I think horrible things like this bring out "Magical Thinking" in many of us: we see the horror and react with what seems to us to be a simple solution, and really believe that will solve the problem. Unfortunately, those simple solutions rarely, if ever, solve the problem they were intended to solve, and they often create unintended consequences.
This article by Jim Geraghty is the most rational look at the situation I have seen:
Grappling With It All by Jim Geraghty in Morning Jolt, Dec. 17, 2012
So, when something awful happens — and the mass murder of kindergarteners is about as awful as it gets — you're going to want to stay off Twitter, and probably the Internet entirely.
We know the coming days will see a lot of cries for gun control, even though many of those proposals would not have prevented this most abominable of massacres. The guns were purchased legally by the gunman's mother, and the shooter took/stole his mother's legally purchased firearms. He was turned down when he tried to purchase a rifle several days before the shooting. This won't change the arguments of the advocates very much, though. After the Virginia Tech shooting, Mayor Bloomberg and various other gun-control advocates kept saying that the proper response was to "close the gun-show loophole" — even though the shooter did not get his weapons at a gun show.
The one thing the gun-control people claim is that they're not gun grabbers, and they don't want to literally ban every gun in the US.
But . . . banning every gun in the US is the only possible gun-control measure that could plausibly achieve the results they seek. If there are any guns in the country, at all, presumably criminals will ignore laws against possessing them (as they currently ignore such laws) and also ignore laws against, well, shooting people with guns (several statutes cover this, pretty exhaustively, and yet they still ignore it).
So all gun control laws are aimed, essentially, at the one class of persons who have already demonstrated their intent to ignore gun laws. The laws are aimed at the very people who don't obey them, but it is taken as an article of faith that if you just disarm the people who aren't breaking the law, for some reason the criminally-minded will follow their lead.
Well, that's absurd, obviously. The only way that a criminal who is determined to get a gun and use it for a criminal purpose will not have a gun is if there are literally no guns to be had-- no guns to be stolen, no guns to be bought off Craigslist, no guns, period.
Still, we find ourselves with horrific news-dominating murder sprees about every six months or so, and the sense that this is "just the world we live in" or "the price of a free society" are ringing rather hollow.
The one gun-control proposal I'm starting to think about is the argument about extended clips. The standard version of the Glock, the most popular handgun in America, has 17 rounds in its magazine. I believe in a near-universal right to carry arms for self-defense, but does anyone feel their ability to defend themselves — the guy working the midnight shift in a convenience store, the coed walking home alone, the senior citizen in a bad neighborhood — depends upon the ability to fire more than 17 rounds without pausing to reload?
Under the Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004, magazines were limited to 10 rounds. Almost all of the most notorious mass killers in recent years — Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Tucson, the Long Island Rail Road — used guns with 15-round clips or more. (The Colorado movie theater shooter had a 100-round magazine that jammed.)
Of course, an extended-clip ban wouldn't end mass shootings. But it would mean that every maniac on a killing spree would have to pause to reload at some earlier point than some past shooters have, perhaps giving other victims a better chance to overpower him or escape.
But in the end, we're still left with the bigger problem: young men who want to kill as many people as possible.
We have quite the well-established profile by now, don't we? Young men alienated from their peers and society at large. They don't have many friends; they don't have girlfriends; they feel denied some sort of recognition or appreciation they deserve. They respond to this with an emotion so far beyond the garden-variety frustration, depression, or anger that it's hard to comprehend. Oftentimes they leave some sort of note or e-mail detailing their grievances against the world. They decide that they're going to become famous and well-known in death in the way they never could achieve in life — and then a world that never seemed to care about their troubles or how they felt will spend a lot of time thinking about them.
I'm pretty convinced that the media coverage fuels these impulses in these young men, disturbed and full of rage and desperately craving some recognition of them, their potential, their pain.
John Tabin spotlighted this assessment from a forensic psychiatrist:
If you don't want to propagate more mass murders . . .
Don't start the story with sirens blaring.
Don't have photographs of the killer.
Don't make this 24/7 coverage.
Do everything you can not to make the body count the lead story.
