Champ Kind said:
While I can understand your perspective, I sort of take exception to the isolation of 'Americans'. Your hometown (my assumption, here, sorry if I'm incorrect) hasn't exactly been rosy lately, either. Are you shocked by what's been going on in Toronto? How about Andres Brevik? The Toulouse shootings?
Again I get your point, but it seems way too simple for you to pile on to the typical passive-aggressive anti-Americanism many Canadians seem to have.
Well, let's clear something up right off the bat. My father is American. So are both of my uncles and my grandmother and numerous cousins and my departed grandfather. This has nothing to do, in the slightest, with any sort of antipathy felt towards America or its people.
But beyond that I think you're sort of missing my point. Yes I was shocked by the shootings in Norway(and read a absolutely chilling story about it at GQ today that I'd advise people to check out) but chiefly because Norway is a country that would rank among the very last I'd associate with gun violence.
In Toronto? I mean there's been gang violence, yeah, and the thing in Scarborough did surprise me because things like that don't usually happen here. The Eaton Centre too. There's been some bad examples of gang violence of late. But it's not like Toronto has become a city that rivals any major American city in terms of shooting deaths. Nobody's going to point to a map of North America and say "Yeah, Toronto is where there's a lot of gang activity."
As for Toulouse I suppose I had a bit of a more personal connection to it as anti-semitic violence resonates with me as someone who is vaguely Jewish so there was a bit of a personal connection.
So, yeah, like I said at the top this has nothing to do with not liking America or Americans just like our collective indifference to Africa has nothing to do with our disregard for Africans. It's just a statement on what we've grown used to. Regardless of whether you call America the Greatest Country in the World or The Great Satan or something in between you have to admit that spree killings like this are not unheard of and don't even really count as rare at this point.
More over, I've never gotten anything much in the way of the sense that when they happen things change at all. Astonishingly. there seems to be a move away from gun control and it's not like there is a booming investment in mental health either. Columbine, Virginia Tech, Gabrielle Giffords...none of those have sparked significant change. So it's not even like the fact that they continue to happen subverts any notions I have about progress in the area.
Like I said, it's a sad thing to say but it's true. News of a mass shooting out of the United States doesn't shock me because of the frequency with which it happens. There's no parallel there to one extremely isolated incident in Norway or violence of a completely different sort in Toronto.