the simpsons and the passive voice

THE PROS AND CONS OF ADVERTISING

THE PROS AND CONS OF ADVERTISING

A CASE FOR ADVERTISING

A CASE AGAINST  ADVERTISING

 http://schoolnet.org.za/learningcircles/pubs06-2/P10/findings.html

Gun culture.

l BY ISHAAN THAROOR America is exceptional for its unique, deadly gun culture Americans woke up Monday morning to grisly news: From the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel, a 64-year-old gunman rained down fire on a crowded concert, indiscriminately killing at least 59 people and injuring more than 500 others. He then appears to have killed himself, according to local police. It was the worst mass shooting in the modern history of a country now all too accustomed to such carnage. Details are still emerging about the assailant, identified as Stephen Paddock, and what could have motivated the slaughter; U.S. authorities looked skeptically at the Islamic State's claim of responsibility. Meanwhile, President Trump and a host of other politicians offered their prayers and condolences, lowered flags to half-mast and stood for moments of silence that only underscored their impotence in the face of such violence. Even the local sheriff in Las Vegas mused that he didn't “know how this could have been prevented.” But to those elsewhere in the world who look on aghast each time a shooting rampage rocks the United States, the answer is blindingly obvious: guns. Police say Paddock had a cache of 18 to 20 guns with him, including some rifles that were fully automatic and therefore heavily restricted by federal laws. American gun laws are complicated and vary by state, but in no developed nation is it as easy or as accepted for citizens to acquire weaponry and ammunition capable of exacting mass violence. The state of Nevada, home to Las Vegas, is particularly lax. Not surprisingly, the firearm homicide rate in the United States far outstrips those of its peers — 16 times the rate in Germany and six times that of Canada, north of the border. The Guardian compiled a staggering data visualization of 1,516 mass shootings in the United States over the past 1,735 days. Elsewhere, sweeping measures taken to ban or restrict access to guns, such as in Australia, have led to a marked decline in homicides and the end of mass shootings, but are seen as nonstarters in the United States. Why is this the case? The United States is simply awash in guns. There are almost as many privately owned firearms in this country as there are people living inside it — a figure that may also account for about half of the known number of civilian-owned firearms in the entire world. The sheer volume of such weaponry is testament to a long history of American gun ownership, but also the successful marketing of arms companies. “One answer to the nebulous but compelling question of why Americans love guns is simply that the gun industry invited us to,” wrote Pamela Haag in her recent book, “The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture.” “As an unexceptional, agnostic imperative of doing business . . . its marketing and advertisement burnished the gun as an object of emotional value and affinity.” But that commercial imperative is tied up profoundly with the myths of the American republic. Gun rights advocates invoke the Founding Fathers and the Second Amendment to the Constitution, which declares “a well-regulated Militia” a necessity for a free state and therefore guarantees “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” “The gun is not a mere tool, a bit of technology, a political issue, a point of debate. It is an object of reverence,” wrote the venerable American historian and journalist Garry Wills in the aftermath a series of mass shootings in 2012. “Devotion to it precludes interruption with the sacrifices it entails. Like most gods, it does what it will, and cannot be questioned. Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. It even guarantees law. Law grows from it. Then how can law question it?” As if on cue, the Republican governor in Kentucky issued a tweet on Monday in which he unintentionally seemed to suggest it would be easier to question the foundations of law than contemplate gun control. Of course, it's unlikely the framers of the Constitution would have conceived of the sort of destructive machinery available at gun shows across the United States a couple of centuries later. More importantly, the United States is far from the fragile confederation of ex-colonies that needed to defend itself in the face of meddling European empires. Indeed, it's now the world's unquestioned hegemon, deploying its overwhelming military might around the globe and occupying countries with no pretense of extending Second Amendment protections to locals. At home,gun politics remain highly racialized , with whites far more keen to champion the Second Amendment than minorities. It's also the subject of a sharp partisan divide, with Republicans and Democrats radically diverging on what should be done. The leading pro-gun lobby group, the National Rifle Association, is an influential player in American politics and helps bankroll a slate of pro-gun candidates in elections. It waged a culture war during the Obama administration, casting the liberal president as a tyrannical figure intent on destroying gun rights. But even with Trump in the White House and Republicans in the majority in Congress, the NRA has only accelerated its messaging, issuing chilling videos warning that its enemies in the media seek to “assassinate real news” and undermine the president — and then deploying veiled threats against them. Trump, whose campaign received $30 million from the NRA, knows where his bread is buttered. In his first weeks in power, he moved to reverse Obama-era regulations that attempted to make it harder for people with records of mental illness to acquire guns. In April, he became the first sitting president to address the NRA itself, engaging in his periodic bashing of the media and Hollywood liberals and promising they now have “a true friend and champion” in the Oval Office. “Only one candidate in the general election came to speak to you, and that candidate is now the president of the United States, standing before you,” Trump said. “You came through for me, and I am going to come through for you.” The people affected by the latest atrocity, meanwhile, might wonder how he and Congress plan to come through for them.

