Guns and bombs for better or worse

There have been many mass shootings and several bombings that have received considerable attention from the media. A few are mentioned here.

In a Century 16 theater in the Town Center at Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, a shooter killed ten people and wounded many others, including two who died later in hospital. James Eagan Holmes, the man charged with this crime, had acquired hundreds of 12-gauge shotgun shells and thousands of rounds of ammunition for handguns and semiautomatic rifles in a few months before the massacre.

In Oslo on July 22, 2011, Anders Behring Breivik set off a bomb that killed eight people and injured hundreds. That same day, a short time later, on the island Utoeya, he shot and killed 69 people and wounded over one hundred.

At the Soldier Readiness Processing Center, Fort Hood, Texas, on November 5, 2009, gunshots killed 13 people and injured 30 others. We expect that jury selection for the trial of Major Nidal Hasan, the man charged with the crimes, will begin soon.

On the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg, Virginia on April 16, 2007, Seung-Hui Cho shot 32 people to death and wounded 17 others. He then killed himself with a shot to the head.

At Columbine High School in Columbine, Colorado on April 20, 1999, Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris killed 13 people and then committed suicide.

In Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, 168 people died and hundreds were injured by the explosion of a bomb in a truck parked at the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. For this crime, authorities executed the perpetrator Timothy McVeigh on June 11, 2011 at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, charged with or suspected of having sent or delivered 16 bombs to various universities and to the cargo hold of American Airlines Flight 444 between 1978 and 1995, pled guilty to 10 counts related to the illegal use of bombs and admitted responsibility for killing three people.

We want to know why these events occurred. What turned apparently ordinary individuals into killers? Possible factors at play in the minds of these murderers include anger from perceived injustices, a desire for notoriety, and a vision (most would say a warped vision) of the world. These appear in varying proportions in different individuals, and not all of these elements are present in every case.

The rampage of Klebold and Harris at Columbine emerged from anger and a desire for revenge. It also involved an ambition to maximize the body count, the reward for which is a high place in the records for mass murders.

Breivik's actions had a strong foundation in a distorted view of the world. Using the name Andrew Berwick, Breivik published "2083--A European Declaration of Independence" online. In that compendium, he described in great detail how he thought to achieve his primary goal: the protection and preservation of his notion of Europe. We can wonder why he chose to kill fellow Norwegians to achieve his goal. Most people feel sympathy for the victims of attacks--especially if those victims are innocent. Men and women like Breivik are the greater threat to his country. His actions are likely to turn his fellow citizens against him and those who share his views, not against the people he wants to see deported from Norway.

Kaczynski developed his view of the world in a manifesto, in which he railed against technology as the source of most of our troubles. He summarized that view in this excerpt: "We hope we have convinced the reader that the system cannot be reformed in a such a way as to reconcile freedom with technology. The only way out is to dispense with the industrial-technological system altogether. This implies revolution, not necessarily an armed uprising, but certainly a radical and fundamental change in the nature of society."

Fortunately for all of us in civilized societies, most of us abhor the killing of innocent people. And we want to know how to prevent these murders. But in the absence of a science for predicting who will commit a crime, we can only rely on our best judgments. And most often these judgments are based on only hints, signs, clues, inklings, suspicions, hunches that a person harbors thoughts of violence, that a person's mood is turning darker, or that action to realize a violent scenario imagined for months or years, or only developed in recent hours or minutes, will ensue. As a rule, conjectures do not warrant the arrest of an individual. Incarcerating people before they commit crimes is extremely difficult to justify.

Right after any mass shooting in this country, and often with the news of such events in other countries, a number of commentators revisit old arguments for gun control. And many people (but too few to make any difference) entertain again the fantasy of a society without guns. This is not a bad idea; fantasies often involve good ideas, like those of a world without hunger or a world with justice and lasting peace. But generally, fantasies waste time. Until weapons technology evolves considerably, guns will remain a factor in every sizable human community.

The bombing planned and conducted by McVeigh, and the bombings arranged by Kaczynski, as well as the countless suicide bombings in the Middle East, are strong evidence that, even without guns, those who are intent on taking lives will find a way.

Most people who think that a gun provides them protection will take pains to keep it. No one is likely to favor unannounced arrivals of police who will scour every square inch of each vehicle and residence to find and confiscate firearms. The number of people determined to retain their guns, and the lengths to which they would go to retain them, would make any effort by authorities to take all guns out of society practically impossible.

The prohibition of alcohol in the United States in the 1920s did not eliminate the manufacture, sale and consumption of all alcoholic beverages, and it had many unintended, adverse consequences, not the least, the growth of organized crime. It certainly failed to improve society in general. Any prohibition of guns would do much worse. Along with its many adverse effects, it would be ineffective: it would not eliminate the manufacture, sale and use of deadly weapons. Perhaps worst of all, many people would come to believe that our government had turned directly against its citizens. Some people would argue that the time for another revolutionary war has come.

Environments and experiences can shape attitudes. And attitudes toward the possession and use of guns are shaped, at least to some degree, by the circumstances in which people find themselves. A few arguments over gun control arise needlessly with the failure of those involved first to consider situations where guns could play a role and then to consider situations where guns should not be used. To some extent, the differences of views on the ownership and use of guns result from the situations of citizens in different regions of the country.

Consider life in a remote part of the country or on a farm or ranch where the nearest neighbors are beyond the horizon. The police, despite their best efforts, cannot arrive on the scene very quickly after a call for help. In such a place, thinking about ways to prevent a robbery, an assault or a rape might make the difference between preventing a serious crime or becoming a victim. One of the most important virtues for people in this situation is self-reliance. We ought to anticipate our needs and prepare for emergencies. And one of the best means for self-defense (as well as a danger to everyone nearby) is a gun.

Yet there are circumstances where the use of a firearm, even with the intent of protecting innocent life or preventing a crime, is fraught with the danger of doing more harm than good. In certain settings, all-out firefights are unwise: they entail undesired effects. Bullets might kill or injure innocent people, even as they miss the criminal.

In some settings, just revealing a weapon is imprudent. On the presumption that anyone who pulls a weapon will use it, a person might fire a gun as soon as another person displays one. And in a crowd where more than one person is brandishing a firearm, a defender might be mistaken for an assailant.

Police officers typically exercise great restraint with their weapons; they have a keen sense of how the use of deadly force can produce collateral damage. Civilians who arm themselves in the cause of justice must also be aware of all the harm their guns can cause and should exercise no less restraint. In all but a few situations, the police, when they can respond to a call for help in a few minutes, are best at handling threats from armed criminals. Thoughts of arming everyone in the population to reduce the number and magnitude of crimes are as ridiculous as the thoughts of confiscating all arms now in the possession of civilians.

We must continue to look for ways to improve mental health, to identify and remedy the causes of alienation and disaffection, to identify and treat people who might pursue violent solutions to their problems, and to address the political and economic inequities that lead to the rage that engenders violence.

But we must never try to understand violence if that only amounts to condoning it. The penalties for those who commit crimes with guns or bombs should be very severe. Violent criminals should have no right to associate freely with the rest of us in society.

And yet, to continue to enjoy our freedoms, to live our lives without the fear of unreasonable searches and seizures, we must accept the possibility that somehow, sometime someone will conceal a firearm or explode a bomb which will injure or kill one or more of our friends, family members, fellow citizens. That is, unfortunately, the outrageous price we sometimes pay for our insistence on freedom and for our choice to produce and distribute weapons the world over.