The Tie That Binds Mass Shootings

[Joseph Tracy]

Abusers or abused are likeliest to commit  killings. 

I feel there is an intellectual abuse that has to do with public and media endorsement of war, of capital punishment, of drones, targeted killings etc. that disallows voices opposed to war, voices empathetic with victims of state violence. The US also seems unable to admit that PTSD has to do with how the conscience is affected by killing in war and not just exposure to loud explosions. Drone operators are now getting PTSD and have high rates of suicide.

Theoretically the western nations after WW2 agreed through the Nuremberg War crimes trials that servants of the state had an obligation to resist clearly immoral orders, and to resist using state power for excessive abuse like torture and mass killing.  


> On Jun 15, 2016, at 10:44 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> http://washingtonmonthly.com/2016/06/15/the-tie-that-binds-mass-shootings/
> 
> Terrorism and chronic warfare are responses to life in societies in which the only perceived choices are dominating or being dominated. These violent responses are characteristic of cultures where this view of relations is learned early on through traditions of coercion, abuse, and violence in parent-child and gender relations.
> 
> It’s not coincidental that throughout history the most violently despotic and warlike societies have been those in which violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman. It’s not coincidental that the 9/11 terrorists came from cultures where women and children are terrorized into submission. Nor is it coincidental that Afghanistan under the Taliban in many ways resembled the European Middle Ages—when witchburnings, public drawings and quarterings, despotic rulers, brutal violence against children, and male violence against women were considered moral and normal. Neither is it coincidental that, in the U.S. today, those pushing “crusades” against “evil enemies” oppose equal rights for women and advocate harshly punitive childrearing.
> 

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