SHOOTER BEHIND THE WALLED GARDEN
Why are mass shootings scarier to the public than any other kind of violence? Why do they command the news cycle? Most stories of violence stay in the local news and stick to the facts. Local stories that get picked up by national and international media are stories sold as small examples of national problems, small pieces of evidence in an indictment of America. Why are mass shootings the only kind we talk about despite being relatively rare?
It’s very simple. Mass shootings are scarier because mass shootings sometimes happen to people with money.
The same week that a lunatic coomer murdered several hookers in Atlanta and a Syrian man committed an act of white supremacy by shooting white people at a grocery store in one of the whitest cities in America, there was also a shooting in Chicago you didn’t hear about. Someone shot up a crowded party and hit 15 people. Two died. Based on the shaky cellphone video I watched, all of those victims were black. You won’t see those victims on TV crying and telling their story because the shooter is still at large and more than willing to kill a snitch on TV. This kind of mass shooting happens all the time in Chicago, but no one trends a hashtag to mourn it.
To quote a woman who got shot:
“I’m just blessed that that’s all I got. I was just happy that that was it. I’ve been through a few times at parties and places where someone is just shooting crazy like that. ... You can’t live your life afraid all the time. I don’t want to be like, I’m not going anywhere. Everywhere you go it’s always going to be something.”
Most of the time, violence is one of those things I call a Poor People Problem, or PPP for short (copyright pending). PPPs are easy to avoid. All you have to do is make enough money to not be poor.
When you look at a heat map of shootings in any large city, you will see that violence is densely concentrated in a handful of neighborhoods, while the neighboring areas are relatively peaceful. We all know these neighborhoods by name where we live.
That’s a big reason people want to make money. People want to live some place safe, some place where the schools aren’t complete shit, where yoga studios are within a 10 minute drive, where homeless people don’t OD in gas station bathrooms, and where cops aren’t twitchy and hostile during traffic stops from their untreated PTSD. You have to pay a premium to afford that. People living in very expensive places like Boulder are paying good fucking money to avoid PPPs like getting shot at. Getting shot at is for poor people. Getting shot is supposed to happen over there, in the ghetto. It’s not supposed to happen in a suburb that’s so expensive that the hourly workers who make their food and wash their cars can’t afford to live there.
(I’m about to go on a serious tangent here, but be patient. I promise I’ll bring it back to the main point.)
Have you ever been to a Whole Foods and the cashier ringing you up asked, “Would you like to round-up to a whole dollar to donate to sick kids?” I’ve seen this scam all over the place, and yes, it is a scam. That extra money you give them gets earmarked. The company records it as income. Then that money gets handed off to a nonprofit which counts as a tax-free charitable donation from Whole Foods. Not you. You didn’t donate it. You just gave it to Whole Foods. Whole Foods donated it. Whichever non-profit receives the money will spend it however they want. Many of these charities shave 90% off the top for operational costs, which means paying management very generous salaries. This scam - like so many other scams - is a trick to make people with money feel like their consumption is morally superior to other people’s consumption. It’s the same reason all those luxury products print buzzwords on the labels whispering sweet affirmations, promising that you aren’t a bad person, like Fair Trade and Farm to Table. They’ll print whatever they have to on those labels to let you know you can be a good person and help fight global climate change, just by spending $300 on a face cream made from cloned human foreskin.
Just like corporations, politicians know their key demo. They get their votes from people who make at least $30k a year because poor people don’t vote. Poor people are invisible to politicians. Why would anyone bother selling solutions to PPPs to poor people? No, you sell solutions to PPPs to people who have money, who vote, and know fuck-all about PPPs. Inevitably, proposals to solve PPPs are about making people with money feel like good people. That’s almost all they ever are. It is exactly like Whole Foods, a company that sells a Eucharist for guilty capitalists, a promise to purge the sin and self-loathing of well-financed progressives with locally sourced, hand-crafted, organic communion wafers. (See? I promised you I would bring it back to the main point and I delivered.)
The news machine is a factory farm for human cortisol, sowing and reaping that crop from the fertile fields of American minds in 7-day planting cycles. News outlets exist to make money. Informing people is incidental to that mission. They know who their audience is: people who vote and rub baby-dick cream on their face because Oprah told them to. Since cable news features activists instead of actual experts for their guests, the news has deeply misinformed people in racist and politically manipulative ways. News coverage zeroes in on totems like the AR-15 because it is black and plastic and looks scary to people who don’t know anything about guns. Singling out the AR for murder is like singling out the Honda Accord for traffic fatalities. Yeah. Deaths correlate with both because they are abundant on account of their popularity. Nevermind that more 17 times more murders are committed using pistols than rifles. If you’ve been paying close attention up to this point, you might have a guess about why rifles get the attention instead of Glock19s. People who use rifles in non-drive-by mass-shootings are nihilistic, suicidal, and psychologically identical to suicide bombers. Gang-related mass-shooters do not want to get caught or get killed. That’s why they use pistols. Pistols are cheaper, easier to conceal, and easier to dispose of. And that’s also why no one gives a shit about pistols. Pistols kill poor people. Pistols are a PPP.
Violence is ignorable so long as it stays a PPP some place else, far, far away, like Honduras or Yemen or Detroit. People with money rarely notice violence until it invades their walled garden. On the rare instances that it happens, they’ll be really loud about it, quick to blame all the wrong things, and demand all the wrong solutions.