Title : Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots?
link : Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots?
Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots?
I'm seeing this headline on the front page of the NYT website: "Pandemic Fuels Surge in U.S. Gun Sales ‘Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen.'" Clicking through, I see the headline "An Arms Race in America: Gun Buying Spiked During the Pandemic. It’s Still Up. Preliminary research data show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners."
It's absurd to state — as if it's a fact — that the pandemic "fueled" the surge when there were riots and the police stood down and did not protect the citizens! I personally got trained to use a gun last summer, and I fired a gun for the first time in my life. That had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was about civil disorder threatening my neighborhood and the manifest unwillingness of the city to keep order. You're on your own, we were told, quite plainly.
Let's see how obtusely the article avoids taking self-defense seriously. Guns aren't a way to defend yourself from the pandemic, so we look like idiots arming ourselves against that. I'd like to see if the NYT respects those of us who are actually thinking rationally about self-defense.
Paragraph 3 of the article alludes to the riots, but look how the NYT strains to undermine the rationality of decision to own a gun:
While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.
Not "riots," not even "disorder" — "protests." As if the gun purchasers are afraid of ideas that were expressed. Buying guns was a "spree" — "spree" sounds irrational — and it was "fueled" — as if it's a fire — by "fear" — and that fear sounds irrational, because it's a reaction to "protests" and the pandemic — 2 things that are not properly addressed by owning a gun.
In the sixth paragraph, we see some very interesting facts:
New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic...
I'm a woman, and I was a first-time gun user last summer.
“Americans are in an arms race with themselves,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents South Los Angeles....
From my perspective, I think it seems that people who want peace and safety got forced into some new practical thinking as the traditional idea of calling the police suddenly looked shockingly weak.
There is no single reason for the surge, but social scientists point to many potential drivers. “There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who writes about political violence.
Well, she's almost saying it, but at such a high level of abstraction, it's almost meaningless.
“There is also all this social change, and social change is scary.”
Again — meaningless abstraction. Maybe Mason said more in the interview and the NYT chose not to use it.
Thomas Harris, a former law enforcement officer who works at the gun counter at Sportsman’s Warehouse in Roanoke, Va., said that around March last year, the customers he would speak with began to include more white-collar workers, such as people from insurance firms and software companies.... He said many of these apparent first-time buyers purchased more expensive guns, in the range of $400 or more. The purpose, he said, was not to carry the gun around in public, but to keep it at home.
“They were saying: ‘We’re going to be locking down. We’re constrained to our homes. We want to keep safe.’”
That's a great quote for the NYT framework: Irrational folk thought a gun would help against the virus.
But I do see something rational even in that. I know that last March, as the lockdown began and we laid in provisions, I contemplated the possibility that civil order would break down. What if the disease spiraled upward to the point where you couldn't get any medical care? What if you had a dead body in the house and no one would come take it away? Some people would lose their mind. Then what if the food supply chain broke down? That never happened, but it could have, and it was rational to imagine that there would be home invasions in search of food.
I'm seeing this headline on the front page of the NYT website: "Pandemic Fuels Surge in U.S. Gun Sales ‘Unlike Anything We’ve Ever Seen.'" Clicking through, I see the headline "An Arms Race in America: Gun Buying Spiked During the Pandemic. It’s Still Up. Preliminary research data show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners."
It's absurd to state — as if it's a fact — that the pandemic "fueled" the surge when there were riots and the police stood down and did not protect the citizens! I personally got trained to use a gun last summer, and I fired a gun for the first time in my life. That had nothing to do with the pandemic. It was about civil disorder threatening my neighborhood and the manifest unwillingness of the city to keep order. You're on your own, we were told, quite plainly.
Let's see how obtusely the article avoids taking self-defense seriously. Guns aren't a way to defend yourself from the pandemic, so we look like idiots arming ourselves against that. I'd like to see if the NYT respects those of us who are actually thinking rationally about self-defense.
Paragraph 3 of the article alludes to the riots, but look how the NYT strains to undermine the rationality of decision to own a gun:
While gun sales have been climbing for decades — they often spike in election years and after high-profile crimes — Americans have been on an unusual, prolonged buying spree fueled by the coronavirus pandemic, the protests last summer and the fears they both stoked.
Not "riots," not even "disorder" — "protests." As if the gun purchasers are afraid of ideas that were expressed. Buying guns was a "spree" — "spree" sounds irrational — and it was "fueled" — as if it's a fire — by "fear" — and that fear sounds irrational, because it's a reaction to "protests" and the pandemic — 2 things that are not properly addressed by owning a gun.
In the sixth paragraph, we see some very interesting facts:
New preliminary data from Northeastern University and the Harvard Injury Control Research Center show that about a fifth of all Americans who bought guns last year were first-time gun owners. And the data, which has not been previously released, showed that new owners were less likely than usual to be male and white. Half were women, a fifth were Black and a fifth were Hispanic...
I'm a woman, and I was a first-time gun user last summer.
“Americans are in an arms race with themselves,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents South Los Angeles....
From my perspective, I think it seems that people who want peace and safety got forced into some new practical thinking as the traditional idea of calling the police suddenly looked shockingly weak.
There is no single reason for the surge, but social scientists point to many potential drivers. “There is a breakdown in trust and a breakdown in a shared, common reality,” said Lilliana Mason, a political scientist at the University of Maryland who writes about political violence.
Well, she's almost saying it, but at such a high level of abstraction, it's almost meaningless.
“There is also all this social change, and social change is scary.”
Again — meaningless abstraction. Maybe Mason said more in the interview and the NYT chose not to use it.
Thomas Harris, a former law enforcement officer who works at the gun counter at Sportsman’s Warehouse in Roanoke, Va., said that around March last year, the customers he would speak with began to include more white-collar workers, such as people from insurance firms and software companies.... He said many of these apparent first-time buyers purchased more expensive guns, in the range of $400 or more. The purpose, he said, was not to carry the gun around in public, but to keep it at home.
“They were saying: ‘We’re going to be locking down. We’re constrained to our homes. We want to keep safe.’”
That's a great quote for the NYT framework: Irrational folk thought a gun would help against the virus.
But I do see something rational even in that. I know that last March, as the lockdown began and we laid in provisions, I contemplated the possibility that civil order would break down. What if the disease spiraled upward to the point where you couldn't get any medical care? What if you had a dead body in the house and no one would come take it away? Some people would lose their mind. Then what if the food supply chain broke down? That never happened, but it could have, and it was rational to imagine that there would be home invasions in search of food.
Thus articles Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots?
You now read the article Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots? with the link address https://welcometoamerican.blogspot.com/2021/05/pandemic-dont-you-mean-riots.html
0 Response to "Pandemic?! Don't you mean the riots?"
Post a Comment