Shooting. Bad. Again.
Yes, someone’ll work out a graphic that says that mass shootings aren’t increasing in frequency; it only feels that way. And someone else’ll say that this never would’ve happened if it weren’t for Gun Free Zones. And yet another person will say that there are more deaths in Chicago on a day to day basis, just not as dramatic. There’ll be arguments about what, if anything, could be done to stop it, and, most likely, a discovery that there is no quick fix of a law that would have prevented this that would have found a reasonable consensus, that is, something other than gun confiscation or a some kind of extensive testing for mental illness beforehand.
And as I write this, twitter is a-twittering with supposed connections between the shooter and radical leftist groups, and saying he targeted Christians. Will this prove to be the case? Is this just wishful thinking by folks who want to be certain they can disassociate any of their pet causes from the shooting?
And yes — this past weekend was also a particularly violent one in Chicago, with 14 people shot in a 15-hour time span this past Monday, and 52 over the weekend. True, murder rates have dropped considerably since their highs in the 70s – 90s, but the absolute numbers are still pretty shocking.
Now there are reports that the shooter specifically talked about, on a chat board, mass shootings making people famous. Wish they’d caught him alive, to be an example for everyone else, that mass shootings also mean you spend the rest of your life in jail or at least a very unpleasant interim time, until your execution. For that matter, wish they’d parade around the Charleston shooter and show him being miserable in jail.
Friday:
here’s the blog post I’ve been thinking about for a while:
As horrifying as these events are, I still pretty much take it as a given that guns are a part of life, that a confiscation program like Australia’s is impossible. And my husband thinks completely differently; he’d be perfectly fine with living somewhere were guns are very tightly controlled and you simply cannot have a handgun, much less more powerful guns, in your home for self-defense. Oh, and did I mention he grew up in Germany? (where, ironically, the “Krimi” is a favorite TV show genre; sometimes they feature a gun being stolen from a shooting club, other times they don’t account for how the killer got the gun.)
Why this difference? It’s a matter of history, really.
In Europe, the frontier was closed before the advent of guns; not so in America.
Which means: path dependency.
By the time guns came about, certainly as the mass manufactured item we know today, not only was Western Europe pretty completely settled, but the forests belong to the king or the local lord; there was no such thing as going deer-hunting to put some meat on the table. That was poaching. And there as no such thing as living on the frontier, or in an otherwise isolated area, and needing a weapon for self-defense. Even the geography here is different, with farmers living in small hamlets but not simply (in general) purely on their own.
Not so, of course, in the US, where the frontier is a part of our (comparatively) recent history.
But what about Australia? That country was settled “recently,” too. And they’re not living under a totalitarian regime, but a democracy, yet they consented to, from all reports, very strict limits on gun ownership. The popular report is that they basically eliminated private gun ownership, although Vox says they only got rid of 20% of privately owned guns.
I don’t know, actually. Certainly the nature of how Australia was settled was different, but I don’t know much about their culture. Anyone want to chime in?
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