It was true of the dangerously wrongheaded excuse that black men are justified in resisting, fleeing and fighting with police because of a “reasonable” fear that the cops might kill them. And they end up being beaten, shot, maybe even killed, not for whatever the cause of the interaction was, but because of how they responded to the cops’ commands or efforts to take the person into custody. It’s not that outrageously wrong police conduct doesn’t occur, but it remains an extreme outlier, happening in an infinitesimal percentage of cases. Unless the guy resists.
This is a panic. A fear born of hyping the extreme cases such that people internalize the false believe that the one in a million case is the norm.
And the flip side of the panic took the life of Kaylin Gillis and almost took the life of Ralph Yarl. Fear of strangers encroaching on your privacy. Fear of big black kids at the door. The difference here is that in both of these cases, the fearful had guns and used them. Why does that not evoke what would otherwise seem the normal human reaction when innocent lives are lost and the discussion of what to do about it bends over backwards not to include guns in the discussion? It’s one thing when killings are done by the evil, outraged or crazy, as they’re evil, outraged and crazy, but these were shootings born of fear.
Again, the plural of anecdote is not data. And as the right is wont to note, the vast majority of gun deaths are not in mass shootings, they’re killings of the everyday American variety—with handguns.
It wouldn’t be hard to scrape local news sites for even more anecdotal evidence, but there’s no need, because the hard data is devastating enough. To cite just one piece of such data, over the past two years gun deaths for people under the age 18 are up 50 percent.
Still, the right-wing fearmongering culture warriors have nothing to say.
In an essay so brilliant it will likely be hated by both right and left, Conor Friedersdorf writes of how our inability to engage in rational, civil discussion about the issues involved in transgender discrimination has impaired our ability to not only resolve controversial issues, but help and protect the vulnerable.
Many Americans who observe the overall tenor of these online conversations are reluctant or even terrified to participate––to ask honest questions, to hazard tentative opinions, to try out arguments––because culture warriors on all sides of the issue police ever-changing taboos. Some are difficult for even the very-online to understand. For example, if a person were to say, “Sex is determined by one’s biology, while gender is a social construct,” would that be consistent with conventional wisdom, or seen as fighting words, or offensive to the left or the right, or somehow, all of the above? To merely ask others to clarify their views is to risk being castigated for “just asking questions”––internet vernacular for accusing others of bad faith that manages to stigmatize curiosity-driven dialogue––if not to be labeled as transphobic from one faction and “a groomer” from another. Little wonder that many decline to talk about the subject at all.
We can’t talk about transgender rights. We can’t talk about guns. The argument against engaging in reasonable, rational discussion is that any concession, any accommodation, will set us on a slippery slope to strip the defensive party of ever more rights and privileges. It’s not that gun owners are against requiring people to take gun safety courses or register their weapons, but that once the gun haters have their nose under the tent, it will just be a matter of time until they criminalize AR-15s.
Most Americans who feel strongly about their constitutional right to own guns will not give them up voluntarily, and if you think the government will someday go door-to-door demanding people fork over their weapons, please allow me to remind you of the fact that many Americans believed government workers going door-to-door to offer free, voluntary COVID-19 vaccines was a harbinger of oncoming Stalinism (or Hitlerism). That should disabuse you of the notion that there will ever be a peaceful de-weaponization of the American population.
We, as a nation, are doing a great many dangerously stupid things out of fear. We don’t really want to do anyone harm (do we?), but we are doing harm to ourselves and others under the misguided panic that arises from sensationalized reporting, exaggerated claims of death and destruction and the irrational inability to accurately assess the likelihood of something bad happening to us. And so we strike first to save our own butts, even though our butts were never really at risk.
And people who did nothing to deserve it die.
We need to be able to talk about it. All of it. Or we’ll just keep killing people for no good reason. And going to war over every inanely petty bit of culture war nonsense (thinking of you, Bud Light) hasn’t eradicated discrimination and produced Utopia.
It’s not that there aren’t things to be done that can vastly improve our circumstances and save human lives, even if we will never achieve Nirvana or “fix” all of our problems. But at least we can find consensus and agree that the resulting trade-offs produce the best outcomes we can and saved as many lives as possible. But we need to talk about it. All of it.
We need to end the panic that drives us to do stupid and dangerous things, and instead work toward surviving together. And we need to be mature enough to realize that we can’t always get our way on everything. But this will not happen until we can talk about it. All of it.
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We can’t negotiate about anything without trust. That requires honesty, context and circumspection. Our media has so profoundly abdicated objectivity and context as to make the discussion impossible. Twitter eliminating verification further erodes trust.
Asking people to give up a right on a “trust us” basis is impossible when the reasoning is based on untruths, half-truths and ommissions.
It is a profoundly dangerous situation, and it is shocking the likes of Wesley Lowery see a moral imperative to make it worse.
“We need to end the panic that drives us to do stupid and dangerous things”
We may need to do something but we cannot do something that we are INCAPABLE of doing. Human behaviour is what human behaviour is not what we WANT it to be.
There is a a saying attributed to Albert Einstein “Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity and I am not so sure about the universe.
SHG you are a lawyer so you are trained in thinking and you overestimate the extent that the idea of a reasonable or rational man applies to humans. Only a minority of the human race can be considered rational 10%, 1% or is it 0.1%.
To avoid the problem about which you are posting a large majority of humans would need to satisfy the definition of “the reasonable man”.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken,
This panic is a narrative that the demagogues of institutional power and their allies simultaneously lie to us about (both in stories and in their significance), performatively wring their hands over, and seek to maximize for their gain/protection. They are the nicotine merchants peddling a cancer to the public while blaming the public for being unhealthy.
If you can get people to do it you’ll get the Nobel Peace Prize. I wouldn’t start writing the acceptance speech yet, though. Noble thoughts though, and that’s something anyway
The panic is purposeful. There’s an existential crisis, the sky is falling, and something must be done. Worst of all, the people who fall prey to this never seem to wise up to the oddity that there is always another existential crisis beyond the crisis du jour. They are perpetual. The need for panic never dissipates.
Perhaps at this point, the only hope lies in panic fatigue so profound that people will only pour another cup of tea if it is confirmed that the sky is indeed falling.
The average person (absent specialized education) has little comprehension of probability calculations. They tend to be abysmally bad at dealing with long tail events; either overestimating possible good (hence the success of state lotteries), or overestimating bad ones (hence the exaggerated fear of sharks or of getting shot by a cop).
The latter is an evolutionary adaptation, ie an animal that perceives a threat that isn’t there (and reacts accordingly) will, on average, have more progeny that one who fails to perceive a threat that really is there. This is fine in nature, red in tooth & claw, but like many other evolutionary bequests, can be decidedly maladaptive in civilization
The internet has made people bolder online and yet more fearful in person. Combined with the isolation of the Covid lockdown, it has set society back in ways I’m not sure we understand.
Something everyone needs to relearn is that their words have power, and need to have to have limits. Liberals just shrugged when their words caused a disturbed man to show up at Justice Kavanaugh’s home armed and ready to kill him. The hard right similarly shrugged when their words caused rioters to break into the Capitol on 1/6.
If people don’t dial it down, violence will continue to escalate and the next thing you know we are headed to a Yugoslavia style break up. Talking heads already talk about a “national divorce” as if it is just a matter of time.