Indiscriminate violence is unacceptable whether the perpetrator is insane, a police officer, a soldier, or anyone else. Shootings of innocents by deranged individuals have become common in the news. It is hard to know how much worse it has become compared to the past. The parameters keep changing and the statistics are usually about three years behind. How many victims do there have to be to make it a mass shooting? One is too many.
The purpose of the press, aka media is to keep the public informed and if necessary alarmed, but they seem to go too far. In spite of the apparent increase in recent years (i.e., since 2016) the odds of being shot at school are quite low. Exact numbers are hard to find, but assume 10 children are shot somewhere in America each school day, and the school year is 200 days, 2000 victims. Again, that is unacceptable, but in any school year there are at least 50 million pupils or 1 billion pupil days. The odds of a pupil being shot on any particular day then is about 2 chances in a million. This is something we need to fix, but we should not be scaring the children about such an unlikely event. They are probably at a higher risk of injury playing sports, walking to school, or worse, being driven by an older sibling.
Back in the fifties pupils were terrified about a hypothetical nuclear attack that never happened. Duck and cover drills caused needless anxiety. It turns out if there is a nuclear blast nearby, nothing will protect you, certainly not a plywood desk. The hype had a political purpose; keep the public alarmed and in need of protection from endless boogeymen.
Analysis of public consequences after the Three Mile Island incident concluded that the greatest harm, actually only harm, to the public was the anxiety cause by irresponsible reporting. There was no more radiation exposure there that year than people in Denver get every year just from living 5000 feet closer to the sun, or one transcontinental flight 30,000 feet closer to the sun. Therefore, less protected by the atmosphere. There was no risk of an explosion event, the reactor shut itself down.
What has changed? The politics of fear feeds on reports of violence, no matter how unlikely. A small uptick in a statistic suddenly looks like the end of the world, when it might actually be within the statistical norm. If an event that occurs once a month occurs twice in the same month, that is a 100% increase, but it’s not really significant, the average has only changed from 1.00 to 1.08, and might be 0.92 next year.
No doubt, if there were no guns, there would be no gunshots. However, that does not mean no violence. There are fifty ways to hurt your lover, neighbor or stranger down the street. The government’s experience in keeping drugs off the streets and out of schools does not give me much confidence that they can keep weapons out of the hands of miscreants.
Attempts elsewhere have not been as successful as some activists want us to believe. Most of the “developed countries” they cite have for most of their history been monarchies, a form of dictatorship; cultures that have never known the kind of individual freedom that built America.
We have a serious problem. Our so-called leaders fail us. One group sees a simple, but futile solution. They act as if passing a law against something makes it disappear. How many times has that been successful? Other camps promote equally instant cures. Some regulations will help. The root problem is at least 237 years old if it is uniquely American, but more likely millions of years. What is really needed is a cultural change and as unlikely as that seems, we have done it several times. Public torture is no longer entertainment, though it was common until 1865. Public drunkenness is no longer acceptable, even smoking, once almost as common as breathing is virtually gone. We can do it with a change in public attitude, but it takes about a generation. A little constraint in political speech would be a good start.
Ken Obenski is a forensic engineer, now safety and freedom advocate in South Kona. He writes a biweekly columnfor West Hawaii Today. Send feedback to obenskik@gmail.com