Yet another mass killing happened yesterday in Cleveland, Texas, when Francisco Oropeza, age 39, took his AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle and killed five people, including an 8-year-old child, after parents had complained Oropeza was keeping their baby awake at 11 p.m.
I believe that showing real war footage of the Vietnam war helped turn public opinion and this is why the Armed Forces stopped showing us actual war footage.
In IIRC 1968 Life magazine published a multi-page center spread featuring row after row of yearbook-sized photos of all the service members who'd been killed in one week. I was 17. These men were barely older than I was. It had a major impact.
Yep, I remember vividly that issue in our house. I still see copies from time to time in Half-Price Books, and it must be available from dealers on eBay and elsewhere.
I think this is completely true. and I think a lot of it feels like it goes hand-in-hand with the all-volunteer army, which hasn't worked out for us at all. during Vietnam, pretty much everybody had some skin in the game, even if it was a friend's (or a friend's friend). all these stupid wars wouldn't have been anything like as easy to get off the ground if that had been the case.
even back in the '60s, I thought some kind of universal national service was a good thing; I just didn't think it should have been so exclusively military.
Fifty years ago I was against the draft, and was a trained draft counselor. I know now that universal compulsory military service (including women) would be a major impediment to starting wars. I’ve come to believe that universal national service of at least a year, with military service being only one option, would do much to unify the nation, and force a lot of young people to grow up very quickly.
Yes, it would be A Good Thing if we had a universal service requirement, with this proviso: Two years national service for all 18-year-olds, men and women, AND two years service at any age between 50 and 70 after that, to avoid making the program a tax the old impose on the young. The huge pool of manpower could be assigned to the many roles the corporate market doesn't find profitable to pay - teaching assistants, hospital orderlies, home health aides, police auxiliaries, forest firefighters, natural disaster responders, etc., etc., and military support personnel, with the offered option of a four-year enlistment, for those who qualify, in the regular military in leu of the second term of service.
A nice dream. Pity it will never happen. It would disrupt The Way Things Are too much.
the only thing with the service requirement for the 50 yo 70 year-olds is the extent to which you'd have to require every place of employment to "allow for it" through what would be an inevitably complicated "mechanism." much, much too "socialist" for most "lawmakers" to be down with. people would bitch and moan about losing two of their "most productive years."
so yes, it would "disrupt The Way Things Are" altogether too much.
but a several-long-weekends-a-year kind of thing (like the Reserves)...THAT feels more like a possibility (although friends of mine who joined the Reserves told me that nobody took those weekends at all seriously). I DO sorta like the four-year enlistment" option idea.
I don't see how making the service requirement a weekend 2nd job evades the... well, moral hazard, for lack of a better term, of making the young do it full-time. The productivity of the seniors is just as valuable to a national service program. Those still working can take a sabbatical, and gain just as much from the experience of service to the country. Retirees will have something to do besides play golf and complain that "kids these days don't wanna work, like we did...".
the thing is, I've had friends who served in the Peace Corps and Vista. and ALL of them say, without hesitation, that these were among the major two or three greatest experiences of their lives.
I agree completely. When I was in high school in the early '70s we all knew friends whose older brothers were in Vietnam, and could see the changes in them when and if they returned. That and having to register for the draft, even though it was abolished before turning 18 was a sobering event for all of us and our parents. I still like the idea of some sort of universal service just to help kids grow up.
Agreed. Two years, either in the military, Peace Corps, or the as yet not in place revamped Civilian Conservation Corps. Go to another part of the country, meet and work with people different than you are. Don't start college until after this National Service commitment.
Not only that media access became restricted in general. During the Iraq war approved reporters were embedded in military units, and what they wrote was subject to censorship. War isn’t popular when you see it up close, as any combat serviceman will tell you. That is, if they ‘ll talk about it at all. Those with PTSD are reticent to talk. Like my father.
I get it, Richard. My husband and I had been together 30 years when he finally started talking about things. See, all of a sudden, he had a mental breakdown. He had a good job with the county that he ended up working 4 hour days until he retired. Actually, he never shared his experiences with me until he put a claim in with the VA. When he had to write everything down as to where he was when three incidents happened, I never ever had been privy to that information. I just sobbed and sobbed. Your dad is most likely in his late 70’s. Try and understand that his blocking out what he saw, is a way of protecting himself and possibly you too. My best...
This is what "Stand Your Ground" looks like. A neighbor asks you to stop firing your semiautomatic after kids and many adults are asleep, so you go next door and blow them away. Because after all it's YOUR yard and they have no right to tell you what you can do in YOUR YARD.
