Today in Louisville, Kentucky. Late last week it was Nashville, Tennessee. A few days before that, somewhere else. It happens with such regularity that you forget the names of the places.
Today a guy walked into a bank and started shooting. There were fatalities and there were wounded. A shoot-out between responding law enforcement and the shooter. The death of the shooter.
It’s almost a predictability that it will happen again and soon. Instead of a bank, maybe instead it will happen at a church, or a mall, perhaps a Walmart or a movie theatre, quite possibly a school. Some deeply troubled human being will walk into some place geared up for war and will shoot it up, systematically murdering other human beings before ending up dead themselves, often by their own hand.
How can these things be stopped? Prevented? What can the rest of us do to ensure that, when we send our loved ones off to work, or school, or to church, that we have a reasonably good chance of them being safe from gun violence?
Preventing mass casualty events is a complicated issue that defies simple solutions, mostly because of the emotion triggered by any discussion around gun violence. But there are some things that can be done to at least mitigate the situation and reduce the probability of it happening as regularly as it does.
Almost everyone is onboard with the notion that we must do more as a society to address mental health. Making sure that individuals with mental health issues have access to treatment and support can surely help prevent them from wanting to go out and hurt, or even kill, others. But this costs money, and when it comes down to it, governments are almost always going to underfund this area if they fund it at all. Plus, the more we intrude into people’s private and personal lives, the more they resent it, and possibly the more angry they become.
People don’t treat mental health the way they do physical health, and often choose to hide it or disguise it. And people in the United States, especially the tens of millions without health insurance, are going to be extremely unlikely to pursue costly medical help they may need. Times are tough, money’s tougher, and the way mental health is tackled and administered is handcuffed by a systemic governmental and political shortcoming.
We could all be in it together, watching each other’s backs, ready to identify threats and offer immediate action to ward off violence before it happens. Encouraging community awareness and engagement and promoting safety programs should help prevent crime and violence, but certainly won’t have much of an impact on its own. But it can’t hurt.
We’ve been taking increased security measures to mitigate the impact of a mass shooting. We lock our outer doors, require people to sign in, we rehearse our responses, install metal detectors in some places, and pop up surveillance cameras. All these actions can help, but again, that’s all they can do is help. In Nashville, the cameras saw the shooter drive up in the parking lot, saw them coming up to the front door, picked it up when they shot out of the front glass door. Cameras followed the person’s movement around the school, all well and good. But cameras don’t stop bullets and they seemingly only offer benefits after the fact when we’re trying to piece together what happened. A locked door is a good idea until someone shoots through it or Bill decides to leave it ajar while he goes out for a smoke. Plus, a lot of shooters have connections to the places they’re attacking, making them familiar with the security protocols.
We’re going to need an improvement in emergency response. The Mounties in Nova Scotia were woefully not up to the task in an alarming number of ways, understaffed, no plan, no training, poor communications among themselves and with the public. By the time they got their act together over twenty people were dead. Improvements in emergency and law enforcement response is critical, and it won’t save all those lives, but it most certainly would have prevented as many as a dozen of the eventual victims from being targeted and attacked.
Police in Uvalde, Texas responded to the school where shots were being fired, but then stalled inside by command failures and poor training. Meanwhile a shooter systematically kills more kids while police dither.
Ensuring that emergency responders are trained and equipped to respond to mass casualty events can save lives and prevent further harm. I can’t see any flaw in that statement.
As a society we can make a better effort at addressing the root causes of violence, things like poverty, social and economic inequality, and social exclusion. But there again, that would require a lot of money and a lot of effort, and there just doesn’t seem to be an earnest political will to tackle these things.
We have to face the fact that there’s very little we can do when a heavily-armed person with assault rifles and enhanced ammunition packages is intent on killing, especially if they have no regard for their own life. Unless, of course, we can prevent them from being heavily armed in the first place.
And I suppose then that would take us to the idea of strengthening gun laws, and it’s here where Americans lose their Second Amendment shit. By implementing stronger gun laws, performing background checks, implementing waiting periods, and enforcing a system of “red flags,” we may be able to prevent dangerous people from obtaining firearms.
And we have to find a way to get far more serious about the number of illegal guns that come over the border from the United States.
A popular argument is that the only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. To me, that’s conveniently simplistic logic. In my view society would be better served if none of the guys had guns, but that’s an impossibility for a number of reasons.
I don’t want to take away anyone’s gun but I do want to prevent anyone from acquiring firepower they shouldn’t have need of in any kind of reasonably civilized society.
I don’t see it as particularly out of line to ban the sale of military-grade anti-personnel weapons. How such weapons would be allowed into the hands of the common citizenry is head-scratching in the first place. Who needs a rapid-fire automatic weapon for anything other than killing people?
Honestly, if your best argument is the need to arm yourself like this to protect against others, then I’d have to suggest there’s something wrong with your society.
No single strategy can completely prevent mass casualty events. But taken together, a series of strategies might have a realistic shot at reducing the risk of such events taking place.
Common sense gun control has to be a part of that.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 