Again?

It's happened yet again. Another person with a firearm has taken out whatever issues he has on people who didn't do a damn thing to him.

Again, of course, it's early days and we don't really know what happened this morning at Los Angeles International Airport, although the report I linked to claims that written material was found on the alleged shooter that indicates he has a problem with the federal government in general and the TSA in particular. I've heard other reports saying the same thing. Several TSA employees were shot in the incident (I hate that word in relation to something like this, by the way; it makes it sound so, I don't know, pedestrian, an event) and most reports are saying that one TSA employee was killed.

And, you know, I don't want to hear the argument, yet again, that it's not the firearms that are to blame, it's the people who use them, that it could just as well have been a knife (that's the alternative implement named in most of these arguments). As far as I'm concerned, that's bullshit. There are other, more benign, uses for knives. Firearms, on the other hand, are specifically meant to kill, and they do so more quickly and more efficiently than a knife. Oh, sure, you can kill somebody with a knife. But, you have to get up close to them (or you have to have a freakishly good throwing arm), and you can't take out more than one person at a time.

And, yeah, I'm angry right now, because this sort of thing just shouldn't happen. My cynical side is thinking, as someone else somewhere on the Internets observed, I wonder how long it'll be before Wayne LaPierre gets up in front of cameras and declares that what we need are more "good guys with guns" in airports. If you follow along here, you know how I feel about the LaPierre Solution to firearm violence.

I'm also frustrated right now, because I've already seen arguments - the predictable arguments - on the 'Net between those who believe that things are still out of hand, 10,000 or whatever the number is now of firearms deaths after Sandy Hook and those who still think that background checks are a slippery slope to the government coming and taking everyone's guns away from them. Well, at this point, I'm beginning to think that some people need to have their firearms taken away from them. Or never given the opportunity to own them in the first place, which is what background checks are all about.

Of course, those kinds of checks aren't going to eliminate gun violence completely, because you can't catch every threat and sometimes people's circumstances change. But background checks are a start, and they should be universal.

I also, by the way, don't buy the argument that it's dishonest people who steal law-abiding citizens' guns who are doing all the shooting. Because, you know, if fewer people had firearms, there would be fewer of them to steal. And if the people who own firearms would practice good security, it would be more difficult for those dishonest people to steal them. It's pretty simple: Lock the damn guns up when you aren't using them for a legitimate purpose, and quit leaving them lying around.

And speaking of that, I used to know some people who owned guns. Left a loaded gun leaning up against the wall next to their front door all the time. With young children in the house, children younger than five years old. When I mentioned this one time, their response was that the kids knew they weren't supposed to touch the guns. Which was probably true. But do you know any three or four or five year old who obeys one hundred percent of the time? No, neither do I.

I did like one thing I saw today on the 'Net. It came over my Facebook feed in a post by writer David Gerrold. He asked the question I have also asked people repeatedly: When did the right to own a firearm become more important than the right to a reasonable expectation that when you walk out the door in the morning to go to work some out-of-control jerk isn't going to gun you down? He didn't put it in just those words, but that's the gist of what he said.

I think it's a really good question.

Sorry. I'm just upset about this latest incident (there's that word again), and I'm thinking out loud in front of everybody on the Internet (which probably isn't a good idea, but that never seems to stop me). I don't have any answers, or at least any answers that my gun-owning friends would accept. But there has to be some answer to this idiocy. There has to be.

What is this? The Wild West?

How many times are we going to have to do this?

No, seriously. I'm sitting here, watching live coverage of another multiple shooting. And people keep asking the exact same questions: How can we guard against this? What happened? How many shot? Why?

