What's Wrong with Men?

Yet another act of violence against women perpetrated by a weak and insecure man:

The man who opened fire in a busy fitness center Tuesday evening, killing three women before committing suicide, had planned the attack for months because of frustration over his inability to find a girlfriend, according to a diary he posted online.

Two law enforcement officials confirmed reports that the gunman was George Sodini, 48, and they said the diary appeared to be legitimate, based on its contents.

In the diary, Mr. Sodini said that he had not had a girlfriend since 1984, and had not had sex since July 1990, when he was 29.

“I actually look good,” Mr. Sodini wrote in an entry dated Dec. 29, 2008. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me — over an 18 or 25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are.

“A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend.”

Anybody who hasn't found somebody who would date them in 25 years has some serious issues, but Sodini apparently thought that the most logical conclusion was that all women everywhere were to blame for his woes. I read stories like this and find myself wondering what percentage of problems in the world are caused by weak and insecure men who have serious problems with women.

Law enforcement officer deaths up sharply, lapse of gun ban blamed

Not good:

Statistics released Thursday showed that 101 local and federal law enforcement officers died on duty in the first half of the year, 31 more than had died at the same time last year. It was the first time in three decades that the toll had reached more than 100...

Floyd called the statistics “very alarming” and “somewhat puzzling, quite honestly, because over the last 30 years we’ve seen a downward trend in the number of officers’ being shot.”

They blame the sharp increase on more violent criminals who have access to deadlier weapons:

Local and federal law enforcement officials told NBC News that criminals were more likely to use high-powered semiautomatic pistols and handguns today.

Some of those weapons, like the widely feared Intratec Tec-9, were banned until 2004, but they became legal when Congress refused to extend the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, even though President Bush, an opponent of gun control, promised to sign an extension.

Semiautomatic firearms — including the previously banned assault-style guns often misleadingly equated with “assault weapons,” which remain illegal — boast higher-capacity magazines than standard revolvers, and their trigger mechanisms allow users to fire off more rounds in a shorter period of time.

The study did not examine how many of the police officers killed this year were shot with weapons that were legalized three years ago, but the study and figures compiled by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics suggest a statistical correlation.

The 39 officers killed in the first half of 2007 exceeds the 36 officers shot to death in all of 2004, the last year the ban was in effect. More broadly, firearm-related crime rose in 2005, the first year after the semiautomatic weapons became legal again, after having declined every year since the ban took effect in 1994.

“We’ve always had lots of guns,” said Charlotte-Mecklenburg, N.C., Police Chief Darrel Stephens, president of the Major Cities Police Chiefs Association. None of the department’s officers were killed by gunfire last year, but six have been gunned down since Jan. 1.

“What we’ve seen is people shifting from revolvers to automatic weapons,” Stephens said. “Rather than six shots or five, they have 14 or 20.”

Floyd said police countermeasures had not yet caught up to the increased firepower of criminals on the street.

“Bullet-resistant vests are designed to stop normal handgun ammunition,” he said. “Criminals are getting their hands on high-powered assault weapons, and those weapons pose a great danger to police because their soft-body armor won’t protect them, in most cases.”

I have to say that I'm not as liberal on gun control as I am on other things and I admit I was just as willing to let the '94 ban die as so many other Democrats at that point. But if this correlation exists, then we should definitely look to re-instituting the ban, in some form at least. The gun control issue is definitely an area where there's too much emphasis on ideology over pragmatic, good policy. Unfortunately, mayors have been much more likely recently to tackle gun measures than our NRA-enslaved Congress.

