You heard it here first: The Troubled Marginalized
There's a category on this blog called
"You heard it here first" and unfortunately, I guess, I can claim this in regard to an item I just read yesterday in The New Yorker from 2015. Our item would be this one here:
Lex Anteinternet: Peculiarized violence and American society. Looki...: Because of the horrific senseless tragedy in Newton Connecticut, every pundit and commentator in the US is writing on the topic of what cau...
That post goes back to 2012. The central thesis of the thread is that what we're seeing in the US in regards to the type of horrific violent act which we saw this past week in Florida is due, more than anything else, to the marginalization of a certain class of young male. The New Yorker article, from 2015, which was written professionally by an author with more resources at hand than I, concluded the exact same thing.
What that article did, which mine did not, was to specifically name the affliction, although anyone reading our article would know what the affliction was or at least what ballpark category it was in. Asperger Syndrome. As one organization dedicated to addressing that condition relates:
Asperger
syndrome is one of several previously separate subtypes of autism that
were folded into the single diagnosis autism spectrum disorder (ASD)
with the publication of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual in 2013. Asperger syndrome was generally considered to be on the “high functioning” end of the spectrum.
Now, and I'll make this clear below, I'm not saying everyone with Asperger's is a danger. But I am saying that we're ironically now in a point in time in which this condition, and ones close to it, can be identified, but we're actually handling those who have (and there's a wide spectrum there) about as poorly as we ever have.
I don't want to re-run again my original piece, but as I related there I'm quite certain that in prior eras these people were worked into society. Now they're not. They were awkward in the era before their affliction had a name, but they were part of a group. Here's what I said at the time.
No place to go, and the lessons of the basement and entertainment.
Standards were taught, first in school, and then in the workplace And,
frankly they still are. That's quite a burden on both, however, as a
society that otherwise has such loose standards is asking an awful lot
of the school and the workplace. Truth be known, there was never an era
when schools were really expected to impart a standard, it was assumed
that kids came into school with one and that some re-enforcment could be
done there. Asking schools to impart a moral code is a pretty tall
order,, and pretty darned unreasonable to expect. It's even more
unreasonable for the workplace to do so, so no standards are going to be
taught there, save by individuals through their own examples. But is
there even a workplace to go to?
So what do they do with their time?
Visual images seem to be different to us, as a species. This seems,
therefore, to dull us to what we see, or to actually encourage us to
excess. It's been interesting to note, in this context, how sex and
violence have had to be increasingly graphic in their portrayals in
order to even get noticed by their viewers. In terms of films, even
violent situations were not very graphically portrayed in film up until
the 1960s. The first film to really graphically portray, indeed
exaggerate, violence was Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch.
Peckingpah used violence in that film to attempt to expose Americans to
what he perceived, at that time, as a warped love of criminal violence
and criminals, but the nature of our perception largely defeated his
intent. At the time, the film was criticized for being so violent, but
now the violence is celebrated. In that way, Peckinpah ended up
becoming the unwitting and unwilling equivalent, in regard to violence,
to what Hugh Hefner became intentionally in terms of pornography. Ever
since, violence has become more and more graphic and extreme, just to
get our attention. Likewise, Hefner's entry into glamorizing and
mainstreaming pornography starting in the 1950s ended up creating a
situation in which what would have been regarded as pornography at that
time is now fairly routine in all sorts of common portrayals.
So, then, certain people are left with no work, and no socialization.
In a prior era, these people fit in, even if they were awkward
themselves. Their work was valued and on Friday night, when pay came,
they were dragged along to the local bar, the Union Hall, or the
Enlisted Man's Club, even if they had little to say and were work
oriented. More than a few probably found a family that way. Others
never did, but their work and workers became a sort of family
This, I would note, rolls us back around to the analysis that this sort
of violence and the Arab suicide bomber are committed by the same type
of people. Youth unemployment in the Middle East is massive. Those
societies have a set of standards, to be sure, but they're under
internal attack, with one group arguing for standards that only apply to
the group itself. And violence has been massively glamorized in the
region, with the promised reward for it being highly sensual in nature.
