Subject vs. object -- Orlando

[lydy]

Whenever gun control comes up, the anti-control people make an argument along the lines of "murderers gonna murder." This is frequently accompanied by a discussion of the poor state of access to mental health services. If it's a politician, this is often from a politician who generally opposes providing health care services, especially mental health and addiction recovery services. All of which is tiresomely predictable. But it occurs to me, today, to notice just how focused this is on the perpetrator, and how it is a point of view that ignores the victims.

I think that one can reasonably argue that a guy that goes to a night club and murders a dozen strangers is, legally and morally, identical to a guy who goes to a night club and murders four dozen people. But this ignores the three dozen people, thirty-six souls, who live in the first scenario, and who die in the second. In addition to the lives cut off, there are the friends and family. If you assume that each victim has only three people that care about them, that's more than one hundred people whose lives are not rewritten by catastrophic loss and grief. It's crass to compare one tragedy to another, but twelve dead people is better than forty-eight dead people.

I don't expect to get to zero dead people. Murderers will, indeed, murder. But I'm not so sure that it doesn't make sense to put up some speed-bumps on their road to hell.

Comments

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And one of those speed bumps would be the one that would have prevented him from just walking into a gun shop and buying the assault weapon that made it so much easier for him to kill 4 dozen instead of, say, 1 dozen. (Not to mention the other four dozen who were also shot but survived, and who in addition to their injuries now struggle with survivor's guilt.)

What I don't understand about the "blame the shooter instead of the gun" line of thinking is that, instead of gun control, it implies that what we need is people control. A strange argument from those whose mantra is "Freedom." It'd be a lot more infringing of our freedom to have the government inquisitioning us all about possible mental problems than to control access to guns the way we control access to, say, driving licenses.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

This, this, this!!!!

There is a thing that I think would be useful and possible: change the law so that the CDC can collect and evaluate data on gun violence. A public health approach to the problem brings with it a huge and varied tool-kit. One of the ways that the conversation tends to go down a rathole is that people bring their own set of facts to the table. There isn't good, comprehensive analysis. Which leads to paralysis on the part of people trying to think their way through the problem, and polarization from the people who are dueling with incomplete facts. The thing about the CDC doing real work, here, is that it would be community and culturally specific. Public health metrics look at behavior in groups, as well as other factors.

I don't expect that good data would change the opinions of the people on the always or never sides of the issue. But I think that it would give the people in the middle something to work with. Right now, we're in the dark about what is happening, and why. All we have are the news stories, and they are not really helpful for building a path forward.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

About 15 years ago, when data was even harder to get, I was in discussion with a gun proponent whose bible was John Lott's since-discredited "More Guns, Less Crime." This guy would demand that you find a peer-reviewed scientific article to back up any statement you made that he disagreed with, up to and including the basic concepts of chaos theory (that was a different discussion). At the time I was working as a reference librarian, so it wasn't too hard to find a peer-reviewed scientific article backing up my opinions on gun safety. It was from a public health journal. His response? Public health journals didn't count. *pfui*

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Heh.

There are things about American Libertarianism that I understand and support. But it's basic structure has no way to deal with public health, and that is a deal-breaker for me. Public health is predicated on the necessity that we all give up a little freedom and a little safety, individually, to make everyone hugely safer and healthier. If your only metric is the individual, then public health doesn't parse. But people don't live as individuals, they live as parts of a community, including the ones that don't believe that basic fact of life.