Since it is still an ongoing situation, there aren't a lot of answers. The talking heads, at least on MSNBC, which is the coverage I'm watching, keep throwing out the same old platitudes, including that the shootings might have been "gang related". They're also making a big deal out of the fact that this campus is a community college, as if it should be self-evident that something like this is more likely to happen there than on a "real" (my word, not theirs, but clearly their implication) college or university campus. There's lots of mention of the fact that there are vocational and technical classes taught on campus, with more unspoken implications (you know these - that it's "lower class" people who take such courses, who might be more likely to carry guns and shoot people). It is also being mentioned that it is a "commuter school", another code word for "not a real college".

As someone who got a good academic general education at a community college before transferring to a four-year school for my upper division courses, none of this is making me happy.

There have also been numerous eyewitness reports that in this latest incident there was an argument taking place, and then the people who were arguing whipped out weapons and started shooting. It is still early days, and it may turn out that this is not the case. However, if that is what happened, I feel compelled to remind people that we do not live in the Wild West. We do not resolve disputes by meeting in the middle of the street, with twenty paces and guns.

I know. I've been harping on this since the Sandy Hook shootings last month. But, somehow, we've got to realize as a culture that violence - shooting or stabbing or strangling or poisoning or whatever - is just stupid and that we've got to cut it out. How did we get to the point where just offing the person who pissed you off, or offing a bunch of people if you're just pissed off generally, is seen as a logical, viable solution to the particular snit we are in.

Maybe I had an unusual upbringing, but I was taught, and I believe, that violence is never an answer to anything. And, I'm not just talking about firearm violence. I was brought up to believe that you don't go and punch someone if they've made you angry. So, I'm not just here to moan about the problems with guns. I'm here to say that if you're first impulse when you are angry or disappointed or upset about something is to hurt someone in any way, you need to examine your assumptions.

This isn't something that I started thinking about today. It is something I've felt strongly about for a long time, but it was brought into focus after a meme came across on my FB feed the other day (yes, I'm back to memes, too). It read:

Life should be more like hockey. When someone pisses you off, just beat the shit out of them then sit in a penalty box for 5 minutes.

I really don't think this is a healthy attitude. Not even in jest.

Or is it just me? Am I unusual in not wanting to hurt people, either physically or emotionally (which is just as much bullying as physical violence)? Am I out of step? Am I the one who doesn't "get it"? Do I need, as I've been told in the past, that I need to "grow a sense of humor" about violence? Or, am I not alone in thinking that maybe we need to start advocating more constructive methods of conflict resolution at school, in the workplace, and in life?

Guns aren't all we need to talk about...

I've been thinking a lot about what happened in Connecticut yesterday, and about the other instances of firearm violence that we've seen in the past few years, not only in schools, but in malls and workplaces and theaters all over the United States. And yes, these things happen in other areas of the world, but they seem to happen much more frequently, and with much worse outcomes, here in the United States than they do elsewhere. Also, I think it is probably true that they often happen for different reasons here than they do other places

Just in the past month or two there have been at least two instances of multiple homicide by firearm in my local region. One of them happened less than three miles from where I sit right now. So, as I wrote yesterday, I believe strongly that we need to reexamine our culture's attitudes toward firearms.

This does not mean that there aren't other things we have to examine within our culture, as well.

One of the things I think we need to look at is the availability of mental health care.

We don't know, as far as I can tell from news reports, why the individual who shot all those people in Connecticut yesterday did what he did. There are, of course, the usual comments about how he was "remote", apparently the current phrasing for the fact that he was apparently a "loner". I think it is safe to assume, however, that people who go on shooting sprees have some sort of mental or emotional issues they are dealing with. Well-adjusted people just don't do things like that. So, I think it would be a big help if care for mental and emotional issues were a) more easily available to everyone who needs it and b) not stigmatized the way it currently is.

I'm not talking about screening everyone for "right-thinking", so that everyone is a cookie-cutter image of everyone else. And I'm not saying that "well-adjusted" means going along to get along. Goodness knows, I wouldn't do well in a system like that. I'm not necessarily the most social person in the world, as anyone who knows me would tell you. What I am talking about is noticing when someone we know doesn't seem to be coping well and having help available to them independent from their ability to pay for that help.

