marbelous

Ik heb niets gepost over de laatste schietpartij op een Amerikaanse Universiteit omdat ik met mijn petje nog steeds niet bij dat soort gebeurtenissen kan. De dochter van een mede-usenetter zit een jaar op een highschool in Amerika en op haar blog las ik dat ze een paar maanden terug nog een ‘lockdown’ oefening hadden; zoals wij brandoefeningen moeten doen zodat iedereen weet wat er moet gebeuren bij brand doen ze daar oefeningen zodat iedereen weet hoe zhij moet reageren bij gekke schutters op school. Vorige week stond er een stukje in de Guardian’s opiniedeel over een documentaire die gemaakt werd over schoolschutters. Tot mijn grote verbazing las ik daar dat er vorig jaar in april (blijkbaar een favoriete maand) vier massale schietpartijen op scholen werden voorkomen: Riverton High School, Kansas; North Pole Middle School, Alaska; Pearl Junior High School, Mississippi, en een in Puyallup, Washington!

Tot mijn nog grotere verbazing merk ik dat er een aanzienlijk deel van de Amerikanen is die op de laatste tragedie in Virginia reageert met de stelling dat er waarschijnlijk veel minder doden zouden zijn gevallen als alle studenten gewoon wapens mee hadden mogen nemen naar de universiteit. Dat is zo’n rare gevolgtrekking voor me, dat ik er bijna sprakeloos van word.

Gelukkig kwam ik op een van mijn favoriete blogs iemand tegen die daar een zinvol commentaar op had. Dat ik dus in zijn geheel wil overnemen:

If somebody is ready to kill you and then kill themself, and you aren’t sure they’re ready to do that, then it’s very hard to stop them.

Hard to believe it. Hard to accept the consequences. If you gear up to kill them before they kill you, you’ll have to tell it to the police, and probably a grand jury, and for the rest of your life you’ll have to put on job applications that you’ve been arrested, and so on. You have to tell the police why you thought he was going to kill you, and everybody’s going to second-guess you about it. A big mess.

So how come somebody is ready to kill you to the point they don’t care what happens to them afterward? Did you have anything to do with that? A whole lot better not to get them to that point, if you can avoid it. But maybe there’s nothing you can do.

Every time a civilian has pointed a gun at me, and every time they’ve pointed a gun at somebody when I was there, they wanted to be listened to. Here’s how I know — they didn’t shoot. They pointed a gun at somebody and got their undivided attention and they talked. If what they wanted most was to kill a victim then they’d have started shooting before they started talking. My sample size is only 11, but I’m convinced that usually it’s that way. Usually people point guns to feel powerful and to be listened to (and maybe obeyed), they don’t usually just want to kill somebody.

If you kill somebody when they first pull out a gun you’re probably doing the wrong thing. On the other hand if you think somebody’s a threat and you point a gun at them to stop them, when it works and they stop before you shoot them they likely weren’t a real serious threat after all. If they’re ready to die killing you, then your gun is no better than pepper spray unless you’re ready to shoot them quick.

You’ve just got to accept that people can kill you and you can’t stop them. Here’s my story — I was having a heated discussion about a technical matter, and the other guy stood up and reached under his coat. Without thinking I grabbed his arm and his throat and threw him to the ground. And then my brain caught up. I let go of his throat and he said, “I’m gonna sue.”. Nobody else in the room saw what he did as threatening, it just looked like me attacking him. I lost a good job. No pension, a bad reference. And then I did some serious thinking. If it happened again, what could I do? Employers won’t even put up with that sort of thing from a *rentacop*. In *Texas*.

Unless you’re independently wealthy, you can’t afford to defend yourself until your attacker has definitively shown to all witnesses that he intends to kill you. Chances are you’ll be dead by then. What I do instead is try to talk people out of killing me. Which means listening them out of killing me. It’s worked every time so far.

If you try to stop a cold-blooded killer by getting him first, you have to be a more efficient cold-blooded killer to do it. And there’s a good chance society will treat you like they’d treat him.

It ought to be set up somehow so that good people can’t be killed by bad people or by crazy people. But it isn’t. We just have to accept that life isn’t fair.