Living In The Mean Time

Everybody has been talking about the recent massacre in Aurora Colorado. In some of the media and from some friends I have heard the concern that this guy was a genius and that geniuses are liable to pull this kind of crap. I disagree, on the whole I think stupid people are much more likely to kill people than smart people are. Killing people just seems like a stupid thing to do. Isn't "stupid is as stupid does" a line from Forest Gump? Not that I think we should be quaking in fear of stupid people either. Most of them are just as innocuous as your typical Mensa member. I think the problem with evil geniuses is that like most intelligent people they are just really good at what they do. Dumb killers don't go about systematic planning, they just get a hankering to kill folks and act on it without planning or forethought. Evil dumb-asses just grab a weapon and start killing. Clearly monitoring of intelligent people is a red herring in regards to preventing massacres.

Of course a lot of people are amazed at the rapidity with which this latest nut-job managed to amass a cache of weapons. This concerns me too. I don't, think any amount of gun control can stop a dedicated killer. At the same time it would seem that this particular killer's preparatory behaviors should have aroused some official concern somewhere, but it doesn't sound like it did. Europeans will be shaking their heads and fingers at us once again. I remember being on vacation in Germany a whole bunch of years ago. We asked some Germans  about going for walk in their town (we really just wanted to make sure we didn't get lost). The Germans enthusiastically assured us that it was indeed safe to walk in their town. They actually told us nobody would shoot at us! We lived in Houston at the time and had not yet had to shoot our way out of the neighborhood we lived in. The Germans seemed to presume we routinely engaged in gun battles. The truth is that Germany has more shooting massacres than we do on a per capita basis (according to a report on NPR). If you look at Europe as a whole instead of country by country and compare it to us they are just as violent and crazy as we are. So controlling access to weapons doesn't work out all that well, too bad!

I guess the one thing we always hear is that nobody knew what any of these killers were up to. Sometimes after the massacre all kinds of evidence pops up, and there were warning signs but nobody took them seriously enough, nobody took preventive action. I am unable to blame people too much for their inability to recognize that a friend, family member, coworker or neighbor is about to go berserk and start killing people. I have a lot of friends and always have had. I have had friends do all kinds of stuff that I never could have anticipated. Later the evidence was clear, after the fact. People are unpredictable. They do some crazy shit! I have done some crazy shit! I am not worried that me or any of my friends are going to commit a massacre. That's the point! Nobody ever expects anybody they know to become a homicidal maniac. I guess we can blow off the idea of developing some profile we can all measure our buddies against, "Ed seemed a little short with the waitress earlier, do you think he could be planning some kind of genocide?" That conversation is never going to happen.

So what do we do? All we can do is appreciate the people in our lives while they last, before they go nuts, before someone mows them down. Chances are it will never happen and even if it does we can enjoy them in the mean time.



Russell