Tuesday, May 8th, 2007

"No Gun Left Behind: The Gun Lobby's Campaign to Push Guns Into Colleges and Schools"

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/08/1328243

Brian Siebel, senior attorney with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, talks about his new report that draws attention to the gun lobby's efforts in recent years to change college campus rules prohibiting firearms.

Well, what we point out is, we didn't even know who had been shot at Virginia Tech, when several gun lobby organizations put out press releases calling for students and teachers on college campuses to be armed. You know, I think they would like it to give everybody a gun and start the crossfire. I think that's their solution to this kind of tragedy. Of course, we totally disagree with that. And the report is designed to draw attention to their campaign. It follows on the heels of another campaign that the gun lobby has been pushing, which is to force guns into workplaces. They have supported bills in a number of states to bar employers from keeping guns out of employees' cars. We think that's again just a kind of foot-in-the-door effort that ultimately they would like to see guns essentially everywhere in society.

The following two articles make worthwhile points in rebuttal to Levy's book - women have been doing better, and "liberation" that comes with a little "Girls Gone Wild" may be more preferable to a regression to the hegemony of Disney "princess" objectification.

ARTICLE 1:
http://alternet.org/rights/28237/?page=1
Feminism Is a Failure, and Other Myths
By Jennifer Baumgardner, AlterNet. Posted November 17, 2005.

While Dowd's book has some feminists of my acquaintance furious ("I don't recognize the world she is describing at all," a 35-year-old editor at the Washington Post told me), Levy's is more dangerous. Intentional or not, Levy contributes to that mean finger, pointed only at girls, that says "You think you are being sexy, you think you're cool and powerful, but you're not. You're a slut and people are making fun of you."

The first piece is most harsh. But Levy is not pointing her fingers at Girls Gone Wild participants and shouting 'slut'. Instead, she is posing an interesting question: to what extent does GGW exploit a trope within current interpretations of feminist liberation that plays into the hands of male-dominated corporate greed?

ARTICLE 2:
http://www.alternet.org/story/51416/
Feminism in the Era of 'Girls Gone Wild'
By Amanda Marcotte, AlterNet. Posted May 5, 2007.

If young women are doing fine by themselves by picking up the books and working hard and presenting a very real challenge to male dominance, then what should we make of the "Girls Gone Wild" stereotype? The notion that college age women are wasting their potential somehow by acting like nothing more than sex objects is paralleled neatly by the notion that the kindergarten set of girls that are supposedly rejecting their feminist parents in order to embrace the fluffy princess phenomenon, pushed mostly by the Disney company. In fact, the princess marketing has something of a "gotcha" element to it, as if the miles of pink and lace present an irresistible temptation for the inner delicate flowers of young girls. The more likely story is that the relentless drumbeat of marketing the Princess line has made girls feel that they're missing out if they aren't a part of it.

Now, this second piece is a little less harsh on Levy. But I think it makes a mistake insofar as it seems to suggest that we have only two options: 1) forwards (which necessarily comes with at least a little bit of GGW); 2) backwards (into Disney princess-land). Marcotte is right to suggest that we do women a disservice to think that we have entered an era of "college age women are wasting their potential somehow by acting like nothing more than sex objects". But I think Levy's argument is more sophisticated than that. There has been an 'en masse' conflation of liberation with an ideology of free self-expression which inadvertently plays into male power. This is not to say that all free self-expression is intrinsically bad, however. There are multiple ways this can be done - not all of which might reinforce male hegemony.

Either way, it is a fascinating debate. I don't think I know all the answers. But I do get suspicious when women seem to internalize male-driven ideologies of what counts as sexuality and then voluntarily reproduce those ideologies under the banner of 'liberation' - it just appears to be a trap. And I wonder if women are benefitting.

