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| What is the oroximate cause of the latest college shooting? by Commander Tansin A. Darcos 10/02/2015, 8:50pm PDT | ||||
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| I happened to have a doctor's appointment today, and as I normally have been watching almost no live or broadcast television or catching general news at home, when I got to the opthamologist's office they had CNN on where it was covering the recent school shooting at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, which apparently happened yesterday, ended in nine people dead, plus the shooter, an event which I was unaware of until this morning. I watched and listened to quite a bit of the coverage.
Someone pointed out how these are happening in what are supposedly Gun Free Zones, and the usual blathering about more gun laws are needed, (as if adding more laws to the 20,000+ already on the books that didn't help this situation will do anything to prevent the next one). The sheriff who represents the area where this tragic incident has happened has been a strong public supporter of gun rights, and who, when interviewed, refused to be baited into making a statement either way, said that his focus for now was to properly investigate this incident, including looking for potential co-conspirators, and was not going to comment about other issues. Someone else said something I think was important. They said, let's not look at whether we need more guns, less guns, more gun control, less gun control, or other things, let's try and look at what was the proximate cause and try to solve that. I agree. And I'll give you what I think is the proximate cause. First thing popped into my head, and I belive quite strongly that it is the primary reason that over the last 30 to 40 years we've seen much more violence, especially gun violence, as opposed to much earlier times, when guns were even more accessible to people. In Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction novel Time Enough For Love, Lazarus Long is time traveling back to 1918 just before World War I, to a time where guns were legal and incidence of crime was so low that almost no one carries them in public, as compared to a (fortunately fictional) time from earth's future in the same city (Kansas City) where guns are outlawed and almost everyone has to concealed carry (multiple) illegal weapons or they are subject to robbery, murder or worse where it is very likely the perpetrator will not be caught and probably never will be caught for any of their crimes. Let me give a couple of reasons to eliminate guns as a proximate cause of this increase in violence, because first, if guns were the proximate cause, this would not have been the 15th educational site shooting since the Sandy Hook massacre in Newtown, Connecticut in December 2012, it would more likely have been the 150th, if not more. If guns were so attractive to the commission of killings and the proximate cause of same, I think in three years we'd see hundreds of shootings of this type, not an average of one every two months, but more like one every day, or every week, like robberies, rapes and other violent crimes are committed hundreds of times every day in this country (and elsewhere). While some people commit crimes of opportunity and I think given a big enough risk vs. reward potential almost anyone would get involved in a criminal enterprise, e.g. Hans Gruber and his $600 million heist disguised as a terrorist attack in Die Hard. I think you'd find it even easier to recruit people to get involved in, say, a white collar crime where no one was going to be killed or injured, just some banks robbed electronically. Most people are not sociopathic mass killers, it cannot be the presence of guns or the availability of guns alone. Something else must be bringing out this tendency in some people. Second, guns just make killing faster and more efficient, they are not the proximate cause of the rather high levels of violence. Guns have been readily available over the 230+ years of this country's existence but gun shootings have been rare until the 1960s, Make that extremely rare. Two men kill a family of four in rural Kansas in the 1950s and it becomes national news, so much so that the killing of the Clutter family was reported by Truman Capote in the book (and the later movie) In Cold Blood which depicted the killing and the subsequent trial, conviction and execution of the two killers. Before 1968 you could legally purchase any kind of gun, handgun, rifle, or shotgun, oppenly by mail just as you can buy a book (or almost anything else) from Amazon.com. Sears Roebuck sold guns in its catalog. Nobody thought twice about it until Lee Harvey Oswald bought a Mannlicher-Carcano bolt-action rifle from a mail-order dealer, primarily because it was a cheap ($23) Italian war-surplus (as in World-War II) firearm. It was common practice that people who traveled across country who needed to have a firearm with them (either they routinely carried one, were a firearms dealer, or carried one because they carried valuables) just wore it in a holster or carried it in their briefcase when going on a plane. It wasn't until excessively large numbers of hijackings curtailed that practice, but as 9/11 showed, stopping guns doesn't prevent hijackinngs either, as long as you can get any deadly piece of equipment on a plane you can threaten it. No, and I have said this before, that I believe the real reason is the excessive prescribing of psychotropic drugs and the number of people who have serious bad reactions to them. Often this prescribing is being done by people who don't have the proper medical training (like school nurses) and that too much of these drugs are being given out too freely to children, for which these products have often not been properly tested, and often used as a chemical babysitter to quiet down the so-called "unruly" and "problem" children. I said before, earlier, here in a reply I posted on Caltrops in my section to someone else's comments. Here's the pertinent excerpt: Commander Tansin A Darcos wrote:- Psychotropic drugs and mass murder, July 25, 2015 I said earlier in this polemic that guns make killing faster and more efficient, but they aren't the proximate cause. Any tool or mechanized device can make the process it is used for more efficient, but a tool is amoral, it is neither good or bad in and of itself, it is how it is used. The Nazis back in the 1930s did mass extermination of more than six million people, all with slow, labor intensive paper recordkeeping. They had no computers at all to assist in their mass murder schemes. That doesm't make paper records evil, It also shows all computers can do is make a particular practice more efficient and either create capacities which cannot be done without mechanization (some real-time processing requiring high levels of precision), or cannot be done without huge amounts of personal labor (imagine processing all checks, credit cards and other transactions manually, with nothing but clerks and the telephone, how much longer processing would take.) We don't hear about people doing mass shootings at police stations and gun shows where there are lots of guns, because the people there know how to use them. As it's been said "Guns don't kill people, bullets kill people." Oh, sorry, wrong phrase. it's "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." Guns just make killing more efficient the way computers make processing paper records more efficient. That doesn't make either - or the possession of either - evil or wrong except in how they are used or what the user's intent might be. If Switzerland decided it wanted a nuclear weapon (let's say they stated it was for research purposes in how the blast would affect stability of geologic areas if striking a mountainous terrain, i.e. they wanted to know what the effect if one was used on them), most of us could roll over in our sleep; Switzerland has been a neutral country and has had no interest in bothering its neighbours for over 400 years. When Iran or North Korea wants one, we have to be very concerned because the people running those countries have been known to be nutcases who are suicidal enough to use one (or more). A nuclear weapon is just a tool, it's the intent of its owner that dictates the danger to others. We need to look at the user of the tool, in this case, firearms, to see what has changed. And this - the excessive prescribing of psychotropic drugs over the last 40 years - seems to be a very strong indicator of the proximate cause as to why things have changed. |
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What is the oroximate cause of the latest college shooting? by 10/02/2015, 8:50pm PDT  Re: What is the oroximate cause of the latest college shooting? by 10/03/2015, 11:17pm PDT Re: What is the oroximate cause of the latest college shooting? by 10/04/2015, 6:24am PDT Re: What is the oroximate cause of the latest college shooting? by 10/05/2015, 5:16pm PDT Instant celebrity for the shooter has nothing to do with it? by 10/04/2015, 10:16pm PDT Re: Instant celebrity for the shooter has nothing to do with it? by 10/05/2015, 5:01pm PDT |
