I didn’t do a blog post last week because I had it all ready to go, and then I couldn’t click “Publish” because in the wake of a mass shooting where eight people lost their lives, a post about stupid depictions of advertising in movies seemed just a little frivolous.
So.
Maybe next week.
This week, I’m going to, whatever, potentially alienate colleagues and clients with 1,200 words of run-on-sentence brain vomit about what the hell, if you’ll pardon my French, is going on here.
For those in need of a catch-up: Last week, a man entered three Asian massage spas in the Atlanta area and killed a total of eight people, six of them Asian women. Police managed to catch him just south of Atlanta as he headed to Florida to do more of that. And then, yesterday, a different man opened fire at a King Soopers grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, killing ten people, including the first police officer to respond and a woman who was just waiting in line for her COVID vaccine.
The weather is warming up, the flowers are blooming, states are prematurely lifting pandemic restrictions, Asian-Americans have been pleading for months upon months for more attention to hate crimes, and eighteen people are dead in two mass shootings (allegedly) committed by two men who were taken into custody alive and kicking.
There is… a lot there.
Race
Of the eight people murdered by Robert Aaron Long in Atlanta last week, six were Asian women. The shootings took place at three Asian-owned massage spas. Authorities say they haven’t found any evidence yet to charge Long with any hate crimes under Georgia’s new hate-crimes statute, which is at once arguable and infuriating. Yes, some steps have to be taken (like always attaching “allegedly” to someone who allegedly definitely murdered eight people) to protect the process and make sure justice, if done at all, actually sticks. At the same time, though… I mean, come on.
A decision that’s much easier to insta-condemn is Cherokee County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Jay Baker’s decision to dismiss the mere possibility of a racist motive on account of the (alleged) murderer said so. No, we’re told that Long actually claimed to suffer from a sex addiction and only (allegedly) murdered all those people because they were sources of temptation. And it was a “really bad day for him, and this is what he did.” (Baker was paraphrasing Long’s claim, but I think anyone would agree he made a bad choice in doing so.)
We’re meant, I guess, to accept the shooter’s claims and ignore the fact that despite the number of massage spas, strip clubs, and other dens of iniquity in the immediate vicinity of the two Atlanta spas (not to mention along his half-hour drive to Atlanta from Acworth), Long targeted the Asian-owned spas (which he himself claims to have patronized). And how the hypersexualization and fetishization of Asian women has turned them from human beings into basically mascots for sexual indulgence and submissiveness, victimizing them and setting them up as a perfect target for an armed man looking to make a bloody, violent statement about sexuality.
We’re also meant to ignore, one supposes, centuries of racism and oppression of Asian people and people of Asian descent in the U.S., from Chinese exclusion (and prior) to Japanese internment camps to ongoing racism surrounding the pandemic, with people as prominent as the once-president himself talking about the “China virus” and worse things I’m not going to report here, and derision and marginalization and outright violence. The 3,800 hate incidents logged just in the past year — and the uncountable number that went unreported — more than two-thirds of which targeted women.
We’re expected to accept all that, because the alleged shooter hasn’t said, “Yup, it’s because they were Asian,” that means his motives weren’t consciously or subconsciously racist. It isn’t enough that, with so many other options, he targeted Asian women for his sexual fulfillment, blamed them for his proclivities, and then targeted them for his rage, inferring racial motivations is a judgment call.
Cool.
Guns
We don’t know a lot about the (alleged, and ugh, I’m done with this — just assume I said it) shooter in Colorado — authorities are still in the very beginning stages of investigating, which is a dangerous time for trying to draw conclusions. We don’t know his motives or under what circumstances he acquired his firearm. We do know that the firearm in question was an “AR-15 style rifle,” which is to say, a lightweight semiautomatic rifle that fires off rounds just as quickly as you’re able to pull the trigger and is sometimes referred to as a “modern sporting rifle” by firearms enthusiasts who apparently prefer their game inedibly full of lead. And we know that just ten days ago, a judge blocked Boulder’s attempts to ban such weapons after they were used in the 2018 Parkland shooting.
And we know that Long legally purchased his 9mm firearm just hours before his shooting spree, with slightly less ease than if he’d been stopping by a gas station for a Coke Zero and a bag of Combos. (Because if someone goes into a gun store needing to buy a semiautomatic pistol right quick, he definitely doesn’t have anything planned.)
I’m not going to go into the Second Amendment, or Constitutional law in general, or the many and varied interpretations of a “well-regulated militia.” I’m just going to say that “AR-15 style rifles” have the sole purpose of killing people, and making it easy to kill people in great volume very quickly. I am asserting, without reservation, that “but my rights” and “slippery slope” aren’t valid excuses for the proliferation of mass-murder tools. And that people willing to stand up amid the dead bodies of human people and say that those are valid excuses need to reconsider their life choices.
This country needs gun control. Yup, you heard it here first.
Moving forward
Ultimately, all of this is about the victims — the people who were killed, and the loved ones left behind.
Authorities have only just released the names of the victims in the Colorado shooting. We know more about the victims in the Atlanta shooting. There was Delaina Ashley Yaun Gonzalez, mother of a 14-year-old and an 8-month-old who’ll never know her mother, out for a date night with her husband. Xiaojie Tan, who was two weeks away from her 50th birthday. Suncha Kim, a grandmother who loved line-dancing in her spare time. Soon Chung Park, who was 74 and whose husband tried to give her CPR at the scene when no one else would. And Paul Andre Michels, and Daoyou Feng, and Hyun Jung Grant, and Yong Ae Yue.
They deserve better. They deserve for people — regular people, authorities, legislators, every and all people — to take action and to keep paying attention to these things after the initial impassioned response subsides. And it would be great if people continued caring because they still cared, and not because there was another weekly shooting to grab their attention.
For those of you who’ve read all the way to the end, I thank you for sticking with me, and I apologize for not providing valuable content as I’ve generally at least tried to provide within the purview of an advertising blog. But that content all comes via my brain, and brain-wise, this is what I’ve got. I hope to God that, should you still want to stop by next Tuesday, you’ll be reading about stupid depictions of advertising in movies. I’m not sure the world can handle the alternative.
Brava!