The Irish Times
28/04/2007
Irish Times Article - Sensible gun laws only way to secure a safe future for US

The majority of students of Virginia Tech are doing something ordinary yet also remarkable this week: they are studying hard for their final exams. Working through the horrific murders of 27 of their fellow students and 5 of their faculty at the hands of a disturbed class mate, Cho Seung-Hui, the Virginia Tech community is refusing to be defined by a violent rampage that has shocked the United States and caused sorrow across the world. Virginia Tech is an institution of higher learning, a place where young people can realize their potential and, as the university slogan puts it, ‘invent the future.’ The return of students in large numbers after such a terrible crime is re-affirming this to the world.

The loss of so many young lives on April 16th has shaken us all. A flotilla of media decamped to our main university campus in Blacksburg and recorded our shock and our tears. It has also encountered, in conversations with our students and faculty, our capacity to rally and persevere. As a Virginia Tech faculty member for eighteen years, I was gratified by two aspects of our response. First, Virginia Tech faculty and students correctly challenged the widespread use of the multi-media images produced by Cho Seung-Hui himself which were integral to enacting his fantasy of heroic ‘re-masculinization’ through brutal violence. The complicity of the media in producing murder as fascinating spectacle is widespread across the globe. Second, amidst our pain, there was also human empathy for Cho’s family and for those beyond our campus who suffer from structural and direct violence every day. The death toll in Baghdad last week was horrific. The Iraq war continues to claim the lives of young American soldiers, some tragically former Virginia Tech students.

The daily death toll from gun violence across the United States is also horrific. In 2004, the New York Times reported this last weekend, an average of about 81 people per day died from gunfire across the United States. Some were suicides, others ‘accidents’ and the rest classified as homicides. In Washington D.C. in 2005, according to public statistics, there were 195 murders, the lowest number in recent years yet still a grim total for a city of only 550,521 people. Look for a rise in the future if the staunchly conservative US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia has its way. Last month, it struck down the District’s restrictive handgun law opening the door to a broad roll-back of gun control laws across the United States, especially in its major cities (the decision is on appeal, and may come before the US Supreme Court).

Marginalized by last Monday’s horror at Virginia Tech was a large demonstration in Washington DC for congressional voting rights. Despite having a population almost as numerous as states like North Dakota (636,677), Alaska (663,661), South Dakota (775,933), and larger than Wyoming (509,294), this overwhelmingly African-American city has no Senators or Representatives with political voting power in the Congress seated within it. This matters significantly when it comes to gun control laws to promote public safety and freedom from random acts of madness. All of the states comparable to DC in population are power centers for those forces glamorizing guns and undermining existing gun control laws. National Rifle Association constructions of ‘tradition’ and ‘rights’ (words familiar to Irish ears) are blended with frontier mythology to sell guns, and lots of them, as necessary accessories of a supposedly ‘free’ lifestyle. Paranoid fantasies revolving around government conspiracies and invading outsiders are used to mobilize gun owners into political projects as single issue voters backing NRA-endorsed candidates. Gun laws are for sissies; real men pack heat. But there is no conspiracy, only the organized effort of the gun lobby, deeply entrenched in Congress, to thwart cities suing gun manufacturers for the devastation caused by their products, and to let the Clinton era assault weapons ban lapse. Under the Bush administration, a plethora of semi-automatic assault weapons are now available for sale to the general public.

Last Friday, in the wake of the Virginia Tech rampage, the Democratic controlled House of Representatives passed a bill creating a new Congressional seat for Washington DC and, to attract Republican support, for Republican-leaning Utah also (most Republicans still voted against the measure). The measure was previously stalled by Republican efforts to attach a provision formally overturning the District’s 31 year old ban on hand guns. The bill moves forward into the Senate where the over representation of rural states and the under representation of the interests of America’s cities is most pronounced. It also faces a potential White House veto.