In other words, out of a population of unemployed young men, with no
prospects, and very little in the way of learned standards, recruiting
those with narcissistic violent tendencies should not be very
difficult. The difference between there and here is that there, those
with a political agenda can recruit these disaffected misguided youths
with promises of the reward of 70 virgins, while here we're recruiting
them through bombardment by violent entertainment.
The Conclusion and what to do about it.
What does seem to be the case is that we have a population we've really failed, but the failure is now so systemic that addressing the problem is massive in scope. But if we don't confront that now, the problem will grow worse and worse. The difference between tolerance and acceptance needs to be reestablished, and the concept that a society must have standards does as well. And that can't be foisted off on the school system. And, while we now seem to accept that we've lost forever certain types of work, we must recognize that work, for some people, is much more than a career, but literally a life raft for them and us, giving their lives meaning. Finally, while we're talking of banning things, we need to really look at violent entertainment. Just as the argument will be advanced by those in favor of banning certain firearms that it doesn't matter that most of the owners of those arms will not misuse them, but that those who do, do so catastrophically, it is even more the case that some will be impacted by the glorious cartoon depiction of violence negatively. And entertainment, at the end of the day, is just that. There's little justification for highly glamorized sexualized violence aimed at teenage and twenty something males.
Right away, I'll note, there are going to be those who are horrified by this assumption, and will respond with the typical "well I know somebody. . .", or assertions that some people can and do good jobs with people so afflicted. Yes, all that's true, but it doesn't change what we're basically seeing here (and its a blistering poor way to conduct any argument as you can literally say that about any problem whatsoever). Almost all of the perpetrators of this kind of violence are young men who fit into this class.
And not only do they largely fit into this class, those identified with having it are often medicated with pharmaceuticals which either have dangerous side affects or for which the their side affects are not very well known.
Right away you will get a bunch of arguments that are largely ignorant, but are comparative. One will be, "well, Canada and Australian don't have this problem, and they no doubt have the same demographics and problems. . . so it's all about guns".
Nope, that doesn't hold up.
Lots of other Western European cultures no doubt have more or less the same percentages (probably) of young men afflicted with this condition as an organic matter. But far from all of them restrict firearms the same way that Canada and Australia do. Switzerland, for example, not only allows the purchase of AR15 type rifles but there's a special version made for the country just for civilians sales. Spain and Portugal allow it. New Zealand allows it. None of these countries are afflicted the way we are with this problem.
So what gives?
Most nations don't dump their young.
We do.
The United States has always had a freakishly mobile society and that's always made our society comparatively violent. We have, for instance, always been a more violent society than Canada's. It has also meant that, more than most other nations, we're pretty comfortable with the young basically being abandoned, either by parents or by society. That's been a feature of this problem as well.
The recent Florida incident featured a troubled kid abandoned by society with two dead parents. The Newton incident saw a doting mother and a departed father. You can find other instances.
Our society has encouraged a concept of personal liberty so vast that fathers can take off and mothers basically can if they choose to, at some point. Piles of troubled boys are raised in households featuring only a female role model who eventually loses control over the subject.
And once these individuals reach 18 years of age, society no longer cares a whit what happens to them, if it ever did.
This was not always the case for us. Society, both by culture and law, once very tightly compelled men and women to be responsible for their offspring, rather than just making it an option for parents.
That's the big difference right there. In the other countries the societies are simply less mobile and there's more of a social structure even if standards of personal conduct have enormously declined. Americans have practically prided themselves on tearing ours down. This has become the trend in all Western European cultures in recent years and that has started to reflect itself back in violent ways, however. In Europe, it's reflected back in European youth joining ISIL, which at least has standards, or being re attracted to the fascist left. In our society it has reflected itself in other ways.
So, if we really want to get at this, that has to get these kids out of basements and off their computers and into useful work. In an era in which our supposedly brightest minds are running around destroying work, that's not going to be easy.
And that gets us back, I suppose, to where we started. While we can now identify the condition, in prior years we simply thought these folks were a bit difficult or a bit odd. But there were useful places for them in positions which truly needed to be filled. Now a lot of those occupations are either gone or the doors are closed to entry in other ways.
