1:50 AM
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
The tragedy of the Newtown shootings is, above all, a terrible crisis of great suffering, pain, and injustice, especially for the families of the 20 children who have been lost, and the seven adults who gave their lives as they sought to protect those children they had been entrusted with.
But even more terrible than the reality of the situation is the overwhelming possibility that it could have been prevented.
I don’t mean to start a debate on morality or gun control, inflame disagreements already in progress, or use a heart wrenching national crisis to further my personal political positions. I do mean to expose certain assumptions, simplifications, and errors that I feel impede our ability to identify and solve the problems that lead to tragedies such as these.
“The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
- Wayne LaPierre
First:
Mental illness doesn’t make someone “bad.” Think back to the way that the mentally ill were treated in the past. Until the 20th century, mental illness was thought of as a moral transgression, and the mentally ill were treated as inmates and criminals of choice, rather than as patients- as people afflicted with serious mental health conditions. As science and our understanding of cognitive processes increased, people began to pay more attention to the connection between physical and chemical cognitive irregularities and irrational, illogical, and sometimes violent behavior.
Thus, the outpour of Instagram repostings that tell the shooter he should have “thought twice before making this terrible mistake” might be acceptable for young people without an educated understanding of psychiatric disabilities, but not for anyone with even a basic awareness of how mental illnesses work. Such people must realize that most school shooters don’t think twice not because they’re immoral, villainous schemers, but because their reasoning doesn’t follow the same paths that we consider culturally normal. The shooters at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and the University of Texas, arguably the three most publicized school shootings of our time, all showed signs of mental illness.
I don’t mean to downplay the gravity of the situation, nor do I believe that the murders that occurred this morning are purely the result of a cognitive or mental disability. Mental illness doesn’t make someone “bad.” But murdering 27 innocent people is an inexcusable and heartbreaking crime, and certainly one of the worst. And for that very reason, I think that we need to stop referencing this shooter, Adam Lanza, as simply “a bad guy”- not because we should excuse the despicable crimes he committed, but because in recognizing the fact that Adam Lanza was mentally ill, we allow ourselves a way to work toward preventing crimes like these in the future.
Second:
A good guy with a gun is certainly an effective way to stop a bad guy with a gun. Had a SWAT team arrived at Sandy Hook Elementary moments before the shooting had started, this tragedy might have turned out differently. Had a single police officer spotted Adam Lanza on campus with two 9mm handguns, he might’ve been able to stop him.
Unfortunately, the good guys with guns can’t be everywhere at once.
Yes, you could solve the problem by making it easier to put guns everywhere. But along with the obvious danger of the fact that not everyone is a “good guy” (not to mention a trained, capable, or empathetic guy) you also ignore the other option of making the gun inaccessible to the “bad” guy in the first place.
Of course, even if you were able to remove guns from the situation, it doesn’t remove a shooter’s intent. It’s still possible that Adam Lanza would get a hold of a different kind of weapon, and attempt the same atrocities, as was the case today, at a school in Chengping, China, where a man wielding a knife brutally stabbed 22 children and one adult. The difference between the two situations is that there were no fatalities in Chengping, and the man was eventually taken into custody by security guards. The intent for the crime is there, but the lethality of that crime is taken away by eliminating the most lethal variable: the gun. Yes, these are two isolated incidents being compared, not at all a comprehensive examination. But you shouldn’t need this data to tell you that handguns are more fatal than knives.
Guns may be fatal, but they can be used for two purposes other than murder: sport and non-lethal self-defense. This raises the issue of legal firearms. The two handguns used in the Newtown shootings were legal and registered to Adam Lanza’s mother. He wouldn’t have been able to purchase them on his own, but he had no need to. Existing laws simply didn’t do enough to prevent those legal firearms from ending up in the shooter’s hands. The discussion on how to make laws more effective in this respect is as complicated as it is varied, and I don’t have the knowledge or the experience to pretend to know the best of the proposed solutions.
But the important thing to grasp is the understanding that we can’t rely on good guys with guns to prevent shootings such as these. No combination of good guys and guns will ever be enough to stop every tragic shooting before it happens. No combination of good guys and guns can change the conditions and environment that enables shooters to obtain and use lethal weapons. That change is brought about by enacting and enforcing effective laws.
God bless the families and friends of those struck by tragedy this morning. My heart goes out to you all.
