Eric the Blue

Are there countries besides ours in which eight kids, age 3 through 12, can die in a mass shooting and the story lives in the national news for around six-and-a-half seconds? I suppose if the slaughter of kindergartners at that school in Connecticut didn’t elicit much more than a ho-hum, there isn’t any reason to think the latest “incident” would push us past some “critical mass” of “outrage and sorrow.” I doubt there is any such critical mass of outrage and sorrow. The opposite is probably closer to the mark. Mass shootings are like videos of horrific crimes that elicit in us a numbing response when played over and over again at trial or online.

Not sure whether it was a day, or a week, before the Louisiana shooting that the former lieutenant governor of Virginia shot and killed his wife before turning on himself the gun that he no doubt purchased and carried for “self-defense.” This was around 3 o’clock one morning. The couple’s teenaged kids were asleep in their rooms when the sound of gun shots woke them. One of them made the 911 call. Too late. Once again, there was no “good guy with a gun” on the scene to stop the good guy with a gun and marital problems. Margaret Atwood’s maxim borne out again: “Men worry that women will laugh at them. Women worry that men will kill them.”

I just googled “chance of gun used for self defense versus for suicide or against family member or intimate partner.” According to the AI “overview”:

Guns are significantly more likely to be used for suicide or against family/partners than for self-defense. Research indicates having a gun in the home triples suicide risk and doubles homicide risk, while defensive gun use (DGU) occurs in less than 1% of personal/property crimes. Studies show 83 women are murdered by an intimate partner with a handgun for every woman who uses a handgun to kill an intimate partner in self-defense.

I know what some of you are thinking. In that case, more women need to arm themselves! My own complaint is the undersense that, while rare, it’s a good thing when a gun is used in “self defense” against the perpetrator of a property crime. Whatever, the overview hurdles ahead:

Access to a gun in the home increases the risk of suicide more than three-fold. In the year after someone buys a handgun, the leading cause of death is suicide. . . .

An abusive partner’s access to a firearm makes it 5 times more likely that a woman will be killed. . . .

People living with a gun in the home are twice as likely to die by homicide and three times as likely to die by suicide. . . .

In 8 out of 10 defensive gun uses, the perpetrator is not armed with a gun.

I guess the approved “conservative” response to that last data point would be that the perpetrators need to arm themselves, so that they can return fire during their burglaries and barroom disputes. The AI overview does not take up the matter of accidental homicides that occur when the genius who owns the weapon is petting it, or his kids get their hands on it.