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I am not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that it was actually journalists that were running around shooting the kids, and not kids wanting to t

I am not sure I understand your argument. Are you saying that it was actually journalists that were running around shooting the kids, and not kids wanting to take revenge with guns they had easy access to? And that without easy access to guns the kinds would have killed the same number of people with, say, a kitchen knife? Really?

mindslight 6y ago
It seems like you willfully misunderstood my argument, as talking about journalists shooting kids is some obvious caricature. Society is held together by people's values and individual adherence to shared rules - aka culture. Kids, like everyone else (eg cops), are acting out cultural norms, being mostly defined by mass media. Entertainment media mostly consists of easy-to-write fight scenes where the main characters dispose of some endless supply of nameless "bad guys". A few hits or shots, that one is gone, move on to the next one. No scenes showing henchman #17 hugging his kids goodbye that morning, or henchman #31's parents grieving. Just purely transactional force-of-will violence - sound familiar? Furthermore, news media then glorifies shooting events when they do happen, showering the perpetrator with attention and making sure they go down in infamy - it's actually a quite precocious way to get one's 15 minutes of fame. And of course there's that other uncomfortable issue of why school environments cause kids to want to kill their peers in the first place! But there's no straightforward approaches to those, and they're held in place by entrenched incentives (lazy writing, clickbait advertising, ass-covering school administrators), while the people speaking up for the inanimate objects are easy to write off.
- mbrodersen 6y ago
  Most rich western countries don’t have mass shootings in schools. Even though the media you describe is the same. So obviously the media is not the reason why. So what is the difference then? It’s simple: kids in the US have easy access to guns. Not so in other rich western countries. If kids in other rich countries had easy access to guns, there would be school shootings there as well.

mindslight 6y ago

It seems like you willfully misunderstood my argument, as talking about journalists shooting kids is some obvious caricature. Society is held together by people's values and individual adherence to shared rules - aka culture. Kids, like everyone else (eg cops), are acting out cultural norms, being mostly defined by mass media. Entertainment media mostly consists of easy-to-write fight scenes where the main characters dispose of some endless supply of nameless "bad guys". A few hits or shots, that one is gone, move on to the next one. No scenes showing henchman #17 hugging his kids goodbye that morning, or henchman #31's parents grieving. Just purely transactional force-of-will violence - sound familiar? Furthermore, news media then glorifies shooting events when they do happen, showering the perpetrator with attention and making sure they go down in infamy - it's actually a quite precocious way to get one's 15 minutes of fame. And of course there's that other uncomfortable issue of why school environments cause kids to want to kill their peers in the first place! But there's no straightforward approaches to those, and they're held in place by entrenched incentives (lazy writing, clickbait advertising, ass-covering school administrators), while the people speaking up for the inanimate objects are easy to write off.

mbrodersen 6y ago
Most rich western countries don’t have mass shootings in schools. Even though the media you describe is the same. So obviously the media is not the reason why. So what is the difference then? It’s simple: kids in the US have easy access to guns. Not so in other rich western countries. If kids in other rich countries had easy access to guns, there would be school shootings there as well.