Gopnik writes: "Only in America are there enough mass shootings in a single
week to allow pundits and philosophers to make complicated points about the
nature of responsibility and guilt that elsewhere might exist only in the
realm of gruesome thought experiments."
Mourners attend a candlelight vigil at San Manuel Stadium, Thursday,
December 3, 2015, in San Bernardino, California. (photo: Mark J. Terrill/AP)
Only in America: Our Shared Blame for the Shooting in San Bernardino
By Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
05 December 15
Only in America, as the song saysonly in America are there enough mass
shootings in a single week to allow pundits and philosophers to make
complicated points about the nature of responsibility and guilt that
elsewhere might exist only in the realm of gruesome thought experiments.
Having instructed us that the first of this weeks mass shootings was free
from any ideological taint at allthat the Planned Parenthood killings were
the work of a lone nut, completely uninfluenced by their rhetoricthe
Republican candidates then ordered us to understand that the next mass
shooting was nothing but ideology, that the horrific killings in San
Bernardino were, as Ted Cruz instantly insisted, an act of Islamic terrorism
that should place us in a time of war. (That phrase either means nothing
at all, since in some sense we have been in a time of war since at least
9/11, or else means something so doomed and horrificfull-scale permanent
warfare in the Middle Eastthat, as the historian Andrew Bacevich has
explained, it could be achieved only by changing everything once admirable
about American life.)
So God bless an American tabloid for doing the work that their headlines
have long done (Ford To City: Drop Dead comes to mind from the
past)putting a complicated point into simple language. In this case, the
headline is on the cover of this mornings New York Daily News, announcing
that Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino killers, and a
Muslim-American, is a terroristand that all the other mass murderers of
recent memory are terrorists, too, and (many bonus points for courage here)
that Wayne LaPierre, of the N.R.A., ought to be thought as one as well.
Ceding the punch-point to the Daily News headlinethough whether it should
be considered an expression of populist sentiment, or, as tabloid headlines
so often are these days (cf. the New York Post), an expression of its
owners idea of populist sentimentthere is still some room left to others
for punctilio in the shadings. Indeed, moral logic compels one, unimaginable
thought, to come (almost) to the defense of LaPierre.
One thing easily confused in the finger-pointing about these two latest
attacks is the difference between guilt and responsibility. Guilt is
specific and personal; responsibility often generalized and shared. We did
not, at Nuremberg, find the German people guilty of war crimes; we found
their generals and the S.S. apparatus guilty. (Although, even there, we
probably did not do as good a job as we later might have in distinguishing
crimes of aggressive war, arguably widespread among war-makers, from the
unique, horrific crimes of civilian massacre on an unimagined scale.) But to
talk of German responsibility for the crimes was legitimate and, indeed,
essential. The Germans themselves started that conversation, and have, to
their credit, carried it on ever since.
To draw closer to home, no one thinks that all Americans are guilty of the
crimes of My Lai or of the abuses of Abu Ghraib. (Insisting that all
Americans are guilty of everything America has done, indeed, was part of the
hideous rationale of the 9/11 terrorists.) But, as American citizens, we
are, in a broader sense, responsible for those abuseswhich is a large part
of why so many Americans became determined to end the wars that had brought
them about. Vigilant reflection on even ones remote responsibility for evil
acts is the essence of morality. It is why Abraham Lincoln, who certainly
did not shy from the mass killing that modern war required, was still
haunted by the young men who had died directly and indirectly as a result of
his acts; why Harry Truman underlined, in a book about Hiroshima, lines from
Hamlet about how unintentional horrors are produced unknowingly by good men,
about accidental judgments, casual slaughters / Of deaths put on by cunning
and forced cause; and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fallen on their
inventors heads. And it is why one of President Obamas finest hours and
best speeches was at the National Defense University in 2013, when he
laboriously and intricately and responsibly laid out the rationale for drone
attacks but also recognized the potentially insidious nature of the
reasoning, saying that Americas legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be
the end of the discussion.* To say a military tactic is legal, or even
effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same
human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also
demands the discipline to constrain that poweror risk abusing it.
