Early yesterday morning at the screening of the new Batman movie a deranged man went on a killing spree. This tragedy cannot be overstated, nor any requisite expression of condolences made to the family and friends of the victims, or the victims themselves. My heartfelt sympathy goes out to all of them.
With that said, I have seen a couple things that have happened in the subsequent 24 hours that I feel compelled to speak out on. The first has to do with a statement made by the chief of police in the following article (http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/police-press-motive-denver-area-movie-massacre-232932177.html)
"The most important thing is that there is justice for these victims, and justice will occur in a courtroom."
Of the myriad of statements I heard, this one stood out to me. The main reason goes to the grander point of justice and the way we as a society and as select individuals must balance it. When I think justice, I think about a moral and/or legal re-balancing of the scales. Someone breaks into a car, they pay for all the lost items, fixing the window, etc. Basically they make the victim whole again in terms of financials. Then they pay a debt to society that has been deemed sufficient. In the end what we are left with is that the victim and society get paid back in a sense. That to me is justice. But when we're talking about murder, and some other egregious crimes, there will never be justice. Someone tell me that justice was served for Mark Klass. Tell me that the scales can ever be rebalanced for him. And yes, I'm against capital punishment, but that's is secondary to my actual point here. If we're going to talk about justice I think we owe the victims of these crimes the respect of not tying the word only to our court system, and especially at such an early junction. So please Mr. Policeman. Stop talking justice at this point.
Having sufficiently vented on justice, I want to move on to propriety. In less than 24 hours, I have seen both sides of the 2nd Amendment argument come out trying to wedge this tragedy into a political point. Worse than that fundamental point is the way in which they have done it. I swear, sometimes I think people have preformed arguments just waiting for an incident to happen so they can just copy-paste the link and a picture into.
https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/523773_10151304716898902_792830919_n.jpg
Well, there's one now. Where do I even begin on this? Well, the bulk of my criticism will have to wait for a little later in this post. But the important thing here is that we have a direct implication that this tragedy is due to the battle over the second amendment.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qwqe0lNnUqI&feature=player_embedded
Holy immeasurable fuck. Really Mr. Gohmert? This is the atheists fault? I mean, no manifesto, no evidence, just take a tragedy and use it to attack the secularists in society? Ignoring the irony that the first two founding fathers he quoted in support of his position are widely considered to be the least religious (or at least most secular). Is this what this situation needs? Are the victims and their families benefiting from your attack on secularism?
Can we all just take a quick step back and recognize that when a tragedy like this strikes that instead of trying first to see a political advantage, we try and help? Please? Can we pretend for five seconds that there is some underlying sense of propriety in our society that goes beyond politics and starts with cohesion?
Lastly, I want to touch on the sense of righteousness that way too many people in this country seem to have. And I'm not pointing at any group here. I'm pointing to anyone who can't think past their own views as though they hold some intrinsic value beyond the sphere of their own minds. Truth is subjective folks, that's just the way of it. Some truths are absolute, but more often than not, there will be a less objective criteria by which we might judge truth. And in the event that our truth might come headlong into a collision with the truth that others hold, we need to set aside our pride and arrogance and try and see that there can be other valid points. In addition, the further to the extreme our own positions might be, the more willing we need to be to accept that a functional reality is even less likely to align with our own points of view.
Taking the second amendment as an example of this, I want to imagine two worlds. One where there are no gun laws and in another there is absolute gun control. One side is anarchy by proxy, and on the other we have the Orwellian world of 1984. Please, can we at least acknowledge that neither of these models is likely to serve our nation? That both are fundamentally flawed, and that implementation of either would result in a tyrannical nation. The former would be at behest of the armed against the unarmed, the latter being of the government against us all. What difference does it make? So before we go off half cocked with either of these trains of thought, can we just take a quick step back and say that there is probably a middle ground that is in practice more feasible?
So please, all you gun control folks who think that the answer to gun violence is to make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to own a gun, can you please just acknowledge that there are bad people out there, and they will always do bad things. And to all you 2nd amendment absolutists out there, can we please accept that there can be restrictions in place to help dampen the severity of whacko's gone wild and still let us protect ourselves? The more we polarize, the more we patronize, the further we get from a real solution.
Speaking of polarizing, let me go back to that picture I referenced above.
Two Similar Stories - Just like "Of Mice and Men" and "Thelma and Louise" are two similar stories. The only thing similar about them is that they both involved bad guys and guns
Two Different Endings - Well no shit.
Beyond the simple concept that correlation does not in any way imply causation, isn't this just about as stupid as it can be? To imply that the endings could/would/should be related is laughable...if it wasn't for the tragedy involved. So, two guys walk into a cafe with the intent of robbing the place. Note, that their intent wasn't to slaughter, but to rob. They are met with a random citizen happening to be carrying a weapon who then confronts and drives them back. Compare that to a determined killer with an intent to kill. Not to rob, not to threaten, and by extension to use the threat of force to intimidate. He came to kill and he did. How could these two situations not have had different outcomes. One has the people coming in without firing a shot. The other is a guy who just started spraying. Then there is the inclusion of the "concealed weapon" caveat to really cloud the issue. In Florida the guy was carrying, in Colorado nobody else was. So this must obviously mean that only the laws of Colorado stood in the way of this killer right? Except that's a flat out lie. The laws in CO and FL are actually pretty similar. It's just a tragic set of different circumstances that led to the outcome disparity. And I just know, I FUCKING KNOW, that it's only a matter of time (probably already has happened) that the "gun control" lobby will prop this up as a cornerstone of why we need stricter gun control with an equally fallacious quippy poster.
I wish there was a graceful way of summing up this post, but if there is, it escapes me. All I know is that this is a tragedy and perhaps the only thing worse than what happened is the way the media, the system, and the political advantage folk will embrace it as an argument first, and a tragedy second.
