Vic Socotra

06 April 2009

Loners

(A Classic Loner)

I have been thinking a lot about weapons lately, the ones on all sorts of scales. The North Koreans tried to assert themselves in a major way over the weekend and failed. Several Americans, or recent immigrants to America, asserted themselves successfully against family and strangers alike.

The media ominously reports the surge in gun sales that came on both sides of the election, one of the few growth areas in the economy.

With this trend has come a disturbing series of events involving gun violence.

There at least two regional wars in progress at the moment, and something eerie happening in Mexico that is like one. I am not talking about that. I am talking about the disturbed loner who runs wild in a spectacular murderous rage.

There is other stuff going on, too, and that is one of the places any discussion starts to drift. I will put that aside for a moment, except to stipulate that I no longer believe in the Easter Bunny, and I do not think that Lee Oswald acted alone.

The recent spate of gun violence by deranged loners is not a phenomenon limited to the US- I am recalling the German kid who ran amok last month and killed 15 people in a shooting rampage in Germany that began at his former school and ended in a wild shootout in the parking lot of a car dealer.

I was surprised by that event, since my working assumption was that the Germans, having had experience with really large-scale gun violence in the last century, controlled their weapons with great zeal.

One thing loner Tim Kretschmer had in common with the Americans is that he ended the thing by his own hand. All of these shootings have either ended in suicide, or police-assisted suicide, which is so close to the same thing that the difference is barely worth discussing.
Connected as they are in terms of scale and tragedy, there is something that connects the perpetrators of the outraged. Young or old, American or not, these are men- all men in this string of horror- who have hit the end of the line. They have acted out with the tools available to them, which has- in this string of horror- been mostly semi-automatic handguns.

Not universally, of course. There is a place for long guns in the story, but they are harder to conceal. Disclosing intent can provide society the means to interdict the crime before its commission.

Loner Jivery Wong was mostly done with his bit of horror before the police could even begin to respond. Loner Sueng-Hui Cho, the shooter of 32 people at the University of Virginia, managed to pull off two separate attacks by keeping his weapons concealed.

People have talked at length about the catalysts for the gun madness. There is no political or religious cause to blame for it, as there are for the young men (and occasional woman) who strap on belt bombs or detonate vehicles crammed with explosives in crowded markets.

Something profound connects them all. The bombers are the beneficiaries of a terror infrastructure that harnesses ideology to the technical means to construct the bombs.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold had a plan to detonate bombs at Columbine High School in their massacre in 1999, and like Tim Kretschmer, were dressed in the color of the undertaker.

Black.

The National Rifle Association argues that an armed society is a more polite society. If you follow that line of reasoning, the DC gun ban did not make the District any safer from gun violence; it only made it safer for those who intended to prey on their fellow citizens. They had no reason to think that the victims would shoot back.

I know why the Second Amendment to the Constitution exists. Justice Antonin Scalia argued persuasively about the history of it in the majority opinion that overturned the DC gun ban.

It is not about clinging to hunting, or belonging to well-regulated clubs, as candidate Obama noted in his not-for-attribution remarks in San Francisco during the campaign.
The right to defend hearth and home against all comers, including the Sovereign, was intrinsic to the Revolution. After the right to speak your mind, the right to defend your home was the very second right enshrined in the Constitution.

But here were are, at a stressful moment in out national life, and people in this heavily armed society are clearly getting to the end of their ropes. I have no idea what the answer might be, or if there is actually a question.

The Germans, bless their meticulous hearts, thoroughly regulated the weapon to which Tim Kretschmer gained access. So as an interim step, registration does not appear to be a deterrent to those who are prepared to die.

Disarming the population seems the logical step under consideration by social progressives. Times have changed since the Revolution, they reason, and the time when an armed citizenry was a guarantee of collective security has long passed.

An effort to disarm the people would be the actual realization of the collective paranoia that is enjoyed by many gun owners. I mean, you are only paranoid if what you fear is not going to happen, right?.

But what are we really afraid of?

I’ll confess I am not as scared of my fellow citizens as I am of the powers of the state, which are gathering in this time of such stress and sorrow. You are more than at liberty to disagree.

For my part, I have to agree with the President, who remarked yesterday in the Czech Republic that “In a strange turn of history, the threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear attack has gone up.”

He is going to embark on a campaign to collect some of the loose fissile material in the world over the next four years, and reduce the threat that some people at the end of their ropes might consider the use of a weapon of mass destruction.

I support the heck out of that idea. But of course it goes further. Mr. Obama said that he is going reduce the role of nuclear weapons in our national security strategy, and will use this good example to encourage other members of the nuclear club to do the same.

It is idealistic, and worth a shot. But as a friend observed after the North Korean rocket fell into the sea, a missile defense shield really doesn’t seem like a bad idea until peace breaks out.

I am no loner, and I am committed to personal disarmament. You go first.

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