If the appalling shooting of two American TV journalists during a live telecast in Virginia wasn’t terrible enough, the horrifying images were uploaded online and stayed for a while before being taken down. This cold-blooded murder became a spectacle thanks to the juxtaposition of video, violence and online platforms. The suicidal killer, himself a TV reporter with a history of conflicts, tried to justify his act as a revenge killing.
Not only did he write about it on Twitter but also uploaded the video on Facebook and sent a clip to a television station. But what this shooting signifies most is the world’s — particularly America’s — inability to rein in guns.
The killer, who finally turned his weapon on himself, had bought his gun quite legally. No one knows the problem better than US President Barack Obama, who recently declared the one area he felt “most frustrated and most stymied” was gun control “in the one advanced nation on earth in which we don’t have sufficient, commonsense gun safety laws even in the face of repeated mass killings”.
Mass shootings have punctuated his presidency at periodic intervals, but without any credible way in which the problem could be tackled. A commonsense law is what the world itself would be seeking as otherwise, a gun in an angry person’s hands in this age in which the outpouring of angst on the social media is an everyday occurrence, is the most dangerous threat to the life and liberty of ordinary people.
