Shooting In Uvalde
Charles Jordan
There are at least two kinds of mass killings. One is a war where large groups of people try to kill large groups of people for specified reasons. The two groups don’t agree about whose reasoning is correct, but the bottom line is a declaration of war between ideas. The other extreme is a mass killing is where one person convinces him- or her-self with little or no discussion with the foe. They may hold discussions with bystanders, but none at all with the targets, chosen mainly for self-glorification. Once the idea of a glorification as seen in mass killings over time is internalized, a decision is made by the individual as to the method. Some times bombs are used, or poisons, or diseases, but lately the method of choice seems to be guns with defenseless children targets for special effects. Many people reach for this glorification with words alone.The problem we have as a society is how to identify a real threat from empty words.
Many interactions with shooters in days/weeks before involves statements like "I hate you" "I'm going to kill you.", "I am buying a gun to shoot up a school." etc. Gun laws are a minor hindrance to an antisocial mentally bent misfit. There are already more than 200 million guns in private hands in the US. We have to focus on the mentality. If someone says they're going to kill somebody, the system has to say don’t joke about it. Our society promises as much liberty as possible but there are limits. Of course the main one is “Thou shall not kill.” But with a society of over 300 million people liberties will need to be modified to cope with increasing densities of citizens.
I suggest the limitation “You’re not free to threaten to kill somebody.” By now you don't joke about bombs when you are boarding an airplane." There needs to be funding of a police department group which looks for disturbing behavior and proactively focuses on intent to kill people. We talk about having red flag warnings, but writing a law is not the same as training people to recognize the problem. Many government “lawyers” feel that all we have to have is the rule of law, rather than the enforcement of laws. The smooth enforcement of the laws requires much more attention and money than the writing of a law by a congressman to get reelected.
I remember fondly a telling exhibition by Governor Jerry Brown at his inauguration. He had an old time bureaucrat assemble all the California laws at the time. The pile of laws was about 6 ft tall. Governor Brown intoned “We have enough laws. We just need to govern to the good of the people.”
In order to avoid the inevitable gaming of the system, we need much more personal involvement. Try to take social media out of the equation as much as possible. The investment to cover the expenses of the important link in this chain, the person who hears specifically the words “I am going to kill someone.” shouldn’t be a deal breaker. Many people won’t mind having some expense, but others might need a little help protecting our society. And reading from the story of the Uvalde killer, some of the people he interacted with were out of state and out of country.
Make it a citation to utter the words I am going to “kill' someone puts that person in the police records to track if the problem escalates. It won’t take long before people stop trivially saying they are going to kill someone if they get cited for it. Continuing problems might lead to the identification of a seriously dangerous person. Some internet connections may be impossible to avoid.
Our society should be built on the protection of its citizens, not just the apprehension of a perpetrator of a crime. The preventative blocking of a potential perpetrator is necessary as our population grows. Statistically, a larger population increases the chance that attitudinal deviations in the population are more numerous. But social media and main stream media enhance the individual stories. People die every day due to many causes. More than 7 people per hour die a violent death, roughly two per hour due to homicide. That’s 48 per day. Many more than 19 at one school. If we prevent every one of the murders of children at schools at the present rate, the overall death rate due to violence will scarcely notice it. The number of suicides, 75% of the total, which depend on guns for the main instrument, might offer a possible reason to restrict the number of guns. But suicides are not very dramatic and one suicide doesn’t give a photo op to a politician.
But dramatic situations like school shootings give us a general impetus to improve all the numbers There needs to be bounds to this red flag type program mentioned above. And I think it should be limited to the threat of murder.
Intercepting a developing murder threat is more complicated than solving a murder, but there are similarities of technique. The analyst need more training to help them develop methods which expose aberrant behavior and provide a simple means of developing a channel which can be trusted to not respond to trivial outbursts and not second-guessing the problem. The pressure of a police response to any statement of "I'm going to kill somebody" should start establishing a taboo on the use of a threat to create physical mayhem. The boundaries would soon be established by litigation, but preventative killing is like preventative medicine, more difficult, but obviously a better way to go. Even though facing up to difficult psychological problems costs money, there are consequences of having a larger and larger population. We need to spend money and effort to ameliorate the tail of our society who have lost the gamble of being born. It’s much better than handing out money to everyone with no idea of what to expect. (except possibly votes)
Back in Texas, the idea is similar to the blandishment of "if you're going to draw your gun, you had better use it or I will use mine." Threats of killing someone should be taken seriously.
