Showing posts with label gun violence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label gun violence. Show all posts
Thursday, May 26, 2022
G.O.P. Says One Nation Under The Gun!
This retro-looking art from Todd Alcott would be biting sarcasm if it weren't true.
https://www.instagram.com/toddalcott/
Wednesday, May 25, 2022
IN NO OTHER COUNTRY
In no other country do we see the level of gun use that we have here in the United States, where this culture has fetishized, venerated, and worshiped fire arms to a grotesque degree, and where the conservative politicians who could do something about this rampant--AND DECADES OLD--scourge have decided to literally sacrifice the lives of children in favor of unrestricted gun ownership. So much for the right-to-life.
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| From The New York Times The Morning newsletter, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From AMERICA'S GUN CULTURE on BBC News, May 25, 2022 |
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| From The New York Times The Morning newsletter, May 26, 2022 |
Sunday, November 10, 2019
The Powerful Art of Ben Turnbull
Artist Ben Turnbull's work powerfully and pointedly addresses the epidemic of gun violence in the United States. Speaking to the penchant Americans have for fetishizing and worshiping fire arms, he uses the lids of old lift-up school desks to carve hidden reliefs of hand guns and semi-automatic weapons...the kind that are used repeatedly in the regular mass shootings that plague our our schools and country, the kind that conservatives and Republicans refuse to do anything to try to curtail or stop.
https://www.benturnbull.com/
https://www.benturnbull.com/
Monday, October 14, 2019
BEAUTY: Art--Jenny Holzer
This past Thursday, Friday, and Saturday October 10-12, 2019, famed multi-media artist Jenny Holzer in collaboration with Creativetime mounted a scrolling, projected-word installation at Rockefeller Center In New York City addressing rampant gun violence in the United States. Vigil gathered together first hand accounts from victims of gun violence, whether personally shot or having lost loved ones to guns, along with poems and statements about this most grotesque, seemingly endless epidemic plaguing life in this country.
https://projects.jennyholzer.com/
http://creativetime.org/vigil-jenny-holzer/
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
Photo: Lauren Camarata
https://projects.jennyholzer.com/
http://creativetime.org/vigil-jenny-holzer/
Wednesday, August 7, 2019
America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic Is the Result of Republican Minority Rule by Mari Uyehara
America’s Mass Shooting Epidemic Is the Result of Republican Minority Rule
A clear majority of Americans and Democrats support stricter gun control—the GOP has been blocking it for decades, and the results have been murderous.
by Mari Uyehara | August 5, 2019
Over this past weekend, America experienced yet another double-header mass shooting, with a total of 29 dead and 53 injured.
On Saturday in El Paso, Texas, a 21-year-old white man, who authorities say published an anti-Hispanic screed on the online forum 8chan, reportedly opened fire in a Walmart store. Police arrived within six minutes, but he had already killed 20 and injured 26 people. Thirteen hours later, another 24-year-old white man reportedly opened fire in the entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio, and he managed to kill nine and wounded 27 others, despite police in the area responding within a minute of the first shots. They were, according to the research group Gun Violence Archive, the 250th and 251st mass shootings in the U.S. of 2019, following two from the previous weekend.
No other developed country has anywhere near this level of both gun violence and mass shootings. A 2016 study, “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities,” found that between 2000 and 2014, the United States had 133 mass shootings, while Finland had just two (killing 18 people in total) and Switzerland had one mass shooting (killing 14 in total). In 2019, America has had more mass shootings than days. In The Atlantic, David Frum, like so many other commentators, called it “a uniquely American determination to ignore the obvious,” pointing out that nations like Italy are home to white supremacists and even fascistic leaders, but not mass shootings. “More guns, more killing. Fewer guns, less killing,” he wrote in conclusion. “Everybody else has figured that out. Americans—and only Americans—refuse to do so.”
