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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
In this corner of the world there were recently two shootings. On the morning of a day in may, a young teenager nabbed his old man's 9mm, using to shoot to death several children and a security guard in a school. In the evening of the next day, a young adult used an automatic firearm, he wasn't allow to own due to prior thefts and assault of an officer, to murder several adults. Both suspects were taken alive, the former immediately, the latter the next morning. Neither appears to have been motivated by any sort of ideology.
The ruling coalitions first response was temporary increase of security presense at schools and a "practical disarmament of this country". The latter including measures such as: two year halt on issuance on new fire arm permits, increase in penalties for illegal firearm possesion, audit of all of firearm license holders by means of medical, psychological, and drug examination. The education secretary resigned, but not before blaming internet, computer games, and "western values".
The opposition meanwhile blames hatred, crime, lies in their opinion spread by the media aligned with presently in power parties; demanding a ban on reality shows, TV shows and print media which promotes violence and "primitivism" or spread fake news. They take no issue with anti-gun measures.
The head of governments reply to these claims by those across the aisle, was that several people including minors have already been detained for theats of violence and glorification of murderers and that there are mesures on the way regarding social media. He defended reality shows, for their regulation could lead to ban of violent films. He didn't comment on his secretary of education's comments.
From this it is seen the impulse to curtail liberty using as an excuse events which on average only minutely influence crime statistics, let alone lives of the average person, is universal.
The Second coming under fire happens in America also, but it it being in constitution makes gun rights more resilient than in other countries. But it is the First which shows the true disparity between the Land of the Free, and rest: freedom of speech is considered by un-Americans to be common to all peoples, yet in the aftermath of an nonideological crime, only America sees this right not only not under threat, it is not even considered to be relevant in the discussion.
People say this a lot but it's hardly unique to guns and not necessarily a bad thing. When events like mass shootings get used as rationale for policy decisions I don't think it's so much a direct response to only that kind of event but something targeted more broadly but for which a particular mass shooting might stand out as a particularly worrisome manifestation of the broader problem that captures the public imagination. See George Floyd, James Bulger, Sarah Everard etc. Indeed, one can see from your summary of the various responses from politicians that each to an extent sees the shootings as the consequences of wider social ills, whatever they might be.
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