What do you bet that this shooter wasn't on anyone's radar as having "mental health issues"? If we started treating the need to own a semiautomatic weapon as evidence of possible "mental health issues," maybe we'd actually get somewhere.
Own it, hell, he was "known to sit in his yard and shoot the AR-15-style rifle `for fun'!
It's Texas so no red flag laws need apply.
"Police had been called to Oropeza's house on a couple of previous occasions over complaints about noise he was making shooting his gun in his yard, Capers said."
I don't think that sending horrific photos to gun-worshiping state or federal officials would have any effect whatsoever. These people would just delete the images and go right on obsessing on the right to own ever more deadly weapons. They are sub-human monsters without any conscience, ethics or morals; nothing anyone says or does or shows them would change their attitudes.
Monsters is more a figure of speech than a realistic description. I truly believe these people are EVIL-- not sick, not scared, not uneducated and worthy of sympathy and understanding. I believe they are pure EVIL!
I’ve been saying this since New Town. And if you’re too chicken to show the 8 year olds mutilated, then show the rooms after the bodies were removed. Just show them. It’s the only way we’re going to wake these paid-off Republican politicians to do anything. I live in Highland Park, where we had our own mini-massacre last July 4th.
I don't think there is a photo in this world horrific enough to change the minds of these gun-worshipers. They will just press "delete" and go on with their day, totally unaffected by what they'VE just seen. THEY DON'T CARE!
Judith, thanks for the comment. I used to feel that way, but I’ve sensed a change in people’s perception of the problem. More and more people are feeling anger and I think we’re due for action. I hope I’m right but wouldn’t be shocked if I wasn’t.
Lucian, I agree that it's time to start showing the shooting victims. At the newspapers I worked at, in the 70s and 80s, the logic was that showing such photos would be to traumatize the victims' families all over again. Maybe I should say that the editors did not want to traumatize American readers. I've always felt that if the naked Vietnamese girl running from the bombing had been a white American girl, we never would have seen that photo. But now I think there is a greater risk in not showing what happens when weapons of war are easily obtained. AR-15 damage remains an abstraction to me.
Thank you, Loosh. Meanwhile -- though I will deny ever asking this -- where are the kit pix? Wasn't that smart former stray supposed to give birth any minute?
Many of us who served in the military have seen the horrible results of seeing flesh and bone being hit by a high velocity, tumbling semi automatic round. Others need to see it as well.
IF it truly is the case that "people kill people not guns" (bullsh*t) then regulating which PEOPLE are allowed to get guns should be the absolute priority. The insanity continues....
The ice cold heartless disconnect of the Republican Congressmen pushing to have war weapons be unregulated in our society is mind-boggling. They need to see the damn images of mutilation and unrecognizable bodies. And keep them up on the screen while they vote. Yep, that is theater but, that is because it is real. Get over it if you are going to vote for war weapons.
You can be sure the GOP would NEVER let this happen. But even if by some remote change such pictures were up on a big screen while they voted, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Those people consider gun deaths to be necessary sacrifices on the altar of sacred gun rights.
As a little kid 70 years ago outside of Chicago, I can remember lots of bloody pictures of dead gangsters in the newspapers. I guess that pics of dead gangsters are OK, but not of regular people.
"Gammyjill" suggested just showing the bloody rooms without the victims would be shocking enough. I agree with that very good advice. Pics of 20 cop cars are meaningless.
Absolutely--the media are in collaboration with the killers in not showing the dead as they were found. They are as guilty of denying the truth as are the sick Republicans they often excoriate for doing the same thing.
But that’s precisely the point. You SHOULD tell us what the cop saw. Protecting us from all the blood and gore does us a disservice. Not that I would like to see it. Remember what Gen. Eisenhower did to the German locals living near one of the Nazi execution factories: he made them, en mass, go to the camps to see the horrors. And he had all the camps filmed to assure there was a record for posterity. Something similar needs to happen at the sites of all these mass murders. Maybe then we can get some traction on gun safety/control.
I'd never read that about Eisenhower-- that he made people from the nearby towns see what had been happening literally under their very noses. I wonder what effect-- if any-- it had on those people. I'll bet the many anti-Semites among them just shrugged and thought "good riddance to Jewish rubbish!" I think you'd get much the same response from today's gun nuts. "So what? Who cares? Sometimes people have to be sacrificed in order to save our sacred right to bear any arms we want."
