We all deal with life’s daily troubles, frequently without giving them a second thought. They are common place to us—the bills, the squabbles, the sicknesses. When these things happen, provided we still find them manageable, we don’t often switch into panic mode, but take a calmer approach to getting through it.
When really tragic things happen, however, we can lose our minds and behave as if this world were supposed to trouble-free after all. This latest school shooting incident is a good example, as school shootings normally are.
Knee-jerk responses to it range from “Give the teachers guns” to “take away everybody’s guns”. But neither proposed solution would stop such atrocities. (And I’m assuming here, for the sake of argument, that this shooting really did happen as reported, and is not some elaborate charade.)
If all the teachers were armed and trained, it’s still quite possible that a shooter could get in and kill at least one person before he or she was gunned down by an armed teacher. Similarly, if all civilians were disarmed of their guns, murderers could use other means to murder. There is no law or strategy that will make it impossible for murder and other atrocities to occur. Indeed, the Texas shooter would have had to break several existing laws to do what he did. Right? So, law alone is not a sure-fire solution.
Neither is religion, I might add. Nor education. Nor science. Violent people have certainly come from all these backgrounds.
It’s not my intent to analyze this particular shooting; that would be another article. And no, I’m not happy with how these things are normally handled. With the Feds generally being in charge of such investigations—and with the Feds being proven liars in so many other matters—it would be foolish to think they would never manipulate the public by publishing false conclusions as to what happened and why. Indeed, such events seem exceedingly useful in the common political games. “Never let a good crisis go to waste” is the catchphrase that comes to mind. And no, I wouldn’t put it past the worst of the lot to go so far as to create such atrocities quite on purpose, and for political ends. Yes, there are some people who are that evil. And it has always been thus. Has it not?
So, I don’t know what to believe about what happened in Texas and why. But I know that in this world, we will have trouble. And while we seem fairly well-adjusted to that in our routine daily lives, big events like this one tend to trigger some pushback in our minds, where we don’t do so well dealing rationally with the bigger troubles of life.
I don’t at all mean to dismiss or minimize the Uvalde, Texas tragedy, but we would do well to keep in mind that we all die in time, and that death itself isn’t something we consider unnatural. Let us observe about ourselves that the daily obituaries don’t send us into panic mode. Neither do the daily crime reports, generally. No, it’s mostly the mass killings that push some of us into panic. So, my point is that it’s not death and violence themselves, but lots of it all at once that sends us over the edge. And when we consider possible countermeasures, it’s easy to get irrational, hoping for a once-and-for-all solution, such as outlawing the guns—even if we can easily reason that this would not put an end to mass murder.
We often choose to be irrational about such things on purpose. Someone can point out the facts and logic to us, and whether we say the words out loud or not, we do indeed push that “I don’t care” button in our minds. (Yes, I’m speaking figuratively here; there is no such button literally.) But since when is this the right solution to anything? Yes, it might make us feel good to “just do something!” just as pounding the desk might make us feel good (sort of) when our computers aren’t working right. But does pounding the desk fix anything? No. And don’t we know that it doesn’t fix anything? Yes. And what’s worse is when we toy with the idea of throwing the computer across the room—as if that’s going to fix anything. Now we’ve crossed from useless pounding to destructive measures that are seriously counterproductive a costly!
When we toy with going after the guns, it’s like throwing the computer across the room. Perhaps we might have thrown it because the email’s not working right, but with the broken computer, we can’t do any of the other things computers do, either. So now we’ve hurt ourselves in our rage. And how dumb is that? If we make it impossible for millions of Americans to protect their homes and lives every day with guns, that is certainly overkill. And while that might make some of us feel better for a short time, how will we feel when we see crime go up and violence and murder increase as a result of it? When we see the bad effects of our irrational policies, will we still feel good about ourselves?
Yes, some will try to feel good about themselves. The make much use of ideas like, “If it saves just one child’s life, then it was all worth it.” But I don’t generally hear those people thinking it out further, such as in, “If this policy costs one child’s life, then it’s not worth it.” How can there be a coin with a heads, but with no tails? This kind of reasoning should work both ways, but since dealing with the back side of that coin doesn’t facilitate the rush of “would somebody just do something???”, they just refuse to think about the back side and focus only on the front. And so, they would disarm the millions on a reckless gamble that it might save at least one child’s life in some school or other.
The Colt Peacemaker revolver got its name because it leveled the playing field, so to speak. It gave the small, weak, and peaceful the same killing power that it gave the large, strong, and violent. And it acted as a useful deterrent to bad guys. Was it a perfect deterrent? Of course not. What is? Even under the risk of being shot to death trying, some bad guys continued to risk doing bad things. But surely, not as many would risk it, for some bad guys are not completely unreasonable. An armed public gives reason to the bad buy to curb his bad acts. So, as long as the bad guy is reasonable, then it’s effective. And so it goes with fences (that can be climbed) and door locks (that can be picked or busted); they keep the honest out. And the laws against breaking and entering keep the reasonable out.
But what if a bad guy is neither honest nor reasonable? What then?
As long as humans have the natural human freedom to do whatever they want inside their minds, we will always have dishonest and unreasonable bad guys who are pushing the limits. We’ll never invent a fail-safe for this. So, when somebody goes further than most violent people do, and murders a lot of people at once, this gives us opportunity to see just how dangerous freedom can be. So we’re tempted to toy with freedom as a rule, and to go beyond punishing the bad guy to punishing everybody. And that’s a policy that we have known from childhood to be unfair and stupid. When the whole class was punished on account of the unruliness of a few, we knew it was unjust and stupid.
And now here we are, all grown up, and threatening to do that sort of thing ourselves. Again. No, it’s not any more reasonable this time than the last time, but we’re doing it again, anyway. And I’m sure there’s some big-money manipulation going on to bolster the cause of going after the guns for political purposes (which are always aimed at riches and power, so far as I have seen).
So, here we go again, having the same argument one more time—theatrics and all. But I think we wouldn’t have this argument as often if we better understood the nature of this world. Yes, we know it’s never going to be perfect, but we still hold out an irrational hope too often that it could be perfect in this or that way. And it can’t. Does that mean we can’t make it any better at all? Of course not. But denying the rights of millions to protect themselves is not going to make things better; it makes them worse. Common sense shows this and history shows this. So the only way to continue in the get-the-guns campaign is simply to shut down our faculties for rational thinking.
And that’s exactly what millions are doing this very day. I have not yet come up with a good reason, however, to be irrational about anything.
—
