Hyperbolic confusion

When looked back upon as history, the hyperbole-infused polarity of our political times will generate condescending head shakes, and not a few “can-you-believe-it?” chortles.

When the rabid dissemination of information, without regard to valid- ity, is juxtaposed against the shock factor required to stand out among the 24/7 ubiquitous-screen stream of distribution, the result is often—literally—chaos.

Some people think they know things that aren’t true at all. Others don’t believe things that are absolutely true. All of which leads to mass miscommunication that creates misplaced worries, miscalculated risks and misunderstood realities.

Here are a few points of demonstrative example.

A friend was talking about her young son’s reaction to a recent school shooting in a distant state: He was unsurprised but still apprehensive.

The fact that a gun is ever discharged on school property is most remarkable in one way: its amazing rareness. The only reason an early elementary student would have an unwarranted fear of something so utterly unlikely as a fatal school shooting is because adults have sensationalized it for him in spectacular fashion.

Culturally speaking, there should probably be a lot more school shootings than there actually are. As a Supreme Court justice once remarked about constitutional rights, students don’t check their criminal violence at the schoolhouse door, either. There are kids whose lives are intrinsically linked with gun-ridden situations such as the drug or prostitution trade, or other lawless lifestyles. They naturally have abnormally low inhibitions about packing heat whenever it pleases them.

There are also kids with warped or damaged psyches whose parents can’t or won’t see the problem, or admit or embrace the need for vital treatment. For a young maladjusted mind smoldering with vindictiveness over being bullied or just being different, violent video games and/or a gun in the home can be like gasoline.

With uncanny hypocritical consistency, the same folks who shout the loudest about “doing something” to stop school shootings, which happen less frequently than Powerball lottery winners, are surprisingly quiet when it comes to what to do about the daily death toll rained down on the nation and its children by non-school shootings.

As studies stream forth over mass shootings in school, it’s becoming evident that such tragedies are as much about mental illness as criminality, if not more. The shooters are nearly always suicidal, associated with the targeted school (usually as a student), and prone to pre-shooting behavior that is full of red-flag warnings. Deterrence never works with suicide murderers. By the time they reach the killing point, they’re at peace with the consequences. And their crimes have typically been planned out to the “T.”

The 16-year-old Saugus

High School shooter illegally obtained and used a “ghost” kit gun (with no serial number for tracing) to kill two classmates and himself and wound three others.

Very few rapists, robbers, drug lords, street thugs, bullies, pimps and the like who carry and brandish guns on a regular basis are suicidal, however. They want to survive their crime, and as often as not, come away from it with some sort of spoils for the effort. Their crimes are often spontaneous acts of opportunity, for which history has shown that properly applied punishments can be highly effective deterrents.

Yet contrast the cognizance of a primary-school youngster about those close-proximity crime risks with the remote bogeyman of school shootings: it’s inexplicably inverse, and amplified by parental complicity.

Moms and dads worry and fret far more over things that hardly ever happen, connected to them only by satellite news, than about the equally violent but immeasurably more frequent commonplace gun crimes in their own hometowns.

This numbed acceptance can become pervasive community-wide. Consider the headline at the top of the Jonesboro Sun’s front page last week that read, “Woman murdered; suspect in custody.”

Instead of stretching across all five columns in extra-large lettering, it only occupied two columns on the left. The type was only slightly larger than a four-column headline beneath the fold about a local high school student’s mapping project. In later reports, residents near the scene of the shooting said the sound of late-night gunshots wasn’t unusual. It wasn’t long ago when any gunfire inside the city limits would have been a freak anomaly.

Also consider published video of an armed robbery at a local gas station. Seeing a man indiscriminately pointing an illegally modified handgun, its high-capacity magazine clearly visible, at a young mother and even younger clerk in order to steal a few bucks is hard to watch. Even harder when realizing it’s happening so close to home; I believe I’ve filled up there before.

There’s nothing hohum about criminals carrying and using guns, and yet when it stops being alarming news, the community itself becomes so battered and damaged in its beliefs and confidences that fears get falsely re-focused on bigger calamities.

It’s a perilous social adaptation of the old money adage: We’re nation-wise but local-foolish about the greatest threat of violence our families and children will face.

Lamentably, that’s just the way big-government politicians prefer it.

—–––––❖–––––—