Nidal Malik Hasan may have shouted “Allahu Akbar” before his murderous onslaught at Fort Hood, but his actions were part of an American phenomenon that is a national emergency.
You had barely enough time to grasp what might have happened in the Cleveland home of convicted rapist Anthony Sowell, where police so far have found the remains of 11 women, when news came of Hasan’s massacre. Yet just as that terrible event was starting to sink in, the airwaves were burning up with reports of a shooting rampage in an office building in Orlando, Florida, in which 8 people were said to have been shot, one—as of this writing—fatally.
It's time to start asking ourselves whether our famous American freedom—in both its liberal and conservative formulations—is not actually a subtle form of dehumanizing tyranny.uthority-whether these "freedoms" are actually a tightening dog-collar turning us all into rabid animals.
More than health care, the economy, jobs, Afghanistan, Iraq, public malfeasance, private dishonesty, civil rights, disease or tainted food, mass murder is American’s primary problem and most fundamental shame. No prosperous country not riven by civil conflict has anything like our volume of mass killings. And yet for all of the fascination with mass murder in the media, in Hollywood—and among us--no politician will do more than pay lip service in condemning it. No journalist will crusade against it. No celebrity will take it up as a cause.
Nobody does a damn thing to try to stop it. Conservatives don’t want to make an issue of mass murder because then they would be confronted with the fact that nearly all of the massacres are committed by people using guns. Liberals don’t want to cry out about it because then they would have to address the fact that the violence of our entertainment—TV, movies, videogames, our proliferating apps—makes killing seem like just another strategy for coping with reality. If the utterly immoral legality of handguns and assault weapons puts killing within reach, then vicarious violence, sanctified by every corner of the entertainment culture, makes murder ethically and conceptually possible...
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