Beyond this modest gesture, the Virginia Tech massacre has generated no serious political response. Politicians have run from the issue rather than face it, blaming university officials and campus security rather than their own complicity with making deadly semi-automatic weapons easily available. The Virginia Tech community reacted strongly against an initial media-driven desire to blame the university and its police force for the absence of a ‘lockdown’ of campus (as if an open campus should be like a prison). Petitions of support for the university president and police chief made it clear we were not accepting this easy ‘blame-the-local-officials’ strategy. Contrast this to how the Australian government reacted in 1996 to the massacre of 35 people in Port Arthur Tasmania by a deranged killer using a semi-automatic rifle. Within 12 days, the federal and state government agreed a ban on semi-automatic rifles and placed strict controls on other guns. The government also launched a large gun buy-back program. The result? Suicides and homicides have declined. In the decade before Port Arthur, there were 10 separate mass-shooting incidents; since, zero.

The United States faces many difficult challenges today. Can the US state extract itself with dignity from Iraq and rebuild its international standing to more effectively thwart terrorism? Can it meet the challenge of global climate change after ignoring it for so long? Can the federal government create legislative solutions that provide adequate health care for all its citizens, as its population ages? And, while its leading politicians may not want to acknowledge it, the Virginia Tech killings renew the question: can the federal government establish meaningful control on handguns and assault weapons? These are profound challenges for the future. My hope and feeling is that some of those students studying hard at Virginia Tech, in the wake of a horrible tragedy, will be involved in inventing a better future for the United States of America, one where security is grounded in sensible gun laws and Virginia Tech is the name of an excellent university not a citation in a continuing list of murderous rampages.

First of all, two fabulous links:

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2001.shtml

http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/1263

I swear, I had to read these twice before I could believe it. But these links are just some of a rash of such claims being made across the right wing blogosphere. These folks are basically arguing that Virginia Tech shooter, Cho, was a "machurian candidate", programmed by the CIA to 'go off' at a preordained time. Why would the CIA wish to do this? Well, because they want to instigate a nation-wide revolution against gun ownership, thus removing the main vestige of the average yanks' power to overthrow the government. And what is the main evidence they draw? Yes, a blog post written by yours truly some time ago advertising an anti-war, anti-CIA (decidedly left-wing!) protest at Virginia Tech.

Here is a clip from the Online Journal piece:

In fact, given Cho Seung-Hui’s deadly proficiency with his Glock 9 millimeter and Walther 22 automatic, he seems much less a random than hand-picked nut, programmed to kill and self-destruct. So who would benefit from striking more gun-terror in the heart of Americans than the biggest gun-toting, terror-provoking administration in the world? And at a point when said administration is bargaining for more money for a war in which more people die in a day than in the last three biggest US campus slayings. Consider the following . . .

Clearly we all need to take a pill. What possible interest would the CIA have in getting rid of hand guns in this country? If only it were true! But what is indeed sad here is the lack of sophisticated analysis. Its just too simple: just brand the CIA as a branch of the 'Illuminati', a secret network of elites that rule the world through such organizations as the Trilateral Commission, and then you don't need to bother to come up with a theory that implicates you or the cultural values you harbor in any wrong doing. This stuff reads like an except of one of those Lyndon Larouche pamphlets you see handed out in the Metro in DC from time to time.

Of course, to many conservatives, the collapse of American society is to be attributed to what they perceive as a feminization and weakening through an influx of foreigners and other ne'er do wells (try to picture George C. Scott's character, Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson, in Dr Strangelove here - wailing about the pollution of the nation's 'precious fluids'). They believe that the 'moral fibre' of the country has has the rug pulled out from under it, so to speak. However, what is remarkably sad about this critique, quite apart from its intrinsic male chauvinism and racism, is that the problems it sees are not the real cause of its advocates' misfortunes. The moral values of American society are not 'rotting' because the CIA and other branches of the global elite are thwarting it. They are rotting because so many members of American society - our friendly right-wing bloggers here not excluded - are locked into a hyper-individualistic view of what society is all about. As Jeremy Rifkin explains in his accessible read, The European Dream, the moral terms of American social life have been staked entirely on competition, risk-taking and the defense of private property (Europe is not that much different, to be sure). As such, American's have little or no time for the gun-control debate quite simply because they have a narrow and skewed understanding of what can be achieved through social contract. They have been viciously competing against each other for so long that they are, essentially, terrified of each other. This is precisely what these more libertarian Americans don't understand: capitalism has run the social fabric of this country into the ground.

