So we have another shooting, this time in a theater in Louisiana. I can't stand it. I have to say this. Sorry it's long.
Guns don't kill people -- not unless you bash them over the head with one. It's the bullets that do the actual tissue disruption, both epidermal and otherwise.
Seriously, though, I see the same old arguments repeated every time multiple (usually) white people get shot by non-police and its predictableness somehow manages to be both sad and hilarious at the the same time.
When you get right down to it, the common factor in all these occurrences is not mental illness, it is not drugs, it is not the lack of gruntlement. It is guns. That fact cannot be avoided or ignored by even the most evidence-denying partisan.
Mental illness has been with us since the dawn of civilization. And many murderous attacks have been committed by both the cold, calculating sociopath and the berserk frenzy of one completely off the rails. These crimes have been greatly assisted by sticks, rocks, knives, ropes, pillows, water, baseball bats, crow bars and any number of other objects and substances that are perfectly safe to humans when used as intended, but that can be wielded with lethal intent.
But guns are different. When they are used as intended, injury or death occurs. They are designed specifically to cause harm. Their only purpose is to fling projectiles a really long way fast enough to inflict damage. Guns are also different because, while you have a fighting chance of evading a lunatic with a baseball bat if you detect him, a sniper can hide in the trunk of a car a hundred yards away and pick you off with no warning and no possibility of evasion (see Lee Boyd Malvo). Only a gun can do that.
Alcohol and other drugs have been with us since the dawn of civilization. Some people can use them responsibly and some people cannot. Those are separate topics about which there is much justified hand wringing and angst. They are associated with much misery, suffering, violence and death in their own right. Drunken rampages and drug-induced violence have occurred ever since those substances began being mixed with testosterone and estrogen. But it is only when you add a gun to that lethal cocktail that damage can so easily occur to so many innocent (or non-innocent) bystanders at such an unprecedented range.
Hatred and violent passions have existed since need and want became a thing. The invention of the post office only intensified the already existing tendency. But until the advent of guns, the pinnacle of lethality was the crossbow, which, though extremely deadly, is slow and and takes much strength to operate. And it can only kill one person at a time unless the intended victims obligingly line up in a row. With a sword-wielding cavalry or infantry at one's disposal, hate can do some serious damage. But such armies are expensive and come with their own set of constraints that render them impractical for everyday use by garden-variety hatred. However, with the advent of the automatic gun, one person can vent his hatred on many more people at once with a never-before-achieved range, speed and lethality.
No amount of twisting and squirming, finger pointing, misdirection, smoke and mirrors, plausible deniability, and squealing about rights can hide or change the fact that, without devices that can hurl a projectile far enough and fast enough to inflict lethal damage, these types of attacks could not occur.
The main problem arises because some people absolutely refuse to acknowledge the fact that guns are the key ingredient, the common factor, in all gun-related violence. They just are. In fact, by an amazing coincidence, that's why it's called "gun-related violence." Remove the gun from the equation and the lethality goes way, way down. The mental illness, the drugs, the hatred and violence remain, but the range, speed, effectiveness, unevadableness, and undetectableness of attacks all plummet.
Now, I'm not saying all this because I want to try to get rid of all guns. That genie is out of the bottle. The toothpaste is out of the tube. We tried banning alcohol during Prohibition and we all know how well that turned out. And we can all see how well the War on Drugs is going. Besides, guns are the great equalizer. They are a powerful way for a weak good to fight a stronger evil and were key to overcoming tyranny. Unfortunately, guns work just as well for orcs as they do for hobbits. And if the orcs get their claws on more guns, the hobbits must do the same or be defeated.
So is that it? Are we doomed to a future of unremitting bloodshed? Is there no alternative to this ceaseless arms race? Is there not some way to make guns so pointless that the technology just withers away and dies a natural death, becoming merely a curiosity of history, like the buggy whip industry? Or, failing that, can't we make it really, really hard for everybody to get them, like nuclear weapons? Probably not.
I don't know what the precise solution is. But the first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging there is a problem. I saw a meme the other day, something to the effect of "the solution to kids throwing rocks on the playground is NOT for teachers to make sure all the kids have rocks". I agree with that.
We _have_ a problem. And the problem _is_ guns. Specifically, guns are dangerous and there are far too many of them at large and in the wrong hands. That is the given, the starting point for the discussion. It is neither debatable nor negotiable, not because it is an article of faith, but because it is an obvious and fundamental truth, like 2+2=4. We know this because there are other countries that do not have this particular problem and one can observe the difference if one cares to look at the numbers.
Organizations like the NRA like to kick up lots of statistical dust to try to sow confusion in much the same way that lawyers and spokespersons for the tobacco industry have done regarding smoking. And so we have recurring killings of innocent people and nothing ever gets done about it because all our efforts are engaged in a big tug of war, the red team vs. the blue team. We're all straining to pull the rope with all our might. Sometimes the red team gains an inch and the blue team squeals in horror and pulls all the harder. Sometimes the blue team gains an inch and the red team yells an obscenity and redoubles its efforts. Back and forth we go and meanwhile nothing productive gets done.
I think the path to the solution hinges on Good and Evil. We have co-opted the word 'evil' to mean anything we disagree with. But in reality, no one thinks of himself as the Bad Guy, reveling in Evil for Evil's sake like Dr. Doofenshmirtz, the Evil Genius, sitting in his lair plotting to Take Over Ze Entire Tri-State Area! This image is a convenient fiction that we have invented to justify our actions and reinforce the rightness of our cause.
I offer the following as illustrations: to the Nazis, the Allies were the bad guys, and they were the virtuous and proud defenders of the Fatherland. To the Soviet Union we were degenerate, decadent capitalist pigs. In the Middle East we are the Great Satan. Some of the criticisms thrown at us we actually deserve, and vice versa. But they were or are as convinced of their rightness as we are of ours. And the more theistic regimes like the Nazis and the nations of the Middle East had or have a 100% certainty of God being on their side. "Gott mit Uns" was the inscription on the belt buckles of the German soldiers, "God with Us".
We have let this illusion of Good vs. Evil infuse us so thoroughly and so powerfully that we somehow fail to recognize that the only real evils of this world are Poverty and Ignorance (which includes Greed). But there is no 'us and them'. It's all just 'us'. And so we waste all our efforts fighting with people who essentially want the same things we do: our modicum of happiness and prosperity, and the freedom to live according to our own conscience. If we were to awaken to the senselessness of this tug of war and concentrate all our efforts on eliminating just those two great monsters, Poverty and Ignorance, all these other problems that seem so intractable to us now would just melt away like the dew off the grass.
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