HURTING AND ACTION

You are hurting and grieving. Your soul is crushed and the world has stopped turning. Some monster went into your child’s school and murdered them. You feel powerless. SOMETHING MUST BE DONE. You feel you are screaming into the void and your screams just dissipate into the darkness. I get that. This is going to be hard to hear. The law failed your loved ones and you. This is not because we didn’t pass gun bans or red flag laws. No, the laws in place failed us.

          Yes, a monster killed your loved ones. You must fight the monsters. They must be stopped. What can be done? Who are these monsters? How will you fight them?

          We will not look at the too many doors thing. I get what Cruz means about “hardening our schools”. It just isn’t being taken seriously as a preventative by those who want to DO something. Greene’s ballistic blanket idea is in a similar boat, seen as a deflection and not taken seriously, though the January 6 commission says they are considering recommendations to harden the Capitol against attack. Guess it’s good for Congress but not your kids. The people who are hurting want legislation that will stop monsters not tactical countermeasures. That is good on the one hand if it addresses the problem and bad on the other if it is just political manipulation.

          Who are these monsters? They are or used to be people and can be anyone though not many are female so generally male. They could be radicalized to an idea usually based on their superiority to someone else though often fueled by an inferiority complex. These tend to come from hate groups of various sorts. If one of these attacks a school, it is usually race related and cowardly because they perceive schools as an “easy target”. They rarely expect to survive if they are pulling a lone wolf attack. They can also be the revenge killer. That is usually a former or current student taking revenge. Another one that usually doesn’t expect to survive. These both tend to collect grievances and then act on those perceived wrongs perpetrated on them. Though only a quarter of them are ever diagnosed mentally ill, most people would probably agree that there are some mental health issues with a person who commits mass murder. We should probably focus on preventing the monster from becoming the monster. However, if we fail in that, we need to stick to what will actually stop one.

So, make legislation to control guns. They are the source of evil that creates monsters that kill kids. Right? Not really.

The last time this was tried was the assault weapons ban of 1994. It had pretty much zero effect on gun homicides or mass shootings. It did result in a massive increase in   AR and high-capacity magazine sales before the law went into effect. With all those guns entering circulation there was no corresponding increase in gun related murder. It’s almost as if, you know, there is no causality between how many guns there are out there and how many murderers there are. That doesn’t stop those who are anti-guns from claiming there is a relationship. Real facts don’t mean anything to them. In fact, gun violence didn’t really start to increase dramatically again until about 2010, 6 years after the 1994 law expired. There was a spike, but it went back down the next year. You know what was happening? The economic crisis and housing industry collapse. The next year Obama Care came out. Yes, since the 80s peoples’ wages were not keeping up with all the economic growth and as one of many coping mechanisms they were deploying to make ends meet, they mortgaged their houses to the rafters and now many lost them. The CDC has the research on gun violence and economic stressors are on the top of the list of causation. Very much like right now. All the anti-gunners can say is we have to many guns, we have to restrict guns, guns are evil and so forth. They aren’t interested in fixing the problem and stopping the monsters. Only their agenda matters to them. The access to mental health care probably did more to stop that 2010 spike than anything else. This is because there is also, a relationship to suicide. Both, mass shootings where the perpetrator doesn’t intend to survive, and the general suicide rates increased at the same pace in the past few years.

Why does this group want to disarm the nation? That is their ultimate goal. They are part of the social democracy movement that go to the extreme and want to make the people completely dependent on the government. I understand and do approve of many of their ideas and programs to help with mental health and create equity in a system severely slanted to the rich. However, I don’t approve of this. You can tell they are disingenuous because they use the exact same deceptive tactics as the Right-wing Republican Fascists. What do I mean? I believe it was Katie Porter made an argument (this sort of argument has been used by many I just happen to remember hers) to remove gun manufacturer’s litigation immunity. Let’s be clear, because what they make is inherently dangerous, the courts tend to find in their favor a lot when someone brings a wrongful death suit against them. She referenced a situation where a child was killed by a Peloton exercise machine and the courts were all over it making a recall and holding the company accountable. Then she brought up a time and doesn’t say it is from 2001 when a 13-year-old child thought a gun was unloaded because he removed the magazine but there was a bullet in the chamber, and he shot and killed another child. The manufacturer of the gun was not held accountable, and she conflates the two events. A negligent discharge of a gun is not the same thing as a design flaw in a product. Guns are dangerous and Pelotons usually are not. The fact that she is anti-gun and is using this type of argument is why she shouldn’t be trusted to have a good faith solution for this problem. She also, wants to repeal the Second Amendment as an anachronism and ban guns in general. Banning guns doesn’t work to solve the problem, we know that. Even when short barreled and fully automatic weapons were banned, it was so police could use the possession of those to arrest and prosecute mobsters. Yes, it was considered a boon to protecting the people but that wasn’t the actual goal. However, during the Chicago mob wars those weapons were still being deployed by the mobsters even though they had been illegal for some time. Criminal gangs do still get their hands on illegal weapons even today. We are keeping them out of the hands of law-abiding citizens and that’s what counts.

