Really, I don't write in riddles.

I've been notified by three people (so far) that I'm now _persona non grata_ because of a post I made regarding the killing of Mr. Charlie Kirk yesterday. 

Two of them made statements that clearly imputed to me statements that I hadn't made, but that they had apparently inferred from what I HAD said. 

This is unfortunate, and I don't expect to change their minds (or, in general, anyone's mind, online) about such things. They've made their judgment, they now have that perception of me, and arguing about how someone perceives you is usually a lost cause from the start.


But for the record, I try to write *exactly* what I mean. If I mean to say "Ho, he deserved to die, good job!", I'd quite literally post exactly that. 

What I posted said that I don't approve of killing people as a solution to the problem and I'd like to live in a world where that's not viewed as an appropriate solution. 

I did then note the irony of the fact that he had explicitly said (very shortly after a school shooting) that some gun deaths were a necessary price for maintaining the Second Amendment's protections. 

I also noted that I wouldn't waste prayers, if I prayed, on him, given what he promoted in life.


NONE of that says "I approve of killing people who disagree with me politically". If I want to say that, I don't need to type that long (especially on FB from a phone, which is a big PITA). I can say "Shooting people like Charlie Kirk is a public service and we need more public servants". 

I don't try to hide my beliefs in my fiction OR my nonfiction. The closest I get to "subtle" (aside from hiding little Easter Eggs in the Arenaverse) is when I had Jason Wood make an anti-Patriot Act speech thinly disguised as a protest against werewolf-triggered paranoia (since the Morgantown Event is basically his world's 9/11). 

If I want to say something, I say it. And I say it very carefully. 

If I DON'T say a particular thing, odds are excessively strong that I don't, in fact, mean that thing. 

Again for the record, no, I don't approve of people shooting people under any circumstances aside from actual self-defense (he's coming at me with intent to injure or kill). I don't even approve of it in wartime, though by the nature of the beast it does and will happen and I'm generally not going to judge the soldiers for it. 

I think Charlie Kirk was doing the world a lot of disservice, and I wish he hadn't done some of the things he was doing, but that didn't earn him a bullet nor do his family and friends deserve the shock. 

At the same time, he as an individual leaves me with no particular fond feelings and I feel no obligation to pretend about it. 

And I find it grimly, ironically amusing that he publicly espoused the "necessity" of some number of gun deaths to protect the Second Amendment.

This is not, in any way, an approval of the killer or of assassination in general. 

I am UNSURPRISED that such things are happening -- to people on both sides of the aisle. 

This event and some discussion after it, though, did give me a different epiphany, which I'll write about separately.  

"Why does this only happen in the USA?"

As I mentioned in my prior post, this event and discussion gave me a bit of an epiphany. It's probably NOT an original one -- I'm sure other people have discussed this point -- but I personally haven't seen it discussed, so I'm going to do so here. 


The perennial argument following any public shooting here (slightly less for individually targeted people like Mr. Kirk, but still present) almost always boils down to staunch defenders of the Second Amendment versus people who just want to NOT see random children or adults shot down on a daily basis. And one of the most common soundbite/talking points will be things like "Nothing could be done to stop it, says only country where this happens". 

The Second Amendment defenders will trot out their own points, including "kids carried guns to school regularly back in the day and you didn't have lots of school shootings" and "guns don't shoot people, people do" and so on. 

A lot of this ends up raising the question: WHY does this happen here in the USA so often, and so rarely elsewhere -- even in places where there are a lot of guns? What's so different about the USA compared to all these other countries?

Well, you know, there are actually a LOT of differences between the USA and most other countries; perhaps the most obvious is that we're a short-term (in the historic sense) patchwork of a lot of different subcultures, divided by states (which function as semi-independent countries INSIDE the country) as well as by background, with populations ranging from surviving Native American populations who are STILL at or near the bottom of the pecking order despite being the ones who were living here when Europeans first arrived, to the descendants of those Europeans, descendants of entire *cities* worth of slaves, descendants of slave owners, refugees, and more. 

But in this case, I think the difference that drives the increase in public shootings is something that's so very American that we don't even think about it as a problem -- because it's just the way things have been going here. 

Most other civilized countries have safety nets for people. The most obvious is healthcare. Here, heathcare is gated -- and often destructively so. Most other countries have universal healthcare in one form or another. 

Most countries also have some other forms of social support -- things that generally reduce, if not eliminate, the number of people for whom the loss of a job equates to instant poverty and living on the street. 

Most countries have wide-based educational support so that people who want to learn don't have to go into a hundred thousand dollars of debt just to finish college.

We -- primarily driven, it's now obvious, by the Heritage Foundation and their associates since the 1980s, though starting with RMN in the late 60s - early 70s -- have been steadily eroding the social safety net. 

"What's that got to do with shootings?"

Well, more and more people are feeling more and more pressure. If you have a FEW people in desperate circumstances, this usually is a self-limiting problem -- there's many people around who can spare a bit of money, time, or resources, and most of them aren't under desperate strain. 

But if more, and more, and more people are under mounting pressure -- "how can I afford the operation?" "I have to keep this job or my whole family loses insurance!" "I have to put up with everything at work because if I miss one payment on my rent I'm out", then there's less "give" in the system. There's more of a feeling of danger, of fear, of potential loss around every corner. 

And that means the fragile ones and the angry angry ones will ALSO have less support to get past their own crises. Mom and Dad don't have the energy to really listen to and understand little Jack because they're both working in grinding jobs that force them to act as though the pressure is perfectly normal -- and they're having their own personal problems, that weaken both of them just when their kids need their strength. Or maybe there's JUST Mom or JUST Dad, which makes it harder. 

In short, what we're seeing is the increasing sounds of strain on the very fabric of society, as we disassemble the supports that used to keep the strain from becoming unsupportable. THAT is why an increasing number of isolated, angry, terrified people are breaking in such a violent way. No one hears them until they shoot, and even if someone did hear them, no one had anything left to give them as support and relief. 

When you create a pressure cooker and keep stoking the fires, the relief valve starts to scream. 

And that's the warning before it all explodes.