Gun Control
A week ago, a man entered a school with a weapon and attacked 22 children and teachers. You may well not have heard of this, because it was drowned out by the media reaction when someone did something remarkably similar in the US a day later. But on the 13th of December, Min Yingjun, a man with a history of mental problems who had become obsessed with the Mayan end of the world, walked into Chengpen Village primary school in China with a knife and set about the pupils. It's telling to observe that China's strict gun control laws meant he didn't have a semiautomatic rifle, and nobody was actually killed.
The Sandy Hook shootings in the states a day later have been used, by some, to suggest that the US has something wrong with its culture. That sort of thing happens less in other parts of the world, is the suggestion. On examination that seems not to be true. On March 23 2010, Zheng Minshen murdered eight children at a school in Fukian province. On April 29th 2010, Xu Yuyuan stabbed 28 children - most of them under four years old - at Zhingxin Kindergarten. The list goes on, but it's worth being aware that more children have been attacked in Chinese schools in the last 3 years than in US ones, it just doesn't tend to get reported as much globally and this skews perceptions. American school attackers tend to use guns and more people die, but this is by no means a US-only phenomenon.
The reaction in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings has been the usual polarisation of sides; I've seen it suggested that the way to prevent this sort of thing happening in future is with armed teachers, more religious tuition in schools, more gun control, and better access to mental health services. I've seen it suggested that American culture needs to change to become more inclusive, and it's social exclusion which is responsible for this sort of attack. Some of these ideas probably have some bearing on the causes, but once again it's worth considering that the country with the second highest incidence of school shootings in the world since 1950 is apparently Finland, where everyone is a happy socialist with a beard and a chunky sweater and according to the WHO has one of the best rates of access to mental health care in Europe. On the other hand, the country with the second highest per-capita gun ownership in the world is the Yemen which as far as I can make out has had one school shooting attack, in 1997.
So it's obviously rather more complex than the rather simplistic more/less guns/healthcare/god speakers would have you believe. What is noticeable, however, is the way attacks on schools have become more frequent in the last half century or so. Powerful weapons, and less powerful ones like knives, were common enough before the '50's but attacks on gatherings of children seem to be a peculiarly modern phenomenon. As the human population has grown rapidly, and the standard of living has improved around the world, so people have started turning on their kids. And that brings me on to Universe 25.
Universe 25, if you haven't heard of it, is one of those experiments which makes you wonder precisely what scientists in the 1960s and 70s were smoking, and whether they might be willing to share. The Universe, you see, was a mouse utopia. A habitat for lab mice designed to give its inhabitants the best possible existence, Universe 25 was kept at a nice steady temperature, the habitat was cleaned regularly and the bedding was changed daily, and the mice were free of disease and given all the food and water they wanted. In short, mouse heaven. The results? The mice went mad and started killing each other.
At first the population increased exponentially, doubling every 55 days. As the number of mice increased, aberrant behaviours appeared. Males, incapable of defending their territories or their personal space from the press of population, stopped trying. Some mice became what were called the 'beautiful ones', who engaged in incessant preening and display without truly engaging with their fellows. Other mice went on rampages of attacking and murdering their fellows at random until they themselves were killed. The surviving victims of these attacks went on to become attackers themselves. As a society as a whole, care for the young ceased as the mice turned on their own children.
I mean, I'm just saying.
Anyway, Barack Obama has made some fairly serious noises about gun control, but there's been a lot of talk about how "the Powerful Gun Lobby" will block meaningful change. As the representatives of this Powerful Gun Lobby, the National Rifle Association spends $720,000 a year on political lobbying. In US political terms, that's nothing. Advocates of gun control could easily outspend the Powerful Gun Lobby by passing around a hat for a week. The realty is rather harsher. There are at least 300 million guns in private hands in the US of which at least 80 million are semiautomatic rifles, including such beauties as the Barratt .50 sniping rifle, and the question I tend to ask is how, precisely, does anyone seriously expect to "control" that lot? For all that 'a ban on semiautomatic weapons' has been mooted, it always seems to be mooted by people who very clearly aren't volunteering to go round trying to take them off people. The best anyone can hope for from Obama is some restrictions on the sale of extended magazines to slightly slow down the rate of killing that armed fruitcakes are capable of, and maybe a bit more restriction on the sale of forearms to people with lobotomy scars on their forehead and a packet of Olanzapine sticking out of their breast pocket.
At risk of seeming critical, some people seem to hold a belief in the power of the state to pass laws which will magically change the world. A belief that banning hunting with hounds in the UK would stop people doing it, or a belief that raising the top rate of tax wouldn't result in people giving the Treasury the bird and moving their money to Singapore, and here's a belief here that by making a law banning private ownership of Tommy Guns would result in tens of millions of Americans shrugging their shoulders and saying "Oh well, it was fun whilst it lasted" before popping them in a bin at their local mall. As it is, there's no way Obama - or Senate of Congress - is going to be mad enough to try doing that because the the thought of some more Waco-esque shots filling the evening news is going to give their political advisors the heebie-jeebies.
So really, not a lot is going to happen as a result of the Sandy Hook shootings. There'll be a certain amount of political posturing and maybe a bit of round-the-edges tinkering to gun laws in the 'states, but a root and branch change cannot be effected by law without an acceptance that trying to enforce the law would be bloody to a degree hitherto unseen and possibly unimaginable. Cultural change of a sort desired by the gun control lobby is something which can only take decades to achieve, and the will to work at that seems lacking. One of the cornerstones of the US right to bear arms is the dictum "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance". If the gun control people want to change attitudes, they might start pointing out that The price of freedom is not only eternal vigilance, but also two dozen dead six year olds every six months. That way at least people can ask if the price is one they want to pay.
