Typically the questions which trigger theories of rhet-oric focus upon the orator's method or upon the discourse itself,rather than upon the situation which invites the orator's applica-tion of his method and the creation of discourse.

The great writers of the Italian Renaissance knew that nature was a force to be reckoned with. But they also saw political leaders fail to act when disaster struck.

Today, we live in a very different world, and Covid-19 bears little resemblance to the plague. But, given that we face very similar socio-economic challenges, Machiavelli’s ideas nevertheless remain as pertinent as ever. Though they may seem cynical, even callous, they are still a useful lens through which to view our own reactions – and a powerful inspiration to seek out new solutions while there is still time. 

Not unsurprisingly, Machiavelli often described such a breakdown of political order using the metaphor of disease. Just as an illness could weaken, or even kill, a human being, he argued, violent class struggles ate away at the body politic. Demagogues were a “plague” on the state; servitude was a “sickness”; and disorder was a “disease”. This was more than just a literary device. Though he rarely addressed the subject  directly, Machiavelli also seems to have been aware that it was in times of plague that liberty was most in danger.

For Machiavelli – as for many of us – part of what made the disease so terrifying was not knowing.

just as when nature contrives to expel any build-up of “superfluous” material in the human body, when there are too many people, “the world is purged” by pestilence – or some other ­devastating means.

Disappointment in the series might come from the fact that Jon Snow – who seemed an earthly, modest and conscience-led leader – ended up being arrested and sentenced back to relative obscurity and powerlessness with the Night’s Watch. With this we are denied a potentially complete leader – and are left speculating what type of ruler the enigmatic Bran the Broken might be.

The series is rich with some cunning leaders, who we would not deem skilled in conscience leadership. The powerful Lannister dynasty produced a succession of rulers who were effective at governing through repressive means.

But then there is cunning leadership

In my recent work assessing contemporary leaders, I suggest that we need to distinguish between three types of leadership. There is the leader who is successfully led by their conscience –

He advised the Florentines to “apply such remedies as they ancients used.” And when encountering problems, the ancients had not? “Strike out new ones.”

Like authoritarianism, The Prince is quick, easy, and full of what seems to be common sense. The Discourses, on the other hand, are like republicanism—long, forbidding, and often difficult to get through.

Enmities between the people and the Senate should, therefore, be looked upon as an inconvenience which it is necessary to put up with in order to arrive at the greatness of Rome.

realize that in every republic there are two different dispositions, that of the people and that of the great men, and that all legislation favoring liberty is brought about by their dissension

In this sense, any government that takes vivere sicuro as its goal generates a passive and impotent populace as an inescapable result. By definition, such a society can never be free in Machiavelli's sense of vivere libero, and hence is only minimally, rather than completely, political or civil.

The law-abiding character of the French regime ensures security, but that security, while desirable, ought never to be confused with liberty. This is the limit of monarchic rule: even the best kingdom can do no better than to guarantee to its people tranquil and orderly government.

Even the most excellent monarchy, in Machiavelli's view, lacks certain salient qualities that are endemic to properly constituted republican government and that make the latter constitution more desirable than the former.

French government,

A minimal constitutional order is one in which subjects live securely (vivere sicuro), ruled by a strong government which holds in check the aspirations of both nobility and people, but is in turn balanced by other legal and institutional mechanisms. In a fully constitutional regime, however, the goal of the political order is the freedom of the community (vivere libero), created by the active participation of, and contention between, the nobility and the people. As Quentin Skinner (2002, 189–212) has argued, liberty forms a value that anchors Machiavelli's political theory and guides his evaluations of the worthiness of different types of regimes. Only in a republic, for which Machiavelli expresses a distinct preference, may this goal be attained.

Such observations must make us wonder whether Machiavelli's advice that princes acquire dispositions which vary according to circumstance was so “practical” (even in his own mind) as he had asserted.

Yet Machiavelli himself apparently harbored severe doubts about whether human beings were psychologically capable of generating such flexible dispositions within themselves.

The idea of a stable constitutional regime that reflects the tenor of modern political thought (and practice) is nowhere to be seen in Machiavelli's conception of princely government.

initiative, skill, talent, and/or strength (all words that are English equivalents for virtù, dependent upon where it occurs in the text).

These aspects of the deployment of lo stato in The Prince mitigate against the “modernity” of his idea. Machiavelli is at best a transitional figure in the process by which the language of the state emerged in early modern Europe, as Mansfield concludes.

He substantiates this assertion by reference to the observable realities of political affairs and public life as well as by arguments revealing the self-interested nature of all human conduct.

Hence, the successful ruler needs special training.

For Machiavelli, people are compelled to obey purely in deference to the superior power of the state.

And of course, power alone cannot obligate one, inasmuch as obligation assumes that one cannot meaningfully do otherwise.

Love is a bond of obligation which these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes.

In other words, the legitimacy of law rests entirely upon the threat of coercive force; authority is impossible for Machiavelli as a right apart from the power to enforce it.

Only by means of the proper application of power, Machiavelli believes, can individuals be brought to obey and will the ruler be able to maintain the state in safety and security.

In this sense, Machiavelli presents a trenchant criticism of the concept of authority by arguing that the notion of legitimate rights of rulership adds nothing to the actual possession of power.

Machiavelli criticizes at length precisely this moralistic view of authority in his best-known treatise, The Prince.

In a sense, it was thought that rulers did well when they did good; they earned the right to be obeyed and respected inasmuch as they showed themselves to be virtuous and morally upright

Thus most people with bipolar disorder will not be able to do “shift work”, where the work day is rotating around the clock.

Dichotomies are useful for education, communication, simplification. Unfortunately, simplicity is useful, but untrue; whereas complexity is true, but useless

But I think there is a different quality to the depressions that people with bipolar disorder experience, because before they start feeling sad and having difficulty experiencing pleasure from their usual activities, they very often have problems with energy. 

I start feeling burned out. While I still have a lot of energy, I don’t have that “I love the world” feeling. If I’ve been playing my Autoharp at my mother’s assisted living facility, and jumping up and down to help all the participants turn the pages and stay with me, I suddenly feel that the staff should be more helpful in doing this. … things don’t just slide off my back. While I try not to “snap” back at people, I am not always successful. I am certainly less willing to ignore things that days or weeks earlier wouldn’t have bothered me at all. I become far less happy, joyful, and kind. I dislike being criticized in any which way.

mood is highly reactive to the actions and reactions of others;

1Cameroon is referred to as “Africa in miniature”2owing to its geographical, linguistic and cultural heterogeneity. Host to one of the highest literacy rates on the continent, Cameroon is viewed as all of Africa in a single country because it exhibits all the major eco-logical features of the continent: coast, desert, mountains, rainforest, resources, and savanna. This country of enormous potential has had its economic and political prosperity hampered by corruption

While every death is tragic, one cannot help but wish that impartial numbers and realities, instead of partial representations and discourses, guided our decisions, policies, and judgments.

Similarly, providing convincing evidence of future terrorist plans and the magni-tude of the threat was challenging. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI; 2005) statis-tics showed that 94% of deadly attacks in the United States between 1980 and 2005 were committed by non-Muslim Americans. Including the 9/11 attacks, Muslim-linked violence made up 6% of deadly attacks in the United States (FBI, 2005). In Europe, this number has remained under 2% since 9/11 (Ahmed, 2015). Under these circum-stances, the media properly performed the crucial task of magnifying the threat. It did so, as this study demonstrated, by covering the events deemed terrorism more exten-sively and thematically, linking them to other terrorist acts and organizations. Beside the significant differences in their framing, the fact that the newspapers published twice as many stories about the Ft. Hood shooting as that of the Navy Yard within the first 30 days is telling.

