Re: The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck Jumps The Rails In Tennessee

[diesel fuel]

On 09 Apr 2023, Michael Ejercito <MEje...@HotMail.com> posted some
news:u0unov$1pavn$1...@dont-email.me:

> https://ethicsalarms.com/2023/04/09/the-sandy-hook-ethics-train-wreck-j
> umps-the-rails-in-tennessee/
>
>
>
> APRIL 9, 2023 / JACK MARSHALL
>
>
> It’s understandable that people of good will lose their minds,
> perspective and good judgment over the emotion-packed problem of
> school shootings, but someone has to stay rational and ethical. It
> might as well be me.
>
> There are three major public affairs sagas currently occupying the
> media’s efforts and the public’s mayfly-like attention: Donald
> Trump’s indictment, Clarence Thomas’s betrayal of his sacred
> obligation as a Supreme Court justice, and the messy aftermath of the
> latest school shooting, this one by a transsexual with a history of
> mental health issues. The first is the culmination of one of our most
> long and continually-running ethics train wrecks. The second is a
> dangerous, Titanic-leval gash in the side of an American institution
> crucial to the survival of our democracy. The third is arguably more
> noise and angst than substance, but a more spectacular example of the
> ethics train wreck phenomenon that either of the other two. As the
> genre requires, everyone boarding the thing is acting unethically,
> including the journalists covering it.
>
> I am going to, for once, only lightly touch on the mainstream
> media’s unethical handling of the shooting and the reactions to it
> by pointing out this: The New York Post’s Alexandra Steigrad
> reported last week that CBS News ordered its staffers to avoid “any
> mention” that Tennessee school shooter Audrey Hale was a transgender
> individual. The apparent theory is that doing so will undermine the
> cause of transgender activists, so the news must be scrubbed to
> advance the greater good, or something.
>
> Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!
>
> After the tragedy, the mindless took over. There has been a powerful,
> passionate anti-gun movement in the U.S. for as long as I can
> remember. When I was a child, it was handguns that the activists
> wanted to ban. Now it is semi-automatic weapons. The immovable object
> then and now was the Second Amendment; it just isn’t going anywhere,
> and that increasingly drives gun-haters crazy with frustration, as
> banging one’s head against a steel wall will do. This became a
> full-fledged ethics train wreck in 2012, when a mentally-ill 20
> year-old man, Adam Lanza, stole his mother’s guns and attacked the
> Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, murdering 26
> people, twenty of them children between six and seven years old. It
> was a previously unimaginable act of pure evil, and it propelled the
> anti-gun crusade into hyperdrive by adding the pure emotion of the
> “Think of the children!” rationalization (#58) to what was already
> a witches brew of propaganda, bad facts, bad civic literacy,
> historical and cultural ignorance, hysteria, incompetent ethical
> analysis and cynical partisan exploitation. In the intervening 20
> years, every active shooter on a college campus or in a school has set
> off another intense outburst of the vile “Second amendment
> supporters care more about guns than the lives of our children!”
> mantra. (more about that shortly.)
>
> On March 30, Democratic state representatives Justin Jones, Justin
> Pearson and Gloria Johnson joined demonstrators in the statehouse who
> disrupted the legislature with a boisterous protest to demand
> “stricter gun control laws,” despite there being no evidence at
> all that any such measures would have prevented Hale’s rampage. The
> three House members assisted in the disruption in the chamber, even
> leading chants of the ever-popular “No Justice, No Peace!” through
> a bullhorn. Jones held up fatuous a sign that read “Protect kids,
> not guns.”
>
>
> ***
>
> Ethics Check #1: The behavior of the three (Democratic, of course)
> state reps was indefensible. No one has explained why Republican
> members of Congress who supported the January 6 protest against what
> many believed was a rigged election were threatened by Democrats with
> a Constitutional ban from running for office as punishment, but the
> Tennessee legislators who actually participated in disrupting the
> government were pronounced by the same news media and party that
> condemned the Republicans as heroes. This is because it can’t be
> explained: it’s mind-blowing hypocrisy and a flaming double
> standard. What the Tennessee Democrats did was clearly worse: no
> Republicans too part in the January 6 attack on the Capital? No riot
> in Nashville, you say? That’s because, and only because, of moral
> luck. Police did not try to force the Nashville demonstrators to leave
> and didn’t have the numbers to even try. The anti-gun protesters, as
> you might expect, did not have a contingent of wackos prone to
