People Have Changed More Than Guns

Guns have changed.

More powerful, easier to shoot and much easier to shoot in bursts.

But people have changed more than guns.  After all, guns have been widely circulated since the Revolution and yet mass murders were rare until recently.  Nor have all the mass murders in the recent scourge been committed with assault rifles or other advanced weaponry.

Mass murderers damn near grow on trees these days.  Not really, but you could be forgiven for thinking that way.  The NRA says that gun crime is down, which is probably true but misses the point of the legitimate hysteria over mass gun violence.  The point is that it's a new and unacceptable phenomena to not be surprised by mass murder in public spaces. Let alone on a regular basis.

Why is this happening?

First of all, it's happening because most of these mass murderers train for years on highly advanced mass murder simulators with names like Call of Duty and Doom and Halo 2.  Sitting alone or alone together with other Zen-like practitioners, they learn to calm their nerves, shoot for the head, drop empty magazines and reload without missing a beat.  Mass Murder Simulators, oops, First Person Shooter games gained mass popularity in the early Nineties, some 20 years ago.  Twenty years is a generation, a generation that now ranges in age from Junior High to High School to College to Young Adult, the cohorts from which are drawn most of today's mass murderers.

But it's not just First Person Shooter Games that are injecting mass psychosis into the body politic.  It's also the Golden Age of TV that we're now experiencing.  Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, Justified, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, True Detective: these and other dramatic series are rightly heralded as breakthroughs in Boob Tube entertainment.  Devotees, numbering in the tens of millions, regularly invite their friends to share their addictions to favorite series.

The pitch from a fan to a newby generally includes a conspiratorial lowering of the voice, followed by a grave warning.

"It's dark, really dark."

Now I stand in a glass house regarding dark entertainment, given my not infrequent macabre enjoyment of action and crime movies, especially action-crime movies.  However, even the most heinous movie comes and goes in a couple of hours.  The mass murder celebrations known as Cable Crime Dramas are ten, twenty, thirty and sometimes fifty hour injections of sociopathic ideas, imagery and intensity into the waiting synapses of their millions of adoring fans.

Some in that audience aren't going to process it all very well.

Is this to say that a given mass murderer can blame his crime against humanity on a TV show or a Mass Murder Simulator?  Certainly no for the former, mostly no for the latter.

It does mean that people have changed due to mass stimuli that's hiding in plain sight.  First, they consume a diet of sociopathic entertainment on TV that is vastly more vivid and increasingly more twisted than ever before in human evolutionary history.  They also hone from a young age their ability to calmly conduct mass murder.

Guns are simple compared to people, making the change in guns less profound than the change in people over the two decade maturation of the Mass Murder Generation with whom we're now living.

The Speech We Need From President Obama

President Obama on the Nigerian schoolgirl kidnapping:

The West has been at war with Islamic Terror for two decades now, a full generation: not a war we chose, but the one that's fallen to us.  Every generation of Americans has its burden.  This is ours.

Islamic Terror has a long history, but first struck America in '93 when acolytes of the Blind Sheikh bombed the World Trade Center.  Attacking low, they killed many but didn't topple even one Tower.

9/11 was the signal day for Al-Qaeda in particular and Islamism in general.  Most Muslims don't support terror as a tactic.  Islamists do.  They embrace recruiting young people - little kids even - to blow themselves up so long as they take out lots of infidel. That is evil.

Islamism is evil because their strategy emphasizes the killing and maiming of innocent civilians.  Terrorists aim for collateral damage.  Their motto is Collateral Damage R Us.

Islamism perverts one of the world's greatest religions, a cancer at its core that will take great leadership to defeat.  Leadership from where?

Leadership from within the Muslim Community hasn't been richly forthcoming, to put it charitably.

Leadership from the Infidel World, er, the rest of us, has been unsteady, uncertain and intermittent: not our finest hour as it were.

Two hundred Nigerian schoolgirls changed all that however.  This hostage situation galvanized the entire world just as it galvanized me.