When the incident is framed as an act of terror, the perpetrator is othered mainly based on his religious and ethnic (immigrant/foreign) background. When it is framed as a crime, othering occurs through patholo-gizing the perpetrator.

The Navy Yard shooting was the second deadliest attack after Ft. Hood. It targeted American soldiers at an American base on American soil. It brought similar chaos, death, and destruction, violating the same sacred norms, spaces, and principles. Yet, not even in the early days of coverage did anyone ask if it could be terror-related. No one questioned if it could be a symbolic or politically motivated act. No one perceived it as an attack on the Army or the nation, and no one felt collectively threatened.

Perhaps by granting an official approval for the construction of the shooting as an act of war, the ceremony permanently fixed the framing of the Ft. Hood shooting.

He argued that this discourse (a) defined the attacks as exceptional tragedies and assigned America a victim status; (b) constructed them as acts of war rather than as crimes or mass mur-ders; (c) described them in ways that allow them to fit into other preexisting popular meta-narratives, such as the Pearl Harbor attack; and (d) constructed them as national attacks as opposed to local (New York) violence.

When an act is framed as a crime of one mentally ill individ-ual, it demands apprehending or treating that individual. Framing it as a part of larger systemic hatred, however, demanded a collective response from all those who did not share that hatred.

Although they constituted a small portion of the coverage, these arguments are worth noting, because they showed that a resistance to framing Ft. Hood as terror-ism existed at least during the early days of the coverage. However, the attempts to frame Ft. Hood differently received harsh criticism and faded to the background quickly. Referring to such attempts on November 10, 2009, “The conversation in the first few days after the massacre was well-intentioned,” wrote David Brooks, but it was “a willful flight from reality,” for it “played down the possibility of Islamic extremism” (p. A35). Five days after the shooting, the terror frame was firmly in place.

An accepting and generous image of the United States as the land of opportunity clashed starkly in the story with an image of an unassimilatable immigrant who betrayed the country that granted him and his family citizenship, a good life, and ample opportunities.

The depiction of the perpetrator constituted the first building block of the framing in both incidents. Previous studies on mass shootings have shown that if perpetrators are immigrants, or from what is considered to be foreign racial or ethnic origins (such as Asians, Arabs, or Jamaicans), the media tend to disregard their citizenship status, resort to negative racial stereotypes, conflate racial/ethnic/religious identity with foreignness, and represent them as permanent foreigners (e.g., Chuang, 2012; Chuang & Roemer, 2013, 2014; Holody et al., 2013; Powell, 2011; Shahin, 2015; Szpunar, 2013). The por-trayal of Major Nidal Malik Hasan in the newspapers after the Ft. Hood shooting as a “perpetual other” based on his ethnicity (Arab), religion (Muslim), and immigrant fam-ily background supported these findings. The depiction of Aaron Alexis after the Navy Yard shooting, however, showed that the newspapers used mental illness to other him.

The relationship between the first six rhetorical strategies and their meta-narra-tives seems symbiotic. The six rhetorical conventions become meaningful only when the incidents are understood within the narrative logic each meta-narrative provides. In other words, the canvases deliver the necessary underlying reasoning for the stories to make sense. Yet, at the same time, the canvases themselves are constituted through these discursive strategies; they come into existence only through depicting, describing, explaining, and constructing numerous events in the same or similar ways by using the same strategies. Hence, the strategies the media professionals choose—knowingly or unknowingly—to tell their stories contribute significantly to the creation and perpetuation of such meta-narratives.

And because this is a knowledge practice invested in forming social articulations rather than reproducing the very differentiations that such violence enacts, a collaborative project of resisting such exceptional-ism might allow us to experience unexpected moments of flourishing.

Instead, we might continue to construct forms of analysis and response that resist their exceptional- ism. Rather than see Oak Creek as exceptional to the shootings either in Newtown or on the streets of Chicago on any given day, we might more effectively revalue its victims while advancing the purview of critical ethnic studies if we think about what articulates these forms of violence. Rather than thinking through the lenses of analogy or comparison, we might work toward theorizing what common conditions give rise to them and what knowledge systems, ways of thinking, and epistemological orientations obscure these articulations from view. Rather than thinking about the mass murder of civilians as abstracted from the myriad ways in which racial cap-italism differentially structures everyday life, we might think about Oak Creek and Newtown in their articulation not only to the everyday of racial subjection under U.S. empire but also in the everyday of mass incarceration and the regime of spatial privatization and enclosure that regularly strips

The fact of their exceptionalism is crucial to acknowledge because it demonstrates the slipperiness of an antiracist poli-tics grounded in a liberal positivist conception of racial violence. Taking Oak Creek or antiblack police violence as demonstrative of the persistence of racial violence in the United States puts us at risk of facilitating the era-sure of the antiblack and settler- colonial foundations of the U.S. neoliberal state that have been the condition of possibility for the shootings at New-town no less than they were at Oak Creek. Not only does such an approach facilitate a reading of what constitutes racial violence as self- evident and in no need of theorization outside of liberalism’s legal and political categories. It also reifies the operations of a particular kind of violence as something unconnected to quotidian forms of social constitution and bodily degrada-tion under neoliberal racial capitalism. Such moves unwittingly risk ratify-ing a broader tendency to neglect the capacity of racial capitalism to shape the lives of everyone at the most fundamental levels of existence:

transformation in which the growth in the state’s capacity for total violence to foster zones of flourishing on a global scale is paradoxically shadowed by, even productive of, its inability to control the terms by which legitimate violence is defined and enacted.

Nonmaterialist accounts that obscure the relational precariousness of racial-ized life are belied by the fact that we live in an era in which the U.S. state itself has become increasingly committed to using violence on its own as well as on foreign populations, while the state’s capacity for protecting even the most narrow vision of the social from violence, suffering, and depriva-tion has not just receded under the weight of global ecological crises but has come under vicious and willful attack. It thus comes as little surprise that all types of racially differentiated bodies and populations may be more vulner-able to violence than they were forty years ago. Under such conditions, even as the violence inflicted on and the value exacted from black and brown bodies continues to structure the material, social, and spatial ordering of the U.S. state, one of the shifts that the recent proliferation of mass shoot-ings as a form of violence demonstrates is that even signifying as white does not guarantee one’s civilian status under contemporary racial capitalism.

