Deja Vu

By now you've read all about the latest mass shooting, which happened Friday morning in suburban Connecticut, where six teachers and twenty children were shot and killed by a 20-year-old man. You don't need me to tell you what a heartbreaking tragedy it is. But the absolutely maddening aspect is that the events before, during, and after the disaster follow a well-established pattern, as regular as the tides. Several times a year, a troubled loner will decide he is going to take his revenge on a system that does not understand him. He (it's always a man, typically young) will plan his triumphant statement over the course of a few months, targeting specific people and/or plotting carefully to maximize the number of kills before turning a gun on himself. He will head to his local gun shop or, even better, a gun show, where he can easily purchase weapons and ammo whose only purpose is to kill people efficiently. The big day comes, and he heads to a public venue, typically somewhere indoors where it's easier to control the situation. With a full clip and an empty conscience, he is now God and Superman. Once he starts firing, it gets easier. A few minutes later, he is dead. Within the following week we find that he was seemingly normal, though odd and reclusive, and we wonder how it could have happened.

We don't need to wonder. They don't all follow that pattern exactly, but they tend to fit the general outline. Again and again. The most common variation is someone who flew into a rage and happened to have guns handy.

The reaction, on the other hand, does fit a pattern. And it drives me crazy. Because this is a societal problem, actually one specific to the US, reaction quickly becomes political. That's fine, because it's in the policy area that we're likely to find a solution. Or decide that no solution is needed. We've become so rotely partisan that the dialogue that ensues is entirely predictable.

1. We will debate whether we should even debate gun policy.

Red: Now is not the time to talk about gun control.

[Wrong. Now is absolutely the time to talk about gun control. Whenever someone says "Now is not the time to talk about X", they mean "We should never talk about X, because I really can't defend my position rationally." If a drunk driver kills a kid after having had eight DUI convictions, it's time to start
talking about DUI laws.]

Blue: We need to talk about gun control.

[Correct. But good luck with that. Obama is too concerned with his Grand Bargain to stand up to the NRA. That needs to change.]

2. Some NRA nutjob will give his expert opinion that the tragedy could have been prevented (or minimized, giving himself some wiggle room) if only everyone involved had been armed.

It's often Wayne LaPierre, the head of the NRA. After the Lynchburg massacre of VA Tech students, he bemoaned the fact that the students and teachers there were not packing heat. After the recent killings in Kansas City where a Chiefs linebacker killed his girlfriend in front of their three-month old daughter and his mother, LaPierre weighed in that everything would have turned out much better if the girlfriend (and presumably the mother) had weapons as well. That argument has never had any relation to facts or evidence. It reflects a fantasy of the Old West, with white hats and black hats, and at the end of the movie you know that the white hats are going to prevail.

3. The really idiotic arguments concerning guns will come out.

These are too great in number and too stupendously ignorant to cover completely, so I'll just gloss over a few:

- "He could have done the same thing with a knife."

No, he couldn't. How stupid are you? A gun is a ranged weapon. A knife is not. It takes much more effort, time, and proximity to kill someone with a knife. A variation on the knife argument is: "It's possible for X to kill someone, so if you ban guns you'd have to ban X", substituting anything from pencils to water for X.

- "Guns don't kill people ..." Yes they do. Are you willing to repeat your platitude to the parents of one of the children killed on Friday? Guns absolutely kill people. Don't hide behind the rhetorical device of agency. I suppose you're willing to claim that heroin, nuclear bombs, cigarettes, and cancer don't kill people either. Set any of those on a table by itself (a favorite exercise of the proponents of this argument), and no one dies.

- "If you outlaw guns ..." This one is so thoughtless I can't finish writing it. The proper finish to that opening is a lot less pithy: "... then at some point only the folks who should have guns, for example cops, would have guns, and we'd all be a lot safer."

- "Freedom". What freedom? Every society limits individual freedom in the interest of the common good. That's what laws are for. Guns make it very easy to kill people and serve no other useful purpose.
How about the freedom to gather in public places without getting shot?

- "The criminals already have guns, so we need them to protect ourselves." Good thinking. Surely more guns will solve this problem of excessive gun violence. By the way, we average over 30,000 gun-related deaths a year, orders of magnitude greater than any other first-world country. Maybe we should try going the other way and getting guns out of the hands of criminals. Just a thought.

- "The Second Amendment." Look up the word "anachronism". The right to bear arms is couched in the context of maintaining a citizen militia, a prevalent concern at the time since they had just spent years in the shadow of a standing British army. Also, the arms at the time were cannons and muskets. It's hard to imagine that the founding fathers intended for automatic rifles to be freely available to any lunatic with a few hundred bucks. That can only be defended by a strict constructionist (hope I got that right) view of the Constitution, which begs the question: Is there any limit? It just says "arms", so I assume I can have a tank, RPGs, and a personal nuclear weapon, as well as unlimited amount of biological and/or chemical weapons, right? Don't impinge my freedom, sir.

4. Politicians will make hay on both sides.

Progressives will be on the right side of the issue, but some of them will not be there for the right reason. Conservatives will be on the wrong side of the issue because their platform demands it, as does the endless stream of campaign contributions from the NRA (an organization that throws around words like "patriotism" and "freedom" while behind the scenes it attends to its real work, which is protecting the profits of weapons manufacturers).

5. At the nadir of the conversation, God will be invoked.

After any horrible event - natural or man-made - God's role as a wish-fulfillment delivery agent will kick into action. It's along the lines of "Our dog died because Mom wouldn't get me an Xbox", but typically on a larger scale with fancier language. At its most innocuous, believers will write the tragedy off as being a part of "God's plan" that is beyond our understanding (while everything that is within our understanding happens to dovetail nicely with the believer's own interests). Dear God: What, exactly, is your plan? Because it's looking like a pretty shitty one.

And then you have assholes like Mike Huckabee, who is leveraging the Newtown tragedy in an attempt to advance his political standing, claiming that God killed those children (or allowed them to be killed, hard to see the difference for an omnipotent being) because part of Huckabee's agenda - more Christianity in public schools - is not being advanced as much as he'd like. In other words, an omnipotent, all-knowing, wise beyond belief being is annoyed that prayer is not allowed in all public schools, so instead of smiting the godless liberals who have been taking religion out of school, he decides to off a bunch of kindergarteners instead? Sounds like a great guy; sign me up to praise him. Here's some news, Mike: If there were a God, you'd be dead by now. More news: There is no plan. There is no God. There are douchebags like Huckabee, studs like Cory Booker, and everyone else. It's just us, Mike. Get used to it and act accordingly.


I could go on in my clumsy way, but there are much better writers to offer perspective. The part that kills me is that it just keeps happening, and our willfully stupid national attachment to guns has a lot to do with it. In a few weeks or a few months, it will happen again.