I know a lot of people who choose not to keep in touch with current events. It's not hard if you pay no attention whatsoever to any of the news media. Ignorance is bliss! Sometimes I wish I subscribed to that maxim, and the last week has been one of those times.
There's no telling what's behind the recent civil disturbances, other than perhaps some truly unfortunate coincidence. One would certainly hope the old 'copycat' phenomenon isn't in play.
Few things trouble me more than when people misuse firearms. Anything produced in large numbers for a long period of time will inevitably be abused, mostly by a group of people who form a 'bottom ten percent' segment of the population. Carelessness is bad, negligence is the earmark of the inexperience of youth and the complacency of maturity. When something is perverted for use as an instrument of criminal assault and murder, it is truly abhorrent.
Law enforcement and criminology are lifelong interests of mine, although my career pursuits lay elsewhere. That doesn't prevent me from incessantly studying both. Any high profile crime is likely to elicit some of my attention, but I carefully observe anything involving criminal use of anything that can be a deadly weapon. Some lessons are best learned vicariously!
The incident in Finland a few weeks ago was a bit of a shock, but not completely surprising. No matter where you live, something like that will eventually happen in one way or another, if enough years pass. In open, free societies, it'll usually be an aberrant individual who perpetrates base crimes. In places where the political climate is tough to surive in, private citizens aren't as much a threat as organized outlaws, and in more than a few countries, the government itself is essentially a criminal organization which victimizes its citizens whenever it feels the whim to do so. I'm perfectly content to live in America, thank you. Even the worst inner cities here are often safer than some of the better neighborhoods in the urbanized third world nations where rival warlords or contentious religious or political factions are jockeying for control. Often times those street battles involve true military hardware; heavy machine guns, grenades, mortars, high explosives, and anti-tank weapons. Compared to that mayhem, experienced in parts of Africa and more notably (at least to those of us who mind the news) Iraq, a few relatively scattered shootings don't seem quite so bad...
I've been very disturbed by the recent trend developing here in the last week, though. First the Omaha incident at the Von Maur store in the Westroads Mall, then the rampaging young man avenging some perceived slight at a Christian ministry and later at a large church in Colorado. Yesterday morning as I drove to work I heard an account of a man and woman killed at a child's birthday party in, I believe, South Carolina. The network news commentator concluded with, "...but no children were harmed.". Like hell no children were harmed! A coworker of mine recently revealed to me that his father had been shot to death on a city street, in broad daylight, in Montana where he was from. It's very plain to see that the event had a major impact on this young man. You just don't forget something like that, you know. As I'm writing this now, with the radio on as always, I'm starting to hear reports of a shooting involving a half dozen teenagers in north Las Vegas. Insanity!
I don't often openly comment on these things, I only discuss them with people I genuinely feel comfortable being around. No one reason for that, it's just the way I am. Maybe it's time to change that position. There's so much people don't understand about reality as it pertains to events like this - it completely flusters me. Americans as a whole suffer from decades of faulty programming, thanks to television and movies, and just popular culture in general. We really never have collectively understood the issue, and as a result widespread hopelessness and paranoia take over when rational thought and circumspect reflection are what we need to keep our national sanity.
Yes, there's a problem. Yes, it can be dealt with, even if never completely solved. As always, DON'T PANIC. But that's what we essentially do. Fear sells, and fear causes panic. Panic leads to terror, and that's no way to live, even though a number of evil people in the world today desire precisely that. One of my childhood 'heros', the late Colonel Francis Stanley Gabreski, spent some time flying for the Royal Air Force in England before the US got involved in World War II sixty-five years ago. Flying the Spitfire, he was so anxious the first time he went into combat against the Luftwaffe he almost couldn't function. He learned from the experience that he needed to stay calm in order to hold his own and hopefully prevail in a dogfight. He went on to become one of our highest scoring aces after he returned to flying for the US Army Air Corps and also became one of our first aces in Korea. If you can learn to keep everything under control and in perspective, you can handle whatever comes your way.
In days to come, I'll examine this issue in detail. As always, I welcome your questions. I might not have all the world's answers, but it never hurts to talk it through all the same. Most of us are smarter than we think, and some of think we're smarter than we are. Since the majority of us are in the former group rather than the latter, we can arrive at all kinds of valid conclusions if we just take it one step at a time and work on the tough issues together...
For now, keep in mind that there really are no guarantees in life and that there's risk in just being alive. It isn't likely, but that status can revert at any time for any number of reasons. Enjoy life while you've got it, and one does that by not overly worrying themselves about things like we're discussing here. Procrastination isn't all bad...put your worrying off until tomorrow!
Until then,
Tim Gordon
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