The collective responsibility that all Americans share is the responsibility
of allowing too many people to have too many guns; guns of a kind that no
civilian ever needs can be bought in this country by almost anyone who wants
one. We have been running an experiment of a kind that no sane ethicist
would allow: what happens when, in a country large enough to contain every
imaginable kind of crazy, from the inward-turning, maniac sort to the
outward-turning, politicized kind, you make sure that almost anyone can
readily buy any kind of gun? And now we know the answer: you get more gun
massacres than there are days in the year.
No sane person thinks that Carly Fiorina is guilty of the shooting at
Planned Parenthood, or that Wayne LaPierre is guilty of the one in San
Bernardinobut those who put weapons into the hands of anyone who wants them
are complicit in what happens when they do. (And those who encourage hate
speech directed at health clinics share responsibility for what happens when
people take them seriously.) They are responsible in the same way that we
are all responsible for the bad consequences of our beliefs, in exactly the
same way that Wahhabi imams who preach intolerance are responsible for the
consequences of their words. Sometimes you can avoid such horrible
consequences with a minimal effort at thinking and acting responsibly. And
when you can, you should.
To search for an ideological sorter for these killingsthis one is a
terrorist, but this one is merely a nut, and this one is sort of a nut and
sort of a terroristwhile refusing to do obvious and simple things to
prevent them is to be responsible for their perpetuation. (The murders in
Paris demanded a complicated cell network, which passed over borders and was
coördinated by ISIS in Syria, exactly because getting assault rifles in
France is hard work, demanding coördinated efforts.)
If the gun lobby ever spoke honestly, what they would say is that of course
we are broadly responsible for these killings, but regular mass killings of
innocent people is the price we pay for the liberty to own whatever guns we
want, in order to be protected from a phantom threat we cannot name. That is
their actual belief, although one sees, on examining it, why they never want
to state it quite so clearly. So there will be ever more mass gun murders,
some to be accepted blankly as the cost of liberty, others to become the
occasion for surrendering liberty to a militarized state. Like the song
says, only in America.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.
Mourners attend a candlelight vigil at San Manuel Stadium, Thursday,
December 3, 2015, in San Bernardino, California. (photo: Mark J. Terrill/AP)
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/our-shared-blame-for-the-shooting-in
-san-bernardinohttp://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/our-shared-blame-for-
the-shooting-in-san-bernardino
Only in America: Our Shared Blame for the Shooting in San Bernardino
By Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker
05 December 15
nly in America, as the song saysonly in America are there enough mass
shootings in a single week to allow pundits and philosophers to make
complicated points about the nature of responsibility and guilt that
elsewhere might exist only in the realm of gruesome thought experiments.
Having instructed us that the first of this weeks mass shootings was free
from any ideological taint at allthat the Planned Parenthood killings were
the work of a lone nut, completely uninfluenced by their rhetoricthe
Republican candidates then ordered us to understand that the next mass
shooting was nothing but ideology, that the horrific killings in San
Bernardino were, as Ted Cruz instantly insisted, an act of Islamic terrorism
that should place us in a time of war. (That phrase either means nothing
at all, since in some sense we have been in a time of war since at least
9/11, or else means something so doomed and horrificfull-scale permanent
warfare in the Middle Eastthat, as the historian Andrew Bacevich has
explained, it could be achieved only by changing everything once admirable
about American life.)
So God bless an American tabloid for doing the work that their headlines
have long done (Ford To City: Drop Dead comes to mind from the
past)putting a complicated point into simple language. In this case, the
headline is on the cover of this mornings New York Daily News, announcing
that Syed Farook, one of the two San Bernardino killers, and a
Muslim-American, is a terroristand that all the other mass murderers of
recent memory are terrorists, too, and (many bonus points for courage here)
that Wayne LaPierre, of the N.R.A., ought to be thought as one as well.
Ceding the punch-point to the Daily News headlinethough whether it should
be considered an expression of populist sentiment, or, as tabloid headlines
so often are these days (cf. the New York Post), an expression of its
owners idea of populist sentimentthere is still some room left to others
for punctilio in the shadings. Indeed, moral logic compels one, unimaginable
thought, to come (almost) to the defense of LaPierre.
