Thoughts, prayers, and argument

Another lone gunman has raised the bar yet again for mass shootings in the USA.

My employer's son was at Virginia Tech in 2007. He just missed being in one of the classrooms where that shooter struck. Ten years later, he lives and works in Las Vegas. He dodged these bullets, too. But I wonder how the world looks to a young person whose life has already been closely invaded by unhinged murderers not once but twice.

Along with normalizing virulent bigotry in the name of free speech, we have normalized personal violence. America was settled at gunpoint. The wave of white people moved westward, hunting, gathering, and subduing the natives as it went. A gun was a tool, like an ax or a plow. The gun was woven into our national identity here far more than anywhere else. It is as American as the flag, and more widely worshipped.

Popular fiction has long celebrated heroes who can handle a shootin' iron. From tall tales around the camp fire to pulp fiction to radio, movies, and television, we admire the man who says little while his gun barks a sharp response to the impertinence of evil. And our super villains push the arms race. Deadly combat is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage.

Actually, singing solo, unaccompanied, on a stage in front of a large audience is the ultimate test of a person's skill and courage. This probably explains the greater popularity of gunplay.

I'm sure that watching people drop before your hail of lead is very satisfying. Many of these killers have already accepted that this will be the last thing they do. Good luck figuring out how to detect those tendencies in a free-range population.

Here in the Land of the Free, we must be careful when we tell people what they cannot do or own. But how many times do we have to see someone misuse a high-capacity weapon before we acknowledge that the tool itself is part of the problem?

When I first got a handgun, I had the weirdest flood of thoughts. I looked at it and saw all the ways in which it could inflict suffering. I could shoot someone else. I could shoot myself. I could shoot an animal. I could put a bullet hole in anything I could hit. I did not buy the gun. My first wife already owned it. It was never enough gun for her, it was just the gun she could afford at the time. She left it behind when she left me.

The idea of inflicting suffering repelled me, I'm happy to say. But we are primitive creatures who have killed since before the invention of language. In all those years, some of us have clearly enjoyed it more than others. That willingness to push things to the ultimate extreme lives inside all of us. It's controlled in some, and unbridled in others.

My gun-worshipping friends repeat over and over that humans are dangerous creatures, and that access to weapons is all that will save the good ones from the bad ones. Sometimes, people get killed who don't deserve it. That's an unfortunate side effect. To the gun believer, it reinforces their contention that everyone should be armed, in order to participate fully in the exchange of lead when it inevitably breaks out.

That sounds incredibly bleak to me. It may be true, but it's sad. Any family picnic in a park, any public entertainment, any convergence of people whatsoever, may be interrupted by a murderer. Get used to it. It's the will of the people and the intent of our founders.

Winston Churchill famously said that democracy was the worst form of government except for all the other forms that had been tried. Granted, a majority could vote to give their government strong police powers, and agree that only trained professionals in the government's service should be allowed to have the most powerful weapons. But we already voted to let the wealthy have all the money, and now they're using it to crush ordinary citizens. In other words, a free society needs to pay attention and stay in control of the people's government to keep the power from being misused.

I wonder if it can be done. How do you keep everyone informed at all times about the actions of all the public officials at all levels of government, in real time? The internet? That hacker-infested, troll-plagued repository of convincing disinformation? What else ya got?

I wish I had an answer. A lie can go halfway around the world while the truth is still getting its shoes tied. That concept has been attributed to a number of famous people, but its origin matters far less than its validity. Especially now, a lie can travel at the speed of light. So can the truth, but a good lie sounds convincing, and a great lie can cast doubt on the truth.

And then there's opinion. An opinion may turn out to be true. It may sound so attractive that its supporters treat it as true, regardless. All this competes for attention in a busy world where increasing numbers of strivers struggle to stay alive and feel like it's worth something. We are asked to make quick decisions about policies with far-reaching consequences. We are represented by elected officials that most of us don't fully trust, because we don't have time to keep track of all the influences  on them.

Broad-brush government haters and conspiracy theorists simplify their lives by condemning the whole thing. It's rotten, they all stink, destroy it all. Maybe they scale it back to certain departments and party affiliations, but a nihilist view of government in general is the foundation of both anarchy and tyranny.

