California

In the wake of the shooting in California. Two things occur to me.

1) Gun control, the basis for it, the plausibility of it, the nature of the debate for or against it, and both the futility of it and the enormous demand for "something to be done" hasn't changed at all since I last wrote about it at length. It probably hasn't changed since I first wrote something about it to be honest. About the only good news is that it took a lot longer to get around to talking about guns, because there other issues at play worth discussing instead.

2) This one horrible act of violence has spawned a curious debate about privilege and the general societal culture when it really should have or could have remained focused on misogyny and gone a lot further and been far more productive. Because that as a motivation is pretty sufficiently vile to be worthy of debate and discussion. Apparently being an ass to women, objectifying and demanding of their attention, and then acting violently when they possess agency and ignore or reject attention, is not a big enough deal to be a cause de jour without tying in a lot of other speculative junk and trying to attack that too.

(just to clarify, white or male privilege is a thing, not "junk", and there are elements of popular culture that may be debatably subversive or interpreted in dangerous ways by a small fraction of the population, but these are very separate arguments and lack the complexity of "guy hates women for not giving him sex", which treats other human beings as objects who exist simply for our pleasure. That's a serious problem with a set of complex causes, but it's a problem that can be pushed back against much more easily than the others)