Subject vs. object -- Orlando
Jun. 16th, 2016 09:42 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lydyWhenever 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.
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.
