Another day, another mass shooting. Same event, different location. Sometimes more are dead, sometimes less. The plot is depressingly and predictably redundant, except when it is your loved one who is sacrificed in the story. As various newspapers have pointed out, this is now almost literally a daily event*. Part of the background noise. Just another news item to ignore as we work our 60 hour weeks just to keep our heads above water.
What is the "patriotically correct" thing we are supposed to say at times like this? Oh yeah! "Now is not the time to talk about politics and policy which divides us. Now is the time to come together and pray and care for one another. We can have the tough political discussion later." And by later, we mean never. And by tough political discussion I mean getting shouted down by the gun lobby after the emotional impact of yet another mass shooting has worn off. And while I have been praying for this tragedy and its victims since I first heard, with all this blood on our hands from so many of these preventable tragedies, I fear the oracle of the prophet Isaiah might be coming true: "When you stretch out your hands, I will hide my eyes from you; even though you make many prayers, I will not listen; your hands are full of blood." [Isaiah 1:15].
We can check that off the list.
What else are we supposed to say? Oh yeah! "This is not supposed to happen here." Except, of course, we have socially engineered that it will by necessity happen here on a regular basis by our crazy lack of gun laws and protections. Because it is in the best interests of the military industrial complex for it to happen here. Because events like this drive up the perceived need for guns, and the perceived need to militarize our police, both because it makes people feel "safe", and because people feel like they need to stock up on guns "before the government takes them away". All the while arms manufacturers make money hand over fist on the fear.
So we set up a social system that guarantees what is often called "stochastic terror". It is stochastic because it is based on probability in natural systems. Just like we cannot exactly predict when and where bubbles will erupt in heated water when it boils, but we know with certainty that if you apply enough heat to water, it will boil. So also, we know that if you apply the social heat of fear mongering, to an infinite supply of guns, governed by lax gun laws, and purchased by emotionally unstable people who are fearful enough to feel the need for multiple military grade arms to "protect" themselves, then this will result in X amount of mass shootings over Y time frame, among Z population. This is NOT to say that everyone who wants to collect guns is driven by fear, but it IS to say that those who are driven by fear or anger to collect guns are precisely the kind of people who wind up committing these regularly scheduled atrocities. And right now that rate is set at basically 1 mass shooting per day, with really big "bubbles" of massive violence every month or so.
We need to realize that this kind of violence is not random in the normal sense of the word. It is now a normal, probability-dependent event, which will regularly occur within a certain time frame in a complex system which is governed by certain rules and inputs. It is now as regular as the sunrise, but without precise predictability. As a phenomena it is more like the dripping of water or radioactive decay than like a train schedule or movie times. But the reason why it happens at the rate it does is pure social engineering. And whatever has been socially engineered one way can be socially engineered another.
We can put in place legal protections and restrictions, and change moral and social messaging in our major institutions, to shift our culture in the direction of peace-making. Yes, there will always be the chance of truly random violence in any culture. But a knife attack can kill or injure a handful, while an attack with military grade weapons can kill or injure dozens or hundreds in the same time frame. And in another kind of culture-- a culture with different values and different legal protections-- violent acts could become actually random, as opposed to the socially engineered regular randomness which we have now become mind-numbingly accustomed to.
As an illustration of the effectiveness of social engineering, let us look at the issue of grenades. Grenades are classified as a kind of WMD because they are so effective at killing and maiming people (especially in large crowds). Grenades would be an optimal WMD to use for the evil "lone wolf" looking to carry out a mass shooting. So, why don’t they use grenades then? They don’t use grenades because grenades are WMDs that are illegal for individuals to own, and only available to businesses with very special permits. Thus, the reason for incredibly low rates of grenade attacks in the USA is directly proportional to the legal status and permitting of grenades. Since this is true, one can only imagine how much it would reduce mass shootings if we had a stringent permitting system for owning and using military grade assault weapons.
At this point I usually feel the need to make the proviso that I actually grew up with guns and I like guns. I like firing them. I like stripping them down and cleaning them. I like competing with them. I taught skeet shooting at summer camp. I own guns myself. But I would be more than willing to limit the number and kind of guns I own, to do a background check for my guns, and to register every gun I have, if it would mean changing the social engineering in our culture surrounding regularly occurring mass shootings.
And I don't take seriously the argument that private citizens need tons of unregistered military grade firearms because that is necessary for "a well regulated militia", so that we can fight the army if our federal government ever tries to invade us. The US military has tanks, bombers, missiles, attack drones, and nuclear weapons. If they ever turn corrupt and try to enslave us in a military coup, we are all done for even if we all own 5 assault rifles each. So waging some kind of "Red Dawn" style citizen uprising against a modern military is nothing but a libertarian myth designed to get us to purchase more guns.
Thus we come back to limitation of kinds and amounts of guns, background checks, and registration. I don't even mind if businesses like shooting ranges and sporting clubs purchase machine guns, so they can rent them to clients to shoot at the facility. It is a ton of fun to shoot these beasts. But there are some kinds of guns that private citizens should not own, especially without registration or background check. I think these are sane steps that any sane culture should take given the empirical evidence of what kind of mass violence we are creating on a regular basis. And the fact that we don't do them might be a sign that we are not behaving in an entirely sane way.
But let's be honest here. Our social engineering makes a lot of powerful people a lot of money. The regular randomness of our massacres are a marketing dream for the military industrial complex, and they are the ones who pay handsomely to our lawmakers to keep it that way. And our premier cultural value is money. We make money the god we serve and sacrifice people to, and then we stamp "in god we trust" on the money we worship. So we will probably continue to keep sacrificing people to profits under the guise of "second amendment rights" or "freedom" or "liberty" or whatever patriotically correct cover we can muster up to make sure money keeps flowing to weapons manufacturers. Thus, in all probability, we ought to resign ourselves to the fact that these regularly scheduled tragedies will continue indefinitely...
Unless someone like YOU speaks up.
*If you need more data, here is a horrifying analytic resource called "The Mass Shooting Tracker".
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