Cowboy culture and the rule of the gun

Authorities have been quick to dismiss terrorism as the reason for an attack on a local newspaper in the American State of Maryland in which five journalists were shot dead.

The alleged shooter was a man with a grudge against the newspaper after losing a defamation case against it several years before.

“It is a local incident and not one involving terrorism,” a law enforcement official was quoted as saying.

But this is missing the point.

Over the years millions of people have been offended by something that is written about them in the media, sometimes with good reason.

Mistakes are made, reports are misinterpreted, apologies and retractions are offered. Some cases go all the way to tribunals or courts. This is the way such disputes are resolved in civilised democracies.

Until now.

What decided the accused that he could settle things with the Capital Gazette by taking a shotgun, blasting into the newsroom and blowing away as many of its staff as he could before the police arrived?

The answer can be seen in the reversion to a cowboy culture that has been on the rise in the United States and elsewhere over the past decade, where those with opposite views are scorned, humiliated and threatened, often with overt violence.

It was a culture that got a massive boost with the election of Donald Trump to the White House, and which the president promotes in almost every vitriol-laden tweet.  

Trump has adopted a position where anger and ridicule replaces reason and debate. Unlike past presidents, who have at least made passing attempts to unite the nation under them after elections, he has unashamedly upheld his partisans and mocked those who opposed him, reminding them again and again that they are “losers”.

Often that loser tag was attached to journalists whose job it is to examine, criticise and question. In the US today, the media is either an unquestioning disciple of Trumpism, or its target.  

Only a few days before the shooting right wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos was reported as saying he could not wait for vigilante squads to start gunning down journalists. He later protested angrily that he was joking.

Just as you no longer make jokes about carrying bombs when you board an aeroplane, in the current febrile atmosphere of the US, and with the country’s laughable gun laws, it is criminal for anyone with influence to make jokes about shooting people, certainly not those who have been made a target by the Commander in Chief.

It is Jarrod Ramos who will eventually stand in the dock charged with those terrible murders, but the guilt does not rest with him alone.