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Home Front: Politix

Thoughts on prevention of mass killings of the innocent

2013-04-25

by Anguper Hupomosing9418

Anguper Hupomosing9418, please note for future reference the formatting changes made. Yellow highlight is for the poster's in-line comments within the article; to emphasize a section of the article's text, please use bold or italics. In this case, your commentary is so extensive that it became a bona fide opinion piece, with the linked article as support.

-- trailing wife for the moderators

Is it just me, or has there been a spike in murders of groups of people all over the country?

15 Apr: New York Police Veteran Kills Toddler Son, Boyfriend and Herself

18 Apr: 4 killed in Akron incident

22 Apr: 5 killed in Seattle incident

24 Apr: 5 killed in Illinois incident

Perhaps it just seems that way. Following is an excerpt from a December 2012 article "Law and Order in a Fallen World":

It is a natural tendency on the part of most human beings, when confronted with great evil, to want to do something about it. We want to stop the horror of death and violence and disease.

It speaks to what is good within us that we desire this -- it speaks to a recognition on our part, innate and abiding, that there is something terribly broken in this world -- a great mistake which has been made along the way, a gear missed in the works, a gaping hole where something should be. The feeling is all the stronger when we face the destruction of innocent life -- the life of a child.

The Mishnah tells us that the act of murder destroys a whole world -- the world as it would've been with that person in it. When the worlds wiped out are so young, the shock of it all echoes and rebounds throughout the lives of others for generations. And the only part that can be played by those left behind is one of charity.

This is a frustrating limitation...In the real world, there is no law that can make the murderously insane sane, or remove all weapons from their grasp. The tweaks that have been attempted in the past in our nation and others have proven insufficient time and again. And no step which disarms the law-abiding will help.

We are in the midst of an historic and statistically impossible decline in violence in America. The economic downturn, which would be a reasonable reason for a rebound in violent crime, has produced nothing of the sort on a nationwide scale. The experts are flabbergasted as to why, and the assumptions of criminologists are being tested to a great degree.

High imprisonment, high tech tools, more disciplined police forces, and cultural factors are all potential reasons. But it is clear that even as guns are available as ever, this has done nothing to drive up crime rates nationwide. And beyond: Steven Pinker has argued, convincingly, that we are at the most peaceful point in human history. In the midst of such declines, spikes of mass violence and murder are all the more jarring.

So all of the blather you are already hearing about how this can be blamed on the lack of gun control, or on violent movies, or first-person-shooter video games, or on some kind of general cultural malaise is based on a cheap emotional appeal rather than on evidence.

On the basis of the evidence, we can look back over decades in which such killings have occurred at a fairly constant rate and in which the cause has usually been the same. We can conclude that in a nation of 300 million people, there will be a certain number of people who become insane. Of those people, there will always be a small number -- usually young men, because young men have a natural tendency toward aggression and a fascination with violence -- whose insanity drives them to kill, whether to take revenge on society in general, or because of paranoid delusions, or because the voices in their heads tell them to.

This is a basic, predictable fact of life in human society, with no particular political implications and -- this is the part that's hard to accept -- no particular solution.

In the end, the options for what the law can do or society can do are largely limited. They will not prevent this sort of evil from happening again. This is infuriating, of course. All we can do, on an individual level, is prepare ourselves to do whatever it takes if we are put in the position of those who stand between the marauder and the innocent. We can take this time to understand that in that situation, there is always something you can do.

I see jihad-driven terrorism in this light. In the past and at this moment in history, ideology-driven rhetoric drives people insane enough to not only carry out but rejoice in committing acts of violence. It is like an undulant fever, but NOT insanity in a psychological or legal sense. This is an imperfect world without perfect solutions available to us.

Posted by:Anguper Hupomosing9418

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