I pulled up Google News a few minutes ago and, at the top of the page, saw items relating to two events I had heard about on NPR throughout the day. Now I have time to read about them.
A man in Missouri, fed up with local officials who, in his opinion, treated him unfairly, showed up at a City Council meeting and killed five people before police shot and killed him.
A student in Louisiana took a gun into a university classroom and killed two other students before killing herself.
I suppose there are psychologists somewhere who can explain these things. There are probably plenty of other people with easy conclusions waiting in the wings, too. But I am less worried about why it happens than I am about how to prevent it. The psychologists are probably right about why it happens. The rest of us, though—citizens, neighbors, politicians—could do a better job of preventing it.
Unfortunately, most of the ideas for preventing gun violence seem to do nothing so much as assiduously avoid the real problem. From the Right, the typical suggestion is simply harsher penalties after the fact; from the Left, it’s gun control. Harsher penalties clearly would not have prevented the events noted above, because those people were prepared to die when they acted. Gun control might have kept the violence from being lethal, or from being carried out with guns, but it would not have addressed the real problem.
Both of the typical solutions leave a glaring hole in the process, from the time a person acquires a gun to the time a person enters the criminal justice system: in between, a person commits an act of violence that severely disrupts the social circumstances surrounding him or her. Something happens inside that person to make him or her likely to cause violence regardless of the availability of a weapon—the violence may not even be physical—and the failure of consequential deterrents ought to tell us that there is something unique about these individuals’ mental state so that consequences, no matter harsh, cannot deter them.
This is perhaps indicative of my frustration with politics in this country. We have the party of gun control (Democrats), the party of harsher criminal penalties (Republicans), and the party of leave-me-the-hell-alone (Libertarians), but there is no party of cultivating whole and healthy people.
Maybe there shouldn’t be such a party, or maybe there shouldn’t be any political parties at all. Parties seem to affect people in much the same way religion affects people: they cause people to be angry at each other, for no reason other than the fact that they disagree on theoretical points; they cause people to segregate themselves; they cause people to take up irrationally extreme positions; they cause people to donate large sums of money; sometimes they inspire people. Most of all, though, they seem to distract people from reality.
As I noted in my last post here, the fundamental, inescapable fact at the root of all politics is that people must live together. Stories about people showing up in public, civic, and educational venues and murdering others are perfect examples of a failure to live together. That failure belongs to all of us.
We might disagree on how to cultivate whole and healthy people, but none of us should disagree that a society filled with such people cannot be worse than a society filled with the fractured and ill. As our society becomes more complex, interdependent, and transparent, it is more important than ever that we ensure the health, safety, and well-being of every person, whether by collective efforts or by increasing our individual awareness to the proximity of our fellow citizens and the danger of setting them off.
Simple things can do it. Simple things can set people off and simple things can keep them happy.
I think a big chunk of the problem is naive excessive reliance on governing bodies to solve problems. As you point out, many on the Left want government to make guns more scarce, and many on the Right want tougher penalties for violent criminals. Neither groups leaves room for personal responsibility and community relationships. Too many Americans want problems to simply go away or be dealt with by someone else. A Family Guy episode put it well with, “How much money do I have to throw at this problem to make me feel safe?” The real solution to these kinds of problems is people treating each other humanely. As Ghandi said, “Be the change you wish to see.” People need to take more personal responsibility for bringing more good into the world. Granted, this is easier to say than to do. That’s no excuse for not trying, though.
This is the one problem I see with the Barack Obama campaign. Although he has the excellent “Yes We Can” slogan (and see the super-cool music video with Will.i.am, too), there is a fine line between a politician who inspires people to self-determination and one who people see as a savior.
No one should ever vote for a candidate because he or she believes that candidate will change our lives for the better.
Peter, you have given voice to a complex set of ideas that have been floating around in my head since I earned the privilege to vote. I agree wholeheartedly that our society has become so polarized that it is now socially acceptable to ignore reality for the sake of being right. After reading your entry, I was totally satisfied by your identification of the problem…but I was also left with an “and then” feeling. (See website.)
Maybe I’m playing the part of the tinny, clamorous, Asian voice piping in through your laptop speakers, but I have to know: what’s your solution? What do you mean by “simple things?”
What does it take to keep a person integrated in human society? Is it complicated?
What would have it taken to keep Steven Kazmierczak from finally walking into a lecture hall and killing people apparently at random?
The profession of treating mental health is on the rise and there are certainly many parts of that field that focus on maintenance of healthy individuals and prevention of catastrophic events like captive institutional shootings (i.e., when a person goes into a school, office, church, or other location where people are known to be congregated without means of easy escape—like fish in a barrel—and begins shooting them), but I remain skeptical about their solutions.
Focusing on individuals does not seem helpful to me. I have heard too many people say that the secret to happiness is not to worry about others, to live and let live, to not regret things, etc. But in my experience, that kind of attitude is exactly what lets people fall through the cracks.
The most difficult problem, to my mind, is achieving a balance between the absolute need for interdependence in a complex society and the deep-seated desire for individual liberty.
Asian cultures have, I think, focused on interdependence at the cost of quelling liberty, while Western cultures have fostered liberty by denying interdependence.
What are the simple things? I think they’re almost everything. No one thing is really that complicated; you just need to look at things from multiple perspectives.
For instance, say you pass someone in the hallway at work and the person doesn’t look up, say hello, or otherwise acknowledge you. Does it mean the person doesn’t like you? That he or she is angry with you? Or that some problem has so occupied his or her mind that everything else has slipped away, even passersby? From the other side, if you are passing someone who looks like that and you need to decide whether to say hello, do you say hello because you want to be friendly, because you need to be seen, or because it’s merely habit? Are you trying to brighten his or her day, or your own day? Ultimately, once you have passed the person, and once he or she has passed you, then whatever happened, is there any reason for either of you to take more from it?
In other words, the “simple things” can sometimes just be changing one’s own perspective. Sometimes recognizing the existence of another person means letting the person be, and sometimes it means intervening. In all cases, it means, for you, being aware that the person is there, but it does not always mean doing anything differently about it.
I can’t think of another way to operate that doesn’t put things out of balance. If you take a complete individualist-isolationist perspective on the world, then you deny the interdependent nature of human society, but if you take a constant concerned-interventionist approach, then you deny the freedom of others to be left alone.
The only way to do that is to try and be aware of what is happening all the time. Which, unfortunately, most of us are not in the habit of doing.