Date: 24 Sep 99 02:23:49 MDT
From: Chris Jerrey <chris.jerrey-AT-usa.net>
Subject: Re: [Tenure idea for publish or perish in the Baudrillard dept: ]


After a couple of months lurking in the shadows, time to step out into the
light. Hello everyone.
Catherine's comments on Fort Worth pressed the thought accelerator.
I'm writing from the comfort of England where we have banned gun atrocities,
or rather the means to commit them. Only time will tell whether that amounts
to the same thing. The move to ban pretty much all firearms was widely
supported in the UK. The ban was introduced in reaction to the Dunblane
Massacre when a lone gunman killed 23 children and a teacher in a Scottish
school. The thinking at that time was, there will always be crazy people and
some will be devious enough to slip through the net of regulations. So let's
make sure that no one has access to the most effective means of expressing a
grudge. I subscribe to that. No one needs a gun in the modern, regulated world
that most westerners live in (farmers being an obvious exception).
So in the UK, there has never been much of a gun culture, it was always
dificult to get hold of a gun and now it's legally impossible. Result, there
have been two gun massacres in the UK in the last 20 years and both were
before the total ban was introduced.
Any reasonable person would come to the conclusion that a country with less
guns was safer from massacres than one where guns were widely available.
Enter the gun lobby. How will history regard these people? Forgive me for my
slack use of Baudrillian terminology as I am only a recent scholar but surely
the cultural construction of the gun lobby is as good an example of a simulcra
as you could want. A construction built out of arcane rights from the
Constitution, macho posturing, an irresponsible call to reckless individuality
and neatly decorated with full integration with the American Way and the
blessing of the Church. A mad world that is sinful and UnAmerican to even
question. 
The challenge for anyone seeking to reduce the number of gun victims, is not
to get others to accept that less guns means less deaths. They will realise
that themselves when they emerge from the gun lobby's cultural madhouse. Only
when large numbers of Americans realise that they won't go to Hell or be a
defacto convert to Communism and do something about that realisation will
anything really change.

CathB2-AT-aol.com wrote:
The murder of the Baptist  youth group (Fort Worth, Texas) was captured on 
videotape.  The vicitms laughed and the band kept on playing. They assumed it

was a stunt designed to make some ethical point about violence in our times. 

It all seemed so trite and stagey, right out of the movies, that they were 
quite surprised to be really dying.  (A mass murderer interviewed on 20/20 
concurred;"They only stay dead if I want them,too," he explained.) 

I haven't actually seen the videotape on local news, so it's possible the 
media is attempting to think of something beyond bottom line viewership.  But

I feel sure that we'll all know whether the tape has been aired by the 
increase in frequency of serial murders from monthly to weekly.  Makes you 
think that Mass Murder for Dummies will be the next in the "for Complete 
Idiots" series, to be shelved next to Sex for Dummies, and other popular 
titles.

Catherine Brown


email: chris.jerrey-AT-usa.net
phone: +44 (0)1342 893620

____________________________________________________________________
Get free email and a permanent address at http://www.netaddress.com/?N=1