National Rifle Association

ShOts FiReD

Posted on December 12, 2019December 11, 2019 by kathiemm

by Bruce Gale

“All units! Active shooter! Repeat, active shooter.”

“Multiple casualties.”

“At the Mall. Movie Theater. Concert Hall. Club. School. Campus. Church. Temple. Mosque. Office. Street. Home.

“Thou shalt not…”

Disconnect.

Finger on the trigger.

Lock and load.

30 round magazine.

Muzzle velocity.

Rounds per minute.

Feet per second.

I-m-p-a-c-t!!

Bullet loves flesh.

Reload.

Finger on the trigger.

Terror. Panic. Cold sweat. Adrenaline rush.

“Never been so scared in my life”

“He just stood there, gunning people down like they were nothing.”

Finger on the trigger.

Thunder of weapon’s firing.

Screams!

Overload.

Stink of cordite.

Clatter of brass casings.

SCREAMS!

Breakdown.

Finger on the trigger.

Bullet chant.

“Wound. Wound. Maim. Maim. Kill. Kill. Kill.”

BLOOD.

“So-much-blood!”

Bullets are blind! Every body’s a target.

BLOOD spatters…

Flows…

Stains…

Pools…

Heart… ~~flat line.~~

“She was just a kid!

“They were the nicest couple.”

“He’d just returned from Afghanistan.”

“Just graduated. Started a new job. Got engaged. Retired.”

“Our thoughts and prayers…”

“Guns don’t kill people…”

“Oh, say can you see…”

Let’s agree to take the Blue field and White stars from our flag. America’s new colors are Red, Red and Red. Land of the traumatized. Home of the blood stained.

Body count…rising.

One thing is certain. If America, in all its glorious imperfections, can deal out senseless, random death, it will. How many movie posters have you seen with the hero/villain pointing a weapon at the viewer? Why do we still believe that this won’t affect the impressionable low frequency mind?

Death toll…climbing.

Lives lost. Souls in the afterlife saying, “Oh, really… you, too?!”

Question: why? Oh, why, why, why? God help us.

At the end of the day, we process the event, count the cost, treat the wounds, bury the dead. Pray that this will not happen again.

And listen shamefaced while our enemies celebrate.

~The End~

Speaking of epidemics and the need for cures

Posted on December 18, 2017January 5, 2018 by kathiemm

by Kathie MM

Racialopathy and ethnicopathy are intimately related to another form of social pathology —addiction to guns — a topic regularly addressed on Engaging Peace (2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, and 2017).

A must-read article by David S. Bernstein in the Atlantic argues that despite media furor over mass shootings, “Americans Don’t Really Understand Gun Violence.”

Why? Because they focus only on fatal gun violence — the tip of an enormous, bloody iceberg of untold pain and suffering for victims of nonfatal violence and their families.

Although estimates suggest over a million survivors of gun violence in the US today, “nobody really knows how often people are shot by their intimate partners, how many victims are intended targets or bystanders, how many shootings are in self-defense, how such incidents affect community investment and property values, or how much it costs taxpayers to care for victims.”

Ignorance includes assumptions that nonfatal shootings are generally confined to African American neighborhoods; however, data show that from 2001 to 2013, “nonfatal-assault victimization rates declined among African Americans and increased significantly for whites.”

The reasons we know so little about nonfatal gun violence are largely politically based. For example, in 1996, Congress passed the Dickey Amendment “which, along with accompanying budget cuts to the CDC, effectively took the federal government out of the business of funding gun research. Though it was ostensibly designed to prevent federal backing of biased anti-gun propaganda, the National Rifle Association-backed law has had a huge chilling effect.…”

If we want to reduce the epidemic of gun violence, we need more information about it. Speak out against the suppression of information and in favor of research.For motivation, see this video.

Remember what they do

Posted on February 20, 2017 by kathiemm

New Orleans march against violent crime in response to multiple recent murders. Marching to City Hall from Poydras Street. the GNU Free Documentation License. Author: Infrogmation.

by Sarah Mensch

Every day, 93 Americans are killed by gun violence. I am twenty-one years old. In my lifetime, more than 630,000 people have been killed by guns in the United States.

