On the Tactics of Mass Murder

In a world populated by more than seven billion persons, the tiny minorities formed by the willfully evil and dangerously insane will number in the millions. Therefore, as I’ve noted before, it is not surprising in a concurrent era of global information networks that we will hear of their horrific deeds all too frequently. How we respond to such events is a measure of our own rationality—but that’s not directly what I want to discuss now.

To tell the truth, I’ve avoided this discussion for a while. However, not naming a potential danger does nothing to mitigate it. Furthermore, the evil and insane can benefit from the information revolution just as easily as the rest of us, so they will find no shortage of terminal inspiration or instruction when the time comes. In the end, our best policy prescription may simply be to not make risks of mass murder worse than they already are.

Misery loves company. This aphorism may explain as much as anything else why certain individuals choose to end their own lives while inflicting as much collateral damage as possible. Garnering the wide recognition they feel they deserve but have never received may be another motivation—which is why I refuse to name perpetrators of these atrocious crimes. In the end, though, I can’t answer the why. A very few broken human creatures stare into the abyss of grief or envy or rage and see mass murder as the best course of action toward even the pettiest of goals. Others in the vast majority of semi-rational human beings who may look into that same abyss will reject violence as unjustified no matter how noble the ends might seem—even when they lack the self-awareness to articulate doing so.

The how is what I want to discuss here. The means and methods of mass killers are so often what drives the public-policy debate … at least after the fact. That’s where the prevention efforts are usually focused. Those efforts are misguided at best.

The entertainment media have made a fetish of the personal weapon, be it a gun or a knife or some other type of sidearm. It has been transformed into a talisman of power in the popular imagination, though its actual lethal capabilities are much more modest. In fact, personal weapons are not the most effective choice for mass slaughter, but deranged individuals embrace the mythology and select them anyway, no doubt indulging in cinematic fantasies of the carnage they will cause. There are deadlier and more destructive methods to exact social vengeance, but if these means are presently used with greater frequency, then we certainly don’t hear about that fact from the politically motivated news media.

The typical American arguments for and against the right to bear arms don’t really matter in this case. Even if guns and knives were completely prohibited, the ban would always be incomplete. If all responsible adults were legally authorized to carry defensive weapons at all times and in all locations, the armed citizen would still be the exception rather than the rule. Actually, we could indulge in the fantastical extremes of these positions … and we would still fail.

All weapons more dangerous than a plastic sippy cup could magically vanish from existence, but mass killers would still arise and still carry their crimes to completion. Conversely, all responsible adults could be armed and ready to defend against any and all direct attacks, but this wouldn’t stop mass murder either. Would-be killers would simply change their tactics, and the results would probably be worse.

Personal weapons are essentially precision tools, best suited for defensive purposes against no more than a few discreet targets. A single bullet isn’t terribly lethal. A blade can be much deadlier but has a more limited threat radius. By choosing a personal weapon for his crimes, a would-be mass murderer has already limited the amount of damage he can do.

Impersonal weapons are by far the more dangerous selection. Explosives, fire, poison, these are just a few things that can be used to kill both indiscriminately and on a large scale. Deployed with insidious planning, the results of such attacks can be truly devastating—and they give the killer not bent on suicide or imprisonment much greater opportunities to escape and repeat his crimes again and again.

The will to commit atrocious acts is and has always been the greatest threat. We’ve learned that lesson over and over again throughout history, but as rational, compassionate people, we want to forget that horrific evil can and does exist in the darkest corners of the human heart. When it escapes into the world through willful intent or insane delusion, the innocent will always be its victims. With billions of human souls sharing life today, these incidents will occur with chilling regularity and frequency—and yet they are still vanishingly rare in absolute terms.

We might mitigate the risks posed by certain strains of this social violence, perhaps at great cost to liberty and prosperity, but in so doing we might only clear the way for more virulent strains to manifest themselves. The how that we can see and discuss won’t give us the solution to this problem. That answer—if there is an answer—still lies within the why. If we can find a solution, I do know that it won’t be political or tactical. It will have to be emotional or spiritual … or, dare I say it, moral.

Meanwhile, to make public policy in anguish is … and always will be … folly.