I once asked my father, who was an all-out conservative as one could get, why we didn’t have a gun in the house. He told me that if you saw what bullets can do to the human body in combat, you wouldn’t want anything to do with guns and bullets. He was one of the last draftees in training before WW2 ended and was qualified on the M1 Garand, a quaint popgun compared to the AR-15…
My father was a WWII combat infantry officer in the South Pacific. He helped bury 25,000 Japanese dead on Saipan. Our house had no guns, The subject never came up—and he was so right-wing I still shudder remembering his beliefs
Agreed. If the parents of the innocents killed at Sandy Hook did what Emmett Till's mother did, gun reform would begin to happen fast. As a parent I can understand why those parents wouldn't want pics of their murdered children made public but it would help towards ending our shameful gun death/injury rate.
At least the Congressmen should see images so they know what the hell they are voting for.
And they are correct "people kill people" with guns. And weapons of war have nothing to do with society-level self-defense. Show the damn images to our elected leaders. Try Sandy Hook. And make images available to those over 18 who want to see. Especially the Sandy Hook deniers.
We have people who gladly share military secrets to boost their fragile egos. Where are the hackers who can get these images and share them so that everyone can mail them to their "representatives"? There must be someone out there. Please, please step up to potentially save lives.
I believe that showing real war footage of the Vietnam war helped turn public opinion and this is why the Armed Forces stopped showing us actual war footage.
In IIRC 1968 Life magazine published a multi-page center spread featuring row after row of yearbook-sized photos of all the service members who'd been killed in one week. I was 17. These men were barely older than I was. It had a major impact.
One of my HS classmates was one of them.
I’m so sorry, Anders.
Yep, I remember vividly that issue in our house. I still see copies from time to time in Half-Price Books, and it must be available from dealers on eBay and elsewhere.
I think this is completely true. and I think a lot of it feels like it goes hand-in-hand with the all-volunteer army, which hasn't worked out for us at all. during Vietnam, pretty much everybody had some skin in the game, even if it was a friend's (or a friend's friend). all these stupid wars wouldn't have been anything like as easy to get off the ground if that had been the case.
even back in the '60s, I thought some kind of universal national service was a good thing; I just didn't think it should have been so exclusively military.
Fifty years ago I was against the draft, and was a trained draft counselor. I know now that universal compulsory military service (including women) would be a major impediment to starting wars. I’ve come to believe that universal national service of at least a year, with military service being only one option, would do much to unify the nation, and force a lot of young people to grow up very quickly.
Yes, it would be A Good Thing if we had a universal service requirement, with this proviso: Two years national service for all 18-year-olds, men and women, AND two years service at any age between 50 and 70 after that, to avoid making the program a tax the old impose on the young. The huge pool of manpower could be assigned to the many roles the corporate market doesn't find profitable to pay - teaching assistants, hospital orderlies, home health aides, police auxiliaries, forest firefighters, natural disaster responders, etc., etc., and military support personnel, with the offered option of a four-year enlistment, for those who qualify, in the regular military in leu of the second term of service.
A nice dream. Pity it will never happen. It would disrupt The Way Things Are too much.
the only thing with the service requirement for the 50 yo 70 year-olds is the extent to which you'd have to require every place of employment to "allow for it" through what would be an inevitably complicated "mechanism." much, much too "socialist" for most "lawmakers" to be down with. people would bitch and moan about losing two of their "most productive years."
so yes, it would "disrupt The Way Things Are" altogether too much.
but a several-long-weekends-a-year kind of thing (like the Reserves)...THAT feels more like a possibility (although friends of mine who joined the Reserves told me that nobody took those weekends at all seriously). I DO sorta like the four-year enlistment" option idea.
I don't see how making the service requirement a weekend 2nd job evades the... well, moral hazard, for lack of a better term, of making the young do it full-time. The productivity of the seniors is just as valuable to a national service program. Those still working can take a sabbatical, and gain just as much from the experience of service to the country. Retirees will have something to do besides play golf and complain that "kids these days don't wanna work, like we did...".
Yes. I served in the National Health Service Corps for 2 important years.
Only if there were several options, all of which were service-oriented, but some of which had nothing to do with waging violence or carrying a gun.
yes. exactly that.
the thing is, I've had friends who served in the Peace Corps and Vista. and ALL of them say, without hesitation, that these were among the major two or three greatest experiences of their lives.
I agree completely. When I was in high school in the early '70s we all knew friends whose older brothers were in Vietnam, and could see the changes in them when and if they returned. That and having to register for the draft, even though it was abolished before turning 18 was a sobering event for all of us and our parents. I still like the idea of some sort of universal service just to help kids grow up.
to "grow up" in all kinds of ways.
