All You Zombies. . .

As I mentioned in my prior post, this event and discussion gave me a bit of an epiphany. It's probably NOT an original one -- I'm sure other people have discussed this point -- but I personally haven't seen it discussed, so I'm going to do so here. 


The perennial argument following any public shooting here (slightly less for individually targeted people like Mr. Kirk, but still present) almost always boils down to staunch defenders of the Second Amendment versus people who just want to NOT see random children or adults shot down on a daily basis. And one of the most common soundbite/talking points will be things like "Nothing could be done to stop it, says only country where this happens". 

The Second Amendment defenders will trot out their own points, including "kids carried guns to school regularly back in the day and you didn't have lots of school shootings" and "guns don't shoot people, people do" and so on. 

A lot of this ends up raising the question: WHY does this happen here in the USA so often, and so rarely elsewhere -- even in places where there are a lot of guns? What's so different about the USA compared to all these other countries?

Well, you know, there are actually a LOT of differences between the USA and most other countries; perhaps the most obvious is that we're a short-term (in the historic sense) patchwork of a lot of different subcultures, divided by states (which function as semi-independent countries INSIDE the country) as well as by background, with populations ranging from surviving Native American populations who are STILL at or near the bottom of the pecking order despite being the ones who were living here when Europeans first arrived, to the descendants of those Europeans, descendants of entire *cities* worth of slaves, descendants of slave owners, refugees, and more. 

But in this case, I think the difference that drives the increase in public shootings is something that's so very American that we don't even think about it as a problem -- because it's just the way things have been going here. 

Most other civilized countries have safety nets for people. The most obvious is healthcare. Here, heathcare is gated -- and often destructively so. Most other countries have universal healthcare in one form or another. 

Most countries also have some other forms of social support -- things that generally reduce, if not eliminate, the number of people for whom the loss of a job equates to instant poverty and living on the street. 

Most countries have wide-based educational support so that people who want to learn don't have to go into a hundred thousand dollars of debt just to finish college.

We -- primarily driven, it's now obvious, by the Heritage Foundation and their associates since the 1980s, though starting with RMN in the late 60s - early 70s -- have been steadily eroding the social safety net. 

"What's that got to do with shootings?"

Well, more and more people are feeling more and more pressure. If you have a FEW people in desperate circumstances, this usually is a self-limiting problem -- there's many people around who can spare a bit of money, time, or resources, and most of them aren't under desperate strain. 

But if more, and more, and more people are under mounting pressure -- "how can I afford the operation?" "I have to keep this job or my whole family loses insurance!" "I have to put up with everything at work because if I miss one payment on my rent I'm out", then there's less "give" in the system. There's more of a feeling of danger, of fear, of potential loss around every corner. 

And that means the fragile ones and the angry angry ones will ALSO have less support to get past their own crises. Mom and Dad don't have the energy to really listen to and understand little Jack because they're both working in grinding jobs that force them to act as though the pressure is perfectly normal -- and they're having their own personal problems, that weaken both of them just when their kids need their strength. Or maybe there's JUST Mom or JUST Dad, which makes it harder. 

In short, what we're seeing is the increasing sounds of strain on the very fabric of society, as we disassemble the supports that used to keep the strain from becoming unsupportable. THAT is why an increasing number of isolated, angry, terrified people are breaking in such a violent way. No one hears them until they shoot, and even if someone did hear them, no one had anything left to give them as support and relief. 

When you create a pressure cooker and keep stoking the fires, the relief valve starts to scream. 

And that's the warning before it all explodes.