An opinion on gun control [long but crushes gun grabbers' positions decisively]

I want to talk about the media’s effect on the shooters. Put yourself in the shoes of one of these killers. One nice thing about playing the villain and being a punching bag for cops, soldiers, and permit holders is that you need to learn about how the bad guys think and operate. And most of the mass shooters fit a similar profile. The vast majority (last I saw it was over 80%) are on some form of psychotropic drug and has been for many years. They have been on Zoloft or some serotonin inhibitor through their formative years, and their decision making process is often flawed. They are usually disaffected, have been bullied, pushed around, and have a lot of emotional problems. They are delusional. They see themselves as victims, and they are usually striking back at their peer group. These people want to make a statement. They want to show the world that they aren’t losers. They want to make us understand their pain. They want to make their peer group realize that they are powerful. They’ll show us. The solution is easy. It’s right there in front of your nose. If you can kill enough people at one time, you’ll be on the news, 24/7, round the clock coverage. You will become the most famous person in the world. Everyone will know your name. You become a celebrity. Experts will try to understand what you were thinking. Hell, the President of the United States, the most important man in the world, will drop whatever he is doing and hold a press conference to talk about your actions, and he’ll even shed a single manly tear. You are a star. Strangely enough, this is one of the only topics I actually agree with Roger Ebert on. He didn’t think that the news should cover the shooters or mention their names on the front page of the paper. So whenever the press isn’t talking about guns, or violent movies, or violent video games, or any other thing that hundreds of millions of people participated in yesterday without murdering anybody, they’ll keep showing the killer’s picture in the background while telling the world all about him and his struggles. And then the cycle repeats, as the next disaffected angry loner takes notes.

They should not be glamorized. They should be hated, despised, and forgotten. They are not victims. They are not powerful. They are murdering scum, and the only time their names should be remembered is when people like me are studying the tactics of how to neutralize them faster.

“The media” is a serious misnomer. Grant without reservation that movies and TV dramas trend sharply left, but “nonfiction" - not explicitly fiction - TV documentaries and journalism (read, wire service journalism) are the fundamental problem for which there conceivably could be a means of First Amendment compliant redress. It is less the medium than it is the format of the programming.
Wire service journalism is unified journalism. Adam Smith was right when he asserted that
"People of the same trade seldom meet together even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public or some contrivance to raise prices." - Adam Smith
. . . and a newswire is a continuous virtual “meeting” of all the news outlets belonging to the wire service. To be specific, we’re basically talking about the Associated Press, but the dynamic is probably about the same for all of them. The result is, over time inevitably will be, journalism which talks about what makes itself look good - and suppresses whatever does not make it look good.
Journalism, broadcast even more immediately than print, is well suited to raising the alarm when that is needed. The reason that the fourth airliner was crashed in Pennsylvania on 9/11/01 rather than being shot down by a fighter or even achieving its objective was the fact that by then journalism had raised the hue and cry, and word reached the passengers of United Flight 93 via cell phone. The trouble, from the POV of the journalist, is that most of the time there is no need for an alarm to be raised.
The need for reasons to raise alarms is the strongest bias of journalism. Just as “to a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” to a journalist everything looks like an actual or at least a potential crisis. Journalists, and certainly the Associated Press, proclaim that “all journalists are objective” - and well they might. Not, certainly, because journalists have no biases - but because that claim promotes the value and importance of paying attention to journalism. And because journalists lack competitors with comparable PR power to be able to ridicule that risible claim.
The claim of journalistic objectivity is inimical to any serious attempt at objectivity by journalists. Making a diligent effort to be objective is of course possible and laudable, but any such effort must begin with humility and an acknowledgement of any incentives and interests which might cause the seeker to not be objective. Claiming to actually be objective is the precise opposite of that - and belonging to an organization which you know will claim objectivity for you is no different. Anyone who rejects the possibility of their own subjectivity is hopelessly subjective.
Whoever rejects the possibility of their own subjectivity blinds himself to viewpoints different from his own. And no matter how he protests that he is telling “both sides of the story” (“Both? How do we know that there are exactly two?), the person who “knows” he is right inevitably will present only a straw man version of any other viewpoint. Especially if the other viewpoint has too much evidence on its behalf for the “objective” person’s comfort.
The need of the journalist for something to raise an alarm over provides an acid test of our institutions - but it also is true that acid can damage good institutions and not bad ones exclusively. In the present instance, journalism promotes scrutiny of whether the difference between, for example, the firepower of a musket and a B.A.R. has implications which the Constitution should address. But the manic fault-finding of journalism - and of the politicians whose only principle is to go along and get along with journalism - does not hesitate to risk subverting the Constitution root and branch.
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