Eight people have died in shootings at three locations in Greater Atlanta.
Five of the dead, all Asian women working at two massage parlors in Atlanta across the street from each other, were killed in what appears to be one continuous sequence of events. Three more were killed at an Asian massage parlor in Cherokee County, north and a hint west of central Atlanta. A suspect is in custody, a 21 year old white man named Robert Aaron Long.
There isn’t much more to say with any confidence yet. It’s possible this is a hate crime, anti-Asian racism. It may not be; maybe incel misogyny is part of or the whole reason. Other factors could weigh in, or be the whole story. We don’t know, but we will soon, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t leaping to conclusions, including about what role was played by the words of a formerly very powerful person who has said a lot of stuff about China over the last year. But the truth is I don’t know anything, and I’m not going to say out loud what I think just yet.
But one thing is overwhelmingly clear: guns are poison.
They destroy society. Their mere presence threatens the concept of a commonwealth: you can’t have a true public sphere if some members of society arrogate to themselves the private right to make life/death decisions anywhere, anytime. And in the reality in which we live, they wreck lives. They ruin the worlds of those who own them; gun suicides amount to about two thirds of all gun deaths–and every life thus lost shreds those of uncounted more who loved the one they’ve lost. And they destroy whole universes in and around the victims of others’ choices to pull a trigger–including the half of all women murder victims, killed by their intimate partners.
We can have a civic society, and as the Atlanta murders remind us in all the awfulness of these crimes, we can have one in which existing while female isn’t a capital offense, if and only if we radically change access to guns in America.
That’s it. Got nothing more in the face of yet another story that will be “too soon” for politics until it’s deep enough in the past to have no impact on politics.
Fuck guns.
Image: Johannes Helder, Man with a pistol, 1899.
Brachiator
I will not jump to any conclusions. But goddam guns and goddam gun nuts.
Elizabelle
Please don’t take this thread down, since we have two on this very sad news. It is good to have both of your perspectives. We can multi-task here.
Too many guns. Affects us on so many levels. I think we should stop reassuring assholes that we are not coming for their guns. They should not be handed out like gum drops.
debbie
@Brachiator:
I’m happy to jump for you. Fucking T****.
Another Scott
Horrible.
Please correct the suspect’s name: Robert Aaron Long (according to the AP).
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Tom Levenson
@Another Scott: Fix’t. Thanks for the catch.
Ruckus
Tom
@Brachiator:
I have been around guns at different times in my life. I hunted when I was a teen, under adult supervision and the realization that guns are really only useful for killing things was paramount. Then in the Navy I carried a 45 pistol on in port ship security watch, with orders that if I felt it necessary I was to shoot to kill. I never had to take it out of the holster. Later I served temp duty with the Shore Patrol and we didn’t carry guns, only nightsticks and handcuffs. So I’ve been around guns and know what they are used for and what the end result of actually using them generally is. (I have a buddy who is an ex Marine, severed a tour in Vietnam, carried an M16 with him, every where he went, never fired it other than at the range.) I know, through the VA, many who carried a gun and used them for their intended purpose.
My point of all of this is that I see little to no use for a gun in a civilized society. Even in a barely civilized society. Maybe especially in a barely civilized society. Some people with guns seem to feel that they don’t have to be a part of a society, that society owes them something (allegiance?) and they seem to think they have a right to shoot you if you don’t agree with their reasoning or beliefs. I find this a very strange and wrong headed concept. Sort of the opposite of civilization.
Mike G
Let me guess the NRA rhetoric:
He was a “law abiding gun owner” in which case “nothing could be done/who could have expected?”
Or he was a felon who can’t legally possess guns but got ahold of them anyway, which just proves that gun control laws don’t work.
laura
I didn’t grow up in a home with guns and my dad wouldn’t allow anyone to bring a gun into our home. I just do not grok the idea that a gun signifies protection or safety and I sure as hell have never wanted or hoped to kill a fellow human being. I’ve never been in a circumstances in which someone tried to kill me and so, I can’t see a gun as anything other than a deadly fetish object.
Elizabelle
So true. We’ve seen other issues perk along, and suddenly there is change that seems rapid. Gay marriage, etc. Could happen with guns.
This is a workplace shooting, too. And, of course, the only reasons the school shootings stopped, for the time being, is that so many schools are closed.
I tire of our “exceptionalism.”
dc
Racism, misogyny and guns, what a great combo!
Ruckus
@laura:
I have been close and very close to being shot, 4 times.
2 were people I was hunting with being assholes and were part of the reason that I stopped hunting. 1 was a buddy and the closest I had to being killed, he missed my head by about an inch. He was not aiming at me, I walked off a porch and stepping off of it saved my life. The 4th was I had to walk back to my ship once because I missed the last bus and apparently the neighborhood was not all that friendly. Fortunately the concept of being shot at improved my running just a tad and the neighbors couldn’t catch me. Adrenaline will do that.
As I said in the comment above this, guns really have a very, very limited place in a civilized society, many far more civilized than ours have far fewer, as in almost no deaths by gunfire. I’ll be ecstatic if we ever actually join them in the ranks of the civilized world.
Brachiator
@Ruckus:
What you say is very reasonable. Unfortunately, the unreasonable will not be moved, have made up their minds and will defend gun ownership no matter what.
Ruckus
@dc:
A trifecta of ignorance and stupidity.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
Yes they will. And of course now that a lot of those weapons are basically military weapons of warfare, they can do an immense amount of damage in a short order. And another point, the major reason that we are where we are is there are people who are making money selling death.
Some by selling hate, some by selling guns…. Gee I wonder who that might be…..
tokyokie
Although my father was raised in a semi-rural environment, he hated guns. He made my brother and me take the NRA gun-safety class, back when the NRA wasn’t a marketing arm of the firearms industry, so that we would understand the lethal nature of firearms. Growing up, neither my brothers nor I owned even a measly BB gun, because my father wouldn’t allow them in the house. Once, after playing pickup football, I challenged some kid to shoot me in my shoulder pads with his BB gun. It basically didn’t do anything, but when my father asked about the small indentation on my pads, I told what had happened, and my mother had to talk him out of going to the kid’s house and taking away his gun.
I took my father’s experience to heart. For reasons I cannot explain, my brothers did not. But I, too, don’t want one of those damn things in the house.
(My father served in the Aleutians Theater during World War II, but he never spoke of his wartime experiences (with the exception of one story that painted Bob Hope in a bad light). My father died 45 years ago, so I can’t ask him, but I’ve come to suspect that he was among the support troops (he was a junior officer in the Corps of Engineers) who had to hold off the Japanese banzai attack on Attu, and that experience colored his attitude toward firearms.)
laura
@Ruckus: a neighbor kid shot me in the face with a bb gun when I was about 9 or 10. Missed my eye by a bit. Just playing with a gun on a hot summer night and a street full of kids. It was an accident.
dww44
Thanks to all those who shared their experiences with guns. Thanks particularly to Mr. Levenson for so eloquently voicing for those of us who can’t, the reasons guns are so antithetical to a truly civil society.
I fear that because our country is so awash in guns and gun culture that we are more likely to solve the climate crisis long before we are able to undo the damage that the NRA and the right wing have visited upon us all.
rikyrah
Kill 8 people…
Still Taken ALIVE???
Betty Cracker
QFT.
JustRuss
I personally know 3 teenagers who have attempted suicide. 2 of them tried to overdose, they’re still with us. One of them is getting married soon. The other used a gun. It worked.