Today is a terrible day. This post is certainly late to the story: 28 people dead, 20 of them children at the hands of a lone gunman in a Connecticut elementary school.
As a gun blog, folks will likely assume I will fall to so called “political” lines, that the choice here is keep guns legal and increase risk or to ban guns and to create safety. It is my experience that most crimes like this have little or nothing to do with the tool, and everything to do with two things: how we manage and address force, and how we handle emotion.
In terms of force, the key question I think our society needs to consider is what is force to be used for? Can we reach some common ground on use of force? So many of our conceptions of force are about getting revenge or getting advantage. I am not one to blame media, but I believe it can be a representation of perceptions people hold in society. The fictional character Dexter in the HBO hit show captures and slaughters people he perceives as “killers” in an attempt to reach justice that cannot be attained through conventional policing. The show explores what may be a broad perception of a justice gap between what can be proven through legal means and evidence that cannot make it to the courtroom. On ABC television Revenge tells the tale of Emily Thorne, whose father was cast, unjustly, as a terrorist. Emily, through a web of subterfuge, endeavors to bring down the family who caused her father to go to prison and who murdered him while he was there.
In my current research I have even been reading about nonviolent coercive force, such as used by activist groups around the world. In these circumstances, protests against business, governments or between political factions is used to GET something.
In all of my reading on force the only uses of force that are NOT for the purpose of getting something are policing (all aspects, including SWAT, Bail Enforcement and daily patrol), security, and self-defense (including all aspects of martial arts and concealed firearm training that I have studied).
I think, and this is a little off the cuff, that when people feel an emotion like, fear, frustration or anger, they jump to the conclusion that they are not just feeling the feeling, but that they are wronged in some way, and that they have to “fight” to get justice. They immediately lash out, often becoming offenders, assailants – offenders that feel like victims. By the time that someone has reached that level it is almost impossible to pull them back. There are some organizations that try to restore this type of offender, but often, in my perception, they only increase the risk of the community they try to bring these offenders into.
This mindset, to lash out to get justice, includes broad swaths of our society. It includes liberals who ostracize, castigate and disparage people who do not think, act or buy the ‘right’ way for social justice. It includes conservatives who do the same, rejecting people because they don’t utilize big box discounters, “prep” for disaster and rely on family and community support over federal agencies and social safety nets. It includes “in clubs” from elementary school to business associations that act to manage and control members and to ostracize others to remind members why they must hue to the norm.
To explain my approach, to the above issues, I’ll prep for emergency as best I can while not judging others who are ill prepared. I’ll work for social justice, but I’ll take social justice messages with a grain of salt and I will refuse to participate in mass movements and ideological positions of all stripes. I avoid in clubs. That’s that.
The way that the security mindset differs from what I’ll call the ‘reactive/assaultive justice’ mindset is that protection is more important than emotion. Would you protect the person who cheated on you in college? Would you protect the person your former partner cheated with? Would you protect someone you perceived had wronged you in the past? Would you protect someone who you believe failed to protect you when you believe they ‘should’ have? If you can answer yes, and I certainly can, then you have the security mindset. You are a protector.
I believe this is at the core of today’s challenge. You can take every weapon from somebody except those that matter: their hands, their legs, their head and their mind. What no one can regulate is what goes into the mind, what occurs in the mind, and what comes out through action.
To provide a couple of examples, Dale Royer, a graduate student at Iowa State University in the 1980’s believed his professor was acting against him to stop him from receiving grant money. His anger and hate seethed up in him, and, though people began to notice his erratic change in behavior, no one did anything to stop him. He ended up going to his family farm in Iowa, filling gasoline cans with diesel fuel from the farm gas pump, breaking into his instructor’s home, dousing the bottom floor and front stairs in fuel, and lighting it on fire. Two children were killed of smoke inhalation on the top of the first flight of stairs. One of those two was in my seventh grade class. Though he used terrible destructive force there has yet to be called a ban on diesel fuel, much to the relief of trucking companies across the nation.
On September 28, Salt Lake police had to shoot a man threatening to detonate an explosive device he had in a backpack on a downtown electric rail stop. The man had an extensive criminal record and some bizarre behavior, as documented by The Salt Lake City tribune http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/54985828-78/mayhew-lake-officers-salt.html.csp The contents of his backpack have not been disclosed, though authorities have stated the materials had the potential to explode. It is likely that his materials were common. Can we ban all items that could rise to such a level?
It is impossible to regulate out all danger. In fact, assailants have deep capacity for innovation and adaptation. A person intent on causing harm will do with the only limit set by the extent of their imagination and capacity to cause harm. When guns are banned assailants will adapt to fire, bombings, automotive or airplane assault, and who knows what other means. To provide safety and protection in our society we need to increase the protective mindset and decrease opportunity based and reactive mindsets that lead to such things as bullying, assault and battery.
You know what, I’m just going to go ahead and posit Murdock’s first rule:
All peace must be backed with force.
If you want to commission some research from me I’ll gladly back up my first rule.
The question is who has the right to bear force? Is it the individual? Does the responsibility to protect derive from the right to self-defense, and is that an individual right or a collective right? Once we determine that force must exist, how do we manage, regulate and implement it in timely and sufficient amount to effectively stop intended assailants.
