Killing in quantity
Advocates of restrictions on gun rights often base their arguments on what they suppose will be the efficacy of a particular law in reducing mass shootings. Banning semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines, limiting places where carry is allowed, empowering law enforcement or even ordinary citizens to apply a red flag to someone—all of these are offered as a means of dealing with what appears to be a rise in the frequency of killers who fire rounds into the occupants of public spaces. Never mind that these killers select the time and location of their crimes, thereby giving them tactical control—i.e., the opportunity to cause a lot of deaths without the type of firearm used mattering all that much. The fantasy is that if only we were to impose enough new laws, we would be safe from attacks of this nature.
The problem here is that while gun control can restrict who legally has what firearms and can, if enacted early enough before a lot of people have guns or with sufficient government intrusion into private lives, make gun crime less likely, it can do nothing once a population is largely armed. It is useless against motivated smugglers if there is a high demand for personal weapons. And it offers no solution against someone who is determined to cause many deaths without making surviving the incident a priority.
Two recent crimes illustrate that reality, a mass stabbing in Saskatchewan, Canada in which eleven were murdered and eighteen more injured and a combination stabbing and shooting at a childcare center in Nong Bua Lam Phu, Thailand with thirty-five killed and twelve injured.
Canada’s gun laws are infamous among the U.S. gun community, and the knife laws are little better—especially given the fact that if you have a blade on your person without an obvious non-weapon use—e.g., woodworking, opening boxes, or similar—law enforcement may assume that you intend to cause harm to others. This includes using said knife in self-defense if you can be shown to have had self-defense in mind when going out with the device.
Thailand is somewhat better. Its gun laws are similar to some of our restrictive states, requiring a separate license for each approved firearm, with carry licenses theoretically available, but the controls for all of this are ineffective, as acquiring an illegal gun is not difficult. Unsurprisingly, it is those firearms that are often used in crimes of violence.
Both of the above mass killings involved illegal drugs, the Canadian murderer being a dealer and the Thai a former police officer who was fired for substance abuse. In the Saskatchewan case, the perpetrator had a long history of violent offenses—including those against domestic partners, be it noted—and was seen as a danger to the public, but was set loose under a statutory release nevertheless.
And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut might say. Canada has an appalling history of violence and neglect of indigenous peoples, and the family history of the rampage killer in Saskatchewan is one among the many consequences. As I mentioned above, the Thai killer had been fired for substance abuse. He had been in court the day of the crime and faced trial for drug crimes.
Do I need to say it again? When we allow poverty, domestic violence, and drug abuse to go unchecked, we create a culture in which rampages are a predictable result. When these things persist for generations—and when they are the result of assaults and neglect committed by government and by the majority population—endemic violence is a certainty. If we really want to reduce these types of mass killings, the incidents discussed here illustrate the futility of gun control and point to solutions that address the root causes.
I am told by advocates of more restrictive gun laws that they do want to see fewer people murdered. They are by and large Democrats, a party that I am not alone in seeing as center-right on the political spectrum, but that at least pretends to care about things like education, income equality, and general welfare. If only we could come to a consensus that violent criminals—particularly relevant here, those who commit acts of romantic partner violence—must be under state supervision, drug addicts must have guaranteed—and mandated, in cases of danger to others—treatment, and poverty must be treated as something to solve, rather than something to exploit election by election, we could drive down all forms of violence, including these acts of mass killings. We would also have to agree—and this should not be difficult, thanks to the many recent examples of police abuses—that sending in the cops after gun owners who are not doing anything wrong is not the answer.
Which is to say, disarming the law-abiding is no means of ending mass killings. Canada’s laws make legal ownership of many weapon difficult to impossible, and Thailand’s pretend to impose control. All that happened in these two cases was that the only persons armed at the scenes of the crimes were the criminals.