Agreed. Two years, either in the military, Peace Corps, or the as yet not in place revamped Civilian Conservation Corps. Go to another part of the country, meet and work with people different than you are. Don't start college until after this National Service commitment.
Not only that media access became restricted in general. During the Iraq war approved reporters were embedded in military units, and what they wrote was subject to censorship. War isn’t popular when you see it up close, as any combat serviceman will tell you. That is, if they ‘ll talk about it at all. Those with PTSD are reticent to talk. Like my father.
I get it, Richard. My husband and I had been together 30 years when he finally started talking about things. See, all of a sudden, he had a mental breakdown. He had a good job with the county that he ended up working 4 hour days until he retired. Actually, he never shared his experiences with me until he put a claim in with the VA. When he had to write everything down as to where he was when three incidents happened, I never ever had been privy to that information. I just sobbed and sobbed. Your dad is most likely in his late 70’s. Try and understand that his blocking out what he saw, is a way of protecting himself and possibly you too. My best...
Yes, absolutely. There was silence in a lot of living rooms during the evening news then.
This is what "Stand Your Ground" looks like. A neighbor asks you to stop firing your semiautomatic after kids and many adults are asleep, so you go next door and blow them away. Because after all it's YOUR yard and they have no right to tell you what you can do in YOUR YARD.
What do you bet that this shooter wasn't on anyone's radar as having "mental health issues"? If we started treating the need to own a semiautomatic weapon as evidence of possible "mental health issues," maybe we'd actually get somewhere.
Own it, hell, he was "known to sit in his yard and shoot the AR-15-style rifle `for fun'!
It's Texas so no red flag laws need apply.
"Police had been called to Oropeza's house on a couple of previous occasions over complaints about noise he was making shooting his gun in his yard, Capers said."
www.reuters.com/world/us/5-dead-texas-shooting-armed-suspect-loose-abc-news-2023-04-29/
The Wild West , and it's up to "us" to somehow pressure the Texas right-wing crackpots in power to rein it in?
A lot easier to fight endless, lawless feuds over land and riparian rights in the movies!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Big_Country
To quote Jennifer Taub: This.Is.Not.A.Well-Regulated.Militia
Neither are the weapons muskets ...
This. Is. Insanity.
People with guns kill people. People with assault weapons kill more people faster and more brutally. Ban these horrible weapons.
Thanks Lucian.
I mostly agree.
As a Air Force Medic
A retired cop
And a retired PI
I know the effect of realism.
But sometimes the effects of viewing can cause horrific trauma to the innocent.
The Clevland, Texas killings are Horrific. Photos to all Texas elected officials.
I don't think that sending horrific photos to gun-worshiping state or federal officials would have any effect whatsoever. These people would just delete the images and go right on obsessing on the right to own ever more deadly weapons. They are sub-human monsters without any conscience, ethics or morals; nothing anyone says or does or shows them would change their attitudes.
They're not monsters - they're humans. Humans will condone, or willingly participate in, war, slavery, and genocide.
“We are all strong enough to bear the misfortunes of others.” ― François Duc de la Rochefoucauld.
"Rats, dogs, and humans - three species that will eat their own kind." - Me
Monsters is more a figure of speech than a realistic description. I truly believe these people are EVIL-- not sick, not scared, not uneducated and worthy of sympathy and understanding. I believe they are pure EVIL!
Judith, you are very likely correct.
This I agree with.
I’ve been saying this since New Town. And if you’re too chicken to show the 8 year olds mutilated, then show the rooms after the bodies were removed. Just show them. It’s the only way we’re going to wake these paid-off Republican politicians to do anything. I live in Highland Park, where we had our own mini-massacre last July 4th.
I don't think there is a photo in this world horrific enough to change the minds of these gun-worshipers. They will just press "delete" and go on with their day, totally unaffected by what they'VE just seen. THEY DON'T CARE!
Judith, thanks for the comment. I used to feel that way, but I’ve sensed a change in people’s perception of the problem. More and more people are feeling anger and I think we’re due for action. I hope I’m right but wouldn’t be shocked if I wasn’t.
I hope you're correct, but I am not optimistic.
They may be the last to care but their families and partners may think better of it
Lucian, I agree that it's time to start showing the shooting victims. At the newspapers I worked at, in the 70s and 80s, the logic was that showing such photos would be to traumatize the victims' families all over again. Maybe I should say that the editors did not want to traumatize American readers. I've always felt that if the naked Vietnamese girl running from the bombing had been a white American girl, we never would have seen that photo. But now I think there is a greater risk in not showing what happens when weapons of war are easily obtained. AR-15 damage remains an abstraction to me.
