Today a friend of mine who happens to be a member of the NRA commented on the Aurora, Colorado Batman shooter. He said; "A gun didn't kill those people; a criminal did. With sympathies for the families and swift justice for the shooter." I replied by telling him that I obviously agree with his statement, but unfortunately life isn't so simple as to be explained away with a cliched altruism. I reminded him that the tension in our social environment is highly palpable, there's a great deal of divisiveness in ideologies and younger people are sensitive to this hostile atmosphere. Most kids today haven't known a time when our country wasn't at war with some nebulous entity that's ready to strike from the blue with an act of terror. They are fully aware of the financial catastrophe that looms, and their entertainment reflects their angst with the failed system. They see rampant fraud pervading just about every aspect of their lives, from GMO's to muni-bond bid-rigging schemes of wall street that put communities and entire nations into debt simply to loot their resources.
Added to these stressors is the violence in the video games and movies. I'm not blaming these products, but the producers market them in a way that makes violent crime and war glamorous. - Much of what passes for music these days seems to be all about 'popin caps' in someone, drug-dealing or 'bitches'. - Kids shows are a fast-paced barrage of flashing images and loud noise. - The commercials foster envy of the other kids that have these great shiny toys. The companies behind the ads do a great job of hiding the fact that, to them, their young impressionable audience is a huge market that needs to constantly be 'harvested' (marketing term, I kid you not). All this combined fosters cynicism, aggression, resentment and creates heightened social tension so that when you mix someone who's already on the edge mentally, and weapons that are too easily obtained, we get this.
I haven't heard any reports of neighborhoods, cities or states doing battle with each other (yet), so what other reason to have multiple assault rifles, thousands of rounds of ammunition, gas canisters and masks? For hunting? I'd say the critters are outgunned as it is. The fact that these items were legally obtained, even over the course of a few months shows that there needs to be a mechanism that alerts authorities when an individual buys weapons, bullets, body-armor or anything else that seems like the purchaser likes to play navy-seal as a hobby. How did this get past anyone? I'm sure the merchants of death are of the attitude "I'm not concerned with what they do after they leave the store." What a sense of community, huh? Every time someone buys munitions their name should be put in a data-base and, like many credit card companies, trigger an alert when any unusual patterns emerge.
While all this is bubbling just below the surface of our culture, the "war on terror" industrial complex seems more concerned with feeling up granny at the airport than conceiving a realistic and effective way of deterring nuts like this. Ben Gurion International Airport in Israel is a good model of what counter-terrorism should look like here. They use simple but effective tactics including bomb-sniffing dogs and profiling, Not racial profiling, but common sense observation of behavior. I suspect the various homeland security contractors here in the U.S. are more interested in assembling a security apparatus that maximizes profits in a way that looks like they're really concerned with our safety. Who knows, maybe James Holmes was a Manchurian Candidate let loose so as to promote gun control policies, or maybe he was just an ordinary guy, crushed by enormous debt, that became severely unhinged. Whatever the case, someone shoulda been hip to this cat weeks ago.