So I sat down with President Goodluck Jonathan, because I'm that kind of guy.  Plus my Father's from Africa, as you know.  Mostly, I recognize that a setback for Islamism on the world stage would be a major victory in our war against Islamic Terror - Hard Power delivering Soft Power benefits.  Thus I had American interests squarely in mind.

"Goodluck," I said, "We've got an opportunity here to do the world good, do Africa good, do Nigeria good and do those innocent girls good.  We're gonna team up my best troops with your best troops, like teaming up NFL All Pros with NBA All Stars, with Google behind 'em."

What could he say?  I'm offering SEALs, Deltas, U.S. Marines, whatever the mission requires.  Speaking of mission, America's troops are eager for a clearly defined mission with such a rightly heroic goal.

Boko Haram has done the modern world the favor of exposing some of Islamism's most hateful elements.  Haram means forbidden.  Boko means Learning, for girls and about Western ideas especially.

Boko Haram targeted schoolgirls because Islamists think they shouldn't go to school.  That makes this a girl's and more generally a Woman's Rights story, even though it's primarily an Islamism story.

Boko Haram must be defeated and I, Barack Obama, am the President to do it.  It's time for the good guys to fight back.  America has been the good guy before, more times than any other nation ever.  We can again.

I will stand in the well of the Congress and ask my fellow Americans to follow me into this fight.  It's not one we chose.  It's one that fell to us.  The Greatest Generations rise above such enemies of freedom.

Our generation can rise to greatness. If not us, who? If not now, when?

Flagrant Foul

NBA fouls come in two classes of severity: Fouls and Flagrant Fouls.  L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling's apparent racial rant reaches beyond the upper realm of Flagrant Foul.  A Flagrant Two foul mandates immediate expulsion from the game.  If the recording of Sterling's voice is substantially accurate, it counts as a Flagrant 3 or a Flagrant 4 or even a Flagrant 5, worthy of expulsion from The Game Itself.  In short, a transgression so severe as to be worthy of fouling out of the league.

In any case, the Sterling Situation is a deeply saddening and entirely slack-jawed incident in modern American history.  Yes, American history, not just NBA history or sports history.  Sure it doesn't rise anywhere near the level of fire hoses turned on Civil Rights protesters.  Yet it is so out of time and out of place - coming as it does on the heels of another elderly yahoo's stupid and savage comments about race last week in Nevada - that it is a signal moment in the apparently never-ending fight against racism.

Not surprisingly, the past and present stars of the NBA have been the most eloquent and on-point about the situation.  Magic Johnson, LeBron James, Chris Paul and Mayor Kevin Johnson have each gotten to the heart of the matter.

• Magic Johnson: "In the most diverse city in the United States? How can somebody like that be running a sports team?"
• LeBron James: "No Room For That In Our Game"
• Chris Paul: “On behalf of the National Basketball Players Association, this is a very serious issue which we will address aggressively."
• Mayor Kevin Johnson called it a "signal moment in the history of the NBA", emphasizing that the players' voices be heard in the outcome.

Unfortunately, new NBA Commissioner Adam Silver was more lawyer than leader yesterday when he weakly decried Sterling's apparent idiocy.  Sure he was correct in deferring talk of sanctions until an investigation is completed.  But he should have highlighted the harm that this flagrant foul causes not just to his league but to the country.  Let's hope he rises to the challenge once he gets a couple of days between games to sharpen his attack.

As for Sterling, there is so much wrong with this rich idiot that Blogger might run out of screen ink before it's all memorialized.  He was dating a girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter, whose ethnicity he disdained.  Then this one-time divorce lawyer put himself in a situation where his ex-wife is suing his sugar doll because he plied her with community property.  Only in L.A.

Mostly he is stunningly stupid, callous and shamefully wrong in his racial views.

Depressing though all this is, there is a bright silver lining to it.  Racism is a universally reviled social offense in America today.  Notwithstanding the many false accusations of racism that often threaten to weaken our revulsion of the real thing, the American people are overwhelmingly agreed that racism is fundamentally wrong.  It wasn't long ago that that wasn't the case.

Now let's see Adam Silver step up for his big shot in the next day or two.  As Magic Johnson might say to a player about ready to enter the game during the NBA Finals: It's winning time.