Don't Be A Wirehead.

     Sandy Hook, Connecticut.

     Are you alarmed yet?  Are you grabbing for your gun?  Are you worried about your children?  Are you hanging on every news article, every news page, every mention of school shootings, theater shootings, violence in the streets that you can find?

     Are you afraid your guns are going to be taken away?  Do you give money to the NRA?

     Do you think guns are evil?  Do you think every gun has the potential to, or the likelihood of, being used in a murder?  Do you think that every gun owner is a potential murderer?

     Do you think it's important to watch network or cable news?

     Do you work as a news broadcaster?

     If you answered yes to a substantial number of these questions, chances are that you ARE the problem.

     I've been paying attention, especially since Columbine.  I don't watch the news.  Occasionally, I will listen to NPR, which plays only news in the mornings and afternoons when I am commuting.  I have to limit this, because if I don't it causes severe depression that can last for days.  If I were to watch the news, one of two things would happen.  A) It would be much worse, or B) If I were to make a habit of it, I might become inured to the horror of it all.

     The point is, every time there is a major slaughter of this sort, it's blasted on all fronts at high volume, so much so that even someone like me who works to avoid the news can't escape.  It's on the television, the radio, the newspaper, the internet....it's everywhere. Whoever just wreaked havoc is now famous!  Often dead, but famous.

     Consistently, thereafter there are "copycat" crimes.

     The problem is defined in the name: "copycat".  Most of these people (not all, of course.  All generalities are false) want attention.  They know they'll get attention by doing this horrific thing because every other person who's ever done it in a big way (as far as they know) got loads and loads of attention.  Like a toddler, they want the attention, and don't really care whether it's positive attention or negative attention, so long as lots of people are paying attention.

     So, by watching the news, by talking about it with your friends and getting them to watch the news, by blogging about the news and Facebooking about the news, you're just giving the sorts of people who are in the state of mind that they are willing to perform such an atrocious act a reason to do it.

     Let me ask a less antagonistic question now: Do you have a legitimate need to know every detail of these tragedies?  Or, to put it another way, Do you really need to know any of this?

     If you really examine the question, and examine yourself realistically, and your life, I think you will find you do not.  Oh, perhaps if you were related to one of the children or teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School, you would need to know.

     Did I need to know?

     No.

     I did not seek out this information.  I work with a number of people who are socked into the 24 hour media frenzy, and feed happily through any outlet they can find, and I knew about it within an hour of it happening because it became the discussion at large.  (One of the disadvantages to working in Cubicle-land.)  When I got in my truck to commute home in the afternoon, my radio had been left on NPR and they were covering it.  When the tears became uncontrollable, I changed the station.

     I did NOT need to know.

     I think the news media has a lot to answer for.  They are no longer purveyors of "news" (news  - /n(y)o͞oz/ - Noun - Newly received or noteworthy information, esp. about recent or important events) but of ratings.  They will say almost anything if it will get them the attention they desire.  I'm not saying that they make things up.  What I'm saying is that they pick the stories that will get the strongest emotional reactions, because those are the ones everyone watches.  It does not mean that those are important stories.  It means that they are ones that will be watched by people who will also watch American Idol, Survivor, Honey Booboo, Dog, The Walking Dead, Adult Swim, Two Broke Girls, and especially CSI and NCIS, or pretty much anything else someone filmed and sold to a network executive.

     Look, I'm not saying anyone reading this is bad, or evil, or anything.  However, your behaviors, your choices, influence the world.  If you encourage these kinds of outrageous news stories (which you do by watching them, reading them, sharing them, discussing them) then you are also encouraging the results of those stories.  

     Years ago, when we lived in Athens (home of the dratted inbred English bulldogs), we had several friends in different aspects of police work.  One was a detective, and found that watching shows like CSI and Law and Order made it easier for him to catch criminals because they committed the same crimes and made the same stupid mistakes.  Another friend, a "beat cop", laughed about gang shoot-outs because, invariably, one of these guys would get hold of a pistol or some similar weapon and hold it like they were in the movies: arm locked in front of them at just above shoulder height, with the gun held at a 90 degree angle to the vertical.  The results were predictable: squeeze the trigger and fire a line of bullets until the gun smashed them in the face and knocked them out through the joys of recoil.

     It apparently made them quite easy to capture.

     As to the whole discussion of guns, A) The Second Amendment guarantees us the right to defend ourselves with guns, not to hunt with them; B) The Second Amendment also calls for a civilian militia rather than a standing army.  Not so sure how well that would go over these days....C) No one (except for a few particularly loud idiots/power mongers) is actually calling to seize all the guns; and D) I'm all for registering the gun owners; not so sure the value of registering the guns themselves.  I'm willing to debate that, but I'm not going into my reasoning here and now.

     In the end, I suppose the real point of this long, drawn-out and slightly abusive rant is this:

     SHUT UP AND THINK FOR YOURSELF.