Tag: Sarah Mensch

I was there, Marching for Our Lives

Posted on by kathiemm
Last year, I wrote about my belief that we know the names of too many shooters and not enough victims. This year, I centered my poster around Parkland victims’ faces, aiming my focus at the march on the safety of children rather than on the punishment of shooters.

By Sarah Mensch

Yesterday, I marched for 2.5 miles with an estimated 50,000 people in Boston. As a student, I stood toward the front, and when I looked around I could see so many of the children I wrote about protecting late last week walking next to me. They looked tired; this was their Saturday morning, intended for soccer practice or Girl Scouts or watching cartoons, and they were spending it pleading for legislators to make school a safer place

A fifth-grader, marching for our lives

The March for Our Lives did not maintain the level of pride or excitement I’ve felt at other rallies I’ve attended; at the Boston Women’s March in 2017 I felt solidarity in my womanhood, and at the Deaf Grassroots Movement rally I felt admiration for my Deaf professors and classmates. But at the March for Our Lives, I felt anger, grief, and most importantly, determination.

The walk-outs at high schools all over the nation and demands from students in Florida specifically have already resulted in Governor Rick Scott (R) signing a new gun bill into law that raises the minimum age to purchase a gun, ends same-day gun licensing, and bans bump stocks.

The littlest protester.

I and the hundreds of thousands of others who marched yesterday have a new obligation today, one that is much more uncomfortable than our duty to be good adults and protect our children: we have to hold on to our anger and our grief. We have to maintain its magnitude and it’s momentum, because without any emotional charge, change in the way states handle guns doesn’t start with the Florida gun bill, it stops there. And until no child or adult dies at the hands of gun violence, we have not done enough.

Given that I’ve just given anyone who reads this a hefty call-to-action, I want to make it clear what organizations Engaging Peace readers can support to make gun safety in the United States a reality:

Some other young protestors, marching for our lives

Did you ever? Saying yes to activism

Posted on by kathiemm
Sarah Mensch, Boston rally. Courtesy of Sarah Mensch, former Engaging Peace intern,

By Kathie MM

Fear, anger, discouragement, and a sense of helplessness are running rampant in this country today, and they have been charging towards this sorry state for generations.

But as pointed out in our recent series of posts , there are thousands of individuals around the world working actively on behalf of peace and justice.  Most started out pretty much as ordinary people, but they saw injustice and oppression and cruelty and had to act, no matter how big and frightening and indomitable the Big Brothers appeared to be.

You may be closer to belonging in their ranks than you realize.

Just think of the following:

Did you ever, as a kid, stick up for some other kid who was being bullied?

Did you ever try to be nice or include in activities some kid who was shy or shunned by others?

Did you ever, as a child, try to enlist the help of an adult to stop bullying or harassment ?

Did you ever, as a parent. confront a teacher or a principal or some other adult because you thought your kid or some other kid was being bullied or mistreated?

Did you ever, as a parent, take time to help your children understand prejudice, injustice?

Did you ever attend a school board or town meeting because you believed something harmful was going to happen to people in your town if particular policies or procedures were enacted?

Did you ever call upon family members or friends to join with you to protest something harmful to people or the environment that a  city council or state senate or big corporation was trying to promote?

Have you ever signed petitions or written to politicians, or participated in rallies against injustices?

Have you ever voted for a new politicalcandidate because you did not like what the incumbent was doing?

If you have done any of these or similar actions, tell us about them — and recognize that you’ve been a protestor on behalf of justice. Keep it up.  People all over the world are taking actions such as those and achieving successes.  But that’s a subject for another post.

Promoting the Joker? The media and gun violence

Posted on by kathiemm

by Sarah Mensch

In my series for engaging peace, I have explored the possibility that the media, particularly films, can provide models for gun violence that may lead to copycat crimes.

For today’s post, I analyzed The Dark Knight, a popular hero film approximately 2½ hours long; it features 43 different guns wielded and shot by police officers, members of the mafia, and several different trademark Batman villains. Batman himself never holds a gun except to disarm someone else. Batman’s archenemy and the film’s main villain, the Joker, holds a gun in eight different scenes, shoots a total of 20 times, and kills three people onscreen and six offscreen.

My last Engaging Peace article discussed the need to revise the media rhetoric on gun violence to avoid sensationalizing the shooters. The Dark Knight (2008) brings my point home. The Dark Knight was voted the movie with the best Halloween costumes the year of its release. Batman and the Joker were the two most popular men’s costumes, with Joker costume sales far outnumbering Batman sales. Even today, nine years after the film’s release, DC Comics has more Joker than Batman Dark Knight merchandise available on their website.

James Holmes plotted and executed a shooting at a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, sequel to The Dark Knight in Aurora, CO, on July 20, 2012. He shot 71 people. When Holmes entered the theater, he said something along the lines of “I am the Joker.” Like the Joker, Holmes had dyed his hair a shocking color and like the Joker, Holmes seemed dedicated to creating an air of chaos to promote his own notoriety.

At the time of the shooting, Holmes was a PhD candidate studying Neuroscience at the University of Colorado. Three years after the shooting, photos were released of Holmes’ apartment. Among the booby traps, bomb setups, and a gallon of gasoline was something particularly interesting: a Batman mask. .

Why did Holmes choose to emulate the Joker instead of Batman?

Could it be that the news media add to the potential for copycatting crimes portrayed in the motion picture media by devoting significantly more attention to perpetrators and evil-doers than victims?

Perhaps if media coverage of gun violence tragedies shifted its focus so that it was the victims and the people who helped the victims whose actions were  memorable,  troubled people like James Holmes might choose to become like Batman, instead of the Joker.

P.S. from KMM: Did you watch the media trailer at the beginning of this post?  If so, what was your emotional reaction to it?  excitement? anxiety? horror? disgust?  Other? Do you remember the actions of one character more than another?

Bibliography:

Frosch, D., & Johnson, K. (2012, July 20). Gunman Kills 12 in Colorado, Reviving Gun   Debate. The New York Times. Retrieved April 6, 2017, from             http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/shooting-at-colorado-theater-showing-     batman-movie.html

Sarah Mensch, Research Assistant, Graphic Designer, 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

 

Remember what they do

Posted on 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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.