What else? They claim the pro-gun people improperly conflate guns and freedom. They are right, they do. However, they are wrong in that the conflation is incorrect. The pro-gunners are taking this from the Second Amendment directly. The idea of a free state depending on a Militia and the Right of People to keep and bear arms that shall not be infringed being in the same amendment places the responsibility of freedom directly in the hands of the People and gives them the tools to protect it. The same can be said and for the same reason about the false anti-gun argument that the people do not NEED access to “weapons of war” as they call high-capacity semiautomatic rifles. Protecting freedom may indeed require that you go against a military level threat to your freedom. Remember the founders had just fought and won a conflict against, arguably, the most powerful military force on the planet. They knew the importance of the people to freedom. Freedom NEEDS military grade weapons in the hands of the people.

So, ok what about restricting the most dangerous ones from the hands of immature citizens. This has been proposed based on the idea that most of mass shooters are immature young adults. That is an erroneous idea and another case of the anti-gun people using deceptive methods or outright lying to people who don’t have the tools or inclination to check their validity. In just one case, there are many, the NY Times released an article that said of the 9 most serious mass shootings 6 were conducted by people under 21 years old. Their sample included Uvalde and Buffalo and went back to 2018. Now remember the article was written to support the idea of legislating an increase of the purchase age for “weapons of war” to 21. Two of those 6 were already 21 and one of the remaining 4 was 17. Their new laws would not apply to the two 21-year-old shooters and all the laws already in place did apply the 17-year-old. Their argument was deliberate deception. Out of the 16 million or so people who turned 18 in that 4-year sample 3 engaged in mass murder, two of them last month. One was a hate crime by a radicalized individual with some mental health issues. One of the other two was a vengeance crime. The 17-year-old was also a vengeance crime. Most school shootings are. I don’t believe the police have firmly settled on the motivation for Uvalde yet. They are too busy pointing fingers and playing the blame game. So, why take the chance. Let’s raise the age.

          The approximately four million citizens turning 18 years of age every year (3.99 million births in 2004) are taking on the Rights and responsibilities of citizenship. They are not all monsters. In fact, statistically less than one of them a year are monsters who could commit mass murder. The legislation presently before Congress will restrict their Rights for three years because less than one of them could murder your children. Just because they belong to the same demographic as these monsters doesn’t mean their rights should be restricted. Looks like defending the Constitution isn’t something the anti-gunners care about. Anyway, it is unlikely to work because remember, these people tend to be grievance collectors. How do you think they are going to respond in three years when you have restricted their rights wrongfully?

           What does work?

Red flag laws can do something to prevent people with mental problems from having access to guns. Those are good if written properly. The First Amendment normally prevents anyone from the government acting against you until you threaten to or do something not peacefully. These laws can to a certain extent get around that. Also, mental health issues have been determined to be one of the precursors for this behavior. These laws could get them help before they crack.

Pass legislation that evens out the economic inequality situation. Violence in general and gun violence particularly has been found by the CDC to be directly related to poverty and economic stress.

          Mental health care. Along with economic stressors, mental health issues as said before are also on the top of the CDC causation list. Though only about 25% of mass shooters are diagnosed as mentally ill, a person does not have to be mentally ill to have mental health issues that could cause aberrant behavior.

          There is one thing that will work 100% of the time, if it is allowed to work. Shoot the monster when it comes to murder you or your children. There are some caveats to that. One, you must have a gun when you need it. Two, you pretty much have to shoot first. Three, your shots must hit. Four, they must stop the monster cold. There is also a fifth that could cause failure. School shooters tend to be insiders, students or faculty. The defender may not recognize the threat or may hesitate as the monster is likely to be familiar to them. Plus, I believe the youngest shooter was 11. A teacher or parent would probably have a very hard time shooting an 11-year-old, even in self-defense.