We live in an era now in which the Hyperextrovert is celebrated and everyone else is compelled to go along with it. Network! Collegiality! Etc. Etc. are the rallying cries of the day. If you are in business, you will get emails, wanted or not, on a nearly daily basis on "21 ways you can Network with the energy of a Chihuahua on meth!" We are not so far gone in this direction that there's something called a Social Anxiety Syndrome for people who are probably just super shy. That may not be a real condition at all but rather something that is identified as one as it's odd for the Super Extroverts that not everyone wants to be that way. I suspect, quite frankly that Aspergers is sort of the same way and that it might actually simply be an extended end of the range of human organic makeup. A minority, no doubt, of the human population but in the same what that other organic conditions are that impact a person's worldview.
Whether I'm right on that or wrong. . .and moreover whether The New Yorker and I are right and wrong, which isn't wrong is that we have a population of young males, some of whom suffer from some pretty pronounced psychological conditions, who used to find employment on shop floors and laboratory tables and the like who now have nothing to do but focus on things that no human being should focus on. The massive erosion of standards of morality starting in the 1960s means that much of them were raised in a narcissistic environment and learned that as the norm and in an era with cartoon violence in the form of video games and movies presents the mental image of those conditions in an era when most people in the Western World experience very little of the real thing.
None of that should be comforting to anyone. What that means is that if this society really seeks to address this behavior it has to start undergoing and immediate rejection of the failed false anything goes ethos brought in by the Boomers and return to the eons old ones that preceded that and which even now is starting to revive in ways that "progressives" can't seem to grasp. And as part of that, the return of responsibility, both societal and parental needs to come back in and frankly be enforced. Parents can't live for themselves with children as exotic pets and as it takes two to create a child, that missing male needs to reappear, by force if necessary.
21
One of the proposals has been, I'd note, to keep anyone younger than 21 from buying the type of firearms featured in this act and Florida is apparently going to pass such a law. Congress might.
I don't know what I think about this. I'm not totally opposed to it, frankly, but I also feel that the American age of majority is spastic. If people who are 21 are not quite adults for some things, they aren't for anything.
You cannot buy a pistol until you are 21 years of age, on the logic that men (and yes, it's men) prior to that age are more likely to use one in a crime. Okay, that might be true.
But you are capable of carrying weapons in war at age 18.
That is, quite frankly, flat out weird.
I truly feel that if you aren't allowed to drink or buy a firearm, you really ought not to be regarded as suitable for military service. If we raise the age for these firearms, we should be honest and bar military service to anyone who isn't 21. We also ought to do away with Selective Service registration at age 18. We should do away with that period, but the intellectual leap that says you can drive, but not buy beer, and not buy a pistol, but join the Marine Corps is, well, too vast. Make everything 21, except for that driving a car, I guess.
Indeed, why can you marry without your parents consent, which is pretty darned dangerous, at 18, but not own a pistol? Or buy alcohol? Weird.
There's not intellectual consistency to it at all. Americans are fond of saying "you're an adult at 18" but lots of statutory provisions don't back that up. You really aren't. You can vote, drive, join the service, and enter into contracts, but that's about it. Otherwise, you're in some gap generation where you have to wait for 21 for everything else. If we're going to do that, let's just make it complete.
Of course, that would also require society and parents to play along. Parents who now shove kids out the door at 18 couldn't. They ought to be minors. A school system country wide which ends for most people at 18 probably should be extended another three years by public funding, if we are to do that. There's your universal post high school education right there. It's only intellectually consistent.
But we're not going to do that.
Which still doesn't mean that this is a bad idea, or a good one. It's just an intellectually confused one.
So what about those guns?
Yet another topic I've written about here before.
The media likes to call the class of weapons that show up in these matters "assault rifles" which they are not. Assault rifles are selective fire weapons and while there are a few in civilian hands, there are very few and there's no reported instance of one actually being used in a crime.
So what we're really talking about is military style semi automatic rifles.
The oddity here is that semi automatic rifles have existed for over a century. Mechanically there's nothing new about the ones around now and even the AR, which gets so much press, has been around for over fifty years now.
What this means is that something in society is making a rifle that was not used much for crime at all into one that is. That's quite clear. And that's addressed elsewhere in this post.
