A Most Peculiar Man, Pt. II

  and I missed you since the place got wrecked
And I just don't care what happens next
looks like freedom but it feels like death
it's something in between, I guess
it's closing time 
--Closing Time, Leonard Cohen
(lyrics, Jay/Feinstein) 

Solitude is the profoundest fact
of the human condition.
Man is the only being who knows he is alone 
--The Labyrinth of Solitude, Octavio Paz 

Rumor had it that he was homosexual;
in reality, in recent years, he was simply
a garden-variety alcoholic 
--The Elementary Particles, Michel Houellebecq
___________________

Continuation of thoughts on the Kurt R. Myers shooting in upstate New York:

Once the shooting starts it is hard to control emotions -- police, included.

SWAT teams practice every day for such scenarios, kitted out in their black gunfighter rigs, often in public. They often appear in public wearing black T-shirts with images of cross-hairs trained on a person's head, or sporting cutesy captions like, "We still make house calls" under a depiction of a team busting down a door.  These men sit in local restaurants wearing such togs, weapons holstered in plain view.

We have seen these same images thousands of times during the past decade of the Phony War on Terror (PWOT ©), sometimes over there, sometimes in t.v. or film, now, increasingly in our our towns. This implied terror now walks openly among us, and we assent to tolerate it, guessing that it is being shown for our own good.

However, the citizens of the United States are NOT the ENEMY, and police have no reason to bully us in this show of force.  They are public servants paid for by our tax dollars.  We do not get off by being the passive players in a BDSM fantasy perpetrated by overbearing brutes who are constructed an "us" versus "them" scenario.

Even in the case of shooter Myers, an adversarial relationship between perpetrator and police is not helpful. If we wish to understand the etiology of a spree shooting, the starting point should be the mindset of the shooter, not the type of weaponry chosen to implement his crime.

Why does a 64-year-old man go on a shooting spree? We do not have the answers, but we can observe that the reaction of our police protectors are often just as violent and pathological as that of the perpetrators they encounter, yet we take comfort in this "good violence". We claim to abhor violence unless it is under an official aegis.  We say we are liberal, democratic and humanistic, but we are all of us armed to the teeth, personally and governmentally.

There are times to employ violence correctly, but correct employment demands the ascent on the spectrum of possible responses; lethal force should not be the go-to response.  Rather, it becomes necessary after depleting non-lethal possible reactions.  However, it seems now -- after the inception of the discretionary Wars on Terror -- we have come to accept violence as an acceptable first reaction.

There is a sickness in our society that cannot be cured by palliative gun control legislation.