Another thing we need to do, as a society, is to quit acting like bullying is a normal activity and that those who are bullied need to "suck it up" or start acting like everyone else so that they won't stick out as a target for bullying. I don't just mean in the schools, among young people, either. Bullying takes place every day in workplaces all across America, on the streets, and over the Internet. This needs to stop.

How is this relevant? I have no clue if the shooter yesterday was bullied at any time in his life, but there are often reports that people who have shot up their school or workplace having been bullied, either actively around the time they do something or earlier, when they were in school. This is a common enough component of such cases that it bears looking at as a risk factor in setting people on a path that ends up with them in a situation where they have convinced themselves that their only option is to kill.

We also need to look at our culture's tendency to see violence, whether lethal or not, as a viable method of problem solving. The media is part of the problem here, I think. I'm not going to advocate for banning violence from film, television, and other forms of entertainment. Some stories that are worth telling have a component of violence to them. What I am going to do is go out on a limb and say that the brutality of the violence depicted in films and other media has probably gone far beyond what audiences need to see to get the idea of the stories being told, and that maybe filmmakers and other artists should try telling their stories less graphically. If nothing else, the current level of brutality in the media desensitizes us all to violence and brutality, and I don't see how that can possibly be a good thing. And, while I don't see that as driving people who would not otherwise do violent things to go out and shoot people, I do think (and this is, of course, a completely non-professional assessment) that it could make someone already predisposed to violence for whatever reason more willing to do more brutal things than they otherwise might.

These, of course, are only my opinions. And, of course, I've probably not even considered some other important things that could be done to make American culture less prone to the sorts of things happening as what occurred yesterday in Connecticut. And, as I said, we don't really know any of the reasons why that happened, and we might never know. These are just the things that yesterday's horrible events have made me think about.

I'd be interested in knowing what you all think are viable solutions to these kinds of tragedies.

Again? Why aren't we talking about gun violence?

I had another post ready to go today, but this is much more important.

A shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut this morning has taken a number of lives. NBC News online is reporting as of 10:56 a.m. California time that 26 are dead, including 18 children. Meanwhile, CBS news is reporting that 27 are dead. The shooter, who is reported to be among the dead, is said to have "ties" to the school, but the reports are unclear as to exactly what those ties are. A second person is reported to have been detained while the police try to determine whether that individual was also involved in the shooting.

I just have one thing to say about all this: This crap has got to stop. We have got to start talking about gun violence in this country, and we have got to get over the idea that many people have that the Second Amendment confers the right to individuals to have as many firearms as they want of any kind that they want.

I am sick and tired of the old argument that "Guns don't kill; people kill". That is just a huge rationalization from people who want to be able to build up arsenals that they have no need for, and I find it offensive. Firearms allow people who have some sort of grudge to go out and kill huge numbers of people before they can be easily stopped. It is senseless and it is stupid, and I'm tired of the National Rifle Association trying to justify virtually unlimited firearm ownership as a "right".

I'm NOT saying that no one should be able to own a firearm, ever. I AM saying that how many and what kinds of firearms individuals can own should be much more tightly controlled, as should the kinds and amounts of ammunition they can acquire. I am also saying that it is disturbing that during the recent presidential campaign, none of the candidates were willing to even address the issues of firearm availability and mass shootings like this.

This is an issue that can no longer be ignored. That it has been ignored for this long does not say anything good about our society. Not that the US is the only place where this sort of thing goes on. But it certainly seems like it happens much more often here than it does in other parts of the world.

Clearly, there are many details that we don't know yet and developing information will change as time goes on, so I won't say anything more now. But, just as clearly, this is a discussion that needs to start now. Not tomorrow, not next week, not after all the victims of today's shooting are buried.

We need to talk about this now, and we need to keep talking about it until the issue is resolved.