Now that the students at Virginia Tech have demanded that media representatives leave their campus and allow them to "heal" and return to normalcy, perhaps the networks and "big print" can redirect their attention to a more constructive obsession.
Now that they've finished stalking virtually every person with a Virginia Tech logo on their chest since the "massacre," now that they've finished rationalizing Don Imus's "First Amendment right" to be racist, now that they've given us month after month of wall-to-wall Anna Nicole coverage, maybe they can devote just SOME of that investigative energy to getting to the bottom of the firearms industry, its control of our government and our very way of life.
Even during the 24/7 Virginia Tech coverage, the almighty firearms industry was only guardedly mentioned, with most coverage implying how futile it would be to try to implement effective gun control in this country. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid warned late last week against a "rush to judgment" on the gun control issue and even otherwise progressive Presidential Candidate Barack Obama made noises about respecting the rights of citizens to keep guns in their homes.
How hypocritical, how curious...
If the media can be shocked at the random shootings at the University and the deaths of 32 innocent persons, why aren't they equally shocked that there were 29,569 gun deaths in the U.S. in 2004, including 16,750 suicides, 11,624 homicides and 649 unintentional fatal shootings?
Just in case CNN, ABC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other media giants haven't been keeping track, that's a rate of 81 gun deaths every single day of the year. If 32 deaths on a single day in Virginia warrant a "full-court press" by our news gathering agencies, what do you do, Anderson Cooper, when our annual gun-related homicide rate is nearly 12,000 persons and Germany's is 373, Canada's is 151, Australia's is 57, England and Wales' is a combined 54 and Japan's is just 19 people?
If the media consider Iraq's American death toll sufficiently newsworthy, at 3323, to justify daily and significant coverage, why isn't there comparable attention given to the 30,000 American deaths, here in this country, due to firearms? Where are the Presidential convocations, the national Days of Mourning, the call for the tolling of church bells for that? Who are we kidding?
Wouldn't it seem to make sense, for example, for the traditional and "new media" to ask where the money really went from the 86 million firearms that were manufactured in the United States from 1977 to 1996? Couldn't they focus--just for a week--on why the total import of handguns into the U.S. increased by 43 percent over the first two months of 2007? Couldn't they, for example, track the movement of the Austrian-manufactured Glock( the hand gun of choice for the Virginia Tech shooter) from Europe, through customs, and into low-income neighborhoods across this country?
Couldn't CNN, if it wanted to, develop a really compelling five-day series, telling us precisely when the NRA took outright "ownership" of the U.S. government? Couldn't they help us, if they wanted to, to understand what the Los Angeles Times meant last week when it described the "muted response on Capitol Hill to the Virginia Tech massacre?" Couldn't they share with us the precise names of the recipients of the $48 million the NRA has pumped into state and federal elections since 1990?
Or maybe none of this is being done because of this one fact:The National Center for Disease Control tells us that from 1993 to 1997, blacks represented 54 percent of non-fatal gunshot wounds in this country and 54 percent of the homicide victims.
So, if certain people are making a great deal of money on all of this, and our politicians can continue to hold onto their offices and the harm is disproportionately impacting black people, maybe it's not such a big deal, after all.
Say it ain't so, CNN.
#####
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
Great Article!!
~Darren Laing of Cornell University
Though liberal politicians do occasionally try to place some limits on gun purchases (ex: Clinton administrations’ ban on fully automatic weapons), the NRA typically reacts with complaints that these are steps to completely disarm the nation. What needs to be understood is that politicians and the media need to earn the affection of the majority of the population for their votes/advertising revenue. Unfortunately a large portion of the US is comprised of rural Americans and they are usually sympathetic to organizations like the NRA. Rural areas do not typically have massive influxes of people and so its citizens are not exposed to ideas that contrast with their own often. Thus they are more likely to settle for rhetoric which corroborates their values which go uncontested. I hope that makes sense.
Ignorant or not, politicians like Obama need these votes just as much as they need the votes of urbanites who in contrast expect more strict gun regulation. Keep in mind most of the big cities in the US are on the coast and most of the US is not on a coast.
One magazine I read last week did discuss the incident in Virginia with respect to a need for gun control, The Economist. The writer’s tone did suggest he was a gun control supporter however the more interesting point he made was that the Democratic party actually got a candidate in the governor’s mansion by seeking out a man who stated, "I have more guns than I need, but as many as I like,” I doubt The Economist is a magazine frequently read in the mid-west, but there are voices for gun control out there.
Post a Comment