That’s not quite right, however. For all the talk of America’s obsession with guns and propensity for violence, only 30 percent of Americans actually own them, according to Pew Research. A solid majority—57 percent of Americans—support stricter gun laws, with 80 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents versus 28 percent of Republicans. Blue states, like California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, and New York, have passed stricter gun-control laws—and even though it’s relatively easy to purchase firearms and bring them across state lines, those states have lower rates of gun violence than those with lax standards, according to the Giffords Law Center. On the federal level, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed two bipartisan gun-control bills earlier this year: H.R. 8 (a bill prohibiting person-to-person firearms transfer unless a background check can be performed) and H.R. 1112 (a bill extending the time firearms dealers have to wait for a response on background checks to 10 days).
That legislation has been held up in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has not brought them to the floor for a vote. It is not merely a problem of obstructionism at the federal level either. Nine of the ten states with the highest gun-death rates—Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia—have both Republican-controlled state legislatures and weak gun laws. So it is not, as Frum asserts, that “Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.” It is largely a Republican determination to do so.
In the wake of the latest mass shootings, Republicans rallied around anything-but-gun-control talking points. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California blamed video games in a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News. "The idea that these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals," McCarthy said. "I've always felt that it's a problem for future generations and others.” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick also pointed at video games, as well as a lack of prayer in schools and saluting the flag, in an appearance on Fox & Friends.
Republican Texas senator John Cornyn—who supported the 1996 Dickey amendment on a spending bill which banned federal funding for the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence—tweeted that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” gesturing toward a “broken background check system, improving access to mental health treatment, by hardening soft targets like our schools, by enhanced training for law enforcement and mental health professionals.” Texas governor Greg Abbott—who once tweeted that he was “embarrassed” that Texas was second to California in gun purchases, urging Texans to “pick up the pace”—also deflected to mental illness: “the need for the state and for society to do a better job of dealing with challenging mental health based issues." As did President Donald Trump, who claimed to reporters that this was “a mental illness problem.”
None of these theories are backed by evidence or even some kind of good-faith reasoning. Every other industrialized country has mental illness, video games, and “soft target” schools, as well as minimal school prayers and flag saluting, without our mass-shooting epidemic. In Japan, where video gaming is widely popular and gun laws are strict, there have been no mass shootings in the past year—never mind hundreds of them in eight months. Researchers have found no link between mass shootings and violent video games. Ditto mental illness. In a study for the National Institutes of Health, professors of psychiatry Paul Applebaum, of Columbia, and Jeffrey Swanson, of Duke, found that only “3 percent—5 percent of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns.” And another psychiatrist at Columbia, Michael Stone, found that about 65 percent of mass murderers exhibited no mental disorder, and a 2016 analysis by the Department of Justice found a similar rate, about 20 percent, of psychotic disorders among mass killers.
“In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times. “That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis—all these semiautomatic weapons, when they became so easily accessible.”
Americans aren’t willfully blind to the fact that the availability of guns is a component of the country’s gun-violence problem. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, while only 48 percent backed a full ban on assault weapons, 96 percent of Americans support background checks for all gun purchases, 75 percent back a 30-day waiting period for all gun purchases, and 70 percent favor requiring all guns to be registered with the police—measures that go beyond today’s federal gun regulations. The Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post, hardly a liberal rag, published a cover editorial on Monday morning, calling for a “Ban on Weapons of War.”
In recent days, while 50 Republican lawmakers turned down invitations to appear on CNN to talk about the mass shootings, Democrat senators, including Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and California’s Kamala Harris, called for more gun regulation, with presidential candidates Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont calling on McConnell to bring the Senate back from recess to enact emergency legislation. Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder tweeted: “Enough-time for real action. Pass a domestic terrorism bill. Ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines, body armor, silencers. Pass universal background checks, end loopholes: gunshow and Charleston. Pass red flag laws. We can reduce the carnage if pols have the guts to act.”
