It should be shocking, but…

How many mass shootings have we had this year? Maybe three, four, five…and the year is a little more than half over. While the circumstances and locations may be completely distinct, the scene is all too familiar. Young men – I’m not sure if I’m aware of a mass shooting carried out by a woman, yet – who for whatever reason are suffering from some psychological issue that never gets addressed, somehow manage to stockpile a cache of weapons without anyone being the wiser. Sometimes the guns are bought from friends or illegally; sometimes they’re purchased (along with rounds and rounds of bullets) from the local Walmart. But somewhere along the line the dangerous thoughts and plans turn into a reality. I don’t know what that point of no return is. Maybe for some of these young men it was purchasing the gun. Maybe it was just deciding one day that they were going to go through with it. Maybe they didn’t actually make up their mind until the shooting actually began.

I read a very powerful book about the Columbine shooting by journalist Dave Cullen. Cullen attempted to get more to the heart of the who the two gunmen were, rather than just paint them as mass murderers. Certainly Cullen was sensitive to the fact that the town of Columbine still had to live with the losses they suffered that day, and so did not try and justify or explain their actions, but instead tried to understand at what point they had made the decision to go through with their plan to kill their classmates and destroy their school. To use the Columbine shooters as an example, it seemed that the two boys made this decision at vastly different times. Eric Harris seemed to make the decision long before Dylan Klebold did. Harris did most of the planning, and seemed to be determined to carry through with it from the beginning. Klebold, on the other hand, seemed much less hell bent on killing his classmates and suffering the consequences of those horrific acts. But whatever the timing, this plan went into action long before the events unfolded. So it begs the question, how many other people have plotted awful crimes of this nature, but simply didn’t follow through with it? What stopped them? What didn’t stop those that did follow through with it? What happened to those that felt that way at one time, but stopped before killing someone? Did they go on to lead “normal” lives? Are they still plotting? Or are the type of people who carry out these acts determined from start to finish to follow through on them?

These are the scary questions that I think we as a society need to answer. Because the reality is that there are people out there right this minute that are plotting the next Columbine, or the next Virginia Tech, or the next Oikos University, or the next Aurora, or the next Sikh temple. Whatever the motivation, they’re planning these attacks; so the question is how do we prevent it? For most that are planning, they will hopefully just give it up, and move on. But for those that are determined to carry out these acts, what can we as a society do?

I think the problem is that our society has gone off the rails, and these people are the unfortunate culmination of a society that embraces guns and violence as a cultural norm, while at the same time repressing individualism and open expression. People are told that to be stoic is good and that showing or expressing your emotions is bad. So we have bred multiple generations of pent-up, angry teenagers who feel that their only outlet to let society know how they feel is by killing someone. Add this to the fact that young men are returning from war with terrible PTSD, but are unable to receive the treatment they require, so instead of turning the gun on a crowded movie theater are all too often killing themselves.

The question of what to do is not an easy one to answer, but the fact is that an answer needs to be found. The issue of guns is part of it. The second amendment (in fact NO CONSTITUTION AMENDMENT) gives carte blanche to carry any type of weapon, anywhere, at any time. All of the amendments to the constitution have limitations; so limiting access to handguns, assault rifles, huge magazines, rocket launchers, landmines, tanks and nuclear weapons are all perfectly within the scope of the legislature (I guess unless the Supreme Court decides otherwise). But limiting access to certain types of weapons won’t do it alone; the problem is much larger than that. We need to allow our society as a whole to express their feelings in an open, non-judgmental way. It’s not unusual for young men to have homicidal fantasies, but when they’re being treated as freaks or murderers for expressing these fantasies with words or pictures (instead of violence), this turns them off to talking about how they’re feeling; which is something that might potentially prevent them from carrying it out. As with all generations before, we have a lot to learn, but the only way to learn about why people are feeling a certain way, or why people do certain things, is to listen to what they have to say.