As a result, I have been arguing that an emphasis on making the facts of racial violence empirically visible without attention to the affective dimensions of anti-blackness and U.S. empire that structure and frame such knowledge might be seen as the discursive constraint of a politics that, in the words of Barbara Jeanne Fields, seeks “the reallocation of unemployment, poverty and injus-tice rather than their abolition.”68

Complicating matters is that just as identity- based social movements have succeeded in diminishing the prevalence of certain forms of state- sanctioned violence, the proliferation of state and nonstate violence affecting black, indigenous, brown, and trans people today can be understood as a reaction to such success— indeed, an effect and index of the massive resistance to liberal nationalist forms of inclusion.

he capacity to achieve the legal recognition of the value of black life depends on struggles that are irreduc-ible to law or policy. In other words, it is one part of a broader communiz-ing struggle over the development and defense of the means, spaces, and material capacities to be able to do more than just live in the first place.6

The insistence on the dialectics of this transition is crucial if we are to elaborate forms and methods of analysis that appreciate the spe-cific ways the resistance struggles of the oppressed have persistently shaped the constitution of power, such that we might appreciate both the granular-ity of social change and the specific conditions of the present moment. If a materialist antiracism is to move effectively beyond legalistic and moralizing claims about racist individuals and toward a strategic approach that seeks to engage power rather than disdain it as criminal or malevolent, then histori-cal time cannot be understood as a zero- sum game illustrating either tran-scendent moral progress or the persistent replication of domination in novel frameworks, but instead as a brittle accumulation of victories and defeats that are always provisional and uncertain.

that the logical presumption of guilt embedded in the law’s discursive architecture turns the victims into threats and the killers into victims?

As the discursive criminalization of Garner, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Walter Scott reminds us, it is not that the capacity of the state to protect civilian life has yet to be fully extended to the most vulnerable among us. Rather, the formation of the U.S. state has historically constituted such vulnerability as an outcome of “the practical concern: how to both defend and legitimate a social order built on ongoing murder and dispossession, that is, the theft of black labor and indigenous l a n d s .”65

massive supply of firearms (and thus their almost unrestricted availability); a veritable epidemic of mental illness driven as much by the pharmaceutical industry as by the anomic conditions of life under neoliberalism; and an antiblack anti- statism that has facilitated a frontal attack on the existence— indeed the very idea— of public space and public institutions. The attack on public space has taken a variety of material and epistemological forms, but what the recent spate of school shootings shares with urban gentrification, “stop and frisk,” “broken windows,” and “zero tolerance” policing, and the transformation of inner city schools from institutions of normalization to mass- criminalization, is the arrogation of the right of incursion on the lives and livelihoods of the people who depend on and dwell in such spaces. The arrogation of this right is productive of the quotidian fear and terror expe-rienced in racialized space, which may never be admissible as evidence or testimony to the routine practices of violence attendant on policy.61

From a materialist perspective, rather, this priva-tized sovereign violence is enabled by an uncanny convergence between a

Rather than viewing this violence as a disturbing trend having to do with America’s romance with guns or the lack of atten-tion to mental health, we might instead read mass shootings as examples of a kind of redistribution of power in which private citizens are increasingly invested with the capacity for sovereign violence— the power to decide who should live and who should die, for demarcating zones of protection and vulnerability, thus assuming the task of martially defending a biopolitical flourishing that the state, in its racial corruption, is actively felt as incapable of securing.

Antiblack anti- statism should be conceptualized as a flexible and materi-ally effective discursive practice of neoliberal state formation: the frontline instrument that would literally clear space for the construction of a new state- capital formation, the fulcrum for what David Harvey refers to as accu-mulation by dispossession. This perspective allows us to revise the domi-nant account of the relation between prison growth and neoliberalism. It is not that the militarization of the police and the proliferation of prisons emerged historically in order to contain the fallout of deindustrialization, transnational free- trade agreements, and the massive dispossession and up- ward distribution of social wealth constitutive of the structural adjustment of the U.S. state. It is rather that the historical and material conditions of possibility for neoliberalism reside in the mass criminalization and confine-ment of the populations most deeply affected and displaced by the privati-zation of public spaces and institutions.56

The emergence of this formation as a racially articulated conjuncture can be productively situated if we locate contemporary nonstate mass shootings within a genealogy that includes a watershed episode of state killing whose rationalization helped usher in and manufacture the legitimacy of the anti- state state. On September 13, 1971, New York state troopers stormed the Attica Correctional Facility and opened fire, killing twenty- nine prisoners and ten prison guards. Simultaneously mass shooting and counterinsurgency op, this move came in response to an impasse following the takeover of the prison four days earlier by a multiracial coalition of prisoners demanding the state’s acknowledgement of their political subjectivity. In the words of the state commission charged with investigating Attica, “with the exception of Indian massacres in the late 19th century, the State Police assault which ended the four- day prison uprising was the bloodiest one- day encounter between Americans since the Civil War.”52 As I have suggested elsewhere, with this deployment of “exception,” the commission unwittingly located Attica within the long history of efforts to constitute U.S. state and civil society through the managed exclusion of those that have been understood as exceptions to the norms of liberal governance: the Indian and the slave.53

This anti- state state generalized criminalization as the preeminent form of racialized class power undergirding a new era of capital accumulation, producing coercive new forms of surveillance, con-tainment, and population management as necessary to the defense of an increasingly privatized and atomistic vision of civil society.

Three years later Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law what was at the time the most significant fed- eral crime legislation in U.S. history, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (1968), an officially antiracist biopolitical measure that provided millions of dollars for the rationalization and militarization of federal and municipal police forces across the United States.

I point to four fundamental transformations that organize contemporary spatial- social life in the United States— the historical emergence of which can be dated across the years 1968 and 1979. First, the expansion of the capacity and technol- ogy of state violence by the U.S. military, the police, and the criminal justice apparatus. Second, the successes of the attack on the Keynesian state’s capac-ity to provide for the social welfare, economic security, and ideal flourishing of its population, achieved through the uneven privatization of public space and institutions that were previously understood as a measure of commit-ment to a “common good”— even if the common good has itself always been an exclusive category. Third, the spatial reorganization articulated on these shifts that has facilitated the circulation of violence and degradation between gentrifying urban ghettoes and a growing network of prisons and jails both everywhere and entirely hidden from view. Fourth, the seemingly increasing frequency of mass shootings of civilians committed by civilians and other nonstate actors.44 There has been an invaluable field of scholarship that has worked out the relation between the first three elements.45 Building on this work, I suggest the importance of thinking these elements together as hav-ing a structural relationship, one in which race operates not simply as a by-product or justificatory procedure but as its central articulating mechanism.

nonstate violence that both ramifies and throws into crisis the accumula-tion regime and affective structure of the U.S. neoliberal state

Contemporary anti- statism as a discursive practice of dispossession evokes the endless search for, and thus the perception and mobility of, racial threats to the nation. Such threats might adhere not only to a variety of racially marked bodies but also the public spaces inhabited by them, including persons whose previously pro-tected civilian status goes unrecognized by a form of private sovereignty enacting the history and logic of antiblack and settler- colonial violence.

then we need to understand the specific articulation of anti- statism, antiblackness, and empire as a structure of feeling, an “actively lived and felt” social experience.42 Only by conceptualizing this articulation as a social and historical phenomenon can we begin to understand how it operates as a condition of possibility for mass shootings in relation to, and no less than, the quotidian “life support systems that sustain terror and bare life [and] which frequently appear in more benign forms of political control.”43

Likewise, if we take for granted that as a military veteran Page believed he was doing the work of the U.S. state by killing Muslims, we ignore that Oak Creek fits into a long tradition of state and nonstate violence against indig-enous and black people that has functioned to draw the boundaries of civil society by designating who would be abandoned to its outside.39 Indeed, we need not rely on a white nationalist manifesto or the lyrics of a song by a neo- Nazi rock band to make the strong claim that Page understood himself as a self- conscripted soldier, defending the racial nation against threats to its freedom and health, imagining that he was doing the work of which the multicultural U.S. state was incapable.40 This form of anti- statism has deep material sources, and it cannot be reduced to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party or the Cato Institute’s wealthy donors anymore than it can be individualized as Page’s.41

