So That This Never Happens Again
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The first reaction to the Aurora Massacre was the
usual call for making sure that "this never happens
again". Everyone from New York City Mayor Bloomberg
to author Salman Rushdie to mystery writer Patricia
Cornwell called for imposing gun control to insure
"this never happens again".
And yet if we were to confiscate every privately
owned firearm and outlaw the manufacture of new ones
in the country, if we were to forcibly
institutionalize anyone suspected of being mentally
ill, and if we added naked scanners to movie
theaters; we still could not insure that this will
never happen again.
And yet Colorado has half the murder rate of
Illinois, as adjusted for population. Idaho, Utah,
Wyoming and New Hampshire, all full of guns, have
far lower murder rates than gun control states like
New York, California and Illinois. According to
Bloomberg, "If we had fewer guns, we would have a
lot fewer murders." But guns are not proportional to
murders.
Utah has the second highest gun ownership rate in
the country and the eighth lowest homicide rate.
Wyoming, the state with the fourth highest gun
ownership rate has the fourth lowest homicide rate.
Meanwhile New York is 48th in gun ownership, but is
the 18th highest in its murder rate.
We escape tragedy by searching for control and this
is an obscene gift that we give to liberalism and
its counterpart, the police state. Both promise us a
better and safer world in exchange for our freedom.
After every tragedy they promise us that they can
keep it from happening again. They can't. No one
can.
The illusion of control attempts to tie James Holmes
to some larger issue, whether it's gun control or
movie violence. It ignores the banality of
individual evil, to make him into some larger
monster that we can fight. But sometimes there is no
meaning to evil except that it exists. No way to
make sense of it or transform into a social crusade.
Evil just is.
We can make war on organized or semi-organized
enemies. We can bomb Hiroshima, round up the Mafia,
launch drone strikes on Al-Qaeda leaders and break
up cartels. We cannot however make war on the evil
that lurks unexpectedly in human brains.
The edifice of government towers over public life.
It is built for fighting systems, groups and "Isms'"
and it can be used to ban guns, lock up the mentally
ill or launch another one of its incessant public
education campaigns. Its ability to stop an
individual bent on causing harm to other individuals
is highly limited at best.
That is where the illusion of control breaks down.
The system can promise to stop gun violence, but it
can't stop a man with a gun. All it can do is
exploit the tragedy for more power. Only individuals
can stop individuals. The only control we can
possibly have comes from living in a society where
the people do the right thing... and are empowered
to do the right thing.
But that is not the society that the gun-controllers
and police-staters want to create. The society they
want is a place where everyone sits quietly, offers
no resistance, contacts the authorities and waits
for the accredited branches of the government to do
something. A place where everyone knows that if they
do something, they may be arrested or sued by the
criminal afterward. A place where people are
expected to be willing to die, but not fight back.
It takes a great deal of conditioning to break
the reflex of leaving things up to the proper
authorities. It takes something like seeing two
towers fall in burning rubble while sitting on a
plane that is clearly headed toward a similar
mission. But shortly afterward the proper
authorities will be back on the job, reminding
everyone to fly planes, submit to some
profiling-free groping, and pay no attention to the
man with the beard and the itchy underwear chanting
"Allah Akbar" to himself in the window seat.
Bloomberg replied to a suggestion that if more
people in the theater had guns they might have been
able to fight back, with, "To arm everybody and have
the wild west all the time is one of the more
nonsensical things you can say." And in Bloomberg's
world it is nonsensical. By "Wild West", he means
anarchy and when you're running a major city that
has more employees than some countries have people,
the last thing you want is anarchy.
Systems respond to a failure of control by
intensifying control. Going the other way is
"nonsensical" to them. To Bloomberg the Aurora
Massacre was a failure of control, which every
"rational" person has to respond to by agreeing that
we need more control. Find the "loopholes" and close
them. Tighten the noose and this will never happen
again... until the next time it does, when it will
be met with the same response.
More loopholes, more nooses and more zero tolerance.
Make a law, name it after a murdered child and sit
back confident that nothing like this can ever
happen again because the big book of laws just had
another forty pages added to it.
That is the government world, a place where every
problem can be solved if you throw enough money,
manpower and laws at it. And that world is as
imaginary as the comic book world playing on the
movie screen during the massacre. That is why gun
control is so appealing. Unlike murders, guns can be
banned.
Government is not god, though it often seems to
aspire to the job. No amount of regulations can
exercise complete control over the world around us.
All they do is create a hedge maze within which both
we and the criminals operate. And criminals will
always be better at navigating that hedge maze.
Those who follow the law will always be
proportionally more dis-empowered by regulations
than those who do not. The flip side of a police
state in the anarchy boiling underneath. The more
laws there are, the more they are broken. The more
control is centralized, the more corrupt the
controllers become until the criminals are in power
and those who are in power are criminals.
A police state is not a perfectly-controlled society
where everyone follows the law or gets locked up.
It's thugs with shotguns, tattoos and uniforms, dark
sunglasses covering their eyes, collecting bribes
from the criminals they are in league with. It's a
president with forty mansions to his name and an
entire apparatus of party loyalists who feed the
bribes up to him. It's not a place that's free of
crime; it's a place that's saturated with a crime,
where everyone is a criminal from the leaders down
to the little boy picking your pocket because
otherwise the gang leader who runs the block will
beat him.
We can turn America into that place in 10-15 years.
All we need to do is spread the failed liberal
policies that destroyed the country's greatest
cities to the rest of the country. Then try to lock
down that anarchy with gun control, SWAT teams and 5
million regulations. Give it time and we'll manage
to achieve the current Democratic Party platform of
being just like Mexico.
In America the police state has emerged as an
attempt to manage the consequence of liberal social
policies. Import enough immigrants from lawless
countries, put them side-by-side in major cities and
it will take a police state to manage the
consequences. Destroy values, promote cultural
anarchy while running regulatory totalitarianism,
and you will need a police state. Destroy
manufacturing and keep enough men of all races out
of work, and the police state will be needed to
manage the violence. Import enough followers of a
religion in which terrorism is a mandate, and it
will take a police state to maintain even temporary
normalcy.
Officially liberals don't like the police state very
much, and yet the police state is the only thing
that prevents the countries afflicted by their
policies from completely melting down. And when
faced with a problem, whether it's a man filling in
a swamp on his own property or individuals owning
firearms, they resort to the power of the police
state. Right now they are telling us that if we just
had a police state where all the firearms were
controlled by the police, this will never happen
again.
Adulthood means knowing that this will happen
again. That madmen will kill people and it is our
responsibility to prevent that not by passing a few
laws that invest more power in a police state, but
by being aware and taking action when necessary. And
knowing that this too may not be enough.
We have some impressive technologies, but those
don't make us gods. We have information at our
fingertips, but that is not the same thing as
control. We do not control the world and we
certainly do not control other people. And it is
important that we remember that.
The actions of James Holmes are not a reflection on
us or on that imaginary village that raises all of
us. It is a reflection on him. To forget that by
assigning responsibility to the gun or the movie is
to abdicate individual responsibility and throw up
our hands to the liberal gods of government and the
police state to come and save us from ourselves. And
they will eagerly answer the call.
The power of the individual to do good comes from a
sense of individual responsibility. Take away that
responsibility and the country begins to rot. Bury
it deep enough and there are only sheep waiting for
a wolf.