Not to make the killer some kind of anti-hero.
Do localize this story to the affected community and as boring as possible in every other market.
And of course, each one seems to spur copycats.
A northern Indiana man who allegedly threatened to "kill as many people as he could" at an elementary school near his home was arrested by officers who later found 47 guns and ammunition hidden throughout his home.
Von. I. Meyer, 60, of Cedar Lake, was arrested Saturday after prosecutors filed formal charges of felony intimidation, domestic battery and resisting law enforcement against him. He was being held Sunday without bond at the Lake County Jail, pending an initial hearing on the charges, police said in a statement.
Cedar Lake Police officers were called to Meyer's home early Friday after he allegedly threatened to set his wife on fire once she fell asleep, the statement said.
Meyer also threatened to enter nearby Jane Ball Elementary School "and kill as many people as he could before police could stop him," the statement said. Meyer's home is less than 1,000 feet from the school and linked to it by trails and paths through a wooded area, police said.
Again and again:
A Bartlesville High School student is in custody on charges he plotted to bomb and shoot students at the campus auditorium on the same day that 28 people were shot and killed at an elementary school in Connecticut.
Police arrested 18-year-old Sammie Eaglebear Chavez at about 4:30 a.m. Friday after learning of the alleged plot Thursday.
An arrest affidavit says Chavez tried to convince other students to help him lure students into the auditorium, chain the doors shut and start shooting. The Tulsa World reports that authorities say Chavez threatened to kill students who didn't help.
The Bartlesville Examiner-Enterprise reports Chavez planned to detonate bombs at the doors as police arrived.
It feels like we're in a sickening game of "can you top this" by evil people. "You shoot up a politicians' event, I'll shoot up a movie theater." "You shoot up a movie theater, I'll shoot up a kindergarten." Each twisted soul is upping the ante for the next to really shock and horrify us — a senior-citizens' center? A nursery school? A neonatal intensive care unit?
The usual argument on this point is "we need to ramp up our mental-health efforts," but that's easier said than done. And what we're really talking about is involuntary detainment and observation of people if they are deemed threatening by "odd behavior." If you think seeing therapy and mental-health treatment is stigmatized now, wait until the government can easily access your mental-health records without your consent to determine if you're a threat to society.
You'll hear an argument about arming teachers, a solution that has its own problems, among them that the security at any given school will depend upon A) teachers willing to carry weapons in their classrooms and B) their ability to control a firearm at all times. The first time a teacher forgets and leaves their gun where a student can touch it, that whole policy will become the newest scapegoat.
I'm not sure that school security is really the right focus, because most schools, with their press-the-buzzer-to-enter, check in at the front office, closed-circuit television cameras, and so on, are not built to stop a determined murderer with multiple guns. Few facilities in our country are. And to be honest, I'm not quite sure I want to rearrange every school in America to be a fortress, designed to stop a determined murderer with multiple guns; the result would be the mass "TSA-ization" of American life.
Finally, over on Slate I saw this comment :
As Slate's David Plotz wrote in an email this morning, "If you stigmatize the ownership and use of guns for most recreational uses—and in particular the ownership of handguns and non hunting weapons—there will be less presence of them in the culture, less use of them, gradually fewer and fewer of them in society, less tolerance for people talking about them and playing with them, and as that happens, guns will become less present, less accessible, less embedded in American society and that gun crime will fall accordingly . . . It is not a single legislative change or even an overnight cultural change. It is a gradual process."
We already have plenty of places in America where gun ownership is stigmatized: any reasonably liberal community or workplace, university campuses, schools, the Slate offices, and so on. Of course, because the culture of those locations so strongly stigmatizes gun ownership, the malicious among us know that they will never encounter armed opposition when they arrive to perpetuate their mayhem. (You notice nobody ever tries to rob NRA Headquarters.) The anti-gun perspective that so many of our friends on the Left showcase as an example of their enlightenment and nobility also, in fact, sends a signal to the evil of the world that they will make comparably easy targets.
ADDENDUM: Sorry, nothing was funny today. Maybe tomorrow will be different.
from National Review.
