Deprecated: mb_convert_encoding(): Handling HTML entities via mbstring is deprecated; use htmlspecialchars, htmlentities, or mb_encode_numericentity/mb_decode_numericentity instead in /var/www/html/wp-content/plugins/super-cool-ad-inserter/inc/scaip-shortcode-inserter.php on line 37
All across Pittsburgh, there have been moments of silence and prayer for the three officers killed in Stanton Heights on Saturday: Eric Kelly, Stephen J. Mayhle and Paul J. Sciullo II.
There have been, and will continue to be, tributes to these officers, and the courage they donned as regularly, and as easily, as they donned their uniforms. Others can speak to that bravery far better than I.
For my part, I wish the moment of silence had started earlier, and lasted longer. Because one of the countless sorrows here, I think, is that sorrow is all we have in common.
Already these tragic deaths have been tallied in a culture war, one which began long before this weekend.
By Saturday afternoon, KDKA Radio had already incorporated news snippets from the shooting into station promos. And talk-radio host Fred Honsberger was already arguing about gun rights.
The alleged shooter, Richard Poplawski, had been kicked out of the Marines during boot camp, Honsberger said. “[T]hat is a dishonorable discharge,” he insisted. “So … according to the law — any person with a dishonorable discharge is not eligible to buy a gun.”
Actually, it’s still not clear what kind of discharge Poplawski received: The Marines aren’t saying. But Honsberger and several of his callers cited the allegation as proof that “It goes back to the old bumper sticker: When you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns.”
So there we are. The debate about what happened in Stanton Heights, and how to prevent it from happening again, has been reduced to bumper-stickers (not to mention denunciations of any lawyer who might choose to defend Poplawski). And conservatives are already indulging in the anxieties that may have contributed to the shooting: According to his friends, Poplawski apparently feared that Barack Obama’s administration was going to take away his guns.
Over on the online forum of the Pennsylvania Firearm Owners Association, for example, gun-enthusiasts mixed sorrow and compassion with fear:
how long will it be before some of us are faced with the choice of give up our guns or resist? … how many scenes like we saw today will play out nationwide?
Of course, you can find people who will say anything on talk radio or online. (The PaFOA has, in fact, acknowledged that Poplawski may have participated in its discussion groups — under the name “Rwhiteman.”) But the FBI reports that in November 2008 — the month Obama was elected — requests for firearm background checks nationwide leapt by 50 percent over the previous year. They have been higher every month since, usually by 20 or 30 percent.
Somehow, I doubt there’s been a sudden upsurge in the popularity of skeet-shooting.
The very morning of the Stanton Heights shooting, in fact, The New York Times featured a column by Charles Blow noting that conservatives are becoming increasingly “apocalyptic. They feel isolated, angry, betrayed and besieged. And some of their ‘leaders’ seem to be trying to mold them into militias.” Blow cited numerous examples, including Glenn Beck — the Fox News talker who recently warned that maybe, just maybe, FEMA was building “concentration camps” to house Republicans.
Could such rhetoric be encouraging violent acts like the one in Stanton Heights? Poplawski reportedly frequented far-right Web sites and is reportedly a fan of radio host Alex Jones, who traffics in conspiracy theories. And for years, conservatives denounced sex in the movies, and violence in gangsta-rap music (which also preaches a reliance on guns and a radical mistrust of government authority). The claim is that, while speech is free, some speech debases our culture, with disastrous effects on individual behavior.
Some lefties are suggesting a similar theory here. As the Web site Crooks and Liars puts it, “there’s a clear, common-sense connection between the paranoiac fearmongering that has passed for right-wing rhetoric … and violence like that in Pittsburgh.”
I’m not entirely convinced. For one thing, I didn’t think that the lyrics of Marilyn Manson caused the mass shooting at Columbine, something many conservatives took as an article of faith. For another, I actually interviewed Alex Jones once, and found him oddly likable. Jones renounced violent tactics — he thought the people who espoused them were most likely undercover feds — and he seemed harmless enough. Just before we began talking about his suspicion that 9/11 was a government plot, I could hear him over the phone telling his young daughter, “Daddy has to work now.”
But of course, I’d been hearing Jones on a low-wattage FM station outside of Meadville, Pa. I never thought anyone would give him a national platform.
Yet there he was on Fox News last month, a guest on Andrew Napolitano’s Freedom Watch. “[T]here is a new world order,” Jones warned, one that “will be run by the very banks that are collapsing society by design.”
So if Poplawski did confuse conspiracy-theories with reality, he may not be alone. I mean, I’ve never heard Jones endorse a theory crazier than Beck’s “concentration camp” speculations. (Beck himself later recanted the theory.) Yet Beck is Fox’s rising star, with an audience of 2.3 million.