Shoot first is iffy legally. Laws could be written more clearly for that. More importantly is one, can you legally have a gun when you need it to shoot first? There is a saying, and I don’t know who to attribute it to: You may not need your gun all the time but, by golly when you do need your gun, you NEED your gun. Frankly most people will never need to use a gun in defense. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t have one. It is their Constitutional right, and you never know, they may NEED it to save your kid.

That shots must hit to be effective, is training and, in some cases, technical. We are a gun culture so the chance that some administrators and teachers in your school already have some training and willingness to act is almost a given.

The hit MUST stop the monster no matter its advantage. You don’t want to have a gun battle raging in your school or classroom. Your ammunition load out must be able to stop any threat. This is a LAW problem. Currently civilians can’t legally buy AP ammunition and for a handgun that is the only munition that will stop monsters in body armor.

          This is “good guy with a gun” idea at its most extreme where every adult is always ready to protect with immediate firepower. This is also, hated by the anti-gun people. They say it will make the US like the wild west. They must be thinking of what they see in movies. For the most part the wild west was a very calm and quiet place. Big violent events like the OK Corral became legendary because they were so rare. Sheriffs often didn’t even carry guns. Neither did cowboys. Yes, they had rifles on their saddles to deal with predators preying on their herd but that was about it. If some drunk cowpoke got uppity in the saloon the sheriff would knock him senseless, sometimes with the help of by standers. If no one was around who could help him home, he might stick him in a cell until he sobered up enough to go back to the ranch with his lumps and lesson learned. So, that argument is just sensationalist BS.

          The monsters in Buffalo and Uvalde could have been stopped by the good guy with a gun. People (by people I mean those who have an agenda that has nothing to do with stopping monsters) say that the good guy with a gun doesn’t work. They point to police who didn’t rush in and stop the monster. They say, they are the good guy with the gun, and they didn’t do anything. They are simply WRONG. Police are NOT the good guy with a gun. The police don’t normally show up until a tragedy has occurred or is occurring. No, the good guy with a gun is the one who encounters the monster before he commits an atrocity and can either prevent it by simply being there to make him reconsider or shoot him if needed. In Buffalo that was the Security Guard (Aaron Selter) that DID shoot the monster. The monster had body armor, so the Aaron’s shots didn’t stop him (see above the hit MUST stop the monster). He didn’t have armor piercing ammunition because of a law meant to protect Police that makes AP rounds illegal for civilians to have. The good guy follows the law and the law failed him and everyone else who the monster shot and killed that day. In Uvalde a person encountered the monster as he got out of his wrecked truck and before he began his murderous rampage. The monster shot at him and though he didn’t have his gun with him, he got it and went in pursuit of the monster. The police stopped him from engaging the monster and because he is the good guy, he obeyed the police. The LAW failed those victims in both cases. Not because we don’t have enough laws but because the LAWS in place PREVENTED the GOOD GUY FROM STOPPING THE BAD GUY.

          There is one more possible technical response. AI schools. A school with a computer system in charge of security. It can identify a threat and respond appropriately to it with warnings, passive, and active countermeasures. It is technically possible now. It is an extension of the “hardening the schools” idea. It would be very expensive and, in many cases, would require schools to be completely rebuilt to accommodate the autonomous systems. That would be a long-term solution.

          Just for a comparison here is something else that is going on right now and a solution could be limiting the rights of a demographic because of the violent behavior of some of its members.

          Ok, scenario: A group of monsters, say, Trump supporters, attacked the Capitol trying to destroy democracy with the intention to murder the Vice President and members of Congress. There were a few thousand of them. Yea, that couldn’t happen. Right?

          Now what if Congress wants to pass a bill that will restrict the voting rights of ALL Trump supporters. All 70 plus million of the people who voted for Trump in 2020 will not be allowed to vote for say three years. Maybe simply make it illegal for ANY registered Republican to vote. Seems reasonable. They all belong to the same demographic as those who committed that crime. Let’s put all Republicans in a three-year time out. They can’t exercise their right to vote because they might try to commit an insurrection. They can’t vote so elections can’t be rigged or stolen from them. Their reason for their attack no longer exists so they won’t do it again. Their Rights are a small price to pay to protect our county. Right?