Editorial: Spree Shootings

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Three tragedies in less than three weeks! How can we carry this crushing load? 

Shoes found following Dayton Ohio Spree shooting

 Of course, as Neil deGrasse Tyson found, people don’t care about the hundreds and hundreds of fatal drug overdoses, gang shootings, medical mistakes, and alcohol related traffic fatalities that occur weekly, every week.  It’s only the big, national media events, the let’s-report-from-a-pool-of-blood events we seem to care about.  Be outraged if you want, but Neil is right.  Read more about Neil:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson

These people aren’t mentally ill, at least according to the DSM-5 which defines our current understanding of mental illness.  Calling them mental ill, I’m told by a professional, denigrates the truly mentally ill.

That needs to change.  Anyone who wants to shoot unknown people based on skin color, religious beliefs or choice of hot dog condiment is mentally ill.

Identifying them needs to start in school and church.  Anyone with a kill and rape list needs sessions with professionals that have the power to deal with them.  Let’s build a culture in these intuitions that allows ‘proto’-adults and younger children to confide in responsible adults without fear of reprisals or punishment.

In our rush to prevent these disasters we demand action from politicians who are as clueless as the rest of us.  To win elections and re-elections  our representatives are unwilling to face voter anger over tax increases to fund real progress.  The same voters demand action so politicians select low hanging fruit.

Expanding background checks will not catch these malignant people.  Nor will reducing magazine size, types of triggers, length of barrels, or the gun sight.  These only apply to the people who don’t commit these crimes, defined as law-abiding.  Many of these shooters obtain their weapons legally.  More than one of these aberrations have been found to be armed with gasoline bombs, knives, loose ammo and God know what else they thought would help them kill more people.  Typically the decisions aren’t made an hour before they go out the door, but months, maybe years before. 

Punishing people who have acted legally and have nothing to do with these tragedies is wrong.  Reducing our rights is the wrong step.  Creating review boards that have the strong potential to be misused and abused is certainly wrong. 

Recent research has suggested these spree shooters are actually suicide attempts.  Perhaps self-termination should be made legal and available.  I expect it could be a profitable endeavor and staged events could allow these nut jobs the release they long for.

The question remains, if the dead had been armed, would the outcomes have been different?  Maybe not.  Simply having a gun doesn’t make you a gunfighter any more than owning a car makes you an Indy 500 racer.  In that minute of terror, you would need to realize what is happening, identify the threat, move to a location you where you could do something and draw your weapon.  An armed bystander would have a better opportunity to act as they would not be taking fire and could worry about the logistics.  What steps are you prepared to take to insure the police don’t identify you as an armed accomplice?  

Perhaps we need to pass a Good Samaritan law to protect the innocent by-stander who engages these fruitcake wackos from damages and accidental death indemnities from dealing with the problem.  Perhaps police need the same protection in spree shooting incidents.

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