People should stop trying to shirk off the blame for America's social ills on its more rarified 'inside the beltway' institutions, and think instead about how each and every facet of American social life has been rent asunder by the regime of capital accumulation, which has not hesitated to uproot and homogenize the length and breadth of the land. Understanding Cho necessarily starts here, with the alienation and misery that has penetrated so deep into the American psyche.

~NiK

Philadelphia Enquirer

Posted on Sun, May. 06, 2007

The April 16 Archive tells a new kind of Virginia Tech story

Storytelling is the heart of literature.

And the heart of history, too.

History came to Virginia Tech on April 16, when a gunman shot 32 people to death before killing himself. In the weeks since, the university's Center for Digital Discourse and Culture (CDDC) has created the April 16 Archive, an online repository of materials related to the shooting that have been contributed by the public.

Materials include firsthand observations, photographs, sound recordings, media reports, personal writing, official statements, blog posts - anything that can be stored as a digital file.

The center has a long-standing commitment to digital literature. Other CDDC projects include the digital art journal New River and a mirror of the Project Gutenberg site. Not surprising, then, the April 16 Archive is much more than a bulletin board of memories and well-wishes. It's a multifaceted account of a single event contributed by people from the Virginia Tech community and the rest of the world. It will only grow larger as time goes on.

"I heard recently that one of the memorial Web sites related to the 1970 Kent State shootings is still receiving stories and materials today," said Brent Jesiek, the manager of the CDDC. "So, we are really on the leading edge here and anticipate that our submission rate will continue to rise in coming weeks as word spreads."

Jesiek explained that the archive is part of the larger trend of digital memory banks, a concept he says has been greatly furthered by the Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. The George Mason center developed the software infrastructure used by the April 16 Archive, providing an "easy-to-use and intuitive interface so that the public can easily submit and browse their own media and materials related to a given event," Jesiek said.

The center has also built memory banks for the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and Hurricane Katrina.

Each digital object in the archive helps cobble together a chronicle no one person could create. Really, it's making possible a new kind of story, one told from a multiplicity of vantage points at once.

That is to say, no one person could have seen and photographed the more than 20 ambulances parked behind the academic buildings on the day of the shootings (as Billy Glynn did), and been a professor at George Mason University whose former student knew someone who was injured in the attack, and was a person held at gunpoint himself (as Mills Kelly was), and have known one of the deceased, 20-year-old Leslie Sherman, well enough to write a loving tribute to her (as her former high school teacher James Percoco did).

The project is a kind of ur-story from which others can spin off their own storytellings. The CDDC intends for the archive to assist "artists, humanists, social scientists, and all other scholars" in researching the event and its documentation. Unlike most sites with multiple contributors, the archive follows the citation protocol of traditional scholarly research. Each contributor provides metadata, including the author's name, the type of object being submitted, the date it was submitted, and so forth.

Some of these metadata are displayed with each entry under the heading "citation information," and some are visible only to administrators or researchers.

It isn't always a matter of reporting facts. On April 16, an anonymous poster submitted an original poem. Six days later, Nicholas Kiersey, an Irish doctoral candidate at Virginia Tech, posted a link to an opinion piece he wrote about the American gun-control debate in the Irish Business Sunday Post.

Since the CDDC encourages submissions from anyone who wishes to participate, the project underlines the power of digital media to allow anyone to act as an artist or a reporter.

"This process gives individual citizen-users more agency to tell their stories in their own words and with their own images," Jesiek said.

To put it another way, as the site's home page declares: "We are all Virginia Tech."

The April 16 Archive is at http://www.april16archive.org

Katie Haegele is a writer who lives in Montgomery County. Her e-mail address is katie@thelalatheory.com