Many pols have those guts, but they are outweighed by a Senate makeup tilted toward less populous states, gerrymandering and voter suppression rampant on the state level, and a judiciary reshaped with far-right appointments, thanks to McConnell’s obstructionism. In 2018, Democratic Senate candidates collectively won 18 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet still lost seats, with the Senate balance maintained by the Republicans 53-47. To the extent that mass shootings are a uniquely American epidemic, it is because the American electoral system is uniquely rigged for the modern GOP—the “Great Compromise” that allotted the same number of Senate seats for both large and small states has metastasized the issue to deadly effect. Without a representative body that reflects the will of the people, it is unlikely that the carnage will stop anytime soon.
Link to original article:
https://www.gq.com/story/americas-mass-shooting-republican-rule
A clear majority of Americans and Democrats support stricter gun control—the GOP has been blocking it for decades, and the results have been murderous.
by Mari Uyehara | August 5, 2019
Over this past weekend, America experienced yet another double-header mass shooting, with a total of 29 dead and 53 injured.
On Saturday in El Paso, Texas, a 21-year-old white man, who authorities say published an anti-Hispanic screed on the online forum 8chan, reportedly opened fire in a Walmart store. Police arrived within six minutes, but he had already killed 20 and injured 26 people. Thirteen hours later, another 24-year-old white man reportedly opened fire in the entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio, and he managed to kill nine and wounded 27 others, despite police in the area responding within a minute of the first shots. They were, according to the research group Gun Violence Archive, the 250th and 251st mass shootings in the U.S. of 2019, following two from the previous weekend.
No other developed country has anywhere near this level of both gun violence and mass shootings. A 2016 study, “Mass Shootings: Media, Myths, and Realities,” found that between 2000 and 2014, the United States had 133 mass shootings, while Finland had just two (killing 18 people in total) and Switzerland had one mass shooting (killing 14 in total). In 2019, America has had more mass shootings than days. In The Atlantic, David Frum, like so many other commentators, called it “a uniquely American determination to ignore the obvious,” pointing out that nations like Italy are home to white supremacists and even fascistic leaders, but not mass shootings. “More guns, more killing. Fewer guns, less killing,” he wrote in conclusion. “Everybody else has figured that out. Americans—and only Americans—refuse to do so.”
That’s not quite right, however. For all the talk of America’s obsession with guns and propensity for violence, only 30 percent of Americans actually own them, according to Pew Research. A solid majority—57 percent of Americans—support stricter gun laws, with 80 percent of Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents versus 28 percent of Republicans. Blue states, like California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Connecticut, Maryland, Hawaii, and New York, have passed stricter gun-control laws—and even though it’s relatively easy to purchase firearms and bring them across state lines, those states have lower rates of gun violence than those with lax standards, according to the Giffords Law Center. On the federal level, the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives passed two bipartisan gun-control bills earlier this year: H.R. 8 (a bill prohibiting person-to-person firearms transfer unless a background check can be performed) and H.R. 1112 (a bill extending the time firearms dealers have to wait for a response on background checks to 10 days).
That legislation has been held up in the Republican-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky has not brought them to the floor for a vote. It is not merely a problem of obstructionism at the federal level either. Nine of the ten states with the highest gun-death rates—Montana, Wyoming, Alaska, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and West Virginia—have both Republican-controlled state legislatures and weak gun laws. So it is not, as Frum asserts, that “Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.” It is largely a Republican determination to do so.
In the wake of the latest mass shootings, Republicans rallied around anything-but-gun-control talking points. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California blamed video games in a Sunday morning appearance on Fox News. "The idea that these video games that dehumanize individuals to have a game of shooting individuals," McCarthy said. "I've always felt that it's a problem for future generations and others.” Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick also pointed at video games, as well as a lack of prayer in schools and saluting the flag, in an appearance on Fox & Friends.