• At the White House media briefing, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders sought to nip questions regarding gun control in the bud, insisting "there will certainly be a time for that policy discussion to take place, but that’s not the place that we’re in at this moment.” But in the same session, she raised a right-wing strawman, pointing to Chicago homicide statistics as supposed proof that gun control measures don’t necessarily save lives. “Apparently it also is hard for Trump’s team to resist talking about policy, even when it insists that ‘today is a day for consoling the survivors and mourning those we lost,’” wrote my colleague Callum Borchers. President Trump, of course, is at this point notorious for his relative insensitivity in the wake of terror attacks. He sought to scold London’s Muslim mayor in June as terror hit the British capital and, on the campaign trail, pointed to a mass shooting in Orlando carried out by a U.S. national of Afghan origin as justification for his ban on Muslims entering the United States. • Regarding racial politics and gun rights in the U.S., Adam Winkler, a UCLA Law School professor, wrote a fascinating piece on the topic for The Post last year. Here’s an excerpt: “The founding generation that adopted the Second Amendment also enacted racially discriminatory gun laws. Fearing slave revolts, early American lawmakers prohibited slaves — and often free blacks, too — from possessing weapons of any kind. Even in states where blacks were allowed to have guns, such as Virginia, they had to first obtain the permission of local officials. And while the ‘well regulated Militia’ mentioned in the Constitution largely fell out of military use, such groups continued to be employed to capture runaway slaves. "After the Civil War, the question of guns and race changed: Many blacks from the South had obtained firearms when they fled to join colored units of the Union Army. When the war ended, the Army allowed them to keep their guns as compensation for unpaid wages. As many of those black soldiers returned to their home towns, those guns were seen by white racists as a threat to the enforcement of white supremacy. Armed blacks could fight back. "So Southern states passed the Black Codes, which among other things barred the freedmen from possessing firearms. Racists formed groups like the Ku Klux Klan, riding at night to terrorize blacks and take away their guns. Congress, still controlled by the North, reacted by proposing the 14th Amendment to make the Bill of Rights, which previously limited only the federal government, a limit on the states, too. It was the greatest expansion of constitutional rights in American history — and, as historians have shown, it was prompted in part by the desire to protect the right of freedmen to have guns for self-defense." • Over the weekend, Jagmeet Singh, a charismatic, 38-year-old Sikh Canadian, won the leadership race for the progressive New Democratic Party, the third-largest in Canada. He cuts a fascinating figure on the electoral scene, and is gearing up to challenge Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He is the first “visible minority,”as the Globe and Mail put it, to lead a major Canadian federal party. Last month, a video of Singh calmly talking down a racist protester who thought he was Muslim went viral and won him online acclaim. But he has a hard job ahead of him, the Canadian daily reports: "His success is rooted in the large following he has amassed in the South Asian community. But Mr. Singh's win is also being celebrated by many in the party's old guard who see the Ontario politician as a force for renewal: someone who can capture the imagination of voters and invigorate the New Democratic rank-and-file after the demoralizing losses of the past election. "The sharply dressed, cosmopolitan, multilingual lawyer was drawn to the New Democrats through his social activism. At the age of 38, he is inheriting a party that is starved for money and has fallen significantly behind the Liberals and Conservatives in terms of donations with just two years to go before the next federal election." • The Guardian’s soccer writer in Spain, Sid Lowe, wrote a terrific dispatch on the role that soccer giant FC Barcelona plays in the larger drama of Catalan nationalism. (For more on what has followed the region’s turbulent independence referendum, scroll down.) Here’s an excerpt from Lowe’s essay: “They say sport and politics shouldn’t mix, by which they tend to mean other people’s politics. It’s a line Spain’s secretary of state for sport has used… but sport and politics do mix, especially with Barcelona, who the Marxist writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán described as the ‘symbolic unarmed army of Catalonia.’ "That identification with Catalonia, while nuanced, shifting, unevenly embraced, sometimes vague and often problematic, is part of what gives Barça an explicitly socio-political dimension. It comes together, of course, in the slogan: mes que un club, more than a club. And that meant this was always going to be more than a match even if in the end it was less than one. "In September 1976, Las Palmas came to the Camp Nou for the first Barcelona game broadcast in Catalan on Radio Barcelona. In October 1977, they were again the visitors when Barcelona invited Josep Taradellas, former head of the Catalan government, in exile since 1939, to preside over the game. ‘I’ll come on one condition,’ he said: ‘You win.’ Before the match, he told supporters they shared the ‘same faith’ he had 40 years earlier, insisting they had inherited a Barcelona ‘rooted in Catalanism’. Later in 1978, Las Palmas were again their opponents when they won the Cup for the first time since the transition to democracy, Johan Cruyff collecting the trophy from Juan Carlos. And then on Sunday, the day of the referendum, Las Palmas arrived once more. This time they said they didn’t want to be silent witnesses: they came with special shirts, Spain flags stitched to their chests."