Aimless Thoughts

One of the big myths you've started to hear from the right in the wake of the Virginia Tech shooting is that the whole thing could have been averted if only the students were armed to the teeth. That goes hand-in-hand with the illogic from these people that guns are magical items that always strike their target, as easy as a bastard sword strikes the dragon with a roll of the 20-sided die in their D&D session.

Guns are actually imprecise objects that require a lot of training. On the battlefield, you have highly trained individuals carrying rifles, and yet there are plenty of friendly fire incidents. The commencement of a shooting incident in a public space is chaotic. People are running everywhere, the rush of sensory information prevents informed knowledge (think about how difficult it is to find two eyewitness reports that match up), and there is no clean and clear target to the shooter. If everybody started firing off at that stage, you'd end up killing everybody in the place.

A Kos diarist and experienced gun handler goes down this road as well:

Given that trained police officers, in several recent incidents, fired dozens of shots at several people and missed most of their shots, and, furthermore, given that no matter how cool and tough and certain and heroic you are or think you are, you CAN make a mistake, what the hell are you thinking?

Life isn't a movie and you're not Clint Eastwood. Target acquisition is a serious problem in any fire fight. The bad guys don't always wear black hats to make them easy to identify. People keep getting killed by mistake in combat (can anyone say Pat Tillman? or Giuliana Sgrena?). How do you identify the "Bad guys?" A few years ago an undercover New York cop was shot dead by a transit cop becasue one of them failed to obey the rules of engagement and know the signals identifying undercover cops.

In any fire fight, you can't always be sure you know the players. That's one reason cops and soldiers wear uniforms. And look what keeps happening in Iraq as the bad guys keep killing people while wearing good guy uniforms.

It's not like on TV. You never really know what's going on. You don't have a handy editor composing the shots so you cam keep track of what's what. Where are the shots coming from? Who's hidden? Who's working together? When six people are shooting and none of them know each other, how do you know whom to shoot?

The answer is you wouldn't, and these armchair cowboys who think that guns are the answer to all of our problems are out of their minds.

I would also say that yes, it's true, one unthinkable incident at a college shouldn't be used as a lever to push all the half-formed beliefs everyone on the Internet appears to have. Like I said, it's a tragedy, but an unbelievably rare tragedy, and while the search for meaning in the meaningless is part of the human condition, sometimes it's just... meaningless. No amount of security is going to be able to stop someone who has the will and no concern for his own life. Bloggers talk about this stuff because they talk about everything, and connecting it to policy is a natural process. I don't necessarily have a problem with that, but you have to understand that the world doesn't always work the way that you want it to work.