Far less discussed than Islamophobia after the shooting was Page’s documented antipathy toward blackness: that is, not simply hatred of black people, but antagonism toward blackness as a capacious racial threat whose infiltration of the state has augured the state’s delinking from the (white) nation. In other words, if the law demands a motive, an equally compelling explana-tion is that the shootings were driven by Page’s revanchist anti- statism. Mobilized by and as resistance to the black freedom struggle, this can be understood as an ethos of white masculinist victimhood against the per-ceived special treatment received by black people as represented by anti-discrimination law, the legal protection of racial and sexual identities in hate crimes law, and more generally the mythical power of black people and Muslims in manipulating the levers of an officially multicultural state, from affirmative action to the implementation of sharia law.38 And while it is un- deniable that each of these accounts is necessary to thinking through the determinants of Oak Creek, the affective structure that undergirds Page’s act should be understood as constituted by a dense social articulation of antiblackness and anti- Muslim racism that is itself made possible by U.S. settler- colonial sovereignty. In other words, what becomes clear is that when limited to a view that reads Sikh people as potential victims of violence be- cause they appear as Muslims, antiblackness and U.S. empire as material and affective determining structures become obscured from analytical purview.

The reification of racial identities as positively knowable prior to the materially produced knowledge procedures that bring them into being conceals how the social production of truth both produces and erodes socially visible differences between bodies and populations. Such material practices of race making activate not only the social perception of threat but also the social mobility of threat across given racial categories.

But while such education may work to coun-ter stereotypes, the liberal antiracist critique uncomplicatedly reproduces the assumption that an identity group’s very status as a knowable object is unconnected from geopolitical relations of power, inequality, and imperial-ist violence. Indeed, such knowledge is made both possible and desirable by material conditions that secure, rather than contest, hierarchies of domina-tion and subordination.27

In the latter, Islamophobia is understood not as a racist belief to which one may or may not subscribe but an endemic form of racism produced by material practices of warfare that simultane-ously function to rationalize the global material inequalities and relations of domination such warfare secures.25 As such, the question remains whether Islamophobia as a discursive practice can be adequately contested without an analysis of the material configuration of forces invested in resource extrac-tion, weapons production, and the global construction of prisons, fences, walls, and other forms of securitization that enforce what Ruth Wilson Gil-more describes as “group- differentiated vulnerability to premature death.”

Meanwhile, the contradiction he presents betweenstate action and inaction forestalls the possibility of acknowledging that the U.S. settler- colonial state itself has from its inception struggled to rec-oncile the mutual constitution of state, extralegal, and nonstate violence: from “Indian removal” to slave patrols, border- control militias to lynch- ing and firebombing, the militarization of urban policing and imperialist counterinsurgency to mass incarceration and the current war on terror. Put differently, the appeal for the inclusion of black life within the ambit of the civilian (“ourselves”) ignores that the very demand to “keep Americans safe” has deputized whiteness, providing a discursive framework connect-ing settler- colonial and antiblack violence with imperialist warfare within and beyond U.S. borders.

In anera of generally declining trust in government and increasing mediafocus on major event-driven stories, such disconnect between the waysa problem is defined in the media and in Congress may be cause forconcern.

Congress isinstitutionally predisposed to favor preexisting problem definitions thatmatch preexisting solutions, as suggested by the Congress’s linkage of schoolviolence with school security and criminal justice. The media have strongerincentives to seek out ‘‘new’’ problem definitions (as in the pop-cultureangle), or to follow those frames attached to high-stakes political showdowns

Put simply, what the news highlights as ‘‘the real problem’’ may ormay not reflect the thrust of policy-making activity in Congress.

Politicians did not publiclystake their party’s fortunes on these problem definitions, though it may haveenhanced individual members’ ability to claim credit for new resources intheir local schools and more ‘‘get tough’’ anti-crime measures.

However, these problem foci did not offer the dramatic com-mercial appeal of stories about pop-culture products likeNatural BornKillers, Marilyn Manson, or video ‘‘shooter’’ games, nor did it offer a high-stakes political showdown as in the gun-control debate.

Thus, policymakers cued the media early on that the post-Columbinepolitical battle would center not only on guns but on popular culture. Thesewere the major storylines the national media followed for the next severalweeks—an example of the tendency of journalists to converge on their senseof what ‘‘the story’’ is, largely defined by political elites (Bennett, 2003;Hershey, 1992). However, the two problem definitions took very differentpaths. Guns became the center of a high-stakes congressional debate thatlasted over two months, culminating in the House’s defeat of a Democraticamendment tightening restrictions on sales at gun shows. Media coveragetracked closely with this debate. Two of the three peaks in media attentionto guns (in the second and fifth weeks after Columbine) coincided with keybattles in the congressional debate; this beat-centered reporting then sub-sided when the congressional debate ended.In contrast, the pop-culture problem definition waned as gun controlgained greater rhetorical traction. The White House summit of experts andindustry executives ultimately could not sustain media attention because itspolitical stakes and policy implications were unclear. Consequently, a dif-ferent pattern of reporting emerged that was less tied to Washington beatsand more thematic, but that also subsided more quickly; in contrast to thegun-control frame, the pop-culture frame all but disappeared after the WhiteHouse summit.

Members of Congress were thus willing totalkaboutpopular culture as a cause of school violence (Bruni, 1999), but Congresscollectively proved unwilling to regulate media content, at least in partbecause they believed themselves constitutionally unable to do so

The gun-control frame was thusimmediately suggested to news organizations by prominent politicianswhose actions promised that gun control could become a major politicalshowdown—and thus a newsworthy story.

Gun control promised a protracted,high-stakes contest among key political players, the sort of political debatethat fits easily into the ‘‘game schema’’ favored by many Washington re-porters

That gun control wasnota new policy idea arguably advan-taged gun control as a problem definition

As explored further below, it appears that themedia responded more to the efforts of politicians to shape public discourseoutside the halls of Congress than to their actual arguments and actionswithin Congress.

Despite this convergence across arenas, however, there are noteworthydivergences, particularly between post-Columbinediscoursein the media andCongress and the actualcontentof legislation. Although popular culture’sallegedly malign influence on teens was a heavy focus of news coverage andcongressional debate, only two bills dealt with this aspect of school violence.Moreover, divergence is evident regarding the other problem definitionsCongress did act most vigorously on. Actual legislative action focused most onprograms to improve school safety, yet that frame was a distant third in mediacoverage, gaining less than half the attention of pop culture. Criminal justicewas the third-ranked problem definition in legislative bills and debate, whilemedia coverage of this angle on school shootings was virtually nonexistent.

The story these data tell is somewhat complicated, but the main storylineis clear: thegunsframe was clearly predominant in media coverage andcongressional debate, and gained considerable legislative action as well. In-deed, the story of school violence following Columbine became to a sig-nificant extent a story about the political struggle over gun control.3Specifically,

Evidence of specific differences in the ‘‘selection principles’’ of the massmedia and Congress, we argue, help explain these differences: the crucial roleof ‘‘policy streams’’ in congressional policy making; the importance ofcommercial and story-telling values in journalistic assessments of newswor-thiness; and the constraints on Congress imposed by the U.S. Constitution

The Columbine shooting thus created the conditionsfor ‘‘positive feedback’’ between the media and Congress in which we areinterested.

hese factors suggest less convergence across arenasthan we might expect, even in the aftermath of high-profile events that focusattention on a ‘‘single’’ issue.

