Wednesday, 23rd March 2005
There is something wrong with you
I don’t think anyone should have guns. I really don’t. If we were in my sappy, idealist world, where guns are not available, a tragedy such as a 4 year old shooting his 2 year old brother in the head wouldn’t happen. In sappy idealist land, “smart guns” are neither needed nor the answer.
Another child killed his classmates again, but you knew that, right? You probably mentioned it in passing to someone over the lavatory stall walls whilst you took an apres coffee piss at work. Terrible, tragedy, awful, shocking and then you’ll go back to your monitors and go home to your TVs and that will be that. If you are in the UK, or somewhere similar, you’ll probably tut-tut about guns and if you are in the states you’ll either defend them religiously or do the same. Or, maybe, maybe you’ll stop to think for a moment instead.
Defending the rights of “law abiding gun holders” is ridiculous, selfish and insensitive - who gives a fuck about your “rights”, when your rights just figured into 10 people dying when they need not have. At the same time, shouting “ban guns” as a reactionary slogan against this kind of violence isn’t helping matters either. Guns are not the problem, they are a symptom of the problem. The real problem is whatever concatenation of events caused this child to have the feelings that drove him to kill himself and nine others.
Obviously this child had problems: he was a social outcast, his dad committed suicide, his mum’s brain damaged and so he is left with his grandfather and partner as his support roles. Who knows who failed him and how, but obviously someone, a great number of someone’s, did.
So on the one hand, people are right, this wouldn’t have happened if guns weren’t so readily available, but what then would have happened to the emotions and thoughts that drove him to do this in the first place? When I was at school, a guy a year above me threw himself under a train in an unsuccessful suicide attempt: he kept his life, but traded half a leg. He must have been the same age as this child, Jeff Weise, when he did it. Would he have brought a gun to school and shot us if he could? Would Jeff have thrown himself under a train if he couldn’t? I suspect that Jeff would have tried to end his own life in some way and I have to wonder: is that any less of a tragedy?
Did American kids always shoot their way through their problems? This time line documents all of the killings in American schools from 1997 to date, but did it happen before? (And I am wondering if this is truly all schools, or just majority white ones?) I certainly don’t remember it happening, but I am also not that old. So perhaps in 1985, when 10 year old me was attempting to liberate a tank full of locusts, perhaps there was a similar kid in America shooting at their classmates.
And I don’t think you can blame violent movies or television programmes or games or books either, because they are simply more symptoms. Perhaps they cause the disease to spread faster, farther, further, but they themselves are not the real issue. The real issue is the part of us that likes to view it, the part of us that creates it. The part of us that will make a horror writer a best seller but leave some soft hearted poet unheard of.
There is something wrong with us, you know. Something desperately wrong. I used to think that this was a really bad time in the world, that things were once better and can be again, but I don’t think I believe that any more. I think it is all just a rhythm, a cycle, a world full of peaks and troughs and maybe all that’s happening now, is that we are peaking, reaching some kind of crescendo. All you have to do is read a little bit of history or even some Dostoevsky, and you will see the same torrents of hate, murder, liars, disease, poverty - just with different victors and victims. As a species, we pulsate to this rhythm of death, targeting some and sparing others, the rules subject to change at any given second.
We’re all such cynical bastards too. I prefaced this entry with the phrase “sappy idealist” because I know that if I didn’t claim the words myself, they would be used as a weapon against me. Used as a way to “prove” my thoughts are useless because I am not realistic. Throwing positive traits at a person as an insult is a convenient way to avoid their perspective, to trivialise their suggestions, to dismiss ideas of change out of some latent fear of it. I’m not dead yet so I’m happy with the world, happy with it, happy…
We’ve all internalised the mantra that “things are the way they are”, so we have blinded ourselves to the idea that, in actual fact, they don’t have to be. That’s the real damaging side affect of westernisation - the doped up indulgence in our own powerlessness. We are not, contrary to our apathetic whines, impervious to change. If we don’t want a system, a government, a law, we can change it. We have only to look at the Ukraine for a recent example to show that people are not powerless and can rise up and demand their desires to be heard and addressed. That we are powerful and can effect change.
Instead though, we’ll all quibble and squabble about what should be done to prevent these murders happening and whilst we are squabbling, another kid will do it again. Meanwhile another kid will have to do what they need to in order to survive, because they are too poor to go to school, but we won’t hear about that kid because maybe they are too brown, or perhaps simply the world is bored of less sensational crimes. And so there are all these children who are upset because no one is helping them; all these angry kids who’ve been shat upon; all these people that are hurt and enraged, marginalised and disaffected. Yet no one cares so long as they stay put and create the appropriate news headlines for the appropriate neighbourhoods and countries. No one cares because to care is to be sensitive and to be sensitive is a crime. So you’ll go on, you’ll go to work or to school or to the bar and you’ll never stop to wonder why. You’ll just make feeble comments on the most obvious facts.
You’ll never ask yourself why it is you can watch murder for fun? You’ll never ask yourself why it is that a woman can be gang raped in your front room and you don’t feel a thing? You’ll never ask yourself why, because you are too scared of the answers, too afraid to hurt and to feel. You’ll never stop to ask these questions of yourself because to do so would be to acknowledge that there is something wrong with you. Something really, really wrong and until you accept that and work on that, another kid will take another gun and blow their fucking brains out, and they will keep on blowing their brains out until every last one of us stops and looks at that demon inside of them that likes to consume others pain in place of their own. Until then, all you can do is hope to get enough money, so as you can get into the right neighbourhood, so as that big, bloody mess will be on your television screens and not on the steps leading to your front door.
Guns make death, no more
Protection deflects, not aims
You want right to kill. 
epistemological dribbled:
It’s a very sad state of affairs indeed. I’m also a little puzzled: most people need to be taught how to fire a gun,so how the hell did a four year old know what he was doing? ;(
bursty pants of joy dribbled:
yeah, and also, it seems that he just went staight to his mum’s bag to get it so, why did he know where it was? why was it there? why wasn’t the safety catch on? why did he know how to release it? why did he know what a gun was? how was he strong enough to pull the trigger and hold it effectively so as to shoot his intended object? how come his aim was so good?
there are a lot of things about that particular story that make no sense to me.
so, maybe he didn’t do it at all.
maybe the mother shot the kid and is blaming the other instead.
epistemological dribbled:
It is a possibility. I can’t imagine, as you say, that a four year old would be strong enough to do it.
bursty pants of joy dribbled:
i mean, guns can be exceedingly light. i’ve only been in the possession of one for a few hours (a story in its own right) and it was fairly large (and scary) and, imo, too heavy for a 4 yr old. BUT there are lots out there that are incredibly light.
to me, it’s about the physcial dexterity of holding, aiming, firing. that’s good hand to eye coordination for a 4 yr old. or was it just a fluke that the holding and firing actually hit the intended person..?
*shrugs*
cindylu dribbled:
Man, when I heard about the latest school shooting, you know what hurt and shocked me most? It wasn’t that it was another high school (as someone who’s lived through all those other shootings I think I’ve become - sadly - a little desensitized to them). Instead, I felt really sad that it was a youth on a reservation. Life on reservations are already tough.
bursty pants of joy dribbled:
yeah. i couldn’t even bring myself to comment on that part. i don’t really understand the sorrow i feel about that or how to articulate it properly. it’s really fucking tragic and what’s more, instead of thinking about what life is like on a reservation, or indeed for native americans in general, people have/are gonna focus on his “nazi” beliefs as if that was the point. it wasn’t the point at all. just more symptoms…