Edit 07/23/20189: We had two more high profile shootings over the weekend that briefly went into the obsession du jour mode, although since they were at times where there was lower ratings many people might not have noticed. During the one Saturday night on CNN one of the media pundits said they had to "treat everyone as a potential armed aggressor," at Trader Joes, which is now typical when these shootings happen. Shortly after this another pundit said, "This is the world we live in," as if there's nothing we could do about it.
Several of these shootings of police officers including two in 2016, another in 2017, were by veterans that were trained to kill by our government to fight wars that turned out to be based on lies and returned to find there's no economic opportunities and minorities don't have the same rights as others that they pretend to defend; another one in 2013 involving Christopher Dorner, was also a veteran who faced racism on the job as a police officer, went on the rampage against other police officers defending a corrupt and racist political economic and police system.
As I wrote earlier these are, of course not excuses, but when they media establishment refuses to report on the most important contributing causes of violence and the political establishment fights tooth and nail to avoid addressing basic non-violent protests be people that are better informed than those relying on on traditional media then it's inevitable that some people will go off the deep end.
Europe does a much better job providing child care education and avoiding child abuse than many parts of the United States and they have much less violence. Some of the countries that do the best at this have less than one murder per hundred thousand compared to five in the United States; the same goes within the states where the areas providing the worst social services often have ten to thirty murders per hundred thousand while those that do the best often have less than three, in some cases below one like Europe.
We have the research to teach the public how to prevent violence without taking away constitutional rights a little at a time!
The most effective solutions shouldn't be controversial at all; stop abusing children, provide fair educational and economic opportunities for all, etc.!
The mainstream media just refuses to report it!
Woman killed during Trader Joe's shooting was store manager 07/22/2018
Toronto shooting rampage leaves 2 dead, 12 wounded and a city baffled 07/23/2018
The most recent active shooter obsession du jour seems relatively minor compared to many other shootings with a massive body count; however, although few people seem to have noticed, Brian Williams causally admitted the potential threat to our democratic process when he said something like, "Everyone is assumed to be a suspect, until proven to be otherwise."
With the excitement about another active shooters in breaking news keeping a few people glued to the TV, (although since there were fewer deaths they might have gotten bored with it quickly) few people might have noticed how accurate this statement is and that it has become routine during news stories about all these active shooting incidents. It's bad enough that people in the area of these shootings have their lives threatened but they also have to be treated like criminals, or so the media and political establishment would have us think.
I don't want to go into some fringe conspiracy theory like Alex Jones does on InfoWars or Jade Helm, which turned out to be nothing, or so it seems; and the most effective solution to this problem shouldn't involve such absurd things; instead it should involve rational research to address the root causes of violence and prevent them like they do in many other developed countries that are much less likely to have these problems. However I went into these causes more in numerous articles including Prevention of violence has to address all causes, not just Guns! and Marketing Failed Solutions To Shootings for Profit? Or Propaganda? and so have other good researchers on alternative media outlets but the closest thing that the traditional media or political establishment comes up with is obsession coverage about gun control, which, as pointed out in previous articles, may be part of the solution, but it's not the only contributing factor to violence, nor is it the most important.
However the only thing the mainstream media seems to come up with, bedsides the gun control debate which goes in circles without accomplishing anything, is more preparation for treating potential shootings like a combat situation that can't be avoided without creating a police state and as Parkland Students who have been given donated see-through backpacks rightfully pointed out these solutions are stupid, and not likely to solve the problem.
In addition to the total lack of coverage for many of the most important contributing causes, and regular active shooting incidents, which I'll go into a little more below, we're approaching the five year anniversary of the Boston Bombings, when for those of you who have forgotten, the city of Watertown was put into a virtual state of martial law. Radley Balko warned us that if this isn't addressed, it could be come standard operating procedure, and even though it hasn't yet nothing has been done to change things since he wrote the following article in the Washington Post four years ago shortly after the first anniversary of the bombing and state of martial law:
Was the police response to the Boston bombing really appropriate? 04/22/2014 By Radley Balko
The economist and historian Robert Higgs has written prolifically over the years about what he calls the “ratchet effect.” In times of crisis, governments tend to expand, usually at the expense of civil liberties. When the crisis abates, government power does, too, but never completely back to where it was before. With each subsequent crisis, government encroaches a bit more. Higgs has documented the effect through major wars, depressions and other national emergencies. But the effect may be particularly pronounced and dangerous with respect to the war on terror, because as crises go, terrorism can never completely be defeated.
We’re now more than a year out from the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. The studies, reviews, and after-action reports have been written. Politicians and other public officials have held hearings, cast blame and pontificated on the lessons they have learned. There have been calls for more monitoring of foreign travelers; better information-sharing among federal, state and local government police agencies; and the inevitable demands for more security, more surveillance and generally more government power to prevent similar attacks in the future. There have been ponderous searches for answers that inevitably end up with public agencies simultaneously deflecting blame and jockeying to inherit the authority and funding from those agencies that inevitably do get blamed.
But there’s an important component missing from all the reports, testimony and lesson-learning: an assessment of whether the government response after the bombing was appropriate, democratic and consistent with the principles of a free society.
As the Atlantic reported last year, we haven’t seen a lockdown and an occupation of an American city on the scale of what happened in Boston after the marathon since the Watts riots — not in Oklahoma City after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in 1995, not in Atlanta after the 1996 bombing in Centennial Olympic Park, not in D.C. during the 2002 sniper attacks, not after a series of pipe bombs went off in federal courthouse in San Diego in 2008, not during the dozens of instances in which a mass killer or serial killer was still at large. In Boston, 19,000 National Guard troops moved into an American city, not to put down a civil uprising, quell riots or dispel an insurrection, but to search for a single man. Armored vehicles motored up and down residential neighborhoods. Innocent people were confronted in their homes at gunpoint or had guns pointed at them for merely peering through the curtains of their own windows.
In the end, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wasn’t found by Guardsmen, a commando team or a police officer in an armored vehicle. After the shelter in place had been lifted, he was spotted by a resident of Watertown who saw something unusual in his back yard and called the police. ..... Complete article
The economist and historian Robert Higgs has written prolifically over the years about what he calls the “ratchet effect.” In times of crisis, governments tend to expand, usually at the expense of civil liberties. When the crisis abates, government power does, too, but never completely back to where it was before. With each subsequent crisis, government encroaches a bit more. Higgs has documented the effect through major wars, depressions and other national emergencies. But the effect may be particularly pronounced and dangerous with respect to the war on terror, because as crises go, terrorism can never completely be defeated.
We’re now more than a year out from the Boston Marathon bombing of 2013. The studies, reviews, and after-action reports have been written. Politicians and other public officials have held hearings, cast blame and pontificated on the lessons they have learned. There have been calls for more monitoring of foreign travelers; better information-sharing among federal, state and local government police agencies; and the inevitable demands for more security, more surveillance and generally more government power to prevent similar attacks in the future. There have been ponderous searches for answers that inevitably end up with public agencies simultaneously deflecting blame and jockeying to inherit the authority and funding from those agencies that inevitably do get blamed.
But there’s an important component missing from all the reports, testimony and lesson-learning: an assessment of whether the government response after the bombing was appropriate, democratic and consistent with the principles of a free society.
As the Atlantic reported last year, we haven’t seen a lockdown and an occupation of an American city on the scale of what happened in Boston after the marathon since the Watts riots — not in Oklahoma City after the Murrah Federal Building bombing in 1995, not in Atlanta after the 1996 bombing in Centennial Olympic Park, not in D.C. during the 2002 sniper attacks, not after a series of pipe bombs went off in federal courthouse in San Diego in 2008, not during the dozens of instances in which a mass killer or serial killer was still at large. In Boston, 19,000 National Guard troops moved into an American city, not to put down a civil uprising, quell riots or dispel an insurrection, but to search for a single man. Armored vehicles motored up and down residential neighborhoods. Innocent people were confronted in their homes at gunpoint or had guns pointed at them for merely peering through the curtains of their own windows.
