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The Invisible Mass Shootings

open letter to Criminologist James Alan Fox

by Brian Ballard Quass, the Drug War Philosopher

July 6, 2022



James Alan Fox is a professor at Northwestern University who has been tracking mass shooting deaths in America since 2006. The following comment is in response to gun violence 1 in America: A long list of forgotten victims" published July 6, 2022 on WTOP.com.

Hi, Professor Fox.

I find the Gannett Corporation's coverage of inner-city shootings to be very un-enlightening, since they report on deaths without ever mentioning the Drug War. For as Ann Heather Thompson wrote in the Atlantic in 2014, "Without the War on Drugs, the level of gun violence 2 that plagues so many poor inner-city neighborhoods today simply would not exist."

Mayors around the country profess bafflement at the increase in such violence, and yet they ignore the obvious cause: the fact that inner cities are armed to the teeth thanks to the way that drug prohibition has incentivized drug dealing in poor and poorly educated communities.

Lisa Ling even produced a whole documentary about Chicago violence (over 800 killed in 2021) and did not even MENTION the Drug War.

This is why the Drug War survives to this day, because no one holds it to account for the evil that it's facilitating.

I hope you will do your part to get USA Today (and the other media outlets that you advise) to acknowledge this connection and to stop pretending that the yearly rise in inner-city gun deaths is some kind of inexplicable fluke.

As to mass shootings, I'm not sure they are as rare as you suggest, at least in inner cities. I think the reality is that the press does not characterize multi-victim shooting incidents as "mass shootings" if they occur in inner cities that are rife with daily gunfire. On July fourth, at least 5 people were shot outside a Richmond hot spot but I didn't see that story running nationwide, or even on news station WTOP.com, for that matter, located in Washington D.C., just 150 miles north of Richmond.












Notes for essay entitled The Invisible Mass Shootings: open letter to Criminologist James Alan Fox:

1: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)
2: Firearm Violence in the United States Center for Gun Violence Solutions, Johns Hopkins University (up)




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Ten Tweets

against the hateful war on US




The Drug Warriors say: "Don't tread on me! (That said, please continue to tell me what plants I can use, how much pain relief I can get, and whether my religion is true or not.)"

Drug prohibition is a caustic lye that destroys every democratic freedom that it comes in contact with.

Even the worst forms of "abuse" can be combatted with a wise use of a wide range of psychoactive drugs, to combat both physical and psychological cravings. But drug warriors NEED addiction to be a HUGE problem. That's their golden goose.

They drive to their drug tests in pickup trucks with license plates that read "Don't tread on me." Yeah, right. "Don't tread on me: Just tell me how and how much I'm allowed to think and feel in this life. And please let me know what plants I can access."

"The depression lifted from my mind like the sun coming out of the clouds." -- Arthur Crowley after using cocaine

The book "Plants of the Gods" is full of plants and fungi that could help addicts and alcoholics, sometimes in the plant's existing form, sometimes in combinations, sometimes via extracting alkaloids, etc. But drug warriors need addiction to sell their prohibition ideology.

What prohibitionists forget is that every popular but dangerous activity, from horseback riding to drug use, will have its victims. You cannot save everybody, and when you try to do so by law, you kill far more than you save, meanwhile destroying democracy in the process.

Well, today's Oregon vote scuttles any ideas I might have entertained about retiring in Oregon.

If Fentanyl kills, then alcohol massacres. The problem is drug prohibition, not drugs.

Thomas Szasz was not an extremist when it comes to drugs. The extremists are those who feel that psychiatrists know more about our mind and mood than we do.


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