Please take some time to think on this matter deeply. I believe it is at the heart of the real conversation. Without deep consideration of reasonable force we are just left with the emotional rants of CNN and MSNBC talking heads.
Seems to me that the middle east is the best example of an area where peace exists only because force keeps the populace in line. Remove the bully at the top and another bully emerges only to eventually use the same coersive tactics as his predecessor to exact compliance from his fellow citizens.
Freedom can only exist only where there is a responsible populace. Where the populace is irresponsible, fascism and other forms of government by force emerge in order for there to be some reasonable degree of safety.
Part of being a responsible people is to ensure that crazies can’t have access to unlimited fire power. The USA is unique in guaranteeing that just about anyone can have weapons, as many as they want. Guns, especially assault weapons, make it easy for crazies to kill a lot of people in a short amount of time. In my view, we are irresponsible because we allow weaponry that can be used only to kill other people to be sold to and owned by private citizens.
There are gun owners who disagree with the NRA position, I actually met one once. They should be speaking up for a sensible, balanced national policy. Unfortunately, if they are speaking out, they are not getting through to the rest of us.
I disagree with your assessment. One of my jobs is to work security at sporting venues and concerts. I work a lot of soccer games, some rugby, rock and heavy metal concerts. Soccer is known globally for mass deaths and/or destruction through stampeding fans or through fights among supporter groups that build into riots. What stops these is effective application of force immediately when an offense is observed.
If you read any intro textbook on policing the first application of force is the officer on the scene. The officer has the right and responsibility to enforce order and regulation through various means in appropriate situations. A security guard is also an officer. The official title indicated on the license is “private security officer.” Security officers have reduced rights and responsibility in their working environment as compared to police, but the reality is the same.
At one venue where I work guard working the field manages about 800 to 1100 fans, watching for hot spots that can lead to violence. A fan swearing and insulting the referees can very quickly get ten or 20 people riled up that then influence a hundred or more fans. When a guard acts quickly, giving more attention to the fan, handing them a copy of the “fan code of conduct” or pulling them aside for a verbal warning often will settle up to a thousand fans in terms of their conduct.
One of the most favorite assaults among 20 something anarchist influenced fans is to hurl quarters at the head of the opposing team’s goal keeper. When caught, these fans are immediately ejected from the stadium and cited by police for assault. The coins hurt, can impact the game and can even cause bleeding and other injuries, but more importantly, giving a pass to such conduct will embolden fans to storm the field, assault players, refs or opposing fans. I have stopped multiple fans from throwing coins during games through appropriate application of observation, attention and thereby, appropriate force.
Social conduct is based on broader perceptions of fairness and swiftness in therms of rewards and punishments. When the fairness and immediacy of justice falls apart it encourages misconduct to spread. People begin to perceive that no merit exists in holding to a norm or ‘higher standard’ and society falls into disarray.
This is a quick introduction to and example of the effective use of force. Appropriate application of force can vary from verbal warnings, fines, arrest, ejection, banishment, or if the assault leads to the risk of life and limb, an array of force can be applied from pepper spray to batons to deadly force such as firearms. None of these have to do with tyrannical governments or repression. I would suggest that the misunderstanding of force is one of the most significant weaknesses in our country. I think there are a lot of reasons for that – extreme reactions to politics in the 1960′s, the projection of wrongness from particular conflicts onto the tools for mitigating conflict, ambiguity about almost every set of common values, lack of trust, lack of honesty – these things and more have made a mess of our cultural framework and language.
the term “force” is actually a long line of force continuum, but you have to be both educated and trained to expand your personal continuum. If all you have trained for is yelling and then shooting, that’s all you will do when pressed. Then you have to look back at how long this set up has been going on. All new schools have the communist style of communal teaching architecture. Huge communal teaching spaces with fabric walls that can be shut but don’t really separate anything. No place to run or hide, like communal showers, it forces you to accept degradation and control. Absolutely the most unsafe design possible.
After all, it takes a village to raise a useful idiot… Next, moronic entrapment policies called a school lockdown. The absolute worst thing you can do. You should have classrooms with real walls so you can lock your door from the inside, open the windows and get out as fast as possible. After all, all federal emergency building plans mandate that you get out as fast as possible through any way possible and go to an off site rally location for head count. The rally site is to be outside the emergency vehicle perimeter and safe from fields of fire originating at the office and easily protectable. You won’t see those requirements in any school emergency evac plan. Plus, when the alerrt team comes streaming in an hour later, instead of having a school that you can clear sequentially with small teams, easy to control space… You have a huge communal area that is virtually impossible to clear. And we should also consider that with the drive by national media doing active massacre training for all the useful idiots via tv, day in and day out, this can only get worse until the communist media mind controllers start doing the right thing…for a change! So you had the useful idiot lemming school administrators locking the kids in the kill zone, either by decree (lockdown) or by the inability to recognize perfectly wrong training and school policy directives. Afterall, look what the lockdown at Beslan accomplished. It doesn’t matter who does it, the result is the same.
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