But, some will say, and they have a point, that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do something about these weapons now as they are a problem now.
The problem with "doing something" is that the something is usually drafted by people who don't know anything about firearms at all, and as a result what they drafted has no impact at all or, worse, principally serves to go after something that has nearly no reported instance of abuse at all. And that's why "banning assault rifles" won't band them and if a statute was broad enough to ban them it would likely be unconstitutional.
Which brings me to this. The real change, if there is one, is that people who really aren't firearms fans have started to acquire this category of firearm as they're fascinated with a cartoon like concept of violence. More on that in a moment.
Fascinated or not, most of the people who buy them for that reason will never use them violently, and some will go on to develop other interests in firearms. But for those who are so fascinated, one thing that they do that their predecessors did not is to buy huge quantities of magazines.
One of the features of this class of arm, but not unique to it, is that they have quick detachable magazines. That's a vital feature of a combat rifle. But most civilian shooters really don't need more than a couple magazines, assuming they're competitive shooters.
Good magazines are expensive but cheap magazines exist and it seems that people in the class we're speaking of buy a lot of cheap magazines. Magazines are cheap because they are not controlled the way that firearms are. But they could be.
Serial numbers could be required on magazines and they could be subject to the same Federal sales conditions that the rifles themselves are. That might limit this a bit. Beyond that, it could perhaps be the case that the number of magazines could be limited for any one rifle. That is, if the number was restricted to two, that would seem to have an impact.
Assuming that's legal.
And it may not be.
The mere fact that I've mentioned this topic in this way, however puts me doubly on the outs with many. For some, the mere suggestion that all semi automatics shouldn't be banned is unacceptable. For other, any restriction on the sales of magazines will seem unpatriotic.
So, that being the case, I may as well go on and offer more offense. What the heck.
And here it is, although it's also something I've mentioned before. The fascination with this category of rifles is grossly overdone in the sporting magazines. I'm not saying that there are no legitimate articles about ARs, but they have become such a big deal that they've sucked the air out of the room in the sporting press. Lots of gun magazines are endless streams of AR articles.
The AR is frankly not that good of a rifle and it never was. The sporting press fascination with it is really absurd. As it is a weapon of war, it makes the focus on this area that of war. That focus needs to be redirected.
Vets in Schools?
Geez, this is a dumb ideal.
I keep reading, often on facebook, that we should put veterans in our schools.
This is apparently based on the charming view that all vets are responsible highly trained combat veterans. Not hardly.
Now, I'm a veteran, and so I know a little of what I speak here. Let's start with the trained combat vets part. Only a fraction of servicemen are in the combat arms.
Indeed, only two of the five services are really focused on individual combat that way to any extent, and that's the Marine Corps and the Army. But even in those services there are vast numbers of soldiers whose daily duties are only remotely tied to carrying arms and combat. Even in World War Two, the last really huge war we fought, most soldiers were not combat troops. That hasn't been the case for the U.S. Army at least since World War One, if not earlier.
And two of the services are based on highly technical complicated machines on which only a few do real fighting. The Air Force isn't made up mostly of pilots but mostly of people who exist to support the infrastructure that lets those pilots fly. The Navy, which is freakishly the most hidebound of the service in regards to tradition is one in which the various positions are, as a rule, completely divorced from directly fighting. Indeed, the Coast Guard is ironically the sea service that most closely resembles the direct fighting sea service of old, as its light vessels actually do routinely engage other vessels and its members actually do board other craft.
Beyond that, the reality of servicemen is a lot more closely reflected in the poem Tommy than by the meme's on Facebook:
I WENT into a public 'ouse to get a pint o' beer,
The publican 'e up an' sez, " We serve no red-coats here."
The girls be'ind the bar they laughed an' giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an' to myself sez I:
O it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, go away " ;
But it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it's " Thank you, Mister Atkins," when the band begins to play.
I went into a theatre as sober as could be,
They gave a drunk civilian room, but 'adn't none for me;
They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls,
But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' " Tommy, wait outside ";
But it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide
The troopship's on the tide, my boys, the troopship's on the tide,
O it's " Special train for Atkins " when the trooper's on the tide.
