Shame is a Psy-Op: the illogical (and highly emotional) demand for Gun Control
A(nother) tragic school shooting occurred in Texas and the reactions can be filed, as per usual, in one of two camps, the “thoughts and prayers but but but the Second Amendment” camp and the “More Gun Control, now” echo chamber.
I’ll expand in a moment about my nuanced take on life, death and government control of guns (I’m against it) but first, I want to address the reaction of the brilliant perseverant (dare I say patriot?) journalist by the name of Alex Berenson. He has proved himself to be pro-Bill of Rights over and over again throughout the pandemic in regard to his objection to abuse of power by authority when it came to Covid-derived civil liberty violations. Yesterday, in (what I suspect was) his profound state of empathy-based grief for fellow parents, he published a post on his own substack entitled, “Ashamed to be an American.” He mentions that once again, as he drops his children off at school, he is dismayed that we have not done enough to protect all children from mass shooters, saying, “the violence has reached a point that we must do something [emphasis mine] if only to show our kids we care enough about them to try, to make reasonable compromises.”
We have already hardened our schools as much as is reasonable. How many shooter drills do my kids have to go through a year? We cannot turn schools into armed camps, and the simple fact is that a madman with an AR-15 can kill a classroom full of kids in a matter of seconds, before anyone can react. If Republican politicians believe that school shootings are the price we must pay for the Second Amendment, they should just say so, rather than enraging the rest of us with fake solutions.
—
I don’t know what else to say. Much less what to do.
But the status quo can’t hold.
We are failing each other, and most of all we are failing our children.
We should all be ashamed today.
Under no circumstances should anyone — and I mean anyone but the shooter-killer himself — be feeling shame. Least of all Alex Berenson. So let’s analyze **why** he feels shame and first delineate the difference between shame and guilt.
I posit that there is an easy to define difference between guilt and shame. Guilt is a feeling of regret, a wish we could go back and un-take an action that caused another person pain. Shame precludes redemption. There’s no way out of shame. It compels us to seek punishment without any opportunity to apologize and/or make amends.
We must oppose murder (this goes without saying). Murder is immoral: it’s terrible when it happens to kids and to anyone. AND he, Alex Berenson, did not kill anyone. If he had, not being a psychopath, he would feel regret and remorse (and likely feel compelled to confess as well). Shame is a whole other ball of wax. No matter what we do, we are still in a prison of self-punishment and in some cases, we even feel compelled to seek external punishment.
If you are feeling shame and it’s not directly related something you personally did wrong, then you are experiencing being the victim of a psychological operation. So what is the point of using shame as a psy-op? Mind control. Mind control leads to action control (triggering an angry demand, possibly for restrictive freedom-reducing legislation). But the mind is only secondary. FIRST, the emotion must be triggered. Heard of winning hearts and minds? The heart always has to be won first. The emotion, shame in this case, infiltrates the heart and subsequently causes the thought in the mind, “ok, we do need to do something,” followed by ACTION, such as calling or writing your elected representative to demand that they pass xyz law, or gathering on the national mall or in front of your state capitol building. Mind control is really emotion control first, thought control second, and action control third.
I posit that: We feel guilt when we regret something we did that caused another person pain. We feel shame when we get caught. (Please note: you are reading a philosophical argument, not scientific truth — this means that I have to prove my claims which is what I am attempting to do here.) I can’t overstate the importance and prevalence of shame as a pain-preventing facet of a healthy adult human being’s personality. As children, our shame is ingrained in us by parents and other authority figures by using command statements, especially those pertaining to potty training or sexual activity — i.e. commands that teach us to shit and piss in a bowl/urinal and only in a bowl/urinal, and that private pissing, shitting, touching and orgasming is ok, but public pissing, shitting, touching and orgasming is absolutely not (some of us also had consent figured into the mix, and some of us definitely did not). Additionally, the use of praise after we’ve refrained from the shame-incurring action OR taken the shame-avoiding action, such as pissing or shitting in a bowl on command or on demand, i.e. “good boy! you used the potty! good job!” doubly reinforces the original “avoid shame” command. If you are a parent, you can no doubt think of a lot more of these subtle and overt command and praise statements. (A few my mom ingrained in me that are presently coming to mind: “don’t embarrass me,” “remember when you’re in a foreign country, you represent all Americans so be polite and courteous,” “take responsibility for the consequences of your actions,” and here’s a praise phrase (behavior reinforcement phrase) she used a lot, “how thoughtful and considerate of you, that’s my daughter [anchoring my sense of self to an extension of her self and to pleasing her],” and on and on. I remember teachers using phrases such as, “look both ways before crossing the street,” “think before you speak,” “respect others,” “don’t run in the halls.” What do you remember?)