Look, we lefties are capable of knee-jerk hatred too. We’re just as capable of assuming the worst about people in the other party. (Although we’re more likely to threaten to leave the country than to “take it back.”) That’s part of what it is to be human. But maybe we have so many lone gunmen partly because our culture, especially on the right, so often encourages hair-trigger rage.
On the day of the shooting, Honsberger himself took time to denounce “loony-tune people” who showed up in Stanton Heights during the TV coverage, “waving to the camera” and saying, “Do you see me on TV?”
“There is a defect in our society,” he concluded.
No doubt. And maybe those people are a symptom. But they aren’t the only ones using the airwaves to express contempt for those we place in positions of authority. And of the messages being put out, “do you see me on TV?” seems like one of the least harmful.
Contributions to support the families of Eric Kelly, Stephen Mayhle, and Paul Sciullo II can be sent to:
The Greater Pittsburgh Police Federal Credit Union
1338 Chartiers Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15220
This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.
So, some dudes on talk radio react to the shootings by talking trash on gun legislation and liberals, and you react to the shootings by talking trash on “conspiracy-theories” [sic] and conservatives. You seem to suggest that discourse be limited, for an unspecified duration, to variants of “Ain’t it a shame?”, that to do otherwise is somehow harmful, and that your punditry is less noisome than Honsberger’s, not only because you’re right about stuff and he’s wrong, but also because the CP dropped on Wednesday and his gums were flappin’ Saturday afternoon. Sorry, Potter, but baloney.
I enjoy your local history articles, and, as this is the first piece of yours to which I’ve taken exception, I’m taking the time to let you know why.
Regardless of the degree to which attempts to exploit last Saturday’s shootings to further consolidate control, militarize police, and disarm the civilian population succeed, I’d be surprised were they not made. Grotesque tragedies are routinely used to push control-oriented agendas, and you have to figure a lot of gun owners and gun abstainers (of which I am, and plan to remain, one) are hip to this. Historical precedents aside, simply based on Obama’s
http://www.ontheissues.org/domestic/Barack_Obama_Gun_Control.htm
and Holder’s
http://reason.com/blog/show/130204.html
views on gun control, gun rights advocates’ concerns that this event will be exploited are legitimate, regardless of the degree of tact and sophistication with which they express them.
Culturally inculcated “hair-trigger rage” you correctly peg as a “reason we have so many lone gunmen”; but there are often other reasons having to do with an aspect of reality you may choose to deny, but which you don’t have to be Julius Caesar to acknowledge: conspiracies.
‘So if Poplawski did confuse conspiracy-theories with reality, he may not be alone. I mean, I’ve never heard Jones endorse a theory crazier than Beck’s “concentration camp” speculations. (Beck himself later recanted the theory.) Yet Beck is Fox’s rising star, with an audience of 2.3 million.’
It blows my mind that, in the same article in which you (rightly) trounce Honsberger for jumping the gun with regard to the specific nature of Poplawski’s discharge from the Marines, you weigh in on an issue about which you evidently feel very strongly, but which you appear to have researched by… watching Glenn Beck. If you’d taken the time to do even the most cursory search engine research, not only would your article have been vastly improved, but it could have come out even longer after the shooting!
First, Alex Jones has been (often quite literally) yelling about FEMA camps and other domestic detention facilities for at least a decade.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_TV-Fl9RiA
Second, after riling up his audience, Beck indeed recanted… using bogus footage to prove his point, and backed up by former Entertainment Weekly editor and current 9/11 and FEMA camp “expert” James Meigs.
Beck can claim they’re for Republicans, the DHS can claim they’re for illegal immigrants, you can (now, along with Beck) dismiss them as crazy theories, and I can but hope you’re correct, particularly for the sake of anyone whose name is on this goofy list.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barry-steinhardt/terrorist-watch-list-hits_b_112596.html
Briefly, recall that in 2006 Halliburton subsidiary KBR snagged a $385 million contract to build… some stuff…
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/04/national/04halliburton.html?_r=1
You also might want to look into HR 645, Rex 84, the refurbishing of detention camps used during WWII (and the manner in which these things were built and used in the first place), the conversion of military bases to camps, and the formaldehyde-filled trailer parks FEMA inflicted on Katrina evacuees (for starters) before drawing provisional conclusions.
Finally, why hyphenate “conspiracy theories”? The concepts to which these terms refer might be inextricably linked in your reality tunnel, but there’s no call to go bringing punctuation into it. Even in the UN website’s transcript of W’s gut-busting November 2001 statement to the General Assembly,
“Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September 11th – malicious lies that attempt to shift blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty.”
http://www.un.org/webcast/ga/56/statements/011110usaE.htm
the terms are not hyphenated. In the spirit of smug generalization, yinz CPers have a nasty habit of hyphenating terms you pretend to understand, but about which you display profound ignorance (Bill O’Driscoll’s repeated hyphenation of “greenhouse gas” springs to mind).
