Control, Gun Control and not Morgan Freeman

There seems to be a bizarre fact about humans: when we are put in serious crisis, our response seems to be: to do anything to regain the perception of control. Remember that feeling when we were kids when our parents kept us safe from all the perils of the world?  Or at least we thought they were doing that, until that day when they really didn’t. That day when we realised that we were vulnerable to everything around us and only chance and circumstance would ever keep us safe. 

There is a certain strength in saying ‘play your role in life, but remember that it is just a part’. However, there are other ways that we maintain that illusion of control. Religion sometimes kicks in; the Dalai Lama can have some groovy quotes “Using force is not a sign of Strength, but rather a sign of weakness.” That sounds good, but is he right? I doubt many people would call it weakness if a Travis Bickle or Martin Riggs type character busted in during any of these shootings and beating the gunman mostly to death. Christianity has its cool understandings too...”That which you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me.” I’m not sure how far ‘the least of my brothers’ extends. I don’t think it would extend to people suffering from a personality disorder. The need for control, the need to know, to see and to be seen as being able to analyse seems to surpass all other needs. 

It doesn’t seem to matter what that control is, how irrational it is or how costly or stupid it is, we want to regain control and our initial way to do that seems to be obsessing about the details of an event.  Isn’t it the funniest thing? It may be one of those things, in line with irreducible complexity, that may well prove evolution to be incorrect. What difference does it make when everything is over and done for, we want to know the most minute little detail for no other reason than to appear in control of it, to have knowledge of a situation so that we may pretend to surpass it.

There have been a few times in my life where a crisis emerged and my response is to gain a knowledge of what happened, every little piece of evidence, every thought, every action, every motivation so that the situation can be analysed to the point of absurdity and then well beyond. I am fascinated in my own ability to obsess about wanting to know details as an initial response to a massive scare; a crisis that knocked you off your feet. Then the thought hits you: the only reason you want to know all this shit is so you can avoid laying blame where it should lay. You can then analyse, philosophise, bicyclise your way back to the controlling and analysing uber-rational dude. Notice how I even subconsciously changed from the first person back to the narrator during that thought?

This bizarre fact seems to be amplified by social media. We can tweak tweet and facebook our possession of knowledge about an event,   a hero or a villain in considerably less than the time it takes to actually read what we are re-tweeting or sharing.  With this in mind, I have been amazed to see the obsessive re-posting of a commentary, allegedly written by Morgan Freeman which essentially contains a self-defeating argument. It doesn’t take too long on Google to find out that Morgan Freeman has nothing to do with these comments and that they were apparently written by “a dude named Mark in Vancouver” However, while a weird apropos  go out to a dude named Mark in Vancouver, I do remember a similar chain post happening on previous shootings our ‘murkin cousins have endured that had been falsely credited to, inter alia, Leonard Nemoy and George Carlin.

It appears a self-defeating claim that a sensationalist media should be blamed for it creates a culture of celebrity worship, which we are hearing from someone who has no background in anything but acting and as such, has no claim to make a statement apart from the sensationalised over-representation his ‘brand’ has in the world.

But taking the time to read through the statement that Morgan Freeman didn’t write, it’s amazing to see the actual message is quite pointed.  The responsibility for the latest shooting murders doesn’t seem to go to the gunman, or the guns, movies, books  or a society that values death, debauchery and rape over all else for no other reason than these qualities sell. According to the very unreal Morgan Freeman, we are responsible, via the media’s apparent obsession with sensationalising everything so that the gunman will be “...remembered as a horrible monster, instead of a sad nobody.”

Wow.

Take a step back and think about that. A person, going through whatever delusion, acquires weaponry that enables him to murder innocent children and bystanders, and who is responsible? Um…hullo? ,,, A pair of DJs from Sydney make a phone call and apparently they are responsible for killing a person. Someone attends a scene of a suicide or a mass killing in their minds. They see the blood, the aggression, the depression, the clear lack of any ability of those around these people to act in time to stop a disaster from happening and they see none of these things. They see a copy of ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ in the corner, they see a violent DVD on the coffee table or they see a cartoon of Mohammed in the bin. That must be the reason. Not for any other reason that one can then assign blame to an external source. One can analyze and judge without having to justify and care. One can make this analysis safe in the comfort that there is such an asymmetry of information. It takes real courage to say…”Um, excuse me, but I don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”

Shame on us for reasoning with our eyes closed so tightly.

The penultimate point that slips in just under the radar in this statement is about gun control. “You can help by donating to mental health research instead of pointing to gun control as the problem…”

This screams a little less of a dude named Mark in Vancouver and a lot more like a statement from a vested interest group like the NRA’s ‘guns don’t kill people’ type non-sense. Our poor ‘murkin cousins generally claim a ‘right’ in their constitution which was put there from a Machiavellian principle that a well-armed civilian militia would instill a peaceful state. What was probably true in Florence, 500 years ago could hardly be more wrong of the US today, where the well-armed militia marks the biggest threat to that peace, rather than the protector of it. To think that, in one year, guns in the United States were the weapon of choice for more than twenty times (9484) the murders that occurred in Australia, England, Wales, Finland, Germany, Canada and Spain combined (545) is a hard argument for these peeps to get around. So either guns kill people, or Americans do.  

This post’s lame joke:

A hunter calls 000 and yells “I think my friend is dead! He just plopped down and died!”
The operator replies “Sir please calm down first make sure he is dead.”
The hunter says “Okay hold on.”

Two loud gunshots ring through the phone line and when the hunter returns, he says “Okay now what?”

This post’s groovy, identity-seeking quote:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

This post’s inappropriate over share:

When I was about 14 or so, I became obsessed with this stupid idea that I had been cursed by something or someone. Strange things happened to me and rather than put it down to dumb luck or just par-for-the-course-of-life type conclusions, I became convinced that there was a source to it; an author and a curse. So at the time I messed around with this Alasdair Crowley stuff about removing a curse. I don’t remember exactly what it was, black candles and red paper, or perhaps the other way around, don’t remember. But I remember as soon as I’d finished the whole thing, there was this nastiness, this presence that never seemed to let go. I had forgotten about it after moving away from home and the passing of the years. When my elder son was about 1, we moved back to Brisbane and passed through my hometown on the drive through. Passing the old house where I grew up, I barely recognised it as it had been ten years since I had been there. I looked at the trees and the once nice gardens and tried to remember the way it was when that same feeling kind of walloped over me again: a fear of some kind. I know that it is probably all in my mind, but it is amazing how vividly these types of things appear.