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January 2014

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The angry mob of white southerners that surrounded Robert Williams and his entourage in June of 1961 met a familiar sight with a deeply disturbing variation. The mob, the police and even the federal government in its absence were following the Jim Crow playbook to the letter, but on this particular day things were not going as planned, so much so that an old man in the crowd wept bitterly. “God damn, God damn!”, the old man protested through tears, “What is this country coming to that the niggers have got guns! The niggers are armed and the police can’t even arrest them!” The old man was partially right. Robert Williams and his fellow activists were armed, trained and refused to hand their weapons over to the police without a fight: the police couldn’t stop Robert Williams. But then neither could the Klan or the FBI or the CIA. As…

For most Americans gun violence is a problem for the ‘other’: the poor, ‘minorities’, the mentally ill. When gun violence veers into the mainstream it’s usually in the guise of a political assassination, a tabloid style crime of passion, a celebrity suicide, or a mass shooting. According to the FBI, mass murder involves an individual murdering four or more persons in a relatively short time frame without a ‘cooling off period’. Mass shootings as a kind of mass murder, are subdivided by many criminologists into three separate categories: 1) family violence, 2) deaths linked to others crimes like drug deals or robberies, and 3) the category that we will be exploring, ‘public massacres’. Of the 31,000 firearm related deaths in 2010, 62% were from suicides, 36% were homicides, and 2% were unintentional ((Reducing Gun Violence in America, Daniel Webster, p.3)). Public massacres are a kind of mutant strain of gun…

One of the ways institutions preserve power is through creating rules and regulations that are labyrinthian, archaic and seemingly unchangeable and then repeating them over and over again in a slogan, giving them an air of legitimacy that unfortunately the public buys into. The Bush administration’s claim that ‘If we don’t attack them there, we will have to do it here’ doesn’t quite resonate like it did back in 2001. And a politician claiming that ‘What is good for GM is good for America” would probably be given the side-eye these days. Conventional wisdom born of institutional sloganeering rarely holds up under scrutiny, so when I hear people regurgitate NCAA rhetoric against student athletes receiving payment it troubles me. Our first instinct is to immediately launch into an argument about how much money colleges do or do not make from college sports, which forces us to wade into the murky…

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