Indeed, Hilgartner and Bosk suggest that organizational andcultural differences among institutions may allow certain problem defini-tions to thrive in one arena yet fail in another

Hilgartner and Bosk theorize thatcompetition among problem definitions is regulated by ‘‘principles of se-lection’’ that operate across all public arenas. Both the media and Congress,they suggest, pay most attention to problems that are inherently dramatic,that resonate with ‘‘deep mythic themes or broad cultural preoccupations,’’and that are promoted by powerful political and economic groups(1988:71).

problem ‘‘framing’’ (Entman, 1993),or as the ‘‘second level’’ of agenda settin

Just as publicinstitutions must limit the number of problems they attempt to grapple withat any one time, so must they limit their focus to particular problem at-tributes. The selection of problem attributes has been variously referred to as‘‘problem definition’’

In other words, journalists andpolicymakers decide not only which problems will occupy their respectiveagendas, but how todefinethose problems

Agenda diver-gences are amplified when prominent politicians cue the media to follow particularstory lines that depart from actual legislative activity.

In recent years, Dr. Tiller had also been the focus of efforts by anti-abortion groups and others — including a former state attorney general, Phill Kline — who wished to see him prosecuted for what they considered violations of state law in cases of late-term abortions. Two grand juries, summoned by citizen-led petition drives, looked into Dr. Tiller’s practices, including questions of whether he met a state law requirement that abortions at or after 22 weeks of pregnancy be limited to circumstances where a fetus would not be viable or a woman would otherwise face “substantial and irreversible impairment of a major bodily function” — words whose interpretation were at the root of much debate

But in the end, Trump won over evangelicals—and won the election—because he exploited beliefs and fears with origins deep in America’s past.

Trump perfected his own brand of prosperity ministry in the ad campaigns for the now-defunct Trump University. “I’ll show you how to turn this sizzling opportunity into a tidal wave of profits,” one 2007 newspaper advertisement read. The candidate who specialized in ludicrous promises has continued that magical thinking now that he’s in office, as he vows to create “25 million new jobs” and insists that he can replace Obamacare with “a much better health-care plan at much less money.”

God never goes back on his word. According to many prosperity-gospel preachers, if you don’t get that new job you prayed for, then you didn’t pray sincerely enough, live righteously enough—or give generously enough to your church.

But for believers, prosperity theology means that the material world has “a miraculous, God-filled quality.” Its basic tenets appear throughout the Bible—the notion that God answers prayers, rewards believers with worldly blessings, and punishes those who don’t keep the faith. And then, like most heresies, it pushes such orthodox teaching to an extreme. Imagine that your desired reality is true, Peale urged believers. His handy slogan: “Prayerize, picturize, actualize.” Peale, the dean of “the power of positive thinking,” would have understood Trump’s penchant for inventing his preferred reality.

Portion Size (10 mins)

mentoR notes - APPendix: AdditionAl ResouRces

Participants are introduced to a wide range of ways to challenge or critique daily media messages. They discuss the many media practices that bombard youth in order to sell products that often promise more than they can deliver

Participants explore the ways boys and men are expected to act in many areas of their lives. They examine how stereotypes limit our ability to reach our full human potential, whether it’s being a good brother, a respectful son, a successful student, or a caring friend.

PRogRAm summARy

You can assess the development of participants at various points in your mentoring experience by referring to the desired program outcomes:

In addition, where possible, mentors are encouraged to provide a positive space for creative outlets such as writing, visual art, video and web activities and photography. Current educational concerns regarding boys’ low literacy levels can be partially addressed through these types of activities.

To that end, this resource offers innovative and cooperative games and physical activities that challenge hyper-competitive sport which research shows is often detrimental to sustaining lifelong interest in being active and healthy.

challenging traditional forms of masculinity that focus on strength and power and the provision of social support from families and peers to ensure that when a boy does find a physical activity of interest, his behaviour is positively reinforced.

Some boys handle this in stride, while others try to change themselves by dieting, using steroids, exercising excessively, or developing an eating disorder like anorexia, bulimia or body dysmorphic disorder

is a strong supporter for teaching young men how to prepare lunch, an activity he says is a good place for boys to start taking on responsibilities in the home.

Common unhealthy eating practices are overeating and undereating. The Game On! program provides ways to support and encourage boys and young men to prepare healthy foods and take on some responsibility for their own food intake.

White’s (1989) journal article “The Road to Armageddon:Religion and Domestic Terrorism,” suggested that identity theol-ogy was capable of inspiring violence; however, his propheticwarning went unheeded. The purpose of this research is threefold.First, the etiology of the Identity Christian movement is analyzedby examining its foundations and tenets. Second, the communica-tion strategies and organized activities that link the belief system’sworldwide proponents are examined. Third, evidence of IdentityChristian underpinnings in domestic terrorist acts was sought

ONCE VIEWED PRIMARILY as a criminal justice problem, violence and its prevention are now often claimed by public health professionals as being within their purview. The author reviewed 282 articles published in public health and medical journals from 1985 through 1995 that discussed violence as a public health problem. She found that while authors tended to identify social and structural causes for violence, they sug- gested interventions that tar- geted individuals' attitudes or behaviors and improved pub- lic health practice. Her study illuminates the tension between public health profes- sionals' vision of the social precursors of violence and their attempts to apply a tra- ditional set of remedies. In targeting individuals to rid the nation of violence, the public health community is de- emphasizing societal causes

The study identifies seven rhetorical strategies newspapers use to frame the acts of violence as terrorism or crime by comparatively analyzing the news coverage of the Ft. Hood and the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard shootings in three major newspapers. It examines the framing of the incidents, the strategies used to constitute the frames, the functions these strategies serve, and the media’s contribution to the discourse of terror.

For many years, the conventional wisdom was that most acts of aggression and violence stem from insecurities and low self-esteem. The possibility that some mass shooters have low self-esteem, low self-worth, or painful personal insecurities should not lead us to overlook another more likely possibility: that a significant number of mass shooters may have large egos and narcissistic tendencies. This article will (a) describe the psychological concepts of narcissism and narcissistic traits; (b) review previous research on links between narcissism, aggression, and violence; (c) review evidence that some mass shooters exhibit narcissistic traits; and (d) discuss the implications of narcissistic mass shooters for society and the media coverage of their shooting rampages.

Four assumptions frequently arise in the aftermath of mass shootings in theUnited States: (1) that mental illness causes gun violence, (2) that psychiatricdiagnosis can predict gun crime, (3) that shootings represent the deranged actsof mentally ill loners, and (4) that gun control “won’t prevent” another Newtown(Connecticut school mass shooting). Each of these statements is certainly true inparticular instances. Yet, as we show, notions of mental illness that emerge inrelation to mass shootings frequently reflect larger cultural stereotypes andanxieties about matters such as race/ethnicity, social class, and politics. Theseissues become obscured when mass shootings come to stand in for all guncrime, and when “mentally ill” ceases to be a medical designation and becomesa sign of violent threat.

but it may also be due topublic perceptions that persons with serious mentalillness, not access to guns in society, are primarily re-sponsible for mass shootings.

hese portrayals of the shooting events raisepublic support for gun control policies but also contributeto negative attitudes toward those with serious mentalillness.

