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David McElroy

An Alien Sent to Observe the Human Race

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All sides rushing to assign blame in theater shootings only leads to error

By David McElroy · July 21, 2012

Somewhere in the neighborhood of 6,744 people died in the United States Thursday. Because of modern media, though, the only ones who mattered were the 12 who died in Aurora, Colo., in a horrific movie theater shooting.

It’s been barely more than 24 hours since the senseless killings, but I’ve seen serious stupidity and recklessness from many people. The truth is that the killer is a blank slate to almost all of us. We don’t know his motives. Any attempts to explain why it happened are simply a matter of us imposing our biases onto something we’re ignorant about. And look at the ignorance we’ve heard so far.

ABC News reported Friday morning that the shooter might be a member of a Colorado Tea Party group. Why? Because the murderer’s name is James Holmes and there’s a Jim Holmes in Aurora who’s a member of a Tea Party group. Making that allegation with absolutely no evidence — other than similarity in names — is some of the worst journalism I’ve seen in a long time. I’d say it represents the mindset of some journalists who want to believe that Tea Party types are violent people who might erupt at any moment.

Conspiracy nutcase Alex Jones is reporting that the shooting is a staged psychological operation by the U.S. government (video) to gain support for a new UN treaty related to the sale of weapons. In the description of his Friday show, the promo says that Jones “breaks down how it will be used to push through ratification of the United Nations’ gun-grabber treaty in the Senate and also manufacture anti-Second Amendment hysteria in the corporate media.” It’s hard to take Jones seriously, but a lot of people who don’t look at his track record of failed predictions keep listening to him. (It’s not just Jones making the claim. Here’s another site that makes the claim with no rational reason.)

Many conservative blogs were reporting on Friday that Holmes is a member of the “black bloc” of Occupy Wall Street. (Here’s one random example of too many to list.) What’s their evidence that this is an attack from the political left? The short article at the blog link says, “Occupy Wall Street’s main website, OccupyWallStreet.org, has named Colorado Massacre Shooter James Holmes as an Occupy Black Bloc Member, which has been confirmed by Occupy Black Bloc researcher and expert private investigator Bill Warner.” Of course, the Occupy website said no such thing, and the “private investigator” was merely speculating. Evidence? Who needs evidence?

(And another insane conservative response to this came from a Texas Republican congressman who said it happened because of “ongoing attacks on Judeo-Christian beliefs.” Yes, seriously. Someone said that.)

More people than I could possibly list have blamed the existence of legal weapons for the shootings. But those people either don’t know or don’t care that guns are used in self-defense hundreds of times a day. I’ve seen numbers as low as 108,000 uses for self-defense each year to 2.5 million per year. The larger figures are hard for me to believe, but even if we accept the low-end estimate (which came from the National Crime Victimization Survey in 1993), that’s still almost 300 defensive uses of weapons every day. (Harvard’s School of Public Health, which takes a hardline anti-gun view, disagrees, if you’re interested in their reasoning.)

We don’t know who James Holmes is and why he decided to shoot a bunch of people Thursday night. Is he crazy? Yeah, he sounds that way to me. Does he have a motivation that will fit nicely into the various narratives that different people have for him? I doubt it. We’ll have to wait and see.

Behind all the attempts to assign blame and concoct simple fixes is one simple thing. Most people don’t like admitting that there’s a little chance that they might randomly die through no fault of their own. They’re indulging in the fantasy that if they simply get anti-gun laws passed, they’ll suddenly be safe. (As my friend Tim Sanders mentioned Friday night, those European-style gun restrictions didn’t stop a lone nut from killing nearly a hundred people in Norway last year.)

It’s a tragedy that 12 people died and dozens more were injured. But simplistic measures such as new gun laws aren’t going to put an end to tragedies. People who want weapons will still find them, and people who are truly motivated to kill a lot of people can find ways to mix legal ingredients to do so. (A fertilizer bomb shouldn’t be too terribly difficult to put together, I assume.) The point is that evil people who want to do evil things are going to find a way to do it.

Unfortunately, some people are still obsessed with the fantasy of perfect safety. When I was in a restaurant Friday evening, I heard someone on a TV news channel bring up the issue of what theaters need to do now to protect their customers. (The short answer: Nothing. You can’t put people into a protective bubble all the time.)

Thousands of people in this country are going to die today. Thousands more will die Sunday and the day after that. It’s a tragedy every time it happens when there’s no reason, but it’s simply a part of life that we have to accept. There will always be evil people doing evil things. And some people will always die before they’re old and worn out. (Do we even need to discuss deaths from auto accidents and swimming pools?)

It’s a terrible thing that the people affected by the Aurora shootings have gone through. But making up facts to suit whatever agenda you already had is a lousy way to respond to it.

Sometimes bad things happen to people. It might be me or you one day. Random death is just as much a part of life as anything else, even if that’s hard to accept. Trying to assign blame and then change a country’s laws to keep up the pretense of complete safety is foolish.

Real life is about tradeoffs, not about the fantasy that we can be safe all the time.

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I got a note today from a woman who lives on the other side of the country and has a young son: “[Young son] says that we should meet you sometime. He just said of your profile picture that he likes your face. I have shared photos and videos of Lucy and the cats since he was really little.” This made me profoundly happy. I trust the intuitive judgment of children about people. Little ones tend to read character very well. Adults are easy to fool, but it’s much harder to fool children about who you really are. I hope I do get to meet this young man and his mom one day.

I’m in the McDonald’s near my house, sitting near the play area. There’s one little girl — maybe 5 years old — who’s here with her father. He’s about my age, so he’s older than the typical father of a 5-year-old. Even though she’s the only kid here, the girl is giggling and having fun by herself. She periodically cries out, “Daddy, look!” And then she shows off something she thinks is impressive. Then, just a moment ago, she called out very sweetly, “Daddy?” He patiently said, “Yes, sweetheart.” And then she said, “Daddy, I love you so much!” And then she went back to playing as her father looked on with happiness and love.

When I first discovered the idea of unschooling, it was so radical that I had trouble finding people who even knew what it was. Today, the idea is mainstream enough that major media outlets sometimes cover the topic in a favorable way. The Sunday newspaper supplement called Parade had a strongly favorable article about unschooling a couple of weeks ago which explained what it is and how it’s different from homeschooling. It’s less structured. There’s no curriculum. There’s plenty of flexibility. And there are no tests and grades. (Most people today are shocked to learn that testing and grading didn’t exist in schools through history until the last couple hundred years.) If you want your children to think for themselves instead of following the herd mentality that pervades every school I’ve been part of, you owe it to yourself — and to your kids — to consider taking control of your children’s development back from governments. Just because you and I survived institutional schools doesn’t mean it’s the wisest choice. Start by reading the Parade article. It might open your eyes.

In the Birmingham suburb of Hueytown, the Golden Gophers of Hueytown High School had just defeated the Eufala Tigers in the second round of the state playoffs Friday night. It’s not a game that will mean a lot to anybody outside those two communities, but it meant everything to the players and coaches involved. After the game, Hueytown defensive coordinator Trent Campbell was celebrating with his victorious players when he noticed Eufala offensive lineman Dallas Ingram distraught and alone. Campbell left his players to console the distraught Ingram and photographer Dennis Victory caught photos of the pair together. “My reaction was to go see about him, because I’ll see my guys on Sunday and next week and the rest of their high school careers, but that’s a young man we watched on film for a week and studied and he’s a fantastic player,” Campbell said later. “And it wasn’t too long ago when I played my last high school football game and I know what that feeling is and you sort of never forget that. I went to tell him what a great player I thought he was and what a great game I thought they played and I wish nobody had to lose that night because it was an incredible game.” This is what sports at the high school level should be about. Winning is great and winning is fun. But humanity and decency last longer.

I have changed radically about some things over the years, but probably none of those changes have been as great as the ways that I feel about people who are viewed as evil or criminal. When I was young, I was eager to see criminals or foreign political enemies killed. Today, I don’t view such people though rose-colored glasses and I don’t view them as blameless folks who are going to turn their lives around if we just think happy thoughts. But I can’t celebrate the death of anybody, even if he might deserve it in some ways of thinking about it. Even if it’s sometimes necessary to kill someone — and those cases are often debatable — I regret the death of someone who will now never have a chance to discover love and change his life. There are some evil people in this world, but I can’t celebrate their deaths.

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