In order to feel ashamed for something you didn’t do, as Berenson does in this case, you have to be a victim of a psy-op and/but it will only trigger you if you already feel that on some level you could have personally prevented it, i.e. that *you* are responsible if only in a peripheral way. It’s an interesting type of humble arrogance — people who have been “leadership” trained often go into this dark place. “You are so smart and charming and persuasive, you have a GIFT. You can make a DIFFERENCE. In the WORLD.” I felt exactly this psuedo-responsibility in the 90’s and 2000’s about the polar ice caps melting and the global warming spreading and the landfills filling. I would pull glass bottles and aluminum cans out of the TRASH at work and take them home to recycle — if I didn’t do it, who would??? It was up to ME to save the earth!
LOL.
Now, apropos of nothing, did you know that both the FBI and the CIA recruit Mormons and Catholics specifically because they feel (they are likely to have been trained by their parents and other authority figures to believe they have) a profound sense of responsibility for the wellbeing of others? Alex Berenson (who is Jewish and not Catholic or Mormon and probably not a federal agent of any kind) seems to exude this type of personality core value. I wish him the absolute best and in my attempt to answer my own prayer for his happiness, I would want him to see that there was no way he personally could have prevented this sick person in Texas from taking this sick action, so may Alex be freed of all feelings of shame.
I agree, yes, the government could have prevented the Robb Elementary School shooting, but with something far more logical than gun control: basic security measures. I used to live in a secure building in Washington, DC, where at any given time several members of congress may be renting an apartment. There’s only one entrance, with a guard/concierge always on duty, and only 2 ways to exit. Apartment doors can only be opened with key fobs which can be remotely disabled with the click of a mouse (we could do this for classrooms). Apartment doors automatically lock as soon as you leave. If the door closes, you’re locked out (unless you have the key fob that opens it — we could do this for classrooms). There’s a courtyard with brick walls three stories high (children could play there). Windows only open outward, not up or in — there is no way to scale the walls and enter any unit through a window. Add a metal detector and armed cops as guards and an additional 2 layers of entry (in other words, 3 foyers instead of 2 — and a metal detector at each level) and no one’s getting in with a gun. Want to add an x-ray machine like at the airport? My God, it’s our nation’s children. Of course we should put one in every school.
In Alex’s usual spirit of doing all the research and analyzing it first before putting quill to paper, he provides this statistic:
The United States is sick.
I don’t know how to unpack my feelings today. I don’t know how to square my belief that the Second Amendment matters, it really does, the government cannot have a monopoly on the means of violence, with the sick feeling I had dropping my kids off this morning. Hug my six-year-old extra tight in case some devil with a hankering to destroy children exercises his constitutional right to walk out of the local gun store locked and loaded.
What is happening to our country?
Does it seem like we have more and more mass school shootings? That’s because we do. Between 1972 and 2012, we had only two school shootings in which more than 10 children and adults died, including Columbine. In the decade since, we have had four, including three in the last four years.
Ok, let’s do the math first.
4 shooters of more than 10 children in the past decade
+
2 between 1972 and 2012
=
6 deranged psychopaths (who were all known to be on drugs)
This caused (ostensibly) Berenson to conclude that “the United States is sick.” Is it though? 6 people out of 330 million people in the whole country.
Or we can use the AP’s figures:
14 shooters since 1999.
14 people out of 330 million people.
You guys, we HAVE to ask, if we are logical math-using human beings, and I posit that after we mourn and process our emotional reaction to the horror of children being slaughtered, we can revert to that state of being, and then we WILL ask: why would 14 people’s criminal acts determine the property rights or reduce the constitutional rights of 330 million other people?
