Friday, August 10, 2012

James Holmes Case: Fresh Perspective

By Meg Curtis, PhD

China Daily offers fresh perspective on the James Holmes case. Speakers on a video featuring a Chinese moderator and residents of New York and China dismiss the central argument over guns in the USA. The Chinese resident mocks the claim that people kill people; guns don’t. Without guns, he observes, people can’t commit the mass killings which occurred at Aurora, CO; Virginia Tech and Columbine.   

Please see the complete video at http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/2012-08/08/content_15650892. htm for this fascinating discussion.

The American viewer may gasp at the realization that all three participants in this video speak so intimately of all three locations, as if they lived in their jurisdiction, and walked by them every day. Of course, via the worldwide media, maybe they do. This, this is the reputation which precedes the United States everywhere she goes: a gun-toting people who sacrifice safety to an obsession with weapons; a society so gun-crazed that wild men can reduce crowds to corpses.  

On this video, the New Yorker’s testimony, however, proves more shocking than the Chinese accusations. The citizen of the Big Apple practically shrugs his shoulders as he admits that he wasn’t shocked over these mass murders. In fact, he’s come to accept such horror, since mass gun killings have occurred repeatedly in the US, and no trend appears to be developing to suggest the future will be any different than the past in the Wild West.

Facts are at his command as he reviews the history of such incidents, too, noting they started at U.S. Post Offices, apparently. Then, with atrocities at Columbine and Virginia Tech, the bursts of gun violence spread to academic campuses. Now, with the James Holmes case, they have spread to movie theaters. His analysis climaxes with a challenge to account for this pattern: Can Americans account for this shifting blood trail, which moves across maps for all the world to see?

 

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