are orthogonal issues. By going for this angle, the author's argument for data privacy is completely undermined in a case where the attackers use a bomb to perform mass murder. Whereas I would argue: data privacy is important whether or not a massacre is committed by guns or bombs. Of course the biggest flaw in the author's argument is that the FBI and Justice Department are currently under the oversight of President Obama -- I know Trump has gotten a lot of coverage lately, but he is not the president yet. President Obama has made no secret of his personal sentiment against personal firearm ownership and it was something that was a big issue in his 2008 election. Emotions are important. But if you truly want to effect change, you have to accept that things are complicated and thus, require more intellectual and personal commitment than the self-righteous sentiment "WHY ISN'T EVERYONE ELSE SEEING HOW CRAZY THIS IS?" That said, I'd be fine with the submission if it contained what the submitted title implies, "I almost died in a mass shooting". Not because I think that one survivor's experience should dominate all others based on that one personal experience (recently, an actual survivor of Columbine made news for advocating that guns should be allowed in school) but because I'm interested in hearing experiences that I have never personally experienced, and how they've led the person to think what they think