It’s understandable that people of good will lose their minds, perspective and good judgment over the emotion-packed problem of school shootings, but someone has to stay rational and ethical. It might as well be me.
There are three major public affairs sagas currently occupying the media’s efforts and the public’s mayfly-like attention: Donald Trump’s indictment, Clarence Thomas’s betrayal of his sacred obligation as a Supreme Court justice, and the messy aftermath of the latest school shooting, this one by a transsexual with a history of mental health issues. The first is the culmination of one of our most long and continually-running ethics train wrecks. The second is a dangerous, Titanic-leval gash in the side of an American institution crucial to the survival of our democracy. The third is arguably more noise and angst than substance, but a more spectacular example of the ethics train wreck phenomenon that either of the other two. As the genre requires, everyone boarding the thing is acting unethically, including the journalists covering it.
I am going to, for once, only lightly touch on the mainstream media’s unethical handling of the shooting and the reactions to it by pointing out this: The New York Post’s Alexandra Steigrad reported last week that CBS News ordered its staffers to avoid “any mention” that Tennessee school shooter Audrey Hale was a transgender individual. The apparent theory is that doing so will undermine the cause of transgender activists, so the news must be scrubbed to advance the greater good, or something.
Nah, there’s no mainstream media bias!
After the tragedy, the mindless took over. There has been a powerful, passionate anti-gun movement in the U.S. for as long as I can remember. When I was a child, it was handguns that the activists wanted to ban. Now it is semi-automatic weapons. The immovable object then and now was the Second Amendment; it just isn’t going anywhere, and that increasingly drives gun-haters crazy with frustration, as banging one’s head against a steel wall will do. This became a full-fledged ethics train wreck in 2012, when a mentally-ill 20 year-old man, Adam Lanza, stole his mother’s guns and attacked the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, murdering 26 people, twenty of them children between six and seven years old. It was a previously unimaginable act of pure evil, and it propelled the anti-gun crusade into hyperdrive by adding the pure emotion of the “Think of the children!” rationalization (#58) to what was already a witches brew of propaganda, bad facts, bad civic literacy, historical and cultural ignorance, hysteria, incompetent ethical analysis and cynical partisan exploitation. In the intervening 20 years, every active shooter on a college campus or in a school has set off another intense outburst of the vile “Second amendment supporters care more about guns than the lives of our children!” mantra. (more about that shortly.)
On March 30, Democratic state representatives Justin Jones, Justin Pearson and Gloria Johnson joined demonstrators in the statehouse who disrupted the legislature with a boisterous protest to demand “stricter gun control laws,” despite there being no evidence at all that any such measures would have prevented Hale’s rampage. The three House members assisted in the disruption in the chamber, even leading chants of the ever-popular “No Justice, No Peace!” through a bullhorn. Jones held up fatuous a sign that read “Protect kids, not guns.”
Ethics Alarms 