By now I'm sure that someone has already posted the opinion that the tragedy in Las Vegas could have been contained with much lower losses if trained individuals in the crowd, openly and legally carrying their own automatic weapons, had been allowed to identify the target and pin him down with return fire. If we really live in a land where outbreaks of gunplay need to be tolerated, we all need not just weapons, but combat training as well. The best remedy for bad speech is more speech. The best remedy for bad gun use is super-precise, heroically competent, instant retaliation. That would obviate the need for heavily armed police forces and eliminate the lag time between calling 911 and the actual arrival of help.

When you're writing the script, you get to pick who wins. Reality is seldom so courteous.

Police misconduct further complicates any simplistic prescription. Armored vehicles and extensive arsenals present quite a temptation. As we learn from many reports of misbehavior ranging from mildly questionable to outright heinous in both law enforcement and the armed forces, some who serve are gratifying a personal urge to dominate more than a lofty calling to protect. Anarchy or tyranny will serve their purposes equally well.

Anyone with a heart feels wounded when we hear of a murder, mass or otherwise. Naturally, those inclined to care will offer warm words at the very least. Those inclined to celebrate violence will exult. There will be a lot of opinions and statistics back and forth. Thoughts, prayers, and argument will create a jumble of noise that will fade to the usual grumble until the next time.

The uselessness of mockery

What self-dramatizing murderers did to the staff of Charlie Hebdo was completely reprehensible. But it illustrates the limitations of satire as a tool of persuasion.

Terrorist gunmen opened fire on a room full of unarmed people in retaliation for cartoons the killers deemed offensive. People who will do such things are a direct result of the human belief that killing and dying are glorious and admirable ways to express the highest devotion to the best ideals. It's a perversion of the concept of genuine sacrifice. But lots of people are fooled by fakes. The belief is real. The death is real. Does it matter if the logic is flawed? If it FEELS like a blaze of glory to them you'll never convince them that it is really the explosion of a flaming asshole.

People who have no sense of humor cause most of the problems in the world. They are also frequently laughable. The more seriously they take themselves, the more they invite ridicule. They create their own hell by trying to demand respect. But how many people will give up a heartfelt belief because someone made fun of them?

Terrorism takes many forms. Almost none of them are true combat. The targets are undefended, for the most part. Terrorism is part performance art, part temper tantrum.

We used to laugh at the idiot who gets stuck holding the bomb when it goes off. No one wanted to be that idiot. Now it's a career path.

People who like to kill other people will not give it up because someone drew an insulting picture of them or got a roomful of people to laugh at jokes about them. They will seethe and simmer and stir up a bunch of similarly nasty people to inflict pain and damage to show how tough they are. How tough are they if they can't take a joke? It doesn't matter: they're armed and dangerous and totally into it.

Well-expressed ridicule of asinine ideas may help divert uncommitted people from them. And it's addictive. But it has to be a gateway to serious discussion. Continual mockery without mercy ends up feeding the problem more than fighting it, pretty much no matter what the problem is.

That being said, we need intelligent satirists making humorous critical observations. We need to be able to laugh at people in power to remind the people in power to laugh at themselves. We need to be able to laugh at them so we don't do something worse. We're better off with people who beat a joke to death than with people who beat other people to death. But the people who measure worth in terms of killing and dying are a tough audience, a stone cold room where you don't want to bomb, because they'll bomb you back.

You may say it takes courage to stand up to such people, and that it needs to be done. Unfortunately, the kind of people who shot up Charlie Hebdo are psychopaths who are completely unimpressed with philosophical arguments and noble gestures. Homicidally self-righteous people aren't just bullies to face down. And the bigger players who manipulate the actual perpetrators don't care about world opinion either. They're convinced they have a winning strategy. It certainly is a formidable one. They're using psychological handles that go back many thousands of years, to the dawn of consciousness and the first awareness that each and every one of us dies. Rather than find in this knowledge a sense of unity with all life, the manipulators have always seen a way to gain power by exploiting people's fear.

The cartoons and commentaries might give some of us a moment of relief from the craziness. We who are capable of laughing share a few as we shake our heads and go, "that's so true!" For a moment it seems like a universal truth.

The one universal truth is that someone will always disagree. When you discover another one, let me know.