I leave you with a quote from The Dark Knight that I think is apropos:

“Nobody panics when the expected people [get] killed. Nobody panics when things go according to plan, even if the plans are horrifying. If I tell the press that tomorrow a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will get blown up, nobody panics. But when I say one little old mayor will die, everyone loses their minds!! Introduce a little anarchy, you upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.” ~ The Joker

I think the rationale is a bit unclear...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/13/us/code-on-shell-casings-sparks-a-gun-debate.html?ref=us

This just proves that the gun industry and the gun lobby care nothing about law and order, but only care about profits. Not that it was ever assumed before, I guess, but individual advocates of the second amendment and supporters of gun rights often use the argument that upstanding citizens should have no fetters on their rights to own and carry a gun. Okay, so let’s assume that gun owners keep them for going to ranges and shooting targets and/or for self-defense. I guess I’m not really sure how this law “would unfairly focus on legal gun owners when most crimes are committed with illegally obtained guns.” A rational person would say that this is the precise reason why this microstamping would be necessary, because it gives police detectives a starting place to look for the weapon used in a crime. Just because police come to your door asking about a weapon used in a crime does not mean they’re implicating you in the crime, it simply means that a gun that you once owned (or still do, but has been stolen) was used in a crime. This could be very helpful in tracing the gun to the last legal (or illegal) owner, and eventually help to solve the crime.

So why are the major gun companies and gun lobby against this legislation? Hard to say… Some say that it is a money issue; the gun industry says that it would add as much as $200 to each gun, but the State of New York – who is trying to pass a law requiring microstamping – not only says the price would be much lower, the law they’re attempting to pass would actually mandate that the increased cost would be no more than $12 per gun. I guess another reason why they’re opposed to it could be because the gun manufacturers are away that their products are purchased by criminals and/or stolen and used for nefarious means, but they would rather make massive amounts of money than actually protect the lives of the citizens of this country – or at least make it easier for police to find the guilty party when a crime has been committed.

FYI - The US gun and ammunition manufacturing industry includes about 300 companies with combined annual revenue of about $6 billion.

Things are tough all over...

Okay, I understand that the police have a difficult job. They have to make spit-second, sometime life-or-death, decisions. They are tasked with protecting the communities which they serve, and preventing crime and bringing justice if a crime is committed.
So why is it that so many people don’t trust the police? Why is it that so many people are afraid of the police? Well, I think that we as citizens fail to recognize that police look at the world from a completely different perspective. On-duty police (and even many off-duty police) look at the world and see potential criminals. If someone is doing something they deem to be out of the ordinary, they think there is justification for investigation. But what is “out of ordinary”? I supposed that depends on the individual officer, and therein lies the central problem. Sure, I think it’s important for officers to use intuition to monitor someone they believes is up to no good.
But why is it that in our country “up to no good” all too often means young black men? Are young white men never up to no good? Are you women never up to no good? Or is it that the police are hyper-focused – as the rest of society is – on young black men (and black men in general) as being suspicious and potentially dangerous? We can look at numerous examples where the police were following “suspicious” individuals (interestingly most of these individuals happen to be black men), the police sometimes undercover or in plain clothes, and wonder why an individual would run or react when the individual that was following them (ESPECIALLY when they’ve done nothing wrong), starts to run after them or pulls out a weapon. I know as a white male, if somebody starts threateningly walking toward me, and especially if they started to pull out a weapon, I would run as fast as I could.
The police never recognize that someone would feel this way, because they know they’re police officers. Never does it occur to them that the individual may not speak English; may not understand what they say; may start to run or walk away quickly as a precaution as soon as they see someone eyeing them suspiciously. Just because you run or walk away quickly from someone, it doesn’t mean that you’re a criminal. In fact, it usually means you’re probably scared yourself. The police need to recognize this, and act accordingly.
However, what the police – and society – above all need to recognize is that a young black man in a hoodie is not automatically suspicious. A young black man in a hoodie can be suspicious; but in the same way that a young white man in a hoodie, and young Asian woman in a hoodie, an old Hispanic woman in a hoodie, or anyone else in a hoodie, is suspicious. They’re only suspicious if they’re doing something suspicious. Walking down the street is NOT SUSPICIOUS. While George Zimmerman, and unfortunately man other people in this country, think that a young black man walking down the street in a certain neighborhood is suspicious, they’re wrong; and too often they’re dead wrong – although the death is that of the [non-]”suspicious” person, not themselves.
George Zimmerman has yet to be locked up, and that is a miscarriage of justice. I will reiterate what I’ve said in previous posts; I’m not trying to declare that George Zimmerman is guilty, but this shooting death should be treated like any other murder that takes place. We have his statement that it is self defense; he needs to be arrested, taken in for questioning, and the burden of proving self-defense will be on him just as it would be on anyone else in a potential murder investigation.