In the end, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev wasn’t found by Guardsmen, a commando team or a police officer in an armored vehicle. After the shelter in place had been lifted, he was spotted by a resident of Watertown who saw something unusual in his back yard and called the police. ..... Complete article
As I said I usually don't rely on InfoWars as a leading source but in one of the rare cases where they did a better job pointing out the extremes the government has gone to they documented some pictures from this event that most people may have forgotten in InfoWars: BATTLEFIELD USA: De Facto State of Martial Law Declared In Boston *Pics From the War Zone* 04/20/2013 Radley Balko pointed out that according to one poll 86 percent of the public in Boston supported these extreme measures, and there was an enormous amount of support for what was considered heroic activity by the mayor, police chief, and the rest of the police department. However, they might not be so supportive if they were reminded of how some police went into a panic and shot up innocent vehicles when searching for Christopher Dorner, as Radley Balko pointed out in his article and another one cited. this is just one of hundreds if not thousands of incidents that alternative media outlets have reported, including Radley Balko, who is one of the few to get his reporting in as high a profile newspaper as the Washington Post.
Radley Balko and others go into more details about how this is an extreme measure when confronted with violence; however the most important problem isn't that they go to extremes when they face a terrorist attack or active shooter; it's that the United States government and media doesn't educate the public about the contributing causes of violence and how to prevent them before it escalates to this extreme. In Europe they don't have one of the 50 cities with the highest murder rates in the world of all cities not at war, with a population of at least 300,000 people (Wikipedia); the United Stated has four, five if you count one of the cities in Puerto Rico, which is part of the United States although they don't have representation. All but three, in south Africa, of the other forty-five cities with the highest murder rates are in South America, Central America, or the Caribbean, which numerous United States politicians, including John Kerry, have referred to as our "Backyard;" however after leaders from Latin America expressed outrage about this reference, he reconsidered and declared that "The era of the Monroe Doctrine," which has been used to justify interference rarely reported accurately in traditional press "is over."
The traditional media and, in most cases the educational system, practically never provide accurate reporting on either our government's activities that has been destabilizing Latin America, or the contributing causes of violence at home including in many abandoned inner cities, that have much higher rates of violence than the rest of the country. There are over one-hundred-twenty-five cities with more than twice the national average murder rates, often three to five times average or more; these cities have little or no economic or educational opportunities, nor do they have much political influence.
These cities also have more than their share of mass shootings. You would think that there would be some effort to figure out what is wrong in these cities that is contributing to high violence; but, although there is plenty of research, in the academic world, or on alternative media outlets, little or none of this is reported in the mainstream media!
There are some times where the people from these cities know more about the causes of high crime than the majority of the public; however, this is not always the case, partly because they might not have the educational background to recognize some of the most important long term causes. However the political and media establishment is typically reluctant to listen to them at all, nor are they likely to listen to better educated researchers that try to help them figure out the causes of violence.
The recent shooting in Parkland Florida is an exception since it is in a wealthy city that rarely ever gets many murders or violence. They've allowed the students from that high school to get an enormous amount of coverage; however, mostly only when they focus on the same things the media covers. On a few occasions they did try to cover additional contributing causes, including one brief discussion where they indicated they also supported efforts by minorities in dangerous cities to increase funding for their education system, but this wasn't reported nearly as widely as the debate on gun control. Besides, before these kids were survivors of a school shooting they're weren't any more inclined to look into the subject than anyone else, so it would be expected that many of them might repeat the same propaganda that the media drills into their head, instead of doing their own research.
I wouldn't be surprised if a few of the Parkland survivors and their families researched additional contributing causes and attempted to draw attention to them; however, if they do then the media might be inclined to stop covering them like they do all other good researchers.
This includes Diane Ravitch, who once had access to numerous presidential administrations going back decades, including the George H. W. Bush administration where she worked for his Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander; however when she stopped supporting the education reform movement supported by both political parties, and large portions of corporate America, including many economists, lawyers, and business executives, but few if any teachers, except for those like Michelle Rhee that were recruited specifically to promote this reform movement, they stopped covering her at all, and when they felt obligated to mention her, as a result of popular support they treat her as fringe.
