— from Steve Henigson —
The last time I wrote about a gun-control initiative, showing that trucks and bombs have also been used to kill lots of people, the most interesting response I got was, “It’s the gun, stupid.”
No. It’s not. Orcas Island’s only brush with mass murder was an explosive device placed near a Turtleback public trail. Not a gun in sight.
Focusing our efforts on guns in order to make us safe from crazed killers is a waste of manpower, time, and money. Remove the gun and there still are knives, bombs, and trucks.
Of course it’s much easier to pick out a scapegoat mechanism and talk loudly about it. But that does nothing to actually solve the problem. Remove guns, and the crazed killer merely switches to something else.
Instead of massively wasting resources to make sure that the latest gun-control proposal is obeyed, law-enforcement efforts should be spent on identifying the disaffected, jihad-bent, and murderously mentally ill. It isn’t guns. It’s the people, stupid.
And then there’s the problem of definition. I-1639 is “The Reduce Assault Weapon Violence Initiative.” What’s an “assault weapon?” It isn’t what the initiative writers think it is. Real “assault weapons” are already illegal in the State of Washington.
How could restrictions placed upon people, who already obey the law, restrict criminals and the insane who, by definition, won’t obey any law? And how can “fixing the background-check system” stop gun violence, if none of the violent people who have lied while buying a gun have ever been either arrested or tried? Laws only work if they are both carefully aimed and enforced.
It takes courage to identify the actual source of a serious problem and to attack it in a meaningful way. Really doing something useful is difficult and expensive. Instead, it’s very easy and cheap for legislative cowards to find a symbolic scapegoat, “assault weapons” for instance, and to attack it meaninglessly and futilely. Initiative 1639 looks good, but it accomplishes nothing.
Steve, as a psychiatrist I have to take issue with you and others blaming mass killings on mental illness. The majority of these killers have NO mental illness and people with mental illness are far more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators. Please join me in fighting the stigma that mental illness is the root of violence or evil.
Neil, while I certainly agree that not all insane people are wanton, random, mass killers, I also ask you to agree that all wanton, random, mass killers are insane.
Someone who slaughters innocent people, and especially children, who have offered no provocation at all, is necessarily acting irrationally, asocially, and anti-socially — insanely.
Steve, I have to disagree. Insanity is very carefully defined in both the legal and medical worlds. Acts of violence are evil, but there is a difference between “mad” and “bad.” These actors are clearly bad, but most are not mad. Would you claim that Hitler was “insane? Let’s fight the stigma!
We’re getting off track. Steve’s point, well made in both posts, is that inanimate objects are not inherently violent. Regardless of motive, violence comes from the human element thus that is the element that must be addressed.
Restricting mere objects is futile, doomed to failure, with the only outcome a further decline of freedom.