Next fall I’ll be teaching a series of books in my SOC/RDG LC that focus on serial killers and mass shooters. Though it is not abnormal psych, I want to get at the social conditions that contribute to people behaving in this manner. I also want to have a very frank conversation about what to do about these things, what kind of society we want to be a part of, and what freedom really means.
So much is being made of the shooter and his reasoning, as though we can rationalize past this. We cannot. We also cannot seek to control society in any reasonable way to prevent outliers from wanting to do this. This was not spontaneous. This was not triggered by video game play. In fact, violence is highly social in nature and can be traced back to an offender’s social roots. Worst still, the offenders are often suffering from undiagnosed mental illness.
So we cannot stop a shooter, but we can minimize the shooting if we control the access to weapons. W.P. Kamau, a comedian on FX, recently joked about how we need to have mental condition questions. He quipped, “Do you ever wish a nigga would?” Funny but true. We do not restrict the undiagnosed unbalanced from getting weapons. I don’t know that we even question the purpose of a gun purchase at the register.
I don’t have the answers. I know that the conversation needs to be had. Notably, there was a similar school attack in China hours before the U.S. tragedy. The attacker could not get a gun and attacked instead with a knife. 22 students were injured and none died. The difference? Gun Control.
I don’t want to be China, but that doesn’t mean that everything they do is wrong.