When she wrote "The Death and Life of the Great American School System" (2010) and "Reign of Error" (2013) she became a pariah within the political establishment; because she exposed that the modern school reform movement was about increasing corporate control of education, often through use of Charter Schools, that are often for profit, while cutting costs to lower income children. This educational reform movement has been supported by both political parties and it's been given an enormous amount of coverage on the mainstream media favoring supporters, while critics are relegated to the fringe, or alternative media outlets that don't reach the vast majority of the public.
One of the states that had the biggest increases in reliance on Charter Schools is Michigan where Betsy Devos is from and this is a result of her support and help from her allies; however the areas where it has been increased the most have been disastrous for education and it's also been a disaster for crime and violence, since the cities that have increased use of Charter Schools the most also have the highest rates of violence or murder, including Detroit which is among the worst cities in the country with murder rates more than forty per hundred thousand, which is eight times the national average. Additional cities that have also increased their reliance on Charter Schools are also among the most violent in the nation and often have the biggest scandals involving cheating.
This includes Atlanta, Washington D.C. Birmingham, Columbus, and New Orleans, among others. Diane Ravitch has recently reported more about additional scandals in Florida where many of the legislatures are married to woman on boards of these Charter Schools, many which might be for profit.
I could go on much longer, and at times I already have; but the bottom line is as long as they continue to ignore the most rational solutions, based on the best research then these shootings aren't going to be reduced much if at all.
They've already used this as an excuse to infringe on the rights of those in local areas and are constantly trying to push legislation that deprives the public of their privacy, the assumption of innocence, and additional constitutional rights!
It's hard to take Trump seriously, or to imagine why the political establishment gave him the media coverage that he needed but it's clear that they did, for one insane reason or another. As long as they continue to rule out solutions that shouldn't be controversial and promote those that are guaranteed to fail, this can only end bad, unless more people from the grassroots wake up, including the educators that are standing up for their rights in schools across the country and many more efforts to hold the political establishment accountable.
The following are additional sources on the subject:
US Mass Shootings, 1982-2018: Data From Mother Jones’ Investigation UPDATED: MARCH 10, 2018 additional updates are semi-routine A large portion of these shootings take place in cities with more than double the national murder rates. These cities include at least six or eight percent of the population but no more than eleven or twelve yet they account for more than their share of mass shootings.
Mass shootings in the US: there have been 1,624 in 1,870 days 02/15/2018
Florida: Legislators’ Wives Are Opening Charter Schools 04/02/2018 By Diane Ravitch
Florida: Charter School in Financial Chaos 04/04/2018 By Diane Ravitch
America’s Most Outrageous Teacher Cheating Scandals 04/01/2013 Most of these scandals are in cities with well above average murder rates and high poverty rates as well. New York is the only one where the murder rates are dropping steadily; but the report on that cheating scandal indicates it's exaggerated. Los Angeles is almost double the national average murder rate; and Columbus is more than double; Chicago, Ill., Birmingham Al., Atlanta Ga., and Washington D.C. are all at least three times the national murder rates. The Texas schools caught cheating weren't specified but a search of the internet indicates that they include Houston and Dallas which are both more than double the national average murder rate and El Paso which is half the national average murder rate.
The majority of these cheating scandals are in areas where income is relatively low and presumably class size and funding per student is also low; however there's good reason to believe that funding for prisons and courts are much higher in these cities; which is what creates the "School to Prison Pipeline," as many people call it. This conclusion is supported by both Diane Ravitch's books and Jonathan Kozol's as well as many other alternative media outlets, although it's ignored by traditional media and the political establishment.
Diane Ravitch Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (2013)
Diane Ravitch The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education (2010)
US protests against Bolivia's decision to expel USAID 05/01/2013
Kerry declares the end of the Monroe Doctrine era 11/18/2013
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