One thing I will never understand about American culture:

[liv]

This bizarre ritual of everybody rehashing their debate club set pieces about Gun Control in response to a news story about children being massacred. I don't have much of an opinion about the debate, but if I did I wouldn't choose today to justify it to everybody I know on all my social networks!

elf talks sense on the issue: legal gun control is largely irrelevant to this particular situation. I also agree with two poets who have responded, rozk and papersky: cults and ideologies that demand child sacrifice are simply evil. No possible opinion about the fine points of interpreting the Constitution can be worth the life of a child.

Comments

[daharyn]

Holy unintentionally offensive post, Batman! I think you've misunderstood what the majority of people are doing right now. I honestly don't see many people talking about the 2nd Amendment this weekend. Sure, politicians are heading for it. Media outlets are on it. Mayor Bloomberg is crying wolf on any TV outlet that will have him. But on my social media I see a lot more people talking about religion, "the need to put God back in the schools", which is a completely different thing. (And not something I have a "debate club set piece" on, in fact.)

I myself said on both LJ and FB that I wasn't interested so much in talking about "gun control", but "gun culture", there being a vast difference between the two, and worked very carefully to manage a conversation over on my FB wall between a few friends who were all full of very strong feelings.

Awfully easy, from such a geographical and psychological distance, to condemn the behaviors people engage in when they grieve as "bizarre." But even my craziest of crazy uncles isn't talking about guns right now.

[liv]

I likely shouldn't have generalized to all Americans, the subset I happen to interact with is a very select and unrepresentative group! And you're right that what I see of US-originating media isn't the truth about ordinary people. elf is American and I've linked to her post as a counterexample to the "let's debate gun control" thing. I thought your post was nuanced and sensitive too, but I wouldn't link to locked posts. I admire you for managing difficult conversations in an emotionally fraught time.

I haven't seen much on religion, other than the two poems, but it's true that those looked as if they were responding to a religious debate I'm not really experiencing. Seriously, my entire Twitter feed and the American bits of my FB feed are full of people posting gun control slogans (mostly pro, but that's a bias among my friends and I've certainly seen some right to bear arms arguments). It's all over several of the American blogs I read. And it's all arguments I've heard dozens of times, even though I take no particular interest in the gun control debate.

I admit, it doesn't look like grieving to me, because I am not aware of any other situations where people grieve by stating their arguments for a political position tangentially related to the losses they're grieving for. If that's what it is, you're right, I shouldn't call it bizarre. Last time we had a mass shooting in a school was 1996, and I'm sure British people made all kinds of weird, ill-thought-out comments at that time, though most of what I remember was people saying how awful it was, being sad about those poor little children and their bereaved parents. I'm sure there's lots of that going on in the US right now, it's just not in my feeds. Which makes sense, people are more likely to post to Twitter and other places set up for debate with mostly strangers, with political slogans than raw emotions.