And fair enough, I hear you saying what about ALL mass shootings in the United States?
Ok, 163 mass shootings in the US between 1967 and 2019.
Now, there haven’t been even close to 37 mass shootings since then. But let’s round up and ask ourselves why we would model our society and its laws around the criminal acts of 200 psychopaths?
Should we cut off all peni to prevent rape based on the actions of thousands of men each YEAR? To say nothing of how many particular “people with penises” have in total committed rape since 1967? (A number far greater than 200 and remember, we rounded way up.) Again, we’re not talking number of victims, we’re talking number of perpetrators. (Please don’t) take a walk on the dark side of the internet and you’ll learn that after a man gives in to an urge to rape, he’s very likely to do it again, and if he gets caught, he often learns by (literal) trial and error or from fellow rapists on dark web message boards that one of the ways to avoid a victim who presses charges is to kill her after raping her.
And why all of a sudden the uptick in school shootings starting in 1999?
No one wants to go here, but people under age 25 on psychotropic drugs IS the variable. I mean, Jesus. It’s an incontrovertible fact: we did not have school shootings — murders committed by kids against kids — until these prescription drugs were widely prescribed. In an episode of “Criminal Minds,” the profilers describe “taking prescribed antidepressants” as part of the standard profile of school shooters.
It drives me nuts when psychos like Alex Jones call school shootings a hoax. A hoax is one way to induce fear (for example, the “War of the Worlds” radio broadcast in 1938 where actor Orson Welles announced to the audience that Martians were invading New Jersey, which induced genuine panic in listeners who believed that Earth was truly under attack by aliens) but not a demand for legislation. Real parents have to watch real small caskets get lowered into the ground after a school shooting to start a nationwide campaign to demand gun control.
Here’s where I have to point out the false premise that Berenson’s claim that “republicans should just admit that an occasional school shooting is the price we pay for the second amendment.” If that were true, then we would have been having school killings using “arms” since the founding of our country. We didn’t have any violent acts toward groups of children at schools at all until 1979. And never were young children targeted, ever, until the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in 2012. It was always high school aged kids who were targeted during these school shootings prior to that, going back to Columbine in 1999. But the overwhelming demand for gun control legislation was precipitated by the tragedy at Sandy Hook.
What changed? The general public’s visceral reaction to the horror of seeing little children be the victims of this type of senseless devastating crime at Sandy Hook.
Now, as James Madison (founding father and co-author of the Bill of Rights) said, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” He knew well that the Second Amendment wasn’t designed to protect our right to hunt and fish — he helped write it. It was designed to allow the American people to defend themselves against tyranny, whether it took the form of a British monarch or a sadistic dictator trying to induce compliance to international law that has nothing to do with domestic American law passed by American legislators elected by American people.
Stay strong and stay logical, Alex Berenson, and everyone else.
Every day, we must ask ourselves, “are my emotions being manipulated in order to induce in me a desire for my constitutional rights to be reduced or eliminated?”
The single acts of 14 people in the past 2 decades had Alex Berenson, an otherwise clear-headed cynic, hysterically crying, “Do something!” He writes, “…the violence has reached a point that we must do something [emphasis mine], if only to show our kids we care enough about them to try, to make reasonable [emphasis mine] compromises.”
Reasonable? That’s the last thing he’s being. He’s not thinking logically at all.
No, a madman with an AR-15 can’t kill a classroom full of kids in a matter of seconds, before anyone can react, if he has to go through 3 metal detectors, an x-ray machine, and show a badge, and scan a key fob to get into the classroom. We haven’t already hardened our schools as much as is reasonable. And no one’s kids should have to go through ANY shooter drills per year. When was the last time you, adult reader, went through a “hijacked plane drill”? Never. And you never will have to because everyone who gets on the plane has to be x-rayed and felt up by TSA and walk through a metal detector and two levels of security before they get on board.
We’re not failing our kids. School shootings are being allowed to happen.
Ask yourself why.
To subscribe to my youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/snowangel448
To follow me on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Sarah__Reynolds
To support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/tribalroles
Berenson’s original post: https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/ashamed-to-be-an-american/
Thank you for reading.