Four days after the Newtown massacre, I’ve had all I can stand.
The radio pundits, the listeners calling in, conversations on the street… pontificating, speculating, hand-wringing, making the same old tired points…
Mass shootings, as horrifying as they are, and as frequent as they have become, are rare events. That means (in all probability) no valid trends, no valid comparisons, no valid generalizations.
Which isn’t going to stop all the talk about video games, or moral decay, or mental health, or being male, or a loner, or bad parenting, or (God help us) school “security,” any of which may or may not have had anything to do what happened in the individual and incomparable events in Newtown, Aurora, and Oak Creek, or with what might have prevented any or all of them.
You want to look at consistently pervasive social factors that are closely correlated with violent tragedies?
Let’s start with stupidity, by which I mean the inability to tell the difference between fearful hand-wringing, idle speculation, fantasy, and moralizing, on the one hand, and thoughtful, dispassionate analysis, preferably backed up by actual data, on the other. Stupidity keeps us from addressing social problems and human suffering, and it is spread, avidly and without attention to consequence, ubiquitously and twenty-four-seven as we like to say. So if we’re going to go on about video games and moral decay, let me put in an oar and say that yes, it was stupidity that killed those kids and keeps us stuck in a social condition where more massacres are inevitable.
Of course, if you want a better kind of stupidity—the “keep it simple, stupid” kind that states the obvious in attempt to bring about some clarity—then I’ll offer that common factors in all these incidents were (1) that they were horrible, tragic, and senseless, and (2) there were, um, you know, guns involved.
