{"id":1290,"date":"2012-12-16T06:46:34","date_gmt":"2012-12-16T06:46:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/?p=1290"},"modified":"2012-12-16T06:54:58","modified_gmt":"2012-12-16T06:54:58","slug":"this-shit-is-insane","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/?p=1290","title":{"rendered":"this shit is insane"},"content":{"rendered":"

I turned off the news sometime before the election and have not turned it back on since. So I learned about the recent mass shootings, here in Portland and then in Connecticut, through friends or people talking at work. In the past, with tragic events like these, I have been glued to the radio or the TV, in a manner that has \u00a0almost always ended up making me feel a little gross — like I was on the verge of crossing some line between “witnessing” and understanding the tragedy and potentially gawking. I went online today to read, for the first time, about the Connecticut shooting. I read a list of the victims names. I’m not sure \u00a0I need much more from the news media than that.<\/p>\n

Does it really take shooting six years olds for this country to tackle gun control? Jesus. Seriously. Jesus. Christ.\u00a0At least 88 people have died this year in mass shootings<\/a> and everybody was somebody’s someone – a sibling, a parent, a best friend, a favorite colleague, a room mate, a spouse or a partner, someone’s teacher or student or coach or neighbor or favorite or cherished whoever that they looked forward to seeing or talking to every day or every week or month. And all of them are gone now. And that’s just people being killed in mass shootings. In 2010, over 8000 people were murdered by firearms. \u00a0Those people were somebodys’ someones too. And they gone forever too.<\/p>\n

It is\u00a0amazing\u00a0to me how in this country, civil liberties have been eroded over the last 11 years, and how as a\u00a0citizenry\u00a0we’ve gone along with the erosion. So now we’re up to our eyeballs with scary bullshit, like\u00a0surveillance\u00a0and wire\u00a0tapping\u00a0and detention and national ids and government secrecy, etc. Just gave away the store for so called \u00a0“national security.” But back the fuck off of “personal security,” right?! Because in this country you cannot touch the right to have a fucking\u00a0assault\u00a0weapon. Maybe this is weak line of reasoning and it’s flawed thinking to compare the two things, but I can’t help but thinking that there’s some thread there about our collective unconscious or conscious.<\/p>\n

Oh, and after we talk gun control, maybe we can talk mental health services<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I turned off the news sometime before the election and have not turned it back on since. So I learned about the recent mass shootings, here in Portland and then in Connecticut, through friends or people talking at work. In the past, with tragic events like these, I have been glued to the radio or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1290","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1290"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1298,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1290\/revisions\/1298"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1290"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1290"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1290"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}