Republican Texas senator John Cornyn—who supported the 1996 Dickey amendment on a spending bill which banned federal funding for the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence—tweeted that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong,” gesturing toward a “broken background check system, improving access to mental health treatment, by hardening soft targets like our schools, by enhanced training for law enforcement and mental health professionals.” Texas governor Greg Abbott—who once tweeted that he was “embarrassed” that Texas was second to California in gun purchases, urging Texans to “pick up the pace”—also deflected to mental illness: “the need for the state and for society to do a better job of dealing with challenging mental health based issues." As did President Donald Trump, who claimed to reporters that this was “a mental illness problem.”
None of these theories are backed by evidence or even some kind of good-faith reasoning. Every other industrialized country has mental illness, video games, and “soft target” schools, as well as minimal school prayers and flag saluting, without our mass-shooting epidemic. In Japan, where video gaming is widely popular and gun laws are strict, there have been no mass shootings in the past year—never mind hundreds of them in eight months. Researchers have found no link between mass shootings and violent video games. Ditto mental illness. In a study for the National Institutes of Health, professors of psychiatry Paul Applebaum, of Columbia, and Jeffrey Swanson, of Duke, found that only “3 percent—5 percent of violent acts are attributable to serious mental illness, and most do not involve guns.” And another psychiatrist at Columbia, Michael Stone, found that about 65 percent of mass murderers exhibited no mental disorder, and a 2016 analysis by the Department of Justice found a similar rate, about 20 percent, of psychotic disorders among mass killers.
“In my large file of mass murders, if you look decade by decade, the numbers of victims are fairly small up until the 1960s,” Dr. Stone told The New York Times. “That’s when the deaths start going way up. When the AK-47s and the Kalashnikovs and the Uzis—all these semiautomatic weapons, when they became so easily accessible.”
Americans aren’t willfully blind to the fact that the availability of guns is a component of the country’s gun-violence problem. According to a 2017 Gallup poll, while only 48 percent backed a full ban on assault weapons, 96 percent of Americans support background checks for all gun purchases, 75 percent back a 30-day waiting period for all gun purchases, and 70 percent favor requiring all guns to be registered with the police—measures that go beyond today’s federal gun regulations. The Rupert Murdoch–owned New York Post, hardly a liberal rag, published a cover editorial on Monday morning, calling for a “Ban on Weapons of War.”
In recent days, while 50 Republican lawmakers turned down invitations to appear on CNN to talk about the mass shootings, Democrat senators, including Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and California’s Kamala Harris, called for more gun regulation, with presidential candidates Cory Booker of New Jersey and Bernie Sanders of Vermont calling on McConnell to bring the Senate back from recess to enact emergency legislation. Former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder tweeted: “Enough-time for real action. Pass a domestic terrorism bill. Ban assault weapons, high capacity magazines, body armor, silencers. Pass universal background checks, end loopholes: gunshow and Charleston. Pass red flag laws. We can reduce the carnage if pols have the guts to act.”
Many pols have those guts, but they are outweighed by a Senate makeup tilted toward less populous states, gerrymandering and voter suppression rampant on the state level, and a judiciary reshaped with far-right appointments, thanks to McConnell’s obstructionism. In 2018, Democratic Senate candidates collectively won 18 million more votes than their Republican counterparts, yet still lost seats, with the Senate balance maintained by the Republicans 53-47. To the extent that mass shootings are a uniquely American epidemic, it is because the American electoral system is uniquely rigged for the modern GOP—the “Great Compromise” that allotted the same number of Senate seats for both large and small states has metastasized the issue to deadly effect. Without a representative body that reflects the will of the people, it is unlikely that the carnage will stop anytime soon.
Link to original article:
https://www.gq.com/story/americas-mass-shooting-republican-rule
Friday, July 20, 2018
BEAUTY: Sculpture--Nathaniel Lewis
Completely apropos of yesterday's post of the social commentary-activist work of soft sculptor Natalie Baxter (here), here is the chilling, activist work of Nathaniel Lewis. He makes children's toys into things that should not be, all rendered in bright, harmless colors.
This statement entitled Automatic Fun is quite powerful.
His CCTV set is painful, bringing to mind the children in 1984 who snitch on their parents.
And finally, the way his Playland Security reduces a real life horrific situation into something children "play" at is even more horrifying.
http://www.nathaniellewis.org/
This statement entitled Automatic Fun is quite powerful.
His CCTV set is painful, bringing to mind the children in 1984 who snitch on their parents.
And finally, the way his Playland Security reduces a real life horrific situation into something children "play" at is even more horrifying.
http://www.nathaniellewis.org/
Thursday, July 19, 2018
BEAUTY: Soft Sculpture--Natalie Baxter
Natalie Baxter is an artist with a cause. She is an activist and protests via her amazing soft sculpture works that shine a light on the realities of life in the United States at this particular point in time. Her bio on her website says:
"Natalie Baxter (b. 1985) explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic Americana, and traditional gender stereotypes through soft sculpture and video. Baxter’s work playfully pushes controversial issues, creating an accessible entry point for unpacking matters of tension in today’s political and social landscape."
Betsy Greer, author of Craftivism, commented on Baxter's series entitled Bloated Flags. “In the run up and wake of the 2016 election, the United States came full cycle with its reality television dreams based on opulence over substance, quick quips easy to quote and a lust for drama over authenticity. These flags by Natalie Baxter illustrate this coming to terms with a change in pace by sharing what our nation’s flag may feel like it’s become, bloated, flashy and familiar in shape alone.”
Top to bottom: Aggressive Nationalism; America, Current Mood; First Month; Fly False; Lil' Glory; Nasty Woman; People Will Think You're Making a Trump Flag (a yuge one); People Will Think You're Making a Trump Flag
174 guns make up Baxter's Warm Gun series. Her artist statement says, "Warm Gun examines the United States’ issues of gun violence and masculinity through a collection of colorfully quilted, droopy, caricatures of assault weapons, bringing 'macho' objects into a traditionally feminine sphere and questioning their potency." Beyond that, I feel it also makes a statement as to how so many people in this country think of guns as toys, just another thing to have like a phone or a car...just a cute little plush toy one can buy at the mall...
Top to bottom: Anything You Can Do; Barb; Joie; Manchester; Racist McShootface; Second Date; Shady Side; Spring Break
And what does America love as much as its guns? Why, money of course!
Thanks Natalie for your amazing work and continuing to make important statements despite the trolls!
http://www.nataliebaxter.com/
"Natalie Baxter (b. 1985) explores concepts of place-identity, nostalgic Americana, and traditional gender stereotypes through soft sculpture and video. Baxter’s work playfully pushes controversial issues, creating an accessible entry point for unpacking matters of tension in today’s political and social landscape."
Betsy Greer, author of Craftivism, commented on Baxter's series entitled Bloated Flags. “In the run up and wake of the 2016 election, the United States came full cycle with its reality television dreams based on opulence over substance, quick quips easy to quote and a lust for drama over authenticity. These flags by Natalie Baxter illustrate this coming to terms with a change in pace by sharing what our nation’s flag may feel like it’s become, bloated, flashy and familiar in shape alone.”
Top to bottom: Aggressive Nationalism; America, Current Mood; First Month; Fly False; Lil' Glory; Nasty Woman; People Will Think You're Making a Trump Flag (a yuge one); People Will Think You're Making a Trump Flag
174 guns make up Baxter's Warm Gun series. Her artist statement says, "Warm Gun examines the United States’ issues of gun violence and masculinity through a collection of colorfully quilted, droopy, caricatures of assault weapons, bringing 'macho' objects into a traditionally feminine sphere and questioning their potency." Beyond that, I feel it also makes a statement as to how so many people in this country think of guns as toys, just another thing to have like a phone or a car...just a cute little plush toy one can buy at the mall...
Top to bottom: Anything You Can Do; Barb; Joie; Manchester; Racist McShootface; Second Date; Shady Side; Spring Break
And what does America love as much as its guns? Why, money of course!
Thanks Natalie for your amazing work and continuing to make important statements despite the trolls!
http://www.nataliebaxter.com/
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