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.

Justice Done in Florida

Or was it?

As it turned out, young George Zimmerman wasn’t standing his ground when he fired that fatal shot in Sanford, Florida, but being beaten into it by younger Trayvon Martin. At least, given the evidence and testimony presented at trial, the state failed to prove otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt, leaving the jury to presumably accept that self-defense had justified the defendant’s actions.

Like many, I at first thought that the defendant must be guilty of something. He had surely confronted the victim and provoked the fight that led to the fatal shooting. (In some respects, I had perhaps even wanted him to be guilty, because I am a person who avoids unnecessary confrontation and could not reasonably see myself in the defendant’s place.) Unlike most, though, I also wanted the local police and prosecutors to do their jobs without political interference, so I was dismayed when the case was pushed as a racial cause célèbre.

I was also willing to change my opinion as the actual facts emerged from the cloak of propaganda. Two currents swayed me both before and during the trial.

First, the state brought an unsustainable charge against the defendant. In Florida, second-degree murder requires that the perpetrator act with hate or a depraved mind, motives that were clearly absent even before the trial commenced. I wondered about this overreach, until the answer struck me. The state had to win on an accusation that couldn’t later be turned against its own agents. A loss would be preferable to exposing constables on patrol to potential murder charges merely for contacting suspicious individuals.

Second, at trial, the most compelling evidence and testimony supported the defendant’s version of events. While the defendant may have initiated contact, the facts strongly suggested that the victim was the aggressor in the fight that followed. That is reasonable doubt right there, even if you feel or believe that there is still guilt lurking somewhere. Confronting a suspicious individual in your neighborhood may be foolish, but it is not a crime and does not justify battery upon your person.

In the end, most of us might never have heard of the incident if the mainstream media hadn’t initially jumped to the conclusion that an old Jewish man had shot a 12-year-old black boy without provocation. Maybe the outcome would have been different then.

American Violence

 

Despite recent dramatic incidents, violent crime has been steadily declining in the United States. The reasons for this are as varied and complicated as the sources of violence. In fact, they are still hotly debated among criminologists and economists, but the fact remains that the general risk is much lower than it once was.

Furthermore, as the Baltimore example shows, the vast majority of murders are perpetrated by career criminals against other criminals. Though murderous spouses and rampaging lunatics grab headlines, they are the rare exceptions. Those citizens who can avoid the culture of criminality face even less risk of falling victim to violence.

Self-Defense, the Right to Arms, and the Concealed-Carry Revolution

The video I’ve shared is from a recent Cato Institute policy forum on self-defense and “stand your ground” laws. Though fairly long, it provides solid historical, political, and legal analysis, so I encourage everyone to watch. As you might suspect, I disagree in part with the last commentator,¹ but I still think he made valid points about the application of the law and the possible need for further guidance. After all, if “stand your ground” laws were a reaction to the misapplication of other statutes by prosecutors, are they not at risk for misapplication themselves? Absent political motives, the mere fact that relative experts disagree on the meaning of these laws suggests there is yet a degree of ambiguity, but that is a matter for legislators and judges to resolve.

As noted in the video, the adoption of such affirmative self-defense statutes has followed the proliferation of right-to-carry laws throughout the country. However, many if not most people are still largely unaware of this quiet revolution, both because the laws encourage or even require the concealed carry of firearms and because the mainstream media usually does their best to ignore the laws once they’ve been passed.² Naturally, there is a long and troubling history behind the right-to-carry movement, and I can touch on that only briefly here.

In A.D. 1986, only a handful of states would readily issue licenses to common citizens. In the rest of the country, the carrying of firearms was either broadly prohibited or the licensing authorities had almost unlimited discretion in issuance. This was the legacy of the two-pronged gun-control efforts³ of the 1920s and ’30s, which were ostensibly intended to combat the dramatic increase in violent crime that accompanied alcohol prohibition.

That began to change when Florida became the first state in recent decades to adopt a shall-issue statute, which required the licensing authority to issue licenses to all applicants who were not legally disqualified. Florida’s concealed-carry law became a model for reform, and by the mid-1990s, over half of the United States had enacted similar shall-issue statutes. The causes have not been widely explored, but I think that they will prove clear enough once this chapter of history is written.⁴

Opposition to the shall-issue movement has been and continues to be fierce, and in each case it has usually taken several years for liberalized concealed-carry legislation to make it through state legislatures and past gubernatorial vetoes. Without fail, opponents have warned of dire consequences should the reforms pass into law. Blood would run in the streets, they assured, as minor disputes and disagreements escalated into shootouts. Invariably, though, such grim outcomes have failed to materialize, and violent crime has continued to decline⁵ as right-to-carry laws have continued to expand.

Today, all but a handful of states enjoy shall-issue licensing or better. California, New York, and several other “liberal” states still maintain discretionary, may-issue regimes, while Illinois is the only state with no licensing system. Legislative reform is unlikely in these gun-control strongholds, so multiple constitutional challenges are now making their way through the federal courts.

The U.S. Supreme Court is widely expected to hear one or more of these cases within the next two years.

1. I am far, far more worried about misconduct by the police and prosecutors than I am about the potential that a criminal might “get away with it” here or there.


2. After vigorously campaigning against a right-to-carry reform, the news media seem to conveniently forget about the topic, except for occasional “investigative” pieces designed to expose or embarrass licensees. Here is a recent exception to that rule. “New Fashion Wrinkle: Stylishly Hiding the Gun.” The New York Times (2012).


3. These efforts resulted in the National Firearms Act of 1934, which sought to regulate firearms at the federal level via taxation (since the federal government was presumably bound from direct infringement on the right to keep and bear arms by the Second Amendment), and the “uniform acts,” which sought to control guns at the state level (since state governments were presumably not bound by the Second Amendment). In practice, though, the various prohibitions on concealed firearms found within the uniform acts were mostly used to disarm “undesirable” people (i.e., minorities and immigrants), and that was probably a large part of the true intent behind them. Otherwise law-abiding white citizens were generally unaffected for several decades, and the wealthy and influential could always count on getting licenses or at least special consideration in the event of any embarrassing incidents.


4. I contend that the right-to-carry revolution developed as a response both to the equalized enforcement practices reached in the 1970s and ’80s and to the political successes of the national gun-control movement from 1968 to 1994. Note that the number of shall-issue states had almost doubled within two years of the enactment of the federal ban on “assault weapons.”


5. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports show that homicides (gun related and otherwise) have continued to decline from 2006 to 2010. Firearms-related homicides specifically dropped from 10,225 to 8,775. More guns on the street simply do not correlate to—let alone cause—more violence.

The Information Revolution

By now, it should be clear that an information revolution is in progress. Just 15 years ago, information was still a relatively scarce and well-controlled commodity. The economic and legal barriers to reaching a wide audience were substantial, and access to information and other intellectual capital required persistence or money or both.

That has all changed. Now, information is abundant and often available at little or no cost to the user. The institutional barriers that once controlled the flow of information have been largely circumvented. The information economy is rapidly adjusting, and the value of intellectual capital is falling—but that is a topic for another post.

The mainstream media are struggling to adapt to the new paradigm. Where once the publishers controlled the supply of information and thus the architecture of any related public debate, the consumers have now freed the market. Web logs and on-line discussion forums now rapidly spread the news that some traditional media outlets still try to conceal, minimize, or distort due to their own political agendas.

Yesterday’s historic court decision in Nordyke v. King is a perfect example. This morning, there is nothing in the Los Angeles Times on the story, but there is an article about the 10th anniversary of the shootings at Columbine High School and the drive for tougher gun-control laws. In contrast, the right-to-arms community on the Internet knew about the decision within minutes of its announcement, and we had known that it was coming for months.

Similarly, ABC’s recent gun-control propaganda piece was a traditionally massive exercise in broadcast “journalism.” It might have stood on its own, but on-line communities mounted an immediate challenge. Discussion forums and web logs quickly and effectively refuted ABC’s deceptive, politically motivated reporting.

And who can forget that it was bloggers who took down CBS’s Dan Rather? A distinguished journalist ended his career in disgrace, because he let his political agenda get in the way of his objectivity … and because he failed to realize that his powerful television network no longer controlled the information.

This then is the true power and promise of the Web 2.0 paradigm. Information wants to be free.