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    • Mass Murder: Means & Motives

    By Damion Reinhardt • • No comments

    Every great tragedy could conceivably have been prevented by some wise and forward-looking policy. In the wake of any particularly tragic event, it is impossible to prevent political partisans from claiming that their own preferred policy would have made the world a safer and better place. (It is also impossible to prevent people from trying to change the subject to relatively unrelated hot-button issues, but that is a whole other post.)  How one responds is typically determined by where one falls on the political spectrum.

    Whenever someone takes it upon themselves to mass-produce untimely death in shocking quantities, here in the U.S., the typical progressive reaction is to go after the means of production.

    We may well debate whether the bills under consideration in the Senate would actually prevent many future mass shootings, and whether it is a good idea to condition the exercise of a constitutional right upon a secret watch list which has almost no due process protections built into it. It is beyond dispute, though, that the Democratic Party is at least pushing for prevention based on regulating the means favored by active shooters.

    The conservative approach, by contrast, is usually to go after the ideology, motivations, and background of the killer.

    We should avoid falling into the either/or trap here, limiting ourselves to addressing either means or motives or else trying to limit our analysis to a single root cause. Kaveh Mousavi explains:

    Yes, it’s about Islam. Yes, it’s about the Muslim community. Yes, it’s about the undercurrent homophobia and transphobia of the American culture. Yes, it’s even about the recent advances of LGBT made recently, and the reaction of a committed homophobe to the events. Yes, it’s about guns. Yes, it’s about the global dominance of Islamic terrorism, which might inspire radical Islamists to carry out such attacks. Yes, it’s about toxic masculinity. Yes, it’s also about Islamophobia, and putting the Muslim minority of the West in a besieged position. It’s about all of these things.

    Emphasis mine. Kaveh embraces the full complexity of the problem, nestling the means of mass shooting in among a lengthy list of complex and often interrelated motives, where it would have stuck out even if I hadn’t put it in bold text. Skeptic Ink’s own Rebecca Bradley takes a similarly nuanced approach by pointing out that all manner of ideologies are capable of radicalizing their adherents:

    I think that Omar Mateen is Anders Breivik, is Baruch Goldstein, is John Allen Mohammed, is Robert Dear, is Abbas al-Baqir Abbas, is Mark Essex, is Nidal Hasan, is Dylann Roof, is Tashfeen Malik and her husband, is Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother. The common thread is pernicious radical ideology, whether based on race, ethnos, religion, or sexual orientation.

    Once we’ve wrapped our heads around the scope and complexity of what we’re facing, we have to ask ourselves which approach is most likely to be effective going forward: addressing motives or regulating means. The First Amendment protects those who preach hate in the name of any given radical ideology and ensures that the federal government avoids persecuting (or supporting) any particular religion, whereas the Second Amendment protects those who seek to bear arms. One of those two provisions is going to have to be narrowed if we hope to craft a long-term policy solution at the federal level.

     

     

    Category: Current Events

    Article by: Damion Reinhardt

    Former fundie finds freethought fairly fab.