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Notes -
ongoing shooting in lewiston, maine
reportedly 22+ dead, 60+ shot. shooter is rumored to be an ex army guy. perhaps shaping up to be the next las vegas massacre. stay safe and prepare for the gun control debate to be revved up full force tomorrow
So basically two weeks worth of murders in Chicago. I want to live in a world where these events are not news and the constant drumbeat of urban violence is.
9/11 was basically a month's worth of traffic fatalities, and yet I find it hard to credit the idea that it shouldn't have been newsworthy.
Why is no one talking about this?
State-backed violence is scalable in a way that traffic accidents or random homicides isn't - if an empire takes one of your state's villages, it's going to take more unless can you fight back - whereas if an earthquake takes one of your villages ... that sucks, but it's just nature, being angry about it doesn't accomplish anything. So 9/11 is noteworthy and worth harshly responding to in a way that traffic fatalities aren't. However, the response to 9/11 was absolutely overdone and poorly thought through in no small part due to the awakening of previously-suppressed national passions and desire for war it caused, and thus could be described as 'too newsworthy'.
"Insane people doing mass shootings" doesn't have the same scaling issue, though. There are already sufficiently strong incentives against doing it that it just doesn't happen that much, and those who do it are mostly insane or stupid. "Mass shootings" and "school shootings" get way more attention than they should by any reasonable metric.
And, yes, the mainstream media does talk about urban violence. What grandparent was pointing to, though, is that they don't emphasize it as much as mass shootings or racism violence, and that they're very resistant to the kinds of solutions that'd actually solve urban violence, such as expanding and empowering police and active and paternalistic intervention to change culture.
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