One thing easily confused in the finger-pointing about these two latest
attacks is the difference between guilt and responsibility. Guilt is
specific and personal; responsibility often generalized and shared. We did
not, at Nuremberg, find the German people guilty of war crimes; we found
their generals and the S.S. apparatus guilty. (Although, even there, we
probably did not do as good a job as we later might have in distinguishing
crimes of aggressive war, arguably widespread among war-makers, from the
unique, horrific crimes of civilian massacre on an unimagined scale.) But to
talk of German responsibility for the crimes was legitimate and, indeed,
essential. The Germans themselves started that conversation, and have, to
their credit, carried it on ever since.
To draw closer to home, no one thinks that all Americans are guilty of the
crimes of My Lai or of the abuses of Abu Ghraib. (Insisting that all
Americans are guilty of everything America has done, indeed, was part of the
hideous rationale of the 9/11 terrorists.) But, as American citizens, we
are, in a broader sense, responsible for those abuseswhich is a large part
of why so many Americans became determined to end the wars that had brought
them about. Vigilant reflection on even ones remote responsibility for evil
acts is the essence of morality. It is why Abraham Lincoln, who certainly
did not shy from the mass killing that modern war required, was still
haunted by the young men who had died directly and indirectly as a result of
his acts; why Harry Truman underlined, in a book about Hiroshima, lines from
Hamlet about how unintentional horrors are produced unknowingly by good men,
about accidental judgments, casual slaughters / Of deaths put on by cunning
and forced cause; and, in this upshot, purposes mistook fallen on their
inventors heads. And it is why one of President Obamas finest hours and
best speeches was at the National Defense University in 2013, when he
laboriously and intricately and responsibly laid out the rationale for drone
attacks but also recognized the potentially insidious nature of the
reasoning, saying that Americas legitimate claim of self-defense cannot be
the end of the discussion.* To say a military tactic is legal, or even
effective, is not to say it is wise or moral in every instance. For the same
human progress that gives us the technology to strike half a world away also
demands the discipline to constrain that poweror risk abusing it.
The collective responsibility that all Americans share is the responsibility
of allowing too many people to have too many guns; guns of a kind that no
civilian ever needs can be bought in this country by almost anyone who wants
one. We have been running an experiment of a kind that no sane ethicist
would allow: what happens when, in a country large enough to contain every
imaginable kind of crazy, from the inward-turning, maniac sort to the
outward-turning, politicized kind, you make sure that almost anyone can
readily buy any kind of gun? And now we know the answer: you get more gun
massacres than there are days in the year.
No sane person thinks that Carly Fiorina is guilty of the shooting at
Planned Parenthood, or that Wayne LaPierre is guilty of the one in San
Bernardinobut those who put weapons into the hands of anyone who wants them
are complicit in what happens when they do. (And those who encourage hate
speech directed at health clinics share responsibility for what happens when
people take them seriously.) They are responsible in the same way that we
are all responsible for the bad consequences of our beliefs, in exactly the
same way that Wahhabi imams who preach intolerance are responsible for the
consequences of their words. Sometimes you can avoid such horrible
consequences with a minimal effort at thinking and acting responsibly. And
when you can, you should.
To search for an ideological sorter for these killingsthis one is a
terrorist, but this one is merely a nut, and this one is sort of a nut and
sort of a terroristwhile refusing to do obvious and simple things to
prevent them is to be responsible for their perpetuation. (The murders in
Paris demanded a complicated cell network, which passed over borders and was
coördinated by ISIS in Syria, exactly because getting assault rifles in
France is hard work, demanding coördinated efforts.)
If the gun lobby ever spoke honestly, what they would say is that of course
we are broadly responsible for these killings, but regular mass killings of
innocent people is the price we pay for the liberty to own whatever guns we
want, in order to be protected from a phantom threat we cannot name. That is
their actual belief, although one sees, on examining it, why they never want
to state it quite so clearly. So there will be ever more mass gun murders,
some to be accepted blankly as the cost of liberty, others to become the
occasion for surrendering liberty to a militarized state. Like the song
says, only in America.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