Results of this study should be interpreted in the contextof several limitations.

Research has shown that thepublic is less likely to support policy efforts when they holdindividuals—as opposed to society—responsible for theissue the policy seeks to address (37).

News media portrayals of mass shooting events bypersons with serious mental illness appear to play a criticalrole in influencing both negative attitudes toward personswith serious mental illness and support for gun controlpolicies. The news story describing a mass shooting eventheightened desired social distance from and perceiveddangerousness of persons with serious mental illness. Thesame story raised public support for both gun restrictionsfor persons with serious mental illness and a ban on large-capacity magazines. Mental health experts have longsuspected that news media depictions of violent personswith serious mental illness contribute to the public’snegative attitudes toward persons with serious conditionslike schizophrenia and bipolar disorder (34–36)

Effects of news media messages on support for guncontrol policies are summarized in Table 4 and Figure 2. Asexpected, a news story describing a mass shooting raisedsupport for both gun restrictions for persons with seriousmental illness and a ban on large-capacity magazinescompared with the control condition.

Gun restrictions for persons with serious mentalillness, however, have generated concern on two grounds.First, the relationship between serious mental illness andviolence is complex, and much of the risk of violence inthis population is attributable to comorbid factors such assubstance use (19, 20). Most persons with serious mentalillness are not violent; prediction of future violence amongsuch individuals is challenging (21), and there is littleevidence to suggest that gun restriction policies for thispopulation accurately target the subgroup of those witha heightened risk of committing violent acts (9). Second, ithas been suggested that promotion of such policies mayhave the unintended consequence of exacerbating thepublic’s negative attitudes toward persons with seriousmental illness and that implementation of gun restrictionpolicies may deter such persons from seeking help (22, 23).Although stigma related to less severe mental disorders ap-pears to have decreased in recent decades (24), stigmatizingattitudes toward persons with serious mental illness haveremained largely unchanged orpossibly increased (25, 26).The majority of persons with serious mental illness remainuntreated or undertreated, and mental health experts viewstigma as a key contributor to poor treatment rates (27)

Results:Compared with the control group,the story about a mass shooting height-ened respondents’negative attitudes to-ward persons with serious mental illnessand raised support for gun restrictions forthis group and for a ban on large-capacitymagazines. Including information aboutthe gun restriction policy in a story abouta mass shooting did not heighten negativeattitudes toward persons with seriousmental illness or raise support for therestrictions.Conclusions:The aftermath of mass shoot-ings is often viewed as a window of oppor-tunity to garner support for gun controlpolicies, but it also exacerbates negativeattitudes toward persons with seriousmental illness.

Using a 2
2
4 experimental design, this study examined the framing of the pro and anti-gun controlarguments posited after the Sandy Hook shooting and the resultant effect on persuasion and credibility.Overall, pro-gun control frames were more persuasive and more credible than anti-gun control frames.Arguments transmitted via online news articles elicited more persuasion than those transmitted viaTwitter. News article sources were deemed more credible too. I discuss the ramifications within

ABSTRACT. In addressing the shape of appropriate gun policy, this essay as-sumes for the sake of discussion that there is a legal and moral right to private gun ownership. My thesis is that, against the background of this right, the most defensible policy approach in the United States would feature moderate gun control. The first section summarizes the American gun control status quo and characterizes what I call “moderate gun control.” The next section states and rebuts six leading arguments against this general approach to gun policy. The sec-tion that follows presents a positive case for moderate gun control that emphasizes safety in the home and society as well as rights whose enforcement entails some limits or qualifications on the right to bear arms. A final section shows how the recommended gun regulations address legitimate purposes, rather than imposing arbitrary restrictions on gun rights, and offers concluding reflections

sions. We conclude that the differing institutional structure and incentives of the news media and Congress can create or inhibit interinstitutional positive feedback in the problem-defining process. Agenda diver- gences are amplified when prominent politicians cue the media to follow particular story lines that depart from actual legislati

Major themes that emerged were widespread disgust with a disordered andunhealthy American gun culture and firearms legislation, a focus on gratuitous and violententertainment media, and a frustration with unethical media coverage of these tragic events

topeconomic engines of the United States

In closing, we posit that the link between the inequality-income interaction and mass shootings can be understoodthrough the relative deprivation perspective, which contendsthe persistent inability of members of a community to achievea culturally defined level of economic success creates anenvironment of anger, frustration, hostility, and violence.

Overall, the figure illustratesa key outcome, that inequality has a much stronger associationwith mass shootings in high-income counties than low-incomecounties.

Ourfindings suggest that to address the mass shootings epidemicat its core, it is essentialto understand how to stem rising income inequality and the unstable environments thatwe argue are created by such inequality.

. This may imply that toaddress the mass shootings epidemic at the population-level, itis essential to understand how economies can create economicsuccess while also minimizing the staggering inequality, andcorrespondingly volatile environments, that often accompanysuch success.

ncontrast,others(Kleck&Gertz,1995)findthatusingagunforprotectiondecreasesthelikelihoodofcertainviolentcrimesresult-inginvictiminjuryorreachingcompletion.Thoughtheseobservationsdonotindicatewhetherthereisanetbene-fitorcostofincreasedgunownership,theydemonstratethepotentialformassshootingstohaveindirecteffectsoncrime.

Wesuggestthattheseresponsesarerepresentativeforthemajorityof Americansand,therefore,peoplewhoareinfluencedbymassshootingstobuygunsareprobablyanatypicalminority.

If researchers cannot employ both question forms, the forced choicequestions provide a clear-cut result, a percentage distribution across causes, whereas blamescales offer a more detailed comparison across potential causes that almost certainly betterreflects how individuals think about causality.

There may yet be a future shooting that unites gun and nongun owners in theirblame of guns. Until that time, however, significant policy changes on gun control areunlikely.

Gun ownership is more than a gun purchase; ownership offers individuals a larger gunculture that maintains distinct and sometimes passionate ideological views of governmentand individual freedoms

Gun owners’ reactions to mass shootings make it difficult to envision major changes ingun laws occurring as a result of future mass shootings.

The results of our analyses indicate that gun owners are more likely to identify popularculture and parenting as causes of shootings whereas nongun owners report popular cultureand gun availability as main factors. Both groups attribute highest levels of blame to theshooter but nongun owners next assign blame to guns while gun owners blame parenting.In addition, gun owners are not optimistic about government and society programs to stopviolence nor did Sandy Hook produce support for gun control laws. By contrast, afterthe mass shooting at Sandy Hook, nongun owners expressed support for stricter gun lawsand they were more likely to be optimistic about government and societal action to stopviolence.

Figure 1 is developed to show the sorting associated with gun ownership and blam-ing guns for mass shootings.

Finally, attributing blame to guns splits gun owners from nongunowners more so than any other cause.

Causes and Mean Degree of Blame for Mass ShootingsCausesSample MeanGun OwnersNo GunsDifferenceGuns5.93.96.93.0,p<0.00∗Pop culture6.46.16.30.1,p<0.61Parents7.17.46.90.5,p<0.07Shooter9.09.08.90.1,p<0.33N338101208NOTES: Authors’ survey July 2014: “In this country we have experienced a number of tragic mass shootingincidents in recent years. On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being none at all and 10 being a lot of blame,how much blame for these shootings do you place on the influence of violence in popular culture suchas movies, television, and Internet? The availability of guns? The way parents raise their children? On theshooter(s)?

media, movies, Internet were identified as the primary cause by 41.5 percent of re-spondents.

