USA Today reports that Seattle’s Café Racer shooter was a concealed carry permit holder. But as usual, the rush to affix blame on a little plastic card conveniently avoids many truths behind this sad incident.
Previous brushes with the criminal justice system highlight his troubled past:
- The shooter had two assault cases dropped when victims recanted.
- His family claimed the shooter was “mentally ill” but never had him committed.
These two points show how important citizen participation is for society to work. Perhaps those not pressing charges are also responsible?
To punish all concealed carry holders for the acts of this shooter is bigotry. What would happen if, after Sylvester Griffin was convicted of raping and murdering a woman, the USA Today or LA Times wrote something like “we just can’t trust blacks and should restrict their civil right of self-defense”?
(Actually, state regimes in the Antebellum and post-Civil War South—and North—did say just that, enacting draconian Black Codes that severely restricted black freemen’s ability to carry any weapon, but that’s a discussion for another time.)
Outside some lunatic fringe, media understandably wouldn’t do this. So why is it okay to paint an entire demographic group with a broad brush? It’s also curious that anti-rights propagandists are so quick to convict. What happened to innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?
Unfortunate and even catastrophic things happen, despite our best efforts to avoid them. Welcome to the Physical Plane. To affix blame on inanimate objects conveniently allows the non-functioning mind to avoid examining the complexities of the social contract.
Knee-jerk rhetoric allows a temporary feeling of smug superiority, since it conveniently avoids self-examination and the messy, effortful process of analyzing the problem and creating a more effective solution. And God forbid anybody should examine history and a plethora of modern datasets, and realize that gun control doesn’t work as advertised!
To affix blame on those who have committed no crime is to deepen the wound and delay healing, because it attaches one’s mind to an alternate reality where something should have been different.
That’s a great way to create mental illness.