Two things

[scarfman]

Perhaps it's preaching to the choir to put it in my LJ, but I feel like doing my part to propagate what I believe are the two most important points in the discussion of the week's top news story.

• The actions of the shooter were planned with deliberation. If guns had not been available he'd've found another way. The gun control issue is irrelevant to the discussion of this event because greater gun control could not have prevented what happened.
• What could have prevented it was the psychological and psychiatric programs to which the shooter was subjected. Obviously they didn't, but you and I haven't any way of knowing how many people there are who, subjected to the same programs, have come away helped and functional. No system is perfect and every system has its unpredictable misses alongside its hits, and by their very nature there's nothing we can do about them except keep a level head when they happen.

Comments

[sidhekin.livejournal.com]

So, if not gun control, what is the difference between USA and Europe, that we have fewer cases like this, and that on average, each such case is less deadly?

The worst case I could find on a quick wikipedia search would be the Dunblane massacre of 1996, where 17 were killed. Within the last 25 years, I find two more cases of 16 victims each, but no more with 10 or more victime. In the same time in America, I find cases of 21, 14, 16, 23, 13, and 32, plus two questionable cases (arson killing 87 and deliberate plane crash kiling 43). (Also, the European population is more than twice that of USA, making the relative numbers even worse for the USA.)

If not gun control, what is the difference? Are we, as a population, just that much saner than you? or more difficult to kill?

(Oh, and for the record: Each European killer mentioned above had a license for the weapon(s) used. No system is perfect.)

[scarfman]

I dunno. It must be something cultural.

[(Anonymous)]

I might disagree with you ; after all, he would have found it very difficult to kill that many people in that short of a time with anything other than a brace of automatic pistols, and if he had tried to make a bomb he might have killed himself instead, by accident.

I think, however, that there is a different point we must not miss : the events would not have been so terrible if not for America's culture of non-resistance. I said it after the 11 September 2001 attacks, I say it every time I hear the police advising people not to fight back against an assailant, and it has now been brought home once again : we as a people have been conditioned to respond to violence with acquiescence. My cousin remarked that when she was in school, twenty-five years ago, someone coming into a classroom with his hands full of weaponry would have been rushed. In this case, the only person (it seems) who even thought of acting against the assailant was one of the professors, an elderly Romanian Jew.

It was in response to a previous incident of this nature that the State of Texas began issuing concealed handgun permits, apparently to give its once notoriously rough and ready inhabitants Dutch courage. Such an expedient is no substitute for the refusal to submit to coercion, whether arising from nature or from instruction in ethics. The principal problem, I think it may fairly be said, is not an excess of guns so much as a deficit of less tangible armaments.

--publius--

[scarfman]

Well, that constitutes something cultural.

How is that new policy working out in Texas? It's an interesting fact ... but, alone, it doesn't show anything. Are the lower death counts of the European incidents sidhekin compares to U.S. incidents due to hostages facing down the killers? Are they due to potential killers being less likely to go postal in the face of a culture more indoctrinated to resistance - is there any way we can show that? What proportion of the total homicide rates are the maximum single-incident death rates in Europe or the U.S. respectively? What about the guy in Nagasaki who shot the mayor this week with a registered gun?

There are too many variables. Where do they all fit? How can we even track them?

Without information we don't have - including information we can't possibly get (How do you measure the number of madmen who don't create hostage situations, to compare it to that of those who do?) - I think my comments stand. But they don't say, let's stand by without doing anything. They say, we have to admit that we can't do everything.