The ongoing carnage wrought on ordinary Americans by this country’s bizarrely permissive gun laws dominated the cable news networks for hours on end Wednesday after a 14-year-old shooter killed four people and wounded nine at Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia.
Two of the dead were also 14-year-olds, destined never to grow older. The other two fatalities were teachers. As a teacher, I take their deaths personally. The teen shooter had spoken about killing people last year, but since Georgia does not have a red flag law, guns were not removed from his house. The deaths of the teens, and the wounding of eight other students, along with a teacher, underscore the horror of these mass shootings, their little lives cut unforgivably short, their parents’ lives blighted in ways that give nightmares to all parents of a child. Regular mass shootings are not permitted in actually civilized countries, whether Europe or Japan. They are as much an American peculiar institution as our form of plantation slavery was, and they are just as rooted in a valuing of property over humanity (in the case of slavery it involved turning humanity into property).
By the magic of empathy and identification, the news hits us in the gut when we hear of these strangers torn to pieces by hot bullets. They are also Americans. It shouldn’t matter, but the vigil-keepers and interviewees are blonde and white. They are like the majority of Americans.
Those who mouth “thoughts and prayers” and who clearly do not feel the deaths viscerally perhaps lack that empathy. Perhaps they are sociopaths, who cannot empathize with others. Some of the unsympathetic, though, distance themselves from the rawness of these murders by seeing them as a cost of living in a “free” society, by which they mean a society that has few effective regulations about the ownership and use of guns. They see the mass shootings the way many people see automobile deaths, as “accidents,” as a feature of life that they believe unavoidable. Many automobile deaths, too, however, are avoidable, and they are collisions, not accidents. Some 25% of them are from drunk driving, which is a conscious choice and not an accident at all. The most common cause of collisions is distracted driving, which also results from choices people make, and it is a problem that is getting worse. As for guns, it is odd that so intentional an act as premeditated murder should be classed as a natural disaster by so many Americans.
Sociologists use the notion of framing to understand the stories people tell themselves about events. Gun safety advocates see responsible gun ownership as requiring laws and regulations that protect owners and others. Those men who are insouciant about mass shootings think requiring gun safety detracts from their individual freedom (and possibly from their manhood, which frankly speaks poorly of them).
Although the cable news channels went into hyperdrive covering the sickening events in Georgie, they ignored other killings of children on Wednesday.
On Wednesday, Israeli bombardments killed 42 Palestinian victims in massacres of three families. The Gaza Ministry of Health said, “Many people are still trapped under the rubble and on the roads as rescuers are unable to reach them.”
Judging by past such bombardments, a majority of the victims, over 20 people, were children and women. The Israeli military allows an astonishing, and sickening, 20 civilian deaths for each militant of the Qassam Brigades that it kills with drones and rockets. No civilized military behaves in this way. It is creepy. U.S. officers would be rightly court-martialed for implementing such lax and inhumane rules of engagement. Officers have told me that the Geneva Conventions are their “Bible.” They are deeply angered when it is suggested that the Israeli military is behaving no worse than the American does.
The 22 or more women and children killed and the dozens of others injured or trapped beneath the rubble in Gaza did not receive even 15 seconds of air time on America’s multi-billion-dollar “news” screens on Wednesday.
I don’t understand why. Is it that they are not coded as “white?” But if you met many of them, you couldn’t tell them by skin color from many “white” Americans, including Italian-Americans. Is it because they aren’t Americans? But opinion polling shows tremendous U.S. empathy with Ukrainian victims of Russian bombardment.
For some, indifference is achieved by framing. “People die in war,” said President Joe Biden. Some people take seriously ridiculous Israeli army allegations of having killed 13,000 Hamas fighters, which makes the total dead of nearly 41,000 (though this is a vast underestimate) seem like par for the course. In fact, the Israeli military counts any young able-bodied male as a militant. And since they kill so many people from the air, the Israelis don’t really know whom they killed in many instances. The U.S. used to do that in Vietnam when it engaged in body counts. One of my late friends, a Green Beret, complained to me bitterly about such body counts or “kiting.” “If it was dead and it was Vietnamese, it was Viet Cong,” he said bitterly.
So the murdered children of Gaza (the Israeli military ROE amounts to mass murder in International Humanitarian Law) are put off stage. They aren’t configured as “news” as U.S. mass media conceive it. The carnage and suffering is daily, so it has ceased being reported on at all.
Boutique outlets like Middle East Eye, helmed by veteran Middle East correspondent David Hearst, show us the reality, which is not easier to take than the deaths in Winder, Georgia — that is, if we haven’t erected frames that prevent us from seeing and feeling it:
