Uvalde shootings — might Caitlin Johnstone's sour assessment of the United States be correct?

26 May 2022

Uvalde

Uvalde's searing kid-murders have raised the usual go-nowhere storm — in a nation awash with guns, nutcases, armed paranoids, hallelujah Snowflakes and freedom-loving hicks (like me).

Assess the following related phenomena.

Falsely framed questions?

One way of redirecting attention away from reaching workable solutions — about any societal problem — is via the posing of misleading questions that deliberately aim the public toward collecting non-answers.

Evaluate, for example, the following responses to Uvalde's sorrow.

Not guns, but mental illness?

A Second Amendment-protecting perspective on school mass murders came from Texas governor Greg Abbott, who (after Uvalde) said that:

"We, as a state, we, as a society, need to do a better job with mental health."

"Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental-health challenge, period."

Facing a follow-up question on the role of the shooter's mental health, Abbott backtracked a bit, saying someone "demented" enough to kill children went beyond "a mental-health issue." He called the gunman the "sheer face of evil itself."

"Is there a difference between a mental-health challenge that can be addressed and evil? I don't know."

Despite his calls for greater mental health support, Abbott just last month cut $211 million from the Texas state department that oversees mental health programs, NBC News reported.

The state also ranked dead last for overall access to mental health care in State of Mental Health in America's 2021 report.

The governor went on to push back against gun-related questions, saying that tougher gun laws were not a "real solution" to the epidemic of mass shootings in the US.

© 2022 Erin Snodgrass, Natalie Musumeci and Azmi Haroun, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott blames mass shootings on mental-health concerns, despite noting that there's no evidence that the Texas-school gunman had mental illness, Insider (25 May 2022)

It is (a sensible person would notice) not obvious how one is going detect and corral psycho murderers — before they act:

First, we have a problem with how to read minds.

Second, how intrusively we would do so.

And third, how willing a supposedly free and diverse society should be to corral allegedly crazy people — so as to keep the rest of us 'safe'.

Governor Abbott does not strike me as a person with the intelligence, knowledge, or merit-of-heart necessary to approach (much less answer) those questions.

Not mental illness, but guns?

The widely accepted Anti-Gun viewpoint is that too many — and too conveniently lethal — firearms are the crux issues.

This is the perspective that posits, statistically reasonably, that — in a culture with as many guns as people — some nutcase, or any random malevolent, is going to pick one up and shoot a bunch of humans with it.

Ergo, these gun control advocates propose that making guns fewer, more difficult to obtain, and less conveniently lethal — would reduce the school-child extermination horror.

From Logic's statistics-based standpoint, this proposal 'should' work, except that:

One would need to overthrow the Supreme Court's interpretation of the Second Amendment.

As well as implement middle-of-the-night surprise searches of virtually every place and property in the United States.

Those searches and seizures presumably to be conducted by elite — heavily armed, shoot-to-kill or alternatively heads-bashing — Federal Jackbootery Squads.

These corollary implications considered, the Guns Reduction Plan seems unlikely to be tolerable or effective.

If that scheme is modified to leave the swath of guns in place — but instead to evaluate the psychological conditions of the people who would be allowed to 'bear' them — then one runs into the same mental health assessment and restriction conundrums that face Governor Abbott's implied Psycho Control Program.

In this last vein — maybe our whole society is nuts?

This third perspective comes from Australian Caitlin Johnstone.

It is, arguably, culturally more insightful than the previous two:

It’s surely not a coincidence that the nation which serves as the hub of a globe-spanning empire that’s held together by mass murder and war propaganda and mass-scale psychological manipulation is the only nation with a mass shooting epidemic.

We are all marinating in the US-centralized empire: its influence, its propaganda, its artificially manufactured culture, its ways of thinking.

We’re so immersed in it we can’t see it. It’s like water for fish to us.

It’s weird how every US president is expected to say something after a mass shooting when US presidents are always orders of magnitude more murderous than the act they’re decrying.

It doesn’t take much work to understand that the US government is an evil institution.

It does take a fair bit of work to understand that the US government is a uniquely evil institution on the world stage, with no one else coming anywhere close.

Consider (in support of Johnstone's analysis) how the Biden administration is happily committed to killing every 'last' Ukrainian in the proxy war that the United States provoked with Russia.

Contemplate, too, how Ukraine is purportedly to be saved by sending it lots of heavy-duty mass-murder weapons — as opposed to — just a passel of competently negotiating diplomats.

And (furthermore) take into account how Dementia Joe wants to start yet another war. This one with China.

Evidently, according to Biden and Crew:

We have to kill y'all — characteristically non-warring Chinese folk — so as to maintain an allegedly murder-free global space.

The moral? — We Americans cannot fix what we do not see or care about

Especially so, with our apathetically ignorant public.

On that topic, consider outspoken Scott Ritter's harsh (but demonstrably accurate) description:

Collectively speaking, the American people are the most ignorant people on the face of the Earth about the world we live in.

We don't know anything.

Don't tell me about defending constitutional rights, if you don't know what's in the Constitution.

And don't tell me about sending 40 billion dollars over to Ukraine, if you can't tell me exactly what's going on in Ukraine and what the history is and why we're trying to do what we want to do.

[T]he American public is not a public of informed citizens.

It should be.

[But] the American public is a bunch of ignorant sheep, who have wrapped themselves in a cocoon of comfort, based on consumer-driven values.

As long as they're comfortable with their life, they're not going to rock the boat.

They don't care that we're underwriting the salaries of the Nazi murderous thugs, who are coming out of the Azovstal bunkers.

They don't care about that, but God forbid the price of gas at 5 bucks.

Thus, for most of We the Sheep, America is okay.

Provided, of course, that it is somebody else's kids who are being slaughtered.

And regardless of whether those deaths and maimings are 'accomplished' by a murdering demon — with victims in the dozens, at most — or by the United States itself — with victims, routinely, in the tens of thousands to multiple millions.

This is the disconnect in Perception and Reality that Caitlin Johnstone (fruitlessly daily) tries to fix.

PeteFree.com

Uvalde shootings — might Caitlin Johnstone's sour assessment of the United States be correct?