We view this gap as politically important, enduring, and central to formulatingpolicy responses to mass shooting tragedies.

Gun ownershipsuggests strong dispositions that are expected to impact causal attributions. Similar to otherpatterns of motivated reasoning, those with a perceived stake in an issue might be inclinedto attribute causes or blame in a manner that makes them or their group appear in a positivelight—hence a self-serving attribution

Owning a gun can, therefore, be much more than possessing a firearm. Rather, gunownership offers social identity; a longstanding ethos immersed in conservative ideology,born from the struggles of frontier life, and represented by the powerful National RifleAssociation and the traditionally more extreme Gun Owners of America.

No such commitment, nor larger culture, works to reinforce nongun owners.

Rhetorically, gun owners are cast as adversaries of those seeking to change individualisticculture to one of government dependence (Heston, 2000; Lott, 2000). The gun cultureelevates the Second Amendment considerably, and gun ownership is thought to be crucialto protecting constitutional liberties from government encroachment

Gun ownership involves significant psychological, social, and political attachments. Gunculture refers to the affection of some Americans for guns and the important role of firearmsin frontier life (Wolpert and Gimpel, 1998:244). Hunting, sport shooting, and associatedactivities are central to the culture (Spitzer, 1995). But guns are not only viewed as toolsand sporting equipment but more recently as larger symbols of liberty (Melzer, 2009;Winkler, 2011). Melzer observed that gun owners are thought of “as freedom fightersbravely defending all individual rights and freedoms” (Melzer, 2009:65).

There are a range of motives hypothesized to affect attributions, including the need toprotect and enhance self-esteem (Zuckerman, 1979), create favorable impressions (Bradley,1978), to believe in a just world (Lerner and Miller, 1978), or maintain prior socialand political beliefs (Fischle, 2000).

Frequently, attributions do not accurately reflect reality and in many instances are fash-ioned from ambiguous situations. In ambiguous circumstances, attributions are more likelyto be influenced by an individual’s own perspective and favor social-psychological needs(Nawara, 2015). Causal attributions can in fact function to insulate or justify a favor-able self-concept or existing political disposition (Heider, 1958; Tetlock and Levi, 1982;Taber, Lodge, and Glathar, 2001). When a political figure declares support for a clean coalinitiative, for example, a constituent who especially likes the politician, and shares partyaffiliation, will likely attribute the figure’s support to personal beliefs rather than environ-mental pressures from, say, Big Oil. Such a favorable internal attribution is consistent withthe constituent’s favorable feelings toward the political figure and justifies past support andshared party attachment. Motives, sentiment, and drive were important components ofHeider’s initial formulation.

Fritz Heider (1958) was the first to analyze attributions andbelieved individuals observe, explain, and analyze behaviors and events with causal explana-tions. He also argued that individuals seek control and stability in their social environments.

An important implication of these findings concerns thepotential for policy change. Though the violent tragedy produced universal shock andcondemnation, there was far less agreement about the very causes of the violence andwhether government or societal action could prevent future shootings. And since causalexplanations are important to shaping political alliances and mobilizing support for policyinitiatives (Stone, 1997; Atkenson and Maestas, 2012; Haider-Markel and Joslyn, 2008) ifthe public is notably divided on perceived causes of a horrific mass shooting, meaningfulpolicy change following Newtown or other mass shootings appears unlikely.

Ownership of a firearm in fact represents an increasingly important political identity(Joslyn et al., 2017). Gun owners are a formidable political constituency, exhibiting identi-fiable characteristics, and share a distinct ethos (Spitzer, 1995). Ownership can be thoughtof as a declaration of sorts. Distinct from conventional correlates of political attitudes andbehavior, guns are a concrete manifestation of important personal values and characteris-tics (Melzer, 2009). Gun may be purchased, given, or received (Burbick, 2006), and offertangible, oftentimes public, symbols of strongly held beliefs and connection to a larger gunculture (Kohn, 2004).

The answers, we argue, lie in the strong tendency for individuals to per-ceive events consistent with dispositions or strongly held social-psychological attachments(Kunda, 1990). Gun possession often includes such attachments.

Several days later,the president initiated a high-profile gun violence task force, chaired by Joe Biden, andannounced gun control as the central issue of his second term.

Given the significantproportion of citizens who own guns, the prospect for policy changes that address gun-related causesof mass shootings is unlikely.

Core Conservatives: In many ways the most traditional group of Republicans. Overwhelmingly support smaller government and lower corporate taxes, and a majority think U.S. involvement in the global economy is a good thing. Country First Conservatives: Older and less educated than other GOP-leaning typology groups. Unhappy with the nation’s course, highly critical of immigrants and wary of U.S. involvement abroad. Market Skeptic Republicans: Stand out from other Republican-oriented groups in their negative views of the economic system. Skeptical of banks and financial institutions, and support raising taxes on corporations New Era Enterprisers: Optimistic about state of the nation and its future. Younger and somewhat less overwhelmingly white than other GOP typology groups. Most say U.S. involvement in the global economy is a good thing and that immigrants strengthen the nation. Devout and Diverse: Majority nonwhite, highly financially stressed, religiously observant and older than other Democratic-leaning groups. The most politically mixed typology group, with about a quarter leaning Republican. Take somewhat more conservative views than other Democratic-leaning groups on a number of issues. Disaffected Democrats: Majority-minority group and highly financially stressed. Have positive feelings about the Democratic Party and its leaders, but are highly cynical about politics, government and how things are going in U.S. Opportunity Democrats: Less affluent, less liberal and less politically engaged than Solid Liberals, though the two groups agree on many major issues. Believe most people can get ahead if they work hard. Solid Liberals: Largest group in the Democratic coalition. Highly educated and largely white. Express liberal attitudes on virtually every issue. Say the nation should be active in world affairs. Bystanders: A relatively young, less educated group that pays little or no attention to politics.

an empire that makes not only murderous weapons but the ideologiesand the inhumanity that enable their use as common here as the air webreathe. It calls, too, for the overturning of a capitalist order that putsthe profits of corporations ahead of the needs of families, children,communities, as well as the unplugging of a police and media statethat chokes off breath and thought alike. Revealed by Moore as bothvictims and perpetrators of the violence of empire, USAmericans areoffered a rare chance to clear the air. More than just another anti-gundiatribe to arm liberals in the face of conservative extremists,Bowlingfor Columbinesketches the basis upon which Americans might uniteto dismantle the bloody system that rules in our name.Whether such a revolutionary change can be accomplished with orwithout guns is another matter.

The American children who open fire on their peers, classmates,teachers, and neighbors offer us the opportunity and the impetus tograpple with a contradiction at the heart of the US.

More radical than its maker,Bowlingsuggests that the deathof Kayla Brown should to be laid at the foot of corporate America,and those who serve it.

“Welfare reform” (signed into law, we should recall, by DemocraticPresident Bill Clinton) stands revealed as a regime of child neglect,as deadly for communities as it is profitable for the likes of DickClark and Lockheed.

