Here in the West, we are all well aware of the Sandy Hook Massacre, which will probably forever stand as a litmus test for many in the United States as 20 children and 6 women lost their lives at the hands (and guns) of a man with a mental disorder that simply snapped. A few hours earlier, in Chengping, a village in central China west of Shanghai and north of Wuhan, a knife wielding, mentally ill man who snapped attacked a primary school, injuring 22 children and one elderly adult. The incident in China is just the latest in a disturbing, periodic occurrence over the past couple of years of mentally unstable men using knives to attack children in schools, including two incidents in 2010 that resulted in the deaths of nearly 30 kids.
The one thing that many focus on in regards to the Sandy Brook and Chengping incidents is the methods used by the attacker and the result: gunfire resulted in death, the knives did not. However, not all gun related incidents in public places result in death nor do knife attacks just only result in injury.
So media chatter has ranged from a focus on the issues of gun control and on the issues about mental health, specifically Asperger's, which is a widely misunderstood autism spectrum disorder. In a culture that depends on framing anything and everything to their own personal worldview, the commentary has ranged from somewhat insightful to absolutely inane. We began to discuss what if guns weren't so widely available and what if they were, popular perception of violence, and how it is possible that mental treatment can go into the direction of being able to accurately forecast a catastrophic sociopathic event before it can even take place.
At 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people in 2011, the United States homicide rate has dropped in half compared to what it was in the early 1990s. While the Christian Science Monitor writes that criminologists have credited more effective law enforcement, longer and stiffer prison sentences, the aging of the baby boomer population, and the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, little has been credited to the increase in gun control that took place during the 1990s under the Clinton administration. And in a way, it is not surprising -- guns don't kill people, people kill people.
The conservative and libertarian rallying cry over the past couple of days has included bringing up stories of how guns have aborted attacks (granted it is a small sample) and how mass murders more often occur in gun-free zones. The baseline of the argument relates in the following spectrum: if guns were allowed in places, such as campuses, then tragedies such as Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Arizona, and Aurora may have been prevented or if in progress, aborted before becoming worse, due to the presence of guns being an effective deterrent and defense. The argument is shortsighted, considering effective training is necessary, for one, and for two, it is still unfortunately a crapshoot as anything can happen over the course of an attack, especially if the "armed, law abiding citizen", is out of position or becomes a casualty him or herself before a defensive act can take place. In other words, a presence of guns does not really guarantee anything.
The converse liberal and progressive battle cry has been using examples of how gun control in other countries has reduced homicide rates and made mass murders far more infrequent in those respective countries than in the United States. There are holes in this argument as well: demographics makes a huge difference and can easily distort an argument unless a conclusive, wide-ranging study is conducted, which reconciles mass murder events to varied demographics in regards to population size, gun ownership to population ratio, homicide rates, and the location of the event, and the perpetrators themselves are all weighted and considered. Not to mention, fatalities still occur in weapons of melee, as evidenced with the Chinese attacks in 2010 mentioned earlier that resulted in the deaths of nearly 30 children.
The reality? There's no such thing as an impermeable solution. The issue with mass murders lies with perpetrators working by exploiting and taking advantage of holes in a given system. Any system in place is bound to be exploited by someone for their own personal gain, no matter how benevolent, or in the case of this post, malevolent. Gun laws can continue to be loosened or tightened, and either way, there will be someone ready to attempt to, and unfortunately be successful, at exploiting those rules to achieve an objective, whatever it may be. The real enablers of such violence is not in the availability of guns or the prevalence of gun free zones; the real enablers of such acts lies in a series of psychological and personal responses to perceptions and subsequent conclusions reached by mass killers about their environment that develops into a violent, sociopathic outburst.
As tragic as these events are, how we are culturally in the United States, where we thrive on gratification, a true, unbiased, non-political approach as to how to evaluate what leads to sociopathic catastrophes, such as what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, remains elusive. People refuse to let go to of the politics. The media keeps playing on politics on the desire to spur reaction and debate. We'll seek answers that justify our own personal stances, but we will not seek answers that may challenge our own stance.
Throughout the years, scores and scores of families around the world have been shattered and ruined because of the acts of one man or one woman that decided to resolve whatever was wrong they saw in their life by resorting to murder, and many times, taking their own life in the final act when they go past that line of no return. We need to start asking the right questions; the hard questions that force us to take a look at ourselves, from what we believe in regards to human rights and gun rights to how we actually approach psychological and mental treatment and analysis.
At 4.7 homicides per 100,000 people in 2011, the United States homicide rate has dropped in half compared to what it was in the early 1990s. While the Christian Science Monitor writes that criminologists have credited more effective law enforcement, longer and stiffer prison sentences, the aging of the baby boomer population, and the waning of the crack cocaine epidemic of the 1980s, little has been credited to the increase in gun control that took place during the 1990s under the Clinton administration. And in a way, it is not surprising -- guns don't kill people, people kill people.
The conservative and libertarian rallying cry over the past couple of days has included bringing up stories of how guns have aborted attacks (granted it is a small sample) and how mass murders more often occur in gun-free zones. The baseline of the argument relates in the following spectrum: if guns were allowed in places, such as campuses, then tragedies such as Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, Columbine, Arizona, and Aurora may have been prevented or if in progress, aborted before becoming worse, due to the presence of guns being an effective deterrent and defense. The argument is shortsighted, considering effective training is necessary, for one, and for two, it is still unfortunately a crapshoot as anything can happen over the course of an attack, especially if the "armed, law abiding citizen", is out of position or becomes a casualty him or herself before a defensive act can take place. In other words, a presence of guns does not really guarantee anything.
The converse liberal and progressive battle cry has been using examples of how gun control in other countries has reduced homicide rates and made mass murders far more infrequent in those respective countries than in the United States. There are holes in this argument as well: demographics makes a huge difference and can easily distort an argument unless a conclusive, wide-ranging study is conducted, which reconciles mass murder events to varied demographics in regards to population size, gun ownership to population ratio, homicide rates, and the location of the event, and the perpetrators themselves are all weighted and considered. Not to mention, fatalities still occur in weapons of melee, as evidenced with the Chinese attacks in 2010 mentioned earlier that resulted in the deaths of nearly 30 children.
The reality? There's no such thing as an impermeable solution. The issue with mass murders lies with perpetrators working by exploiting and taking advantage of holes in a given system. Any system in place is bound to be exploited by someone for their own personal gain, no matter how benevolent, or in the case of this post, malevolent. Gun laws can continue to be loosened or tightened, and either way, there will be someone ready to attempt to, and unfortunately be successful, at exploiting those rules to achieve an objective, whatever it may be. The real enablers of such violence is not in the availability of guns or the prevalence of gun free zones; the real enablers of such acts lies in a series of psychological and personal responses to perceptions and subsequent conclusions reached by mass killers about their environment that develops into a violent, sociopathic outburst.
As tragic as these events are, how we are culturally in the United States, where we thrive on gratification, a true, unbiased, non-political approach as to how to evaluate what leads to sociopathic catastrophes, such as what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, remains elusive. People refuse to let go to of the politics. The media keeps playing on politics on the desire to spur reaction and debate. We'll seek answers that justify our own personal stances, but we will not seek answers that may challenge our own stance.
Throughout the years, scores and scores of families around the world have been shattered and ruined because of the acts of one man or one woman that decided to resolve whatever was wrong they saw in their life by resorting to murder, and many times, taking their own life in the final act when they go past that line of no return. We need to start asking the right questions; the hard questions that force us to take a look at ourselves, from what we believe in regards to human rights and gun rights to how we actually approach psychological and mental treatment and analysis.
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