The Sandy Hook shootings in the states a day later have been used, by some, to suggest that the US has something wrong with its culture. That sort of thing happens less in other parts of the world, is the suggestion. On examination that seems not to be true. On March 23 2010, Zheng Minshen murdered eight children at a school in Fukian province. On April 29th 2010, Xu Yuyuan stabbed 28 children - most of them under four years old - at Zhingxin Kindergarten. The list goes on, but it's worth being aware that more children have been attacked in Chinese schools in the last 3 years than in US ones, it just doesn't tend to get reported as much globally and this skews perceptions. American school attackers tend to use guns and more people die, but this is by no means a US-only phenomenon.
The reaction in the wake of the Sandy Hook shootings has been the usual polarisation of sides; I've seen it suggested that the way to prevent this sort of thing happening in future is with armed teachers, more religious tuition in schools, more gun control, and better access to mental health services. I've seen it suggested that American culture needs to change to become more inclusive, and it's social exclusion which is responsible for this sort of attack. Some of these ideas probably have some bearing on the causes, but once again it's worth considering that the country with the second highest incidence of school shootings in the world since 1950 is apparently Finland, where everyone is a happy socialist with a beard and a chunky sweater and according to the WHO has one of the best rates of access to mental health care in Europe. On the other hand, the country with the second highest per-capita gun ownership in the world is the Yemen which as far as I can make out has had one school shooting attack, in 1997.
So it's obviously rather more complex than the rather simplistic more/less guns/healthcare/god speakers would have you believe. What is noticeable, however, is the way attacks on schools have become more frequent in the last half century or so. Powerful weapons, and less powerful ones like knives, were common enough before the '50's but attacks on gatherings of children seem to be a peculiarly modern phenomenon. As the human population has grown rapidly, and the standard of living has improved around the world, so people have started turning on their kids. And that brings me on to Universe 25.
Universe 25, if you haven't heard of it, is one of those experiments which makes you wonder precisely what scientists in the 1960s and 70s were smoking, and whether they might be willing to share. The Universe, you see, was a mouse utopia. A habitat for lab mice designed to give its inhabitants the best possible existence, Universe 25 was kept at a nice steady temperature, the habitat was cleaned regularly and the bedding was changed daily, and the mice were free of disease and given all the food and water they wanted. In short, mouse heaven. The results? The mice went mad and started killing each other.
At first the population increased exponentially, doubling every 55 days. As the number of mice increased, aberrant behaviours appeared. Males, incapable of defending their territories or their personal space from the press of population, stopped trying. Some mice became what were called the 'beautiful ones', who engaged in incessant preening and display without truly engaging with their fellows. Other mice went on rampages of attacking and murdering their fellows at random until they themselves were killed. The surviving victims of these attacks went on to become attackers themselves. As a society as a whole, care for the young ceased as the mice turned on their own children.
I mean, I'm just saying.
Anyway, Barack Obama has made some fairly serious noises about gun control, but there's been a lot of talk about how "the Powerful Gun Lobby" will block meaningful change. As the representatives of this Powerful Gun Lobby, the National Rifle Association spends $720,000 a year on political lobbying. In US political terms, that's nothing. Advocates of gun control could easily outspend the Powerful Gun Lobby by passing around a hat for a week. The realty is rather harsher. There are at least 300 million guns in private hands in the US of which at least 80 million are semiautomatic rifles, including such beauties as the Barratt .50 sniping rifle, and the question I tend to ask is how, precisely, does anyone seriously expect to "control" that lot? For all that 'a ban on semiautomatic weapons' has been mooted, it always seems to be mooted by people who very clearly aren't volunteering to go round trying to take them off people. The best anyone can hope for from Obama is some restrictions on the sale of extended magazines to slightly slow down the rate of killing that armed fruitcakes are capable of, and maybe a bit more restriction on the sale of forearms to people with lobotomy scars on their forehead and a packet of Olanzapine sticking out of their breast pocket.
At risk of seeming critical, some people seem to hold a belief in the power of the state to pass laws which will magically change the world. A belief that banning hunting with hounds in the UK would stop people doing it, or a belief that raising the top rate of tax wouldn't result in people giving the Treasury the bird and moving their money to Singapore, and here's a belief here that by making a law banning private ownership of Tommy Guns would result in tens of millions of Americans shrugging their shoulders and saying "Oh well, it was fun whilst it lasted" before popping them in a bin at their local mall. As it is, there's no way Obama - or Senate of Congress - is going to be mad enough to try doing that because the the thought of some more Waco-esque shots filling the evening news is going to give their political advisors the heebie-jeebies.
So really, not a lot is going to happen as a result of the Sandy Hook shootings. There'll be a certain amount of political posturing and maybe a bit of round-the-edges tinkering to gun laws in the 'states, but a root and branch change cannot be effected by law without an acceptance that trying to enforce the law would be bloody to a degree hitherto unseen and possibly unimaginable. Cultural change of a sort desired by the gun control lobby is something which can only take decades to achieve, and the will to work at that seems lacking. One of the cornerstones of the US right to bear arms is the dictum "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance". If the gun control people want to change attitudes, they might start pointing out that The price of freedom is not only eternal vigilance, but also two dozen dead six year olds every six months. That way at least people can ask if the price is one they want to pay.