Sporting event, gladiatorial combat, its really no worse than enjoying a political round table that gets heated or an episode of Jerry Springer. Pick a team, enjoy. I wouldn't object except the 'teams' at a trial include someone who isn't their voluntarily and has presumption of innocence, and we never do this play-by-play with trials where that presumption is pretty obviously minimal, even for grotesque mass murders, twenty second recap of anything out of the ordinary but amusing during the trial, maybe once a week, then a two minute recap when the verdict is rendered, three for a slow news day. They also often gets so passionate that they spark riots and fights and vandalism and murder, Jerry Springer sparked fights too but they were unarmed and on air and I was going to say quickly broken up but they did tend to lag on pulling them apart I think, for the audience's pleasure I assume.

Well we all have gut reactions, that's unavoidable so nothing to worry over, render a kneejerk conclusion isn't likely to be terribly accurate but I'm pretty sure snap judgments are something of an evolutionary necessity. Its when one has time to contemplate it but can't eliminate, reduce, or ameliorate one's initial prejudice that it becomes a problem. I'd imagine that even trying not to I know a fair amount about this case simply by osmosis but my trick is whenever I have a gut reaction I immediately try to argue the other side to myself. Probably why I like the bad guys in a lot of stories.

It's the proxy part that really bugs me though, I hate when individual tragedies get used as the basis for laws, they tend to be very bad laws. And I've always felt there was a flavor of necrophilia to using someone's corpse to advance a cause. Everybody does it, but its still pretty fucked up. Nor do cries for 'Justice!' tend to move me much, since the loudest criers always seem to have twisted notions of what the term means. In any event, once one has turned an individual case into the basis for one's narrative on political causes then its basically impossible for someone to change their mind, they don't want and have an emotional anchor to the side their on. If I did view this case as all about gun rights then I'm stuck with that, because I sure as heck ain't going to change my mind about gun rights so I can't dare change my mind about the case. And while that's less despicable then carrying a corpse around as a banner its also a lot more dangerous in its own way.

Believe me, I don't need much of an excuse to sneer at the media, its just like politicians though, everybody blames them for everything while conveniently forgetting their own non-insignificant role in fostering such behavior.