#1493 Marketing, Messaging and Mass Shootings
Best of the Left - Leftist Perspectives on Progressive Politics, News, Culture, Economics and Democracy
Jay Tomlinson
4.5 • 3.4K Ratings
🗓️ 4 June 2022
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Air Date 6/4/2022
Today we take a look at some of the obvious steps we need to take to reduce gun violence in the United States, debunk some of the favored propaganda supporting unfettered gun ownership and explore the origins of how Gun Culture™ was invented by corporations as the frontier era need for guns began to vanish pushing them to convert guns from tools that were needed but not loved into items that were loved though no longer needed.
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SHOW NOTES
Ch. 1: Igor Volsky on Ending Gun Violence - CounterSpin - Air Date 5-27-22
We revisit some conversations about gun violence and gun culture this week on the show. In March of last year we spoke with Igor Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America
In addition to the police response being an unfathomable failure, it is also proof that the ‘good guy with a gun’ theory doesn't work.
Ch. 3: Jordan Klepper Debunks The "Good Guy with a Gun" Argument - The Daily Show - Air Date 12-11-15
Jordan Klepper sets out to determine the likelihood of another gun owner stopping an active shooter.
The far-right wants you to think the Second Amendment is about average Americans taking up arms against a tyrannical government. But none of that is true... The real history of the second amendment is far more interesting and unsettling.
Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger speaking to Charlayne Hunter-Gault, PBS News Hours, 12/16/1991
Ch. 6: How the Gun Industry Used Marketing to Change a Culture - Letters and Politics - Air Date 8-7-19
Today, we are in conversation with Pamela Haag about American gun culture and its influence on policy and gun market. Guest: Pamela Haag is an award-winning nonfiction writer, essayist, cultural commentator, and historian.
“Together we rise,” reads the motto on a wall of the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The school serves about 600 students in the second thru fourth grades. Over ninety percent are Latinx.
MEMBERS-ONLY BONUS CLIP(S)
In this public News Brief, we discuss the phoned-in, cynical response by Republicans to mass shooting and how they've devolved into a dark, meta self-parody.
Guest: Robert J. Spitzer is Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Political Science Department at the State University of New York, College at Cortland. He is the author of 15 books including Guns across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights.
FINAL COMMENTS
Ch. 10: Final comments on the bonus episode in which we explain the cultural foundations of capitalism, guns and beyond
MUSIC (Blue Dot Sessions)
SHOW IMAGE:
Description: A pencil sketch of a larger-than-life hand gun on the shoulders of a weary man, in the image of Jesus carrying the cross. He stands in a pool of red blood.
Credit: “Gun Culture” by Christopher Dombres, Flickr | Public Domain | Changes: Cropped
Produced by Jay! Tomlinson
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast in which we shall |
| 0:07.0 | take a look at the obvious steps we need to take to reduce gun violence in the United States, |
| 0:12.2 | debunk some of the favored propaganda supporting unfettered gun ownership and explore the origins |
| 0:19.1 | of how gun culture was invented by corporations as the frontier era need for guns began to |
| 0:27.0 | vanish pushing them to convert guns from tools that were needed but not loved into items that |
| 0:34.2 | were loved though no longer needed. Cooks today are from Counter-Spin, all in with Chris Hayes, |
| 0:40.9 | The Daily Show, The Tom Hartman program, The PBS News Hour, Letters and Politics, and breaking |
| 0:48.5 | the sound barrier with Amy Goodman with additional members only clips from citations needed and |
| 0:54.8 | letters and politics. Other countries have misogyny and racism, untreated mental illness, and |
| 1:08.1 | bar fights and robberies. What they don't have are weeks like the one we saw in March of 2021, |
| 1:15.3 | in which Americans, just reeling from the murders of eight people in Atlanta, woke up to news of |
| 1:22.3 | ten people killed in Boulder, Colorado. It's the guns, the difference is the guns. We asked for |
| 1:30.3 | help thinking about that from Eager Volsky, executive director of Guns Down America and author of |
| 1:36.3 | the book Guns Down, how to defeat the NRA and build a safer future with fewer guns. I started |
| 1:43.4 | by noting the journalistic and maybe just human tendency in the wake of a mass shooting horror |
| 1:50.9 | like Atlanta, like Boulder, like Sandy Hook, like Buffalo, like Yvonne Day, to seek more information, |
| 1:59.5 | more details. What were the circumstances, the motivations, who is this individual? Somewhere |
| 2:05.7 | along the way one gets the sense that the problem of gun violence is too complicated to address. |
| 2:12.7 | Whatever measure is being suggested, wouldn't have prevented the latest attack, and somehow that's |
| 2:19.0 | not a reason that that's not enough, but a reason to abandon the whole project. I asked Eager Volsky if |
| 2:27.1 | getting past that hopelessness calls for new goals, or maybe just clarity about what our goals are. |
| 2:34.8 | You're absolutely right. There's really this sense oftentimes in the press that this problem is |
... |
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