See America Has to be Exceptional No Matter What, Whether That is in a Good Way or a Bad

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press

BEIJING (AP) — Often the target of U.S. human rights accusations, China wasted little time returning such charges following the shooting at a historic black church in South Carolina that left nine people dead. Elsewhere around the world, the attack renewed perceptions that Americans have too many guns and have yet to overcome racial tensions.

Some said the attack reinforced their reservations about personal security in the U.S. — particularly as a non-white foreigner — while others said they'd still feel safe if they were to visit.

Especially in Australia and northeast Asia, where firearms are strictly controlled and gun violence almost unheard of, many were baffled by the determination among many Americans to own guns despite repeated mass shootings, such as the 2012 tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults.

"We don't understand America's need for guns," said Philip Alpers, director of the University of Sydney's GunPolicy.org project that compares gun laws across the world. "It is very puzzling for non-Americans."

A frontier nation like the U.S., Australia had a similar attitude toward firearms prior to a 1996 mass shooting that killed 35. Soon after, tight restrictions on gun ownership were imposed and no such incidents have been reported since.

A similar effect has been seen elsewhere.

"The USA is completely out of step with the rest of the world. We've tightened our gun laws and have seen a reduction," said Claire Taylor, the director of media and public relations at Gun Free South Africa.

Ahmad Syafi'i Maarif, a prominent Indonesian intellectual and former leader of Muhammadiyah, one of the country's largest Muslim organizations, said the church shooting shocked many.

"People all over the world believed that racism had gone from the U.S. when Barack Obama was elected to lead the superpower, twice," he said. "But the Charleston shooting has reminded us that in fact, the seeds of racism still remain and were embedded in the hearts of small communities there, and can explode at any time, like a terrorist act by an individual."

A 21-year-old white man, Dylann Storm Roof, now faces nine counts of murder for the South Carolina shooting. An acquaintance said Roof had complained that "blacks were taking over the world."

Many places around the world struggle with racism and prejudice against outsiders, but mass shootings in the U.S., where the Constitution's second amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, often receive widespread global attention.

Probably, no-one's more disturbed by or frustrated by the American obsession with guns and flat-out denial of continuing racism (shout-out for Chief Justice John Roberts ! *) than...the slight minority sane population of Americans.  Unfortunately, the history & the culture of said nation seems to have encouraged or attracted the development of an above-normal percentage of out-and-out lunatics in the population.

And as for the thing about the US being out of step with the rest of the world, the thing you have to understand, is that this is a point of pride in the US, where obsession with national greatness and inherent national superiority has turned the international and indeed consensus generally into something inherently suspicious.

One case in point being, the US' pride in being just one of three nations still refusing adoption of the metric system.  The US had pledged to do so, and presumably originally intended in fact to someday so do, but at some point, as it dragged its feet on and on, rather than let itself feel any guilt or sense of failure over the continuing delays over adopting Metric, politicians instead seized on the outlier status of the US as a point of pride, and started to turn what was once accepted consensus over international standards into an absurd bogeyman-style conspiracy.

Hence, here we are in the year 2015, such that when a Democratic candidate for the presidency says this:

Let's be bold -- let's join the rest of the world and go metric," he said during his launch. He clarified during a question-and-answer session after that it would be a "symbolic integration" meant to show goodwill to the world.

He acknowledged that shifting to the metric system could cost the U.S., but that "the economic benefits that would come in would surpass those costs of putting up new signs and the like."

The response of one of his Republican candidates for the same office is inevitably this:

Republican Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal has already incorporated it into an attack. In an email to POLITICO, his spokesman Michael Reed said Chafee is a “Typical Democrat — wants to make America more European. Governor Jindal would rather make the world more American.”

Because the entire rest-of-the-world would benefit so much from replacing something as easily understandable and easily calculated as a base-ten system of measurement with something from the Middle Ages based around such things at the size of a particular monarch's foot or hand !

The country is run, to the shame of its sane residents, by a bunch of childish extremists.  The sort of people who, in the wake of a historically black church being shot up by an evident white-supremacist extremist racist (the event itself in the wake of so many other acts of mass-shootings and so many other demonstrations of racial violence), argue that we must not make the event 'about race', and that those who want to bring discussions of gun-control into the debate are radical demagogues, and who insist that, really, the asshole was targeting Christians, not blacks.

Who did so, despite his own words to a survivor of the attack, explicitly outlining his motivations, and his desire to start a race-war.  Some of whom, will no doubt continue to do so, even given the recent discovery of an online manifesto making his violent racist aims and motivations even more explicit.

The United States' problem is perhaps its own success.  A nation rich and powerful for much of its short history, and so rich and powerful since the end of the Second World War that it has come to see itself as beyond criticism, as beyond the purview of mere mortals.  The US is/has long been suffering from a sort of God-complex.  Rather than embracing criticism, and learning from its mistakes, the tendency is to demonise the critics, and to celebrate even its own failings (such as say the dismal state of healthcare in America) as successes (it's a sign of how free we how we compared to you Euro-commies !).  Live free, die young and poor; But opportunity abounds; You could have been rich and successful...theoretically...

Perhaps demographic changes will one day reduce the ageing lunatic fringe to enough of a minority that the non-maniacs can take over the asylum.  The numbers are promising.  Then again, the lunatics may just burn down the asylum before that could/in order that that never be allowed to...happen.

Especially as the tool of choice in burning down this particular asylum would likely be not lighters, but cheap, readily-available, and hugely (especially, thanks to the NRA, since the inauguration of a certain black president) stockpiled bullets.


* As always, Thanks Harriet Miers !