As a journalist writing for a “free” paper, “mistrust of government authority” and “contempt for those in positions of authority” should only be construed as “radical” in the sense in which the Ninja Turtles used the term. If you can’t handle this, I seriously suggest you stick to writing well-researched and entertaining articles about street names and local landmarks.
Democans, Republicrats, and anarchist conspiracy geeks would all do well to avoid “paranoiac fearmongering” as well as ideologically biased denial and intellectual laziness. Let’s keep each other honest, here!
In the meantime, I’ll spot the CP some hyphen credits to offset your excess.
Happy Easter.
Make that “contempt for those we place in positions of authority”. Sorry to misquote ya!
Thanks for your note, and for the Easter wishes. Not quite sure where to begin here, so I’ll start with the fact that you apparently agree on the central point I was trying to make:
“Culturally inculcated ‘hair-trigger rage’ you correctly peg as a ‘reason we have so many lone gunmen.'”
You’re right, of course, that by weighing in on Honsberger and Co., I’m engaging in post-shooting punditry too. And my main excuse — “they started it” — is never all that convincing. But I’m not sure how else to proceed. My argument is that knee-jerk fear of gun control may be a factor in this shooting. So it seemed worth pointing out that much of the RESPONSE to the shooting is … knee-jerk fear of gun control.
In any case, I object to your claim that I have demonstrated insufficient “mistrust of government authority.” I think I’m plenty paranoid about how government works. For example, I have MY own conspiracy theory about what Obama plans to do with guns. Here it is:
I suspect Obama and Co. supported various firearm regulations back when it was politically expedient to do so. But the political dynamic has changed: Polling data suggests that enthusiasm for gun bans has cooled, and Democrats in Congress have reached various accommodations with the NRA and its pals. (See last night’s “60 Minutes” for more.) Therefore, our politicians have joined with a sinister cabal of gun-rights advocates. Together, they have hatched a pact to betray the liberals who helped put Barack Obama into office, and not really do jack-shit about guns. At most, I expect them to make a half-hearted effort they know will fail, just to keep their “base” happy.
Now it’s possible my harebrained theory may be wrong, and you may be right. At some point, there really COULD be a sinister effort by gun-control supporters to … um … support legislation consonant with their long-held beliefs. (The swine!) As you point out, it’s happened before. And if it happens again, well, I guess it will be up to people who oppose the legislation to press THEIR long-held beliefs.
But here’s the thing. For sanity’s sake, I think we’d be better off responding to such threats when they actually appear, rather than when a bunch of talk-radio and internet alarmists start pushing the panic button. Otherwise, I’d be stocking up canned goods in the basement in preparation for the dreaded Fairness Doctrine, which I’ve been hearing is due ANY DAY NOW. (Even as Democrats do everything they can to make Rush Limbaugh the poster boy of the GOP.)
Maybe that seems hopelessly naive to you. But another of my conspiracy theories is this:
There is a group of people out there who control at least one prominent media outlet, and who are amply represented in the halls of power. This group has a secret agenda to pander to our worst fears because it sells guns, attracts big audiences, and earns votes. They seek to enrich and empower themselves by keeping us jumping at every shadow … and then holding themselves (and their products) out as our only means of defense. Who’s to say that even Alex Jones — so recently embraced by Fox — isn’t somehow part of the plot? These guys control a TV network — what’s to stop them from planting some rumors online too?
So on the one side, I have a distrust of government. On the other side, I have deep doubts about the people who stoke that distrust. It’s a narrow line one has to walk.
One way I try to follow it is by doing things like, say, waiting for gun control legislation to appear BEFORE I start freaking out about it. I also try to walk the line by wielding Occam’s Razor. In the absence of other evidence, I assume (for example) that FEMA trailers laced with formaldehyde are the result of indifference, ineptitude and profiteering. I make that judgment largely because I’ve found those forces to be much more widespread than sinister conspiracies.
We’ll see who’s right, I guess. I’ll sure follow your advice to keep my eyes and ears open, and be willing to revise my opinion down the raod. And if you and I end up in some FEMA camp, well, you’ll be able to say “I told you so.” Or at least continue taking me to task for a misplaced hyphen.
Potter – You should have known better than to rely on the NYT for accurate info. Glenn Beck has actually DEBUNKED the rumors that FEMA was creating camps to house dissenters.
“Glenn Beck has actually DEBUNKED the rumors that FEMA was creating camps to house dissenters”
Well, not if you ask commenter “quietdown,” who below implies that Beck used “bogus footage” to do so. But my article did note that after stirring up these rumors, Beck later disavowed them.
I think democrats and republicans are all involved in the illuminati nwo vise that is squezing tighter every minute, its no wonder people flip out. Its hard to stay cool under pressure but its the only way to win. Peace, Burghman2008