Yes, makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep
Is cheaper than them uniforms, an' they're starvation cheap.
An' hustlin' drunken soldiers when they're goin' large a bit
Is five times better business than paradin' in full kit.
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, 'ow's yer soul? "
But it's " Thin red line of 'eroes " when the drums begin to roll
The drums begin to roll, my boys, the drums begin to roll,
O it's " Thin red line of 'eroes, " when the drums begin to roll.
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints;
While it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Tommy, fall be'ind,"
But it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind
There's trouble in the wind, my boys, there's trouble in the wind,
O it's " Please to walk in front, sir," when there's trouble in the wind.
You talk o' better food for us, an' schools, an' fires, an' all:
We'll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don't mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow's Uniform is not the soldier-man's disgrace.
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an` Chuck him out, the brute! "
But it's " Saviour of 'is country " when the guns begin to shoot;
An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please;
An 'Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool - you bet that Tommy sees!
In other words, the ideas that servicemen are all heroes is charming, but it's not really true. Indeed, just a few months ago we were all worried about Marines taking pictures of female Marines sans uniform, with it being understood that there was plenty of bad conduct by both male and female Marines in this category. I'm sure that this exists in the other services as well, but it just hasn't come to light.
Suffice it to say, merely being a vet hardly qualifies you to be some sort of super sentry.
Relying on the police
One thing the recent event shows, and
I've mentioned it here as well, that average citizens do, however, have real reason for not being comforted by those who always argue that the police are there to protect you.
They are, but that doesn't mean they're all up to the job or that its their only job.
I also dealt with this a while back, but the television view of police, or at least the modern one, is really skewed. The average day for a policeman, if we're to make reference to television, was more like that portrayed in Car 54 Where Are You than it is in Chicago Daily Disaster or whatever. Policemen have so many duties that expecting them to be effective sentries is also asking for a bit much.
Indeed, this is another area where people who make comparisons to other countries routinely fall flat in what they're observing. Continental European police forces usually (but not always) have a branch of militarized police. We don't want that in the US, or at least we never have, but most European countries (but not the UK) do have them. France, for example has both the National Police and the National Gendarmerie, the latter of which is part of the Armed Forces but which is under the Ministry of the Interior. The Carabinieri fill that same role in Italy. The point is that we don't have police like the Europeans often do who are actually soldiers with policing roles, and we don't want them either.
Indeed, it's worth noting that at least in terms of real effectiveness in a bad spot western policemen are more reliable than eastern policemen, in my view, as they're more used to having to act on their own and they're frankly typically a lot more familiar with their firearms. The bigger a city's police department is the less likely that either of those things are true.
Which leads us to our next topic . . .
Arming Teachers
This is one of those areas in which discussion so devolves so rapidly that no air ever reaches the actual topic. People are so viscerally against it or so irrationally for it that its never actually discussed.
Let's start with a simple matter. The idea of "arming teachers" is a non starter if that means that every teacher must be armed. That's a horrible idea and its just as bad, really, as the idea that veterans ought to be stationed in schools. No, it's worse.
Making people carry weapons who don't want to, or who are afraid of them, is just flat out not going to work and beyond that has its own philosophical problems.
But allowing people who are willing to undergo the process to obtain a license to do so is another matter entirely.
I've argued this here before but I'm flatly of the view that a person who has gone to the trouble to obtain a modern concealed carry license is considerably more likely to be able to effectively use a handgun than the average policeman is. Their focus on obtaining the license was single minded, they've gone to the trouble to obtain it, and they don't have to train themselves for the 10,000 other things the average policeman does.
So I would allow teachers to carry concealed, as long as they adhered the philosophy of doing that, which is that the public should never know who carries concealed and who does not. The real protective aspect of allowing for licensed concealed carry is that nobody knows who it does that. At some point, some people who do will end up having to use the sidearm, a horrible thing to face, but once that becomes a realistic possibility of semi common occurrence there's a true deterrent effect.
Indeed, that's basically why policemen are armed in most nations. It's not so that they can shoot at folks, it's to let everyone know that they can, if they have to. Policemen are still targets of violence, to be sure, but its not common.