> violence, though they might have. The news media’s near unanimous
> position is that people disrupting a Republican-run legislature in the
> midst of doing government business is admirable, but disrupting a
> Democratic-run Congress is an “insurrection.”
>
> ***
>
> The Republican leadership stripped Jones and Johnson of their
> committee assignments after the disruption. Pearson avoided their fate
> by not serving on a committee. Republicans then filed a resolution to
> expel the three Democrats from their seats in the state legislature
> for “disorderly behavior” and bringing “disorder and dishonor to
> the House of Representatives through their individual and collective
> actions.” Jones and Pearson, both black and now being lionized as
> “The Justins” were expelled by House Republicans, who hold a
> super-majority. Johnson, who is white, avoided their fate by a single
> vote. ***
>
> Ethics Check #2: What the three Democrats did would lead to being
> summarily fired in any other organizational context. If, just to pick
> a hypothetical out of the air, Clarence Thomas joined a protest in the
> Supreme Court during oral argument of the same sex marriage case,
> using a bullhorn to join protesters who had stormed the chamber,
> impeachment would not be an excessive consequence. The expulsion is
> being reported as “an attack on democracy,” which is Bizarro World
> logic: it was the three legislators who actually disrupted democracy,
> “demanding” action that in government that functions by voting,
> negotiation, and due process.
>
> ***
>
> Ethics Check #3: However, using the most severe punishment, while
> justifiable, was spectacularly incompetent, and thus unethical. Not
> only that, letting the white, female legislator escape with a lesser
> penalty neatly handed the race card to the party most fond of playing
> it. Of course, they did play it immediately. The Tennessee Republicans
> are morons.
>
> ***
>
> Meanwhile, as has happened with every mass shooting over the last 20
> years, the empty cries to “do something” echo across thee land. My
> favorite so far is the New York Times op-ed yesterday by Country music
> musician Keith Secor titled, “Country Music Can Lead America Out of
> Its Obsession With Guns.”
>
> ***
>
> Ethics Check #4: Read it if you want your brain to fall out of your
> skull. The headline itself disqualified the column: America has no
> “obsession”‘ with guns: anti-gun zealots have the obsession with
> guns. America’s “obsession,” as in “recognizing a cornerstone
> of our national experiment in democracy,” is with individual
> liberty, in which the right to self-protection is crucial and
> indispensable.
>
> Secor says he “now believes that country music has a unique
> opportunity to shepherd conservative Southerners, a demographic
> essential to the passage of any meaningful legislation, to the table
> to negotiate gun reform.” (Sure.) Typically, he shows no sense of
> what “meaningful legislation” or “gun reform” would be; these
> are just place-holders for “do something.” More highlights:
>
> “Earlier that day at Episcopal School, both of my kids had
> experienced their first active shooter-training drill. My daughter
> complained to me that she’d gotten an unlucky position at the desk
> her teacher instructed them to crawl behind. “If there had been a
> shooter, I probably would have gotten shot,” she said with a nervous
> laugh.”
>
> The anti-gun propagandists along with the mainstream media are 100%
> responsible for scaring our children into clinical depression. The
> chances that a kid will get terminal cancer, drown in a community pool
> or be killed by his parents are far more likely than than the risk of
> being killed by a mass school shooter, but the “Our kids don’t
> feel safe!” trope is standard equipment in the anti-gun
> disinformation campaign.
>
> Now that the tragedy of school gun violence has come to Nashville, our
> city is poised to help lead the nation toward effective regulations
> such as red-flag and safe-storage laws, a ban on military-grade
> weapons, stricter background checks and the repeal of permitless carry
> laws.
>
> None of which would have prevented the Nashville shooting. Red flag
> laws are unconstitutional, and should be: they are pre-crime measures
> that remove an individual’s constitutional rights through
> speculation and discrimination. Criminals and madmen are not going to
> be deterred by the repeal of permitless carry laws, and Secor marks
> himself as a deceitful messenger by using the term “military-grade
> weapons.” Safe-storage laws are a good idea, as are strict penalties
> for parents who let their children get a hold of their guns. If the
> anti-gun lobby would restrict itself to that, I doubt even the NRA
> would object too strongly. But those measures wouldn’t have stopped
> the Nashville shooter, or the massacre in Uvalde either.
>
> The Sandy Hook Ethics Train Wreck will apparently roll on forever.

Shoot the protesters and it will stop.