The Gun Non-Debate After Every Mass Shooting.

Eric Renderking Fisk | November 17th, 2017

Every time there’s a mass shooting there’s a predictable yet loud clarion call: Ban the guns.

Whatever the make and model gun is used in a mass shooting there is the demand by people in the Main-Stream news outlets, late night talk shows, and social media that we’re past due in banning that specific gun. Were it not for that specific gun so many people would still be alive today, were it not for that gun there would be that much suffering in the world.

Part of the predictable behavior is that someone will blame a specific politician for not doing enough. As of this writing – November 2017 - it’s Speaker Paul Ryan’s fault that more people are dead because of the AR-57. Because of him, and him alone, people are dead. People are dead because of Paul Ryan’s inability or unwillingness to do anything.

In a couple of years from now, it will be another politician to blame because of that person’s inability or unwillingness to do anything, and perhaps it will be another specific type of firearm that’s to blame.

But not a single word of the motivation. There are those among us who always blame a product, weapon, or another kind of device that’s to blame for senseless violence but there’s never any call to figure out why crazy people want to kill a lot of other people suddenly. And if there is one person who says, “This is also a mental health issue,” that person becomes the villain.

For many of those people among us, the person who says, “This is a mental health issue, too” is just as guilty as the person who committed the crime. Or, if that politician or celebrity is of the wrong political persuasion then that person who mentioned we need to focus more on “motivation” is more at fault than the person who pulled the trigger.

And yet, knowing what I know I’m about to say something that I know I’ll be verbally crucified for thinking and digitally castrated for publishing this… We need to get to the bottom of why people have the need to commit these evil acts and go after the motivation just as intensely as the guns themselves.

It’s not the mere gun that’s the culprit. It’s not the actual gun itself or the lack of laws, or background checks, or any of the other tools used in a killers’ arsenal, it’s the shooters thinking and his state of mind.

Why do some people have the urge to kill many other people?

What makes someone want to go to a church or school and kill everyone there?

Why churches and schools?

What was the timeline, what caused one person to wake up one day and decide this was the day he was going to make himself famous by killing as many people as he could before he gets caught or killed, too?

What is making the deranged people in our society kill other people?

And how come we can’t have a conversation about motivation without the conversation devolving into personal attacks? If you talk about going after the motivation of these killers, to the ‘anti-gun nuts’ it’s like you’re talking about “A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual, and certainly without any choice.”

The chit-chat about banning guns is easy, the emotional equivalent to low hanging fruit. Without addressing the topic of ‘motivation,’ the talk of only banning specific guns won’t save any more lives. Attacking the politician because of that person’s inability or unwillingness to do anything is mere ‘witch-hunting’ and is accomplishing nothing without addressing the killer’s incentive.

When there’s another mass-shooting, feel free to dust off this rant and share it again and have the courage to ask the tough question about the nature of evil and motivation behind mankind’s darkest impulses.