The Orlando attack is a tricky one for me. I'm weary of the current trend of news reporting, for starters. It feels, to me, that there has been a breakneck race for people to be the first to use the attack to further their cause, be it preemptively bashing Trump, supporting Trump, turning their Facebook profile picture into a wee rainbow, the works. The news here has been showing blurry Snapchat footage of scenes inside the club with gunfire going off in the background. I don't feel that is necessary to further the news story. I remember news being quite stoic when I was a kid. As long as there has been a portable means of capturing film people have captured clips of people being shot, racing cars flying into packed crowds, aircraft falling to earth and bombs exploding in packed streets. The news doesn't have to show any of that. It ultimately gets to a point where you end up passively resigned and weary of the whole thing. I turn on the news at 10:00 now and see a sea of conflict, strife and injustice. If I turn my back on that I somehow become bourgeois and insensitive, but what can I actually really do about any of this stuff? I don't think the news is engineered to empower the viewer, or even inform them as much as wear them down and make them feel powerless.
Americans must be pretty tired of having us Europeans repeatedly chastise them over an issue in their country that they are no doubt acutely aware of. Guns are an interesting phenomenon because whilst they are a tool they really only fulfill a very select few purposes, and ultimately the outcome of their one task lies with the handler. Common sense stuff, and only incomprehensible to us in the UK at least because there isn't a gun culture here. Culturally I think European countries lie slightly closer to Kantian ethics perhaps, as a lot of what we consider normal (such as cutting around the place unarmed) is basically for the benefit of the broader society and places less responsibility on the individual. I'm not saying anything is better or worse than anything else, only that the repeated criticism of mass-shootings in the US is often coming from people with a limited frame of reference. We have some fairly murky practices both currently and historically in Europe. Heck, last week we in the UK were celebrating the 90th birthday of an unelected figurehead who has a surprising level of influence on policies for a random old woman, and who is German but we all pretend is British. The PR team that work round the clock to maintain and promote a very tight image of the UK Royals, and who are always pulling people 'into line' seems bizarre, draconian and unhealthy. The UK also has a massive drink problem that nobody wants to talk about. No society is perfect, after all.
I care about the attack in Orlando, but only so much. I don't know any of the victims as far as I can tell, and I'm not sure their families really care a squat that some rando in Scotland has turned their Facebook profile picture into a wee rainbow for the next week or so. I do feel that many try and outperform each other in the public display of mourning, especially on the aforementioned Facebook and the like. When it gets to the stage that you feel you have to do something lest you end up the sore thumb then that isn't right.