That many victims, many of them children, could fill NRG Stadium, where this year’s Super Bowl was held, about ten times.

In 1996, Congress eliminated $2.6 million from the budget of the Centers for Disease Control. That money was restored, but only with the stipulation that neither it, nor any other funding to the CDC, be used for research on gun violence and its effect on the American public. This makes obtaining reliable gun violence statistics difficult. Given the political power of the National Rifle Association, passing gun control legislation is even more difficult.

Earlier today Kathie Malley Morrison asked me if I personally knew any victims of gun violence. At first, I described myself as “one degree of separation” from several gun violence victims, but then remembered a former camp counselor of mine who was killed in late 2006. Kathie told me that years ago one of the girls who grew up in her small town neighborhood was shot and killed by her husband in front of their two small children.

With an average of 30,000 people killed by guns in the US each year, I think it would be hard to find someone who was more than one degree of separation from a victim of some sort of gun violence. Yet most people do absolutely nothing to prevent this violence.

The available gun violence statistics are dismal, to say the least. Americans are 20 times more likely to be killed by a gun than people in other developed nations. In 2016 alone, there were 58,205 instances of gun violence in the U.S. and there is no real end in sight—despite all the violence, 45% of Americans believe that Americans are safer with more guns rather than fewer.

Resolving to end gun violence in a country where the media flaunt and profit from portrayals of violence isn’t easy, but I want to suggest two ways readers of this article can help.

Make a donation to Everytown For Gun Safety, a nonprofit gun safety advocacy group. Donations are tax-deductible. If you don’t want to contribute financially, consider signing up for Everytown’s mobile list of Gun Sense Activists for texts with ways to help make your community safer.
When you hear about upcoming gun control legislation, go to this site to find out how to contact your state’s senators and representatives and tell them how you think they should vote. You’re their elector, which means you’re their boss. If calling your representative sounds intimidating, check out this comic for some easy guidelines for doing so .

Sarah Mensch is a psychology major at Boston University. She is thrilled to be working on a Directed Study focusing on the effect of the media on gun violence under the supervision of Dr. Malley Morrison. When Sarah graduates, she aims to go on to graduate school to earn an MSW and become a therapist. In her spare time, Sarah enjoys pursuing her minor in Deaf Studies, photography, and exploring Boston.

Shooting down morality: a picnic for the gun industry. Part 1.

Posted on February 12, 2016March 11, 2021 by kathiemm

In his new book, Moral Disengagement: How people do harm and live with themselves, psychologist Albert Bandura does a masterful job of showing how, for example, the National Rifle Association (NRA) promotes moral disengagement to promote arms sales at all costs.

For example, leaders of the NRA have offered moral justifications (or at least pseudo-moral justifications) for unlimited arms sales, asserting, for example, that if the German people had been armed during the Holocaust, “we wouldn’t have had the tragedy we had there.”

NRA spokespeople also make generous use of euphemistic labeling to sanitize the activities of the gun industry—essentially equating guns with free speech, and portraying gun laws as a form of governmental gag order.

The NRA leadership also make ample use of the moral disengagement process of advantageous comparison, suggesting that if it was not immoral for people at Honeywell to make nuclear weapons components, then there certainly can’t be anything wrong with making and selling guns. Charlton Heston, former president of the NRA, invoked the Nazi persecution of Jews as a rationale for buying arms.

Another moral disengagement mechanism that Bandura identifies in the NRA arsenal is diffusion and displacement of responsibility. How could it be the fault of the gun industry, NRA proponents ask, if guns fall into the wrong hands and good people don’t have the guns they need to protect themselves from the bad guys?

In our next post, we will consider additional mechanisms of moral disengagement used by the arms industry to get people to arm to kill, and ways to combat their tactics.

Kathie Malley-Morrison, Professor of Psychology