The Shooting

As you might well imagine, blogs on the left and the right have had quite a bit to say about the Virginia Tech shooting over the past three days. In fact, they started having quite a bit to say about two hours after news of the shooting broke. The responses that I saw were all of one variety or another. Pro-gun sites blamed the lack of guns for the massacres. Anti-gun gun sites blamed the presence of guns for the massacre. Both sides attacked the other for using the issue to make a political point. Some bloggers lamented everyone's willingness to jump to conclusions, claimed self-righteously that they would not do the same thing, but couldn't help but slip a little bit of their own opinion on the "why" of it at the same time. Some didn't. In fact, it hardly seems that anybody could write more than one sentence about the issue without giving away what they felt was (or wasn't) the cause of it, and what exactly we ought (or ought not) to do about it. And then there were the just flat-out plain stupid responses.

Of course, the cultural conservatives blame evolution, same-sex marriage, co-ed dorms, the failure to teach the Bible in school, etc., etc., for the shooting. Liberals seem to take the opposite tack with their unwillingness to blame the shooting on anything more than a failure to adequately control guns. What I haven't seen so far except here and there, is a willingness to blame the violence that permeates our culture. We tolerate incredible amounts of violence in our daily lives, and especially in our entertainment. Children watch violent cartoons at a young age, and violent movies before they're old enough to know better. They grow up acclimated to stories of violence in the news, to gratuituosly violent TV shows and movies, video games and music, and to celebrations of violence in popular culture. They don't think there's anything wrong with it, which is why they in turn take their kids to violent movies that they're too young for. Our culture is awash in violence, and liberals and conservatives seem not to think much of it.

We also accept that people can be alienated from others in a way that was probably not possible in earlier times. We see someone who is disturbed, we hear someone utter dark thoughts, we see them alone and seemingly uncared for, and we say nothing. We think they're "weird" and we leave them alone, or we make fun of them. Reportedly, people tried to warn others about the young man who committed these killings. Their efforts went nowhere. In truth, we just don't think much of people who seem to become completely disconnected from society. That's just the way it is these days.

And yes, there's something wrong with a culture in which people who are angry, depressed, homicidal or prone to violence, can get weapons which allow them to kill dozens of people at a time, or their wives, or their kids, or themselves. Yes he could have poisoned someone, yes he could have stabbed someone, yes he could have set a building on fire, or driven his car into a crowd. But without guns, he could have never trapped people in a buildling and killed them so quickly and efficiently.

So what's my solution you ask? Well, like most people with strong opinions about something, I don't really have one. I don't know what we should to do remove the stain of violence from our culture. I don't think banning violent movies is the key, and I don't think not letting kids play with toy guns is the key. I think we have to want to destroy our fascination with violence, guns and power, but I don't know how you bring that about. I don't know what to do about the profound alienation that some people experience, though as liberal I do believe that government ought to try to provide (or lead others to provide) the stability that family and friends no longer do for some people. I don't think guns should be as easy to get, though as a Texan I'm perhaps inclined genetically to think that if people want them, and want to carry them around, then maybe they ought to be allowed to...as long as they're willing to wait awhile to get them, and we agree that some people shouldn't be allowed to have them at all.

I do know that unless we're willing to talk about everything that contributed to this shooting, even the things that seem to be embedded in our culture, we're never going to hope to prevent this from happening again short of installing security guards armed with machine guns at every location, public and private. Unfortunately, I'm pretty pessimistic about that happening. In fact, I interpret the unwillingness to talk about it, the sheer absence of any discussion of it, as our willingness as a society to tolerate one shooting like this after another as the price we pay for who we are. We're free to make that choice, but we ought to at least be willing to talk about whether it's worth the cost.

UPDATE: Note, the world can see about us what we refuse to see for ourselves.

UPDATE II: Here's Scott Horton, with some more of the world's opinion:

Around the world, America is being portrayed as a land of wanton violence, obsessed with firearms—as the locus of a bizarre death cult. The grounds for this are not simply what happened at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School, but the way the American public has reacted to these tragedies.

Don't get me wrong. Just because people in other countries says it, doesn't mean it's true. But, enough of them are saying it that we really ought to pause and wonder if they're seeing something that we're not seeing about ourselves.