An AR-15 carbine. Wikipedia user M62.
I have been fairly vocal the last few days about why I think gun control won't work to prevent mass shootings. Gun confiscation is politically impossible and any attempt will result in civil war. And less serious gun control efforts would do nothing to actually prevent mass shootings.
I realized something though. The only option being discussed right now is gun control. Very few people are offering up other possible solutions. The gun control lobby has been very good at making sure no other solutions are considered or mentioned. I aim to change this. I'm going to go through several options I think might work for this problem. I apologize in advance for the listicale format but it's just easier this way.
1. Get rid of "gun free zones" and allow CCW everywhere. Easy enough. It's very clear that mass shooters prefer to attack places where there won't be much resistance. In a place like a school where nobody is armed and most people aren't capable of fighting period it is very easy to kill a huge number of people in a short time even if you don't use a gun.
I have also said for a long time there there appear to be three kinds of mass shooters. First there are those that are psychotic. They attack due to mental illness and they are very hard to predict behaviorally. These are the guys that are hearing voices. The 2nd group is terrorists, who are doing what they want for political reasons.
But I think armed resistance is especially effective against the 3rd group. This group is motivated by nihilism and suicidal tendency. These folks want to go out in a blaze of glory and tend to either give up or kill themselves once the cops show up or someone fights back. This group makes up the majority of school shooters and a decent faction of other mass shooters and I think if people were armed the majority of these people would kill themselves or surrender.
Of course having armed people in a mass shooting would help against the other types as well. It wouldn't be a panacea. There have been cases where people who tried to fight back in mass shootings have died. That being said even if someone doesn't stop a mass shooter with a concealed firearm even fighting back has advantages. Even if you die in the attempt you are still buying time for others to escape. In a mass shooting seconds are more valuable than anything else and one teacher taking 30 seconds of time to delay a mass shooting gives his or her students more time to escape. And, of course, there will be cases where the CCW holders will either kill, wound or scare off mass shooters as well.
The only thing I would note about this is that the people that conceal carry shouldn't be identified to the students and shouldn't just be limited to teachers. Basically anyone that can pass the background check and is willing to be trained should be allowed to CCW. But if you identify who those people are they might be the first target in the shooting. If a mass attacker doesn't know who has a gun they won't be able to pick that person off first.
2. More armed guards/cops in vulnerable places. One of the most frustrating parts of the Florida shooting was the fact that the campus was huge and there was only one cop in the entire place. 1 cop in a campus of 3000 students is ridiculous. Most schools have student resources officers but for whatever reason they never seem to come into play in these mass shootings. Part of it may be because theses cops tend to stay in high schools and not middle and elementary schools.
Hiring more cops might be a decent idea. Instead of one cop in an entire school district, why not a team of two or three in each? In massive schools like the Marjory Stoneman school that Nikolas Cruz attacked, why not have a larger team? And when cops are on breaks or have down time, why not have them wait around at schools?
Hiring armed security could help as well. Police have other duties as resource officers and could be called away for various legitimate reasons. For example if there is a kid bringing drugs to the school the cop could be busy taking that kid to the station for processing while the attacker strikes. A private security guard wouldn't have any other duties and would be there to respond to attacks.
Much has been made of possibly hiring former soldiers to be security at schools. I don't have a problem with this other than the fact that I don't think we have enough to properly protect all of our schools. We would have to use non-veterans as well, which shouldn't be a problem.
3. Understanding that mass shootings are memetic. Have you ever wondered why people use the AR-15? Sure it's a common and popular rifle but so is the Mini-14, which has similar capabilities only with a wood finish. Why don't people use the Mini-14 over the AR-15? Why don't they use pistols that are more concealable or battle rifles that have more power?
I'll ask another question. Why did car ramming attacks become popular? Purposefully ramming people was never very common but now these kinds of attacks happen all the time. The first major attack was the Nice attack that killed 86 people and wounded dozens more. After that everyone imitated it because they saw how successful it could be and understood how much coverage it could get. ISIS made it a standard play in their book and even non-Islamists started to use the attack as well.
It seems very clear that mass attackers get their ideas from the media coverage of previous attacks. After Columbine attackers used the weapons and style that those attackers used. Instead of rifles attackers used pistols. After a few high profile attacks using AR-15's and the massive media coverage of those cases, the attackers switched weapons.