Good to hear from you, Joyce! Everyone should go check out Joyce's Substack, one of the funniest things you'll ever read: https://joycewadler.substack.com/p/archie-and-veronica-and-betty-are?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1290075&post_id=117184291&isFreemail=false&utm_medium=email
Thank you, Loosh. Meanwhile -- though I will deny ever asking this -- where are the kit pix? Wasn't that smart former stray supposed to give birth any minute?
The Archie et al. stuff is fun, but the memoirish pieces are keepers—chapters waiting to hop into a book.
I agree. Back to the Catskills immediately! Or at least take us to Cuba with Mom.
And restaurants with $100-a-bite live food and Cynthia Heimel.
Yes, that picture is embedded in my brain forever! When it came out, I was attending marches against the Vietnam War and Nixon.
Many of us who served in the military have seen the horrible results of seeing flesh and bone being hit by a high velocity, tumbling semi automatic round. Others need to see it as well.
IF it truly is the case that "people kill people not guns" (bullsh*t) then regulating which PEOPLE are allowed to get guns should be the absolute priority. The insanity continues....
The ice cold heartless disconnect of the Republican Congressmen pushing to have war weapons be unregulated in our society is mind-boggling. They need to see the damn images of mutilation and unrecognizable bodies. And keep them up on the screen while they vote. Yep, that is theater but, that is because it is real. Get over it if you are going to vote for war weapons.
You can be sure the GOP would NEVER let this happen. But even if by some remote change such pictures were up on a big screen while they voted, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. Those people consider gun deaths to be necessary sacrifices on the altar of sacred gun rights.
As a little kid 70 years ago outside of Chicago, I can remember lots of bloody pictures of dead gangsters in the newspapers. I guess that pics of dead gangsters are OK, but not of regular people.
"Gammyjill" suggested just showing the bloody rooms without the victims would be shocking enough. I agree with that very good advice. Pics of 20 cop cars are meaningless.
Absolutely--the media are in collaboration with the killers in not showing the dead as they were found. They are as guilty of denying the truth as are the sick Republicans they often excoriate for doing the same thing.
I lived in Newtown, Conn, for thirty years and I won’t tell you what a cop said he saw on the awful day.
But that’s precisely the point. You SHOULD tell us what the cop saw. Protecting us from all the blood and gore does us a disservice. Not that I would like to see it. Remember what Gen. Eisenhower did to the German locals living near one of the Nazi execution factories: he made them, en mass, go to the camps to see the horrors. And he had all the camps filmed to assure there was a record for posterity. Something similar needs to happen at the sites of all these mass murders. Maybe then we can get some traction on gun safety/control.
I'd never read that about Eisenhower-- that he made people from the nearby towns see what had been happening literally under their very noses. I wonder what effect-- if any-- it had on those people. I'll bet the many anti-Semites among them just shrugged and thought "good riddance to Jewish rubbish!" I think you'd get much the same response from today's gun nuts. "So what? Who cares? Sometimes people have to be sacrificed in order to save our sacred right to bear any arms we want."
The gun nuts most likely would delight in seeing the blood, guts and gore.
The ice cold disconnect of defenders of assault weapons being in our peaceful society is stunning.
For money. All for money.
Words right out of my mouth. It is always about the money, whether war, weapons, politics or religion. It would be sad if it weren’t so detestable.
I once asked my father, who was an all-out conservative as one could get, why we didn’t have a gun in the house. He told me that if you saw what bullets can do to the human body in combat, you wouldn’t want anything to do with guns and bullets. He was one of the last draftees in training before WW2 ended and was qualified on the M1 Garand, a quaint popgun compared to the AR-15…
My father was a WWII combat infantry officer in the South Pacific. He helped bury 25,000 Japanese dead on Saipan. Our house had no guns, The subject never came up—and he was so right-wing I still shudder remembering his beliefs
Agreed. If the parents of the innocents killed at Sandy Hook did what Emmett Till's mother did, gun reform would begin to happen fast. As a parent I can understand why those parents wouldn't want pics of their murdered children made public but it would help towards ending our shameful gun death/injury rate.
At least the Congressmen should see images so they know what the hell they are voting for.
And they are correct "people kill people" with guns. And weapons of war have nothing to do with society-level self-defense. Show the damn images to our elected leaders. Try Sandy Hook. And make images available to those over 18 who want to see. Especially the Sandy Hook deniers.
We have people who gladly share military secrets to boost their fragile egos. Where are the hackers who can get these images and share them so that everyone can mail them to their "representatives"? There must be someone out there. Please, please step up to potentially save lives.
YES! Like Anonymous!