The "You Didn't Do That" Society
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
First Elliot Rodger murdered his
three roommates with a knife, hammer and machete.
Then he shot eight people, three of them fatally,
and tried to run over several others in his car.
After the bodies were taken away, everyone on
television agreed that it was the fault of the guns.
Rodger
had been in therapy since he was eight and was
seeing therapists every day in high school. He had a
history of making violent threats and the police had
already gotten involved. He was on multiple
prescription medications and had therapists whom he
alerted to his plans by sending them his manifesto.
A therapist reacted by notifying his mother who
drove out personally. By then even more people were
dead.
In a country where a little boy with a pop tart
chewed in the shape of a gun triggers immediate
action, the professionals who cashed in on the
killer’s wealthy family were in no hurry to call the
police. One even reassured his mother while the
shootings were going on that it wasn’t him.
So it was clearly the fault of the guns. Guns that
Elliot Rodger bought with $5,000 from his family.
The BMW he used to commit some of the attacks was
given to him by his mother.
Jenni Rodger, his British aunt, blamed America and
guns for her nephew's massacre. "What kind of a
society allows this? How can this be allowed to
happen? I want to appeal to Americans to do
something about this horrific problem."
Somehow the parenting failure of her brother is now
the fault of an entire foreign country.
Rodger's father issued a statement through his
lawyer in support of gun control and "staunchly
against guns." It might have been a bit more useful
if Peter Rodger, instead of opposing a category of
manual instruments, had spent more time dealing with
his son's problems.
Guns did not kill six people. His son did.
Maybe Elliot Rodger's family would not have been
able to change anything, but it's likely that they
could have at least prevented the massacre if they
had become more involved instead of delegating the
problem that their son had become to therapists and
medications. It's the height of cynicism for his
father and aunt to take refuge in abstractions about
gun control.
When a teenager stabbed twenty people at a
Pittsburgh-area high school there were no easy
answers about gun control to take refuge in. If
Rodger had stuck to his knife, hammer and machete,
his relatives who coddled him all these years
wouldn't be able to shift the blame to an abstract
policy. They wouldn't be able to politicize the
crime and snip their own involvement out of the
picture.
Elliot Rodger's parents, communicating through a
lawyer and a talent agent, find it convenient to put
up another layer of abstraction between themselves
and the actions of their son. And the easiest way to
do that is to transform it into a widespread social
problem. The more that the smiling people on
television talk about gun control, the less likely
they are to talk about them.
Even mental illness reduces a specific crime to the
abstraction of a social problem. Expanding an
individual act into a social problem manufactures a
collective responsibility. The scapegoats are people
who had nothing to do with what happened. The
killer's family has successfully shifted
responsibility to people who live a thousand miles
away and never even knew their son existed.
Guns have become a convenient cliche. The new
villain is no longer the killer, but the 5 million
members of the NRA who are unwilling to give up
their constitutional rights because Elliot Rodger's
family failed at their single most important job.
Why is a gun owner in North Carolina more
responsible for the Isla Vista killings than Peter
Rodger? Does Peter Rodger’s staunch opposition to
guns free him from responsibility while dumping it
on the majority of Americans who believe in the Bill
of Rights?
Elliot Rodger was not a social problem. He was not a
gun culture. He was not a national anything. He was
an individual and individuals bear responsibility
for their own actions.
The
left is expert at removing responsibility from
individuals and assigning it to the culture at
large. Every murder is a failure of society. And
society fails every murderer, they insist. We are
all murderers because we own guns or didn't vote for
the right politicians who would have allocated more
money to mental health treatment, school counseling
or midnight basketball.
And outlawed guns.
The "You didn't build that" society is also the "You
didn't do that" society. The flip side of Elizabeth
Warren and Barack Obama's collectivist rhetoric is
that just as no one invents the airplane, creates a
company or writes the Great American Novel on their
own, no one kills six people on their own. If you
killed six people, it's because of the Second
Amendment. If you wanted to kill sorority girls,
it's because of Seth Rogen movies. If you're a
half-Asian who beat and stabbed your Asian roommates
to death, it's because of white (or half-white)
supremacism.
No one does anything good or bad on their own. The
good that men do gets taxed away for the purported
benefit of society and the evil that they do is
blamed on society.
In a collectivist system, everyone is responsible
for everything collectively and not responsible for
anything individually. Everyone but the killer is
responsible for his shooting spree. And that means
no one is responsible. The problem is tackled with
public awareness hashtags and legislation that hurts
millions of people who didn't do anything wrong.
America's gun owners, like its machete and hammer
owners, did not kill anyone. Every day the vast
majority of gun owners somehow manage to get through
the day without a killing spree. Their tools don't
have minds of their own. The gun culture that
liberals talk about does not sneak in through their
windows at night and urge them to shoot up the
neighborhood.
Elliot Rodger did not kill because he had guns. He
bought guns because he wanted to kill. And he wasn't
very good at it, wounding more people than he
killed. Like many on the left he believed that guns
would make him invincible. They didn't. And it was
the same good guys with guns the left sneers at who
put a stop to his killing spree.
We aren't rethinking the First Amendment because of
Rodger's YouTube videos and manifesto. Why are we
supposed to rethink the Second Amendment every time
some psycho includes guns in his killing spree? The
problem was not with Rodger's computer, his
smartphone, his hammer, his machete or his handguns.
They were only the tools that he used. The problem
was with him.
The solution to horrifying crimes is not collective
guilt, but individual responsibility. Instead of
transforming individual acts into a social problem,
we should instead remind ourselves that the keystone
of morality is individual responsibility.
Collectives are not moral. Individuals are.
People don't kill because there is a gun shop around
the corner. They kill because they make a choice.
Elliot Rodger's family doesn't want to deal with
their own choices. Elliot Rodger certainly did not
want to deal with his. However if we want a moral
society, we won't get there by pretending that
choice doesn't exist. We won't get there by banning
guns. We won't get there through abstractions.
A moral society recognizes the power and
responsibility of individual choice. A better
country doesn't begin with banning guns, but with
holding accountable those who kill. Even while
liberals were puffing out their chests over gun
control, the Supreme Court's liberal justices
stepped in to save Freddie Hall who kidnapped, raped
and murdered a pregnant woman and shot a deputy.
That
was in 1978. A decade earlier, he had gone to jail
for raping another woman and gouging out her eyes so
she wouldn't be able to identify him.
Like some of the other monsters on death row, Hall
decided to plead retarded. His IQ scores dropped.
After a long series of appeals, the Supreme Court
finally decided that executing him would be
unconstitutional.
"Florida’s law contravenes our Nation’s commitment
to dignity and its duty to teach human decency as
the mark of a civilized world," Justice Kennedy
wrote, speaking for the majority. But America was at
its best in dignity and decency when it held men,
including monsters like Freddie Hall, accountable
for their actions. Decency and civilization come
from individual choices. Liberals like Kennedy
reject individual choices and seek every possible
pretext for protecting killers from their moral
choices.
A society that makes excuses for monsters becomes an
amoral cesspool where no one is responsible for
anything because everyone is responsible for
everything. Instead of offering collectivist excuses
and implementing collectivist overreactions, we can
restore dignity and decency by rejecting social
problems and embracing individual responsibility.
Our choice is not between a safe society without
guns and a dangerous society with guns. It is
between a society of individual responsibility where
everyone can be trusted to own a gun and a society
of collectivist irresponsibles where no one can be
trusted to own a gun.