Though it bumps into 1st amendment rights I think that the techniques and efforts of mass shooters should be handled carefully. We don't need to explain to people how and why these attacks work. News media should be much more careful about what they choose to cover. This is why I am very careful not to discuss the other various methods of killing a large number of people unless those methods are already "out of the bag".
4. Using memetics against mass shooters. Remember Elliot Rodger? The loser that shot up his roommates and then tried to attack a bunch of sorority sisters but failed so hard that he ended up killing random people instead? Remember his manifesto and his stupid YouTube videos where he complained about women not liking him? Remember when the internet collectively made fun of him? Because I do.
I'm convinced that the massive mocking that Elliot Rodger helped reduce the number of mass shootings. After the Isla Vista shootings the prototypical attacker changed from a disgruntled young man who had problems with woman and switched to a terrorism model. I'm convinced it was due in part of how pathetic and useless Elliot Rodger was portrayed by everyone.
In short, my theory is that nobody wanted to be seen as Elliot Rodger, the "Supreme Gentleman", the man who couldn't get laid and hated himself because he was biracial. Instead of being some badass fighting back about how unfair the world was everyone collectively agreed that he was a pathetic sad man that even screwed up his mass shooting. Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to be seen as the next "Supreme Gentleman".
My question is why don't we do the same thing with all of these mass killers? Instead of building them up into mythic figures, why don't we mock and make fun of them as the pathetic failures they are? Nobody wants to be a mass shooter if mass shooters are made out to be losers who fail at everything they try. Nikolas Cruz seems ripe for mocking and so did Stephen Paddock, but we never mocked them in the same way we did Rodger. If we did perhaps the next attack wouldn't happen.
5. Enforce current laws. The most frustrating thing about the shooting in Florida is the fact that Nikolas Cruz was well known to everyone. Dozens of people knew what he was trying to do and reported him to the authorities. But the authorities didn't do a damn thing. The school board, the local cops, even the FBI enabled him by not taking him seriously and doing everything they could to keep him on the streets instead of in the justice system.
Had Cruz been arrested for the various serious crimes and threats he made he would likely not have been on the streets. He's be in prison or jail and once he got out he would have failed his background checks. He might have been able to get a gun anyways, the background check system isn't perfect and it's easy to steal or buy an illegal gun, but it would have been more difficult.
One of the easiest things we could do is to simply fix the background check system. We need to make sure that every felon who is not permitted to own a gun is in the system along with those that are mentally ill. We should also make it available for private sellers. I am sure most sellers would like to make sure that anyone they sell guns to is legally able to buy but right now you have to go through a dealer to do so. Why not open it up to everyone and anyone?
Cracking down on straw buyers would help in mass shootings and gun crime in general. Right now it's a very minor crime generally to buy a gun for someone you know can't have one and even where it is a felony, it is often not prosecuted. Focusing on straw buyers and throwing the book at them every time would make it MUCH more difficult for those that can't have guns to get them.
6. Stop making mass shooting into a culture war issue. I said before that mass shootings are memetic in nature and that part of the motivation for these attackers is the attention they get. Right now we are having a "national conversation" about the Florida attack even though it happened a week ago. What are other mass shooters thinking about this?
My guess is that they are just getting additional motivation to attack. They understand that they can make a large part of the country lose their collective minds over gun control. As long as you aren't attacking conservative or doing it for Islamic Jihad, you can be guaranteed weeks of media coverage just by shooting up a school. Simply killing a large number of people can make you world famous but if you start a culture war? You are immortal. That seems like the exact opposite message we should send to potential mass shooters.
Our culture seems to be obsessed with fame. You can argue about why this is but you must agree that in a fame obsessed culture it's a very bad idea give people fame for destructive actions. Instead we should focus on, well, almost anything else. Mocking the attackers, like I mentioned above, is only one option. We could focus on the heroism of the victims and the first responders, or the lives of the victims. We could about actual threats that are more likely to kill like car accidents and heart disease. Or we could just ignore them as statistically speaking they are complete outliers.
So, are any of these solutions going to happen? Some of them are being discussed but I don't know how much attention these efforts will get and if there is any political will to do them. Certainly controls on media would have to be voluntary and given their recent behavior, I doubt we could get them to do anything.
Still, it's not like gun control is going to happen and at least some of these actions are possible, even without the government. Certainly mocking these attackers is something anyone can do. But I think as long as the only thing anyone wants to talk about is gun control, nothing will change.
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