Showing such “criminality”stripped of context, the media keep up a steady drum beat of fear,disdain, suspicion, and hatred towards those who are not rich andwhite, teaching Americans to view the world through the eyes ofcops. But the state is calling the tune.

and demonization of the poor structure and fuel this continual cam-paign of fear, a fear that stokes not only individual consumer spendingon guns and home security systems, but also government spending onmilitary contracts (and, we should add, increasingly militarizedpolice).Thus do corporations and politicians alike profit from the very fearsthey help induce.

Within this basic fra-mework, Moore spotlights the particular ways that anti-black racism

Reframing 9/11 in relation to USregime-toppling, invasions, bombings, sanctions, and covert fundingschemes that have in various ways worked to undermine democracyand inflame fundamentalism, the film presents what generallyappears within official US ideology as an attackon “our way of life”as rather anexpressionofthat way of life.

The nature of the “influence” at work here need not be conceived ofat the level of a simplistic “monkey see-monkey do” theory of militarymimicry. More reasonable is to understand USAmericans’ acceptanceof violent responses to “problems,” “threats,” or “enemies” as partak-ing of a similar structure, one grounded in an ignorance of history andan obtuseness to social context. Such a mentality makes violence –whether in the form of “crime” or of “terrorism” – appear as an inex-plicable, terrifying, almost other-worldly presence, an alien entityincapable of being understood, an “evil” in need of annihilation. Inthis regard, Moore’s treatment of 9/11, years prior to his 2004 filmFah-renheit 9/11, is particularly stunning.

2) his estranging of the ruling“common sense” that allows Americans to accept and even to supportthe mass killing of people in one context while experiencing and expres-sing horror and hysterical sadness at the killing of people in another.

The greater, state-sponsored violence is endorsedwithout batted eye. The smaller scale horror of the school shootingfills those killer eyes with tears.

Whiteness itself stands revealed as a sociallyaccepted form of the paradoxical “Whacko” syndrome.

(1) that “Thereare whackos out there”; and (2) that the existence of such “whackos”– ISIS being this year’s prime example – justifies an aggressive US mili-tary and police state, armed to the teeth and ready to kill? Isn’t thisentire society, in a sense, taught to sleep with a .44 magnum underits pillow? Read against the grain of its zany laugh lines,Bowlingsuggests that “mainstream America” is not nearly so far from“whacko” James Nichols as it would like to think.

But hisfocus is not so much on why it is dangerous for Americans to havegunslying around as it is on why it is so dangerous forAmericanstohave guns lying around.

He pushes further to link US gun violence (and gunculture) to underlying legacies and systemic problems: from thehistory of white supremacy, to the racialized post-9/11 paranoiainflamed by corporate media and politicians, to the long-standing nor-malization – indeed the sanctification – of American violence in theform of US militarism and empire. Just as powerfully, the filmrefuses to engage in demonizing or pathologizing the killers it con-siders, instead tying their violence to the pressures put on youngpeople today and to the despair affecting so many US “post-industrial-ized” working-class communities in the age of predatory capital’sdevastating abandonment.

However, the mass shooting in El Paso is being investigated by the FBI’s newly estab-lished Domestic Terrorism-Hate Crimes Fusion Cell (FBI,2019). The Fusion Cell was estab-lished to address what the agency views as‘complementary FBI missions to combatdomestic terrorism and provide justice to those who are victims of hate crimes’(McGarrity& Shivers,2019). While this represents a positive step towards recognition of the severity ofthe threat from domestic terrorists, it is too early to say whether this marks a turning pointin a move away from the double standards in the treatment of domestic terrorists.

Giventhe prevalence of mass shootings by individuals espousing white supremacist ideologies,it may be time to revisit the appropriateness of current anti-terror legislation and to criti-cally assess whether the distinction between domestic and international terrorism is war-ranted. Indeed, one mechanism that would go some way to correcting the imbalancewould be to add violent far right groups to the list of banned terrorist organisations.Other countries are making such moves. For example, the Canadian government recentlyannounced that neo-Nazi groups Combat 18 and Blood & Honour would be added to thelist of banned terrorist entities (Public Safety Canada,2019). Appropriate and effectivelegal instruments are critical to adequately addressing the threat posed by the violentfar-right. Alongside this, however, is the need for greater consistency within the mediain labelling a terrorist act as terrorism, irrespective of the background of perpetrator.

By designating an attack as a hate crime or some other type of crime not associ-ated with terrorism, investigators are potentially missing out on identifying a widernetwork of extremists with whom the perpetrator may be associated.

Third, labelling a violent extremist attack as something other than terrorism depriori-tises the investigation.

The definition of‘mass’shooting used in this paper follows the work of Horgan, Gill, Bouhana,Silver, and Corner (2016) who define a mass shooting as four or more victims (not includingthe offender).3.

The moral panic thesis could in part explain the double standardspresent in the way the media chooses to frames perpetrators from differentideologies aseither terrorists (usually in the case of Muslim offenders) or not (as has been found in thecase of many right-wing extremist offenders) (Yin,2013).

These data support critiques of the conceptu-alisation of terrorism in the media and highlight inconsistencies in the use of the term.

A superficial but obvious reason for this is themuch higher number of fatalities in the Orlando mass shooting.

The sheer numberof references to terrorism in reporting on Mateen relative to Roof (1,082 compared to95) provides overwhelming evidence of media framing

A text search for the terms,‘terror/ist/ism’as well as‘hate’and‘hate crime/s’was con-ducted across a total of 257 news articles published on the Charleston attack and 422articles on the Orlando attack. Even though both shootings appear tofit within legaldefinitions of terrorism, distinct differences were evident in the way the attacks were por-trayed.

However, therewas limited suggestion from the authorities or within the media that the attack was motiv-ated by such views

‘engagement with others in these communities and posting behaviours on social mediademonstrate an outward acceptance of subcultural values expressed by far-rightgroups’(p. 97).

Toexamine this, two cases of ideologically motivated mass shootings2were chosen for analy-sis

Kimber-ley Powell’s(2011) study of media framing of reported terrorist attacks in the United Statesfound that attacks committed by right-wing perpetrators were portrayed as a minor threat,perpetrated by individuals with mental health problems, whereas attacks inspired by Jiha-dist ideology were framed as a coordinated threat by a hostile outsider force.

In this way,framing is a powerful tool which can define the boundaries of public debate andinfluence how the public perceive threats.

This paper argues that it is likely the conceptual and legal ambiguity sur-rounding domestic terrorism will be reflected in the way the media frames attacks byright-wing violent extremists.

akimi(2006) argues that in this way, the media are intrinsically linked with the legal system‘by influencing expectations about policy content, authority, and control’(p. 11).

device because of actual or perceived race, colour and national origin of a person (Reilly,2018; US Department of Justice,2011). Yet even here, when terrorism law was applied, thecase was construed as a hate crime by the media (Reilly,2018). U.S. Department of Justicecounsel, Thomas Brzozowski, noted that the hate crime charge determined how thepublic understood Harpham’s actions and that,‘Folks seize on that and view thisalmost exclusively in terms of hate. What they miss is the fact that his underlying criminalactivity clearly meets the statutory definition of domestic terrorism...without a doubt’(quoted in Reilly,2018).

They alsopoint out that many perpetrators of hate crimes do not seek publicity for their acts,whereas terrorists are more likely to use publicity to further their goals (