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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