Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/09/24/soldering-leds-is-hard.html
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Looked so beautiful in the thumbnail; before I could see the gun violence fetishizing. I guess that’s a solid 25% or more of gaming culture, but still.
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Eh… not keen on the wood, otherwise it would be “shut up and take my money”.
Kryptek camo on a plastic with nickle plated shells would be sweeeet.
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“I love guns so much, I don’t care how much they tear up my thumb skin!”
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I want to say swords in to plowshares, but I know I’m just being wishful & obtuse
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“Luger 9MM, a Remington 20, and a 12 gauge Hornady 50 caliber”
Someone knows their cartridges like Stephen King knows his. Just waiting for somebody to mention Cordite now… 
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I know I’m just being grumpy, but this idea that the glorification of gun violence in media doesn’t have an impact on society is just… I don’t buy it.
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You should look into it. Fantasy violence doesn’t translate to real world violence. These same arguments were leveled against pulp magazines, radio plays, comic books, TV, Movies, and video games.
Indeed the level of fantasy violence is at an all time high, and real world violence is in a decline - not just in the US, but world wide.
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Yeah, I understand all of that, but I don’t buy that there’s no connection between the fetishizing of military weaponry and the subsequent adoption of it by police forces and “enthusiasts” which, in turn leads to it being used on innocents. This leads to aberrational death tolls of which Vegas is a perfect example. Sure, still super-rare and unlikely to impact most folks directly (or the historically statistical low), but for the one in a million, I just can’t get my head around the denialism that it has no impact.
Also, I’m not meaning to put words in your mouth. I realize that’s not what you’re saying here, just expanding and clarifying my original thoughts.
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When it comes to the police becoming more militant, it has been a slow progression that has been amplified by the war on drugs and then the war on terror, and combined with a lot of ex-military becoming cops, the gov. giving police some surplus gear, and some of the training and mentality shifts. Part of it too is when you have it, you’re going to use it. So something like SWAT which was once used just for very specific scenarios and only by large departments, is now common in most medium to large cities, and used for things as simple as arrest warrants. Of course I am talking in broad strokes, in general.
So your above concerns on that are valid, but the problems we are seeing are from the above and other issues, not “gun violence in media”.
Again, the “gun violence in media” isn’t affecting how many more people want to go out and hurt others in real life. I will concede that some of the types of firearms that are available make it EASIER to hurt others. But using your example, whether the guy used several AR-15s or a surplus bolt action rifle from WWII, it wasn’t the type of gun or media consumed that lead him commit his murders. And while he may have killed less people with a different type of gun, the horror would still have been great.
So if you’re point that certain types of guns make hurting others easier, I will concede that. But interest in firearms in general or use in the media doesn’t seem to be affecting the number of people going out and hurting others.
Though there is some speculation that the sensationalism and media focus on people who commit horrendous acts appeals to the type of people who end up committing such acts. Their own little act of infamy. But that is speculation at this point.
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Perhaps we should be concerned about the glorification of something deeper. Not the surface elements like guns or fictional violence, but the world view about violence which our fictional stories present as truth. Gun violence itself is almost always experienced as a dramatic device in fiction - actually the more gratuitous and glorified the violence, the more it’s experienced as a dramatic device. That is, people respond very differently to a TV show showing gun violence and a TV news segment about gun violence. They recognize which is communicating something true.
It’s intuitively understood that the dramatic devices of a fictional story are not to be taken literally. The story is using them to describe a real truth that is more abstract. This is how people experience things they understand to be dramatic devices. It’s not how people experience things they understand to be depictions of actual reality.
This is why the US government is not stressed about depicting hyper-realistic insurgent warfare in movies, but they are very stressed about “terrorist recruitment videos”. It’s not the aesthetic elements, the acts, or even the themes that are an issue. It’s that terrorist recruitment videos are communicating something that Hollywood never can: credible evidence that in actual real life, brutal violence, torture, etc solves your problems and brings you glory.
Guns themselves, no matter how much you glorify them fictionally, do not communicate that message. It’s the ideas about when, how, and why violence should be used in real life - against children, prisoners, foreign nations, women, other ethnic groups - that should concern us.
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Yep. I agree with everything you said and this last paragraph sums up my intent. I just don’t see how a society that fetishizes gun violence, along with the multiple avenues we’ve created for both acceptance/acquiescence to their position in our society as well as their ubiquity in multiple realms (police force militarization, private citizenry militarization, legitimizing terrorism from white male “patriots”, etc.), doesn’t ultimately reap some physical and psychic burden. Sure, it doesn’t increase the likelihood that someone will go out and kill, but a hunting knife or even a bolt-action rifle kills a whole lot fewer people than an AR-15. Statistically, these incidents of mass murder are not that directly affecting to the average American, but we bear he psychic scars more heavily than almost any other current issue. It’s not something we can draw a statistical connect to, but I don’t buy that we aren’t deeply suffering for this glamorizing and fetishizing.
Thanks for your always-reasoned responses.
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Yes! Precisely this! I do think that the fetishization of guns coupled with our nonsensical laws particularly exacerbate this, but you’re right. It is the belief that violence, warmongering, imperialism and brute force can bring about “justice”. This frontier mentality coupled with our very immature world view (I’d peg US at about an 11 year old intellectual and experiential capacity) obviates any historical, statistical or even remotely reasonable worldview.
To wit: I just came back from breakfast at a local diner where a father and daughter (70’s & 50’s or so) were discussing trump. Her take was that, although the US economy is on the verge of collapse (33 month from now; her words), we would be “saved” by the impending rapid economic growth in N Korea (!!!) because “trump is the only person rocket man will deal with”. This is profoundly ignorant on so many levels (specifically, the size of the N Korean economy and their complete dependence on China), but what I think would be hardest for her to understand is that thats not how dictatorships work! having no experience with one other than the macguffins of British colonialism and federal “tyranny” and those only as abstracts, she as no capacity to comprehend the fact that dictatorship thrives on suppression of the proletariat, complete economic control and the cult of personality that is entirely dependent upon deprivation. If big brother is the only one feeding you, he must be a “dear leader”. I know this is tangential to the thread, but the cultural isolation, freedom from serious threats of invasion, insular thinking and non-stop jingoism directly fosters this idea that might and aggression are the primary means by which people defend themselves and liberate others.
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