The conversation around the Iowa shooter has become “well, he was bullied and that’s why he snapped.”

I studied this kind of stuff (incidents, the vulnerability of certain spaces, the fact that violence is merely physics, etc) for about 13 years before getting bored with the broader discussion, the similarity of the incidents and politics generally as it all started to make me rather cold. That said, looking at this and the Covenant shooter, I don’t recall seeing this kind of relative sympathy for mass killers. I get the sense, however that it’s because the shooters aren’t plausibly Republican anymore. Not like they all were OR that it plays a role into most of them. They’re almost to a man, and it is almost always men, bullied, lonely, fatherless, on boatloads of antidepressants and/or narcissistic.

It’s really a fascinating thing to watch the broader conversation in the media and on the socials shift drastically and still, one assumes deliberately, miss the point. As if there’s a mutual agreement to not contend with the problem.

Specifically, the reticence to address the violence itself has always been frustrating. It’s pitched as this dark, almost ethereal concept where the shooter is some jackass with a gun who, when someone brings up the idea of shooting back, becomes Agent Smith. Because fighting these specific humans is like nailing Jello to a tree, we can only apply legislative “solutions” because it’s just such “a complicated issue”.

Minor problem; violence is not complicated. The situations are dynamic, the motives almost always personal, but the violence itself is merely physics, specifically the first law, with moral implications. If nobody is there to shoot back, the object in motion will stay in motion. This is not complicated. If we’re calling in police to stop the situation, we are calling in RESISTANCE. Resistance, which could’ve already been there.

Depending on the identity of the shooter, the story oscillates between “this was a senseless killing” and “this was an attack driven by hatred”. Sometimes we just split the difference with the phrase “there is not yet a known motive for this senseless act”.

One thing that has changed, is the left’s approach to this situation. While we’ve waited 30 years at least for any change, it still misses the point completely. You will now hear gun control advocates talk about budgeting for “a needed increase in physical security”, which sounds like they’ve learned something. They have not. That “physical security” amounts to better locks on the doors and more cameras. The goal being, one assumes, to have better hiding places and higher definition angles of the carnage. But nothing to immediately respond to the threat. Once these measures stop nothing (because they can’t stop anything) they can then go “well, that didn’t work, time to shift back to the gun ban thing”.

To be fair, can the “sufficient armed security” idea be applied to -every- school? Obviously not. However, securing a large portion of schools, especially given the relative rarity of these incidents already, is preferable to hanging a camera on a fencepost (or multiple cameras on several fenceposts) and wondering why the camera isn’t stopping anything.

The right does have the correct view on this; physical security being ACTUAL security and not TSA-lite, but it generally fails to explain how this view is correct. Part of it is because it seems the ideology has been infected with a wicked hero complex. Another problem is the need to explain violence to an ideology that sees it as both a universal evil (unless it’s a progressive activist), and a problem so complicated it can ONLY be “solved” by one extreme, very sweeping measure we don’t have time to think about.

All I can assume is that if one discusses violence on a