When the mass shootings in El Paso hit the news, I knew it was a matter of time.
I grew up in west Texas. I spent a lot of time driving I-20 and US-80. I knew parts of Odessa like the back of my hand.
I made a comment to a FB friend that he may have misinterpreted.
If we keep killing the shooters, how are we going to find out why?
It's an easy comment to misinterpret, I imagine, especially for people who, like me, grew up where a mass shooting has occurred. This hits close to home, and it feels like I am saying there is an acceptable level of collateral damage or something.
But walk with me on this.
If there were a sudden epidemic of bird flu, we'd want to pin down where it was coming from.
If there were a sudden uptick in rabid animal cases, again, we'd want to look for a source so we could eradicate it.
But we are not looking for the cause of the sudden epidemic of mass shootings.
No, calls for getting rid of the guns is not looking for the cause. It's assuming the cause, because, you know, guns are dangerous.
But guns have been around for a lot longer than the sudden epidemic of mass shootings. Hundreds of years longer, unless you count wars as mass shootings.
Even without a surviving killer to talk to, we can still think about possible causes.
Odessa is a relatively violent town. It has several times been highest in the number of murders per capita, not just in Texas or the US, but in the world. There have been, in the past, shootings we might now call mass there before, but they only made local news.
Most of the city is relatively safe, but, yeah. Bar shootings on the weekends. Eruptions of the war on drugs. Certain parts of town you really should avoid on weekend nights.
At times, part of the violence has been the town's dependency on the oil industry. Boom cycles always attracted lots of temporary workers and often caused serious shortages of housing, and made it difficult for the temporary workers to get access to necessities.
Boom economics is like that. The people who come for the work find that maybe they should have stayed where they were, and get frustrated, have money in their pockets, go to the bars, and let their frustrations boil over. Arguments happen. Fists, bar stools, knives, and guns come out, whatever weapon is handy. People get hurt and sometimes die.
Another part of it is probably the desert heat and the mineral level in the tap water, making it easy for people to be irritated.
But the biggest constant factor since before I was in middle school was that Odessa was the first big town after El Paso on one of the primary traffic routes that drug runners took from Mexico to the eastern seaboard.
Violence has a reason.
The spate of mass shootings in the US that began sometime after the turn of the millenium must have a cause.
The kinds of mass killings that occurred within the US until recently were cases of one killer gone over an edge and committing a string of murders over a period of time, cases of fighting between organized crime organizations, a few cases of bombings by organized violent political groups, a few cases like Charles Manson, and so on. Random shootings were rare in non-war conditions, and we haven't had war within the borders of the US since about 1865 (according to conventional wisdom).
Violence has been with us for a long time. It is not going to magically go away any time soon.
Taking one weapon away will only turn those who think they have reason to become randomly violent to other weapons -- knives, poisons, arson, makeshift bombs. (I'd add a few more to the list, but that would make this rant even more insensitive than it already is.)
You can see this in Japan. There's been a recent spate of knife attacks in which several people die before the attacker is brought to bay, and there have been a spate of deadly arson cases recently, as well. Looking back only a little ways in the past, there have been a case of arsenic in the curry and of poison gas in the subway that stand out.
If you are seeing one specific weapon, or of weapons in general as the cause, you are missing something really important.
When a shooter is dead, we can guess from his recent history what his motives might have been. He can't defend himself, but he also can't make a fool of himself. We cannot know what actually pushed him over the edge, to go to war against society, and we leave his motives in a darkness that invites glorification by rumor.
And this is what it is. We are at war. Death by violence is a glorious rebellion against some form of oppression. These mass shootings are evidence that the madness of war has leaked back into the parts of our society where we have lazily thought that violence had been put away.
Compare the deaths from mass shootings in the US to deaths from other causes. Drunk driving? Suicides? Working (and living) conditions among the undocumented workers? ...
Compare the deaths from mass shootings and such all over the world to death from other causes. What is going on in Africa, the Pacific Rim, and the less known parts of China?
We are at war.
But we keep killing the best sources of information about the enemy, in the cases of mass shootings. And dead shooters tell no tales, leaving us without the best source of information on why the rash of killings occurs.
If I can surmise, I can offer this: If you aren't reaching out with what extra you have to help those who have less than you have, you potentially contribute to the complaints they have.
Having complaints is not always the complainer's fault.
Self-righteous anger is as likely a cause as any I can think of, coupled with the mirage of becoming a martyr in the cause against an inequitable society.
If you want to help reduce the number of mass shootings, reach out to the people near you.
If you have extra time, money, or other resources, reach out to help those who need help.
If you have needs that you don't know how to meet, keep reaching out to the people around you, even if they don't seem to care. Or look for people who do care to reach out to, who don't recommend violence. Please don't just give up. Giving up puts you in the position where violence no longer seems unreasonable.
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Courtesy is courteous.