Tragically Insignificant

 

In recent days, we’ve seen a tragic rash of murder and mayhem around the globe. Naturally, people react to these shocking events with high emotion, and the usual responses follow. In the United States, we talk about more gun control. In China, they talk about more knife control. But pointless attempts to restrict whatever tools were used to execute the evil intentions are not what I want to examine here.

Some people may blame weapons or poor healthcare or moral decay or video games or certain kinds of music for the apparently increasing frequency of such tragedies, but really none of these things are to blame. Such events—undeniably terrible as they are—are rare outliers. The likelihood that a given individual will fall victim to an occurrence like these is vanishingly small.

However, we live in a world of over seven billion people connected by a global telecommunications network. Not only are the tiny, tiny minorities of willfully evil and/or dangerously insane human beings thus noticeably larger than in past historical eras, but now we learn of their horrific deeds almost instantly. The root problem in this instance is nothing more than mathematically inescapable demographics.

As terrifying and heart-rending as these tragedies are, they are still statistically insignificant events. To base public policy on vain attempts to prevent all such incidents would be to make evil the lowest common denominator of human interaction and would be, as it always has been, a very destructive way to spend our collective grief.