How to get it wrong in one article or less.
Can’t fault MSNBC for this. They simply report what so-called “experts” say. And experts ALWAYS say “the ready availability of guns is a prime cause in the upsurge of violence”.
What’s funny about this article is that at least two of the murders were stabbings. And I don’t know how you stab someone with a gun.
But this post isn’t about guns. It isn’t about knives. And it isn’t even about violence. It’s about devolution.
What we are seeing here, in these sudden, apparently pointless, murders is simply this: the devolution of society from guilt to shame. In the “gangsta” culture, if you want to call it that, the appearance of shame or “disrespect” is untenable. And the only thing that can repair the damage done is the spilling of blood. Where a guilt culture relies on a finely-tuned sense of inner shame for behaving badly to act as a brake, a shame culture relies on the fear that at any moment anything you do or say could be taken the wrong way and get you beaten or killed.
And it has the same predictable results here as it does in the middle east. People are slaughtered for what most reasonable people consider trivialities.
No, I don’t have an answer. I don’t know how you make a culture grow up.
But I do know that the “experts” are wrong. It is not the availability of alcohol or weapons. It is not the lack of jobs. It is simply the lack of modern civilization that is the root of the problem. That the popular culture is infatuated with the “gangsta” culture is no help, either. When street thugs are celebrated as heroes, then there is no incentive to change their ways.
And that’s why Tupac gets blown away in the street. Because a shame culture has no way to forgive except with death.