In comments made regarding the recent Planned Parenthood shooting, President Obama stated:
I say this every time we have one of these mass shootings. This just doesn’t happen in other countries.
This statement, being offered in Paris, less than three weeks after the Paris terrorist attacks, is making the conservative rounds as a demonstration of utter tone-deafness. It is. 130 people were killed in those attacks, some by suicide bomb, some by shooting. To make a statement that mass shootings don’t happen in other countries as the city and country he’s in are trying to recover from the horror of one, is stunningly self-absorbed.
It is also factually wrong, even if we exclude the Paris attacks. Mass shootings of various sorts have happened all over the world, including Europe.
In some of his past utterances, President Obama added the qualifier “with this frequency,” and his defenders point to those occasions in defending his statement against assertions of falseness. This time, he clearly didn’t say anything of the sort, so I’m wondering how his statements will be proclaimed valid by his apologists this time.
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass contains a passage that tells us everything we need to know:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.”
So, in defense of Obama’s “just doesn’t happen in other countries,” we might specify that “mass shootings” are only perpetrated by individuals of particular demographics, with certain motives, and/or in certain situations and locales. All other incidents where multiple people are shot at one time are something else, whether it be “workplace violence,” “gang violence,” “civil unrest,” or “militant attacks.” So, by narrowing the definition of “mass shootings,” we can find a way to make Obama’s statement true.
The next part is the neat trick in this. We don’t overtly declare this definition. We don’t make it explicit. We use those other phrases when describing incidents that contradict Obama’s assertion, and let people fill in their own blanks and repeat as they will. So, when someone hears Obama’s “mass shootings don’t happen in other countries” statement, he isn’t informed that it’s only accurate if the plain meaning of “mass shootings” is narrowed down to exclude many incidents that a reasonable person might label thus. It’s a gimmick used in Critical Theory, where blanks are left for people to fill in per their own preconceptions and predilections.
It’s also dishonest.
Note that I’m not actually claiming this is the president’s thought process in stating what he’s stating. Perhaps he actually believes that mass shootings don’t happen in other countries, though the recent Paris attack and the Charlie Hebdo shootings from earlier this year are about as in-your-face as one can imagine. Perhaps he believes that “mass shootings” does exclude those motivated by Islamic terrorism, as if terrorists seeking guns and doing crimes operate in some parallel universe. Perhaps he meant to include “with this frequency” but didn’t remember to vocalize it.
Unfortunately for the President, Humpty Dumpty’s self-centered fluidity of language isn’t how the real world works. When people hear something, they expect it to mean what an average person thinks it means, and not have to torture the language to make it fit reality.
We don’t yet know the motive for the Planned Parenthood shooting. We do know that many of the proposals in the wake of other recent mass shootings would not have stopped the shooters from obtaining their weapons or committing their crimes, but it seems that this is of secondary importance. The President’s eupehmizing about the Planned Parenthood shooting point to an intent to act, and he may very well pursue some broadly restrictive measures that may very well do more harm than good when it comes to mass shootings, and will certainly infringe on our rights, but it seems that neither individual rights nor actual policy success are of high priority.
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