fallacies

The Virginia Tech killing spree has brought the usual suspects out of the woodwork. And, I have seen a lot of fallacies put forward the last few days which need debunking.

1. guns are bad

Yes, a gun was used by some wackjob to commit a whole bunch of murders in a very short span of time. But no, guns are not in and of themselves bad. Cho was bad evil. The specific tool used is irrelevant. Guns don't kill people - people who point guns at other people and pull the trigger kill people.

2. "the worst mass murder in US history..."

Bull. There were three incidents that happened within the last 15 years that were worse. One of them resulted in the deaths of 79 people due to a fire. Another resulted in the deaths of 168 people due to an explosion of a bomb made of diesel fuel and fertilizer. And the worst mass murder in US history, resulting in the deaths of 2973 people, was caused by 19 people with box cutters. Don't trivialize their deaths.

3. "our children aren't safe in their schools..."

The people who died in Virginia Tech were NOT children. They were adults. Yes, they were young adults, but adults nonetheless. Adults who apparently had been conditioned to react passively when an imminent threat to their very lives existed. If it makes you feel better to infantilize them, consider that it was that infantilization that is in part responsible for the death toll. Cho used a Glock to kill those people, which means that he had to stop and reload three times during the course of his actions. And yet, he wasn't torn limb from limb by a snarling mob the first time he had to stop to reload, or the second. Perhaps if they hadn't been treated like helpless babies all their lives, they would have put a stop to it during the first reload, or charged at him when the shooting first began.

4. "we need more security, we need to ban guns..."

Horse puckey. Virginia Tech was already a "gun-free zone" - as is NASA's Johnson Space Center. It didn't make the victims any safer, it just made them disarmed prey. How often does one hear of a rampaging attacker, storming into a police station with guns blazing? If that does occur, how long does such an attack last before the attacker is brought down? Why is it that such attacks usually occur in schools, where there are a lot of disarmed potential victims?

The world is not a safe place. It has never been a safe place. Treating adults as if they were infants - as if they were not responsible for their own personal safety - is not going to make them any safer. Enacting additional laws against guns or even specific types of guns won't change anything - after all, the people responsible have already decided to commit murder, and there are laws in every nation against that.

So what is the solution?

Stop treating people as though they are defenseless sheep. Allow people to defend themselves. Teach people to be responsible for their own safety.

That's what it all boils down to, isn't it? The people that want to ban guns, out of the misguided belief that it will somehow make them safer, are they not viewing themselves and the rest of society as defenseless, to be protected by others more capable (and better armed) than they? Do they think that avoiding responsibility for themselves and deferring that responsibility to the police will actually protect them?

It is time to abandon the notion that your personal safety - and the safety of your family - is the responsibility of anyone but yourself. YOU are responsible for your safety. Suck it up, and take responsibility for yourself.

Update: If anyone thinks that I am "blaming the victims" here, then they should read this by Mark Danziger (hat tip to Transterrestrial Musings). In any situation like this (and I am including such not-so-dramatic situations as a convenience store robbery or a bully on a playground), you are either involved or you are not involved. If you are not involved, then you have a choice about whether to get involved or not - but if you are already involved, then you fall into one of three categories: villain, hero, or victim. If you are not the villain in the situation, then your choice is between being a hero and being a victim - and the more people who choose hero, the less chance that the villain has to claim more victims. When the bullets started flying, the results would have been much different if a couple dozen people had chosen to be heroes rather than victims.

Update 2: Dafydd ab Hugh said the same thing, only better. And I want to add something that should hopefully clarify a bit about what I wrote above; namely, that I do not mean that society is "every man for himself", in fact I mean the opposite. Yes, every man is ultimately responsible for his own safety. However, he is also responsible for the safety of his loved ones, and on a more general level for the safety of everyone around him, and it is a responsibility that cannot be sloughed off or deferred. It is that kind of sense of responsibility that motivated the passengers on Flight 93, and their actions saved lives - maybe not their own , but those of uncountable numbers on the ground in Washington. And it is that sense of responsibility that was once understood by all and taken for granted, but has slowly slowly slowly been drained from a modern society that now swaddles people, forcing them (rather than allowing them to decide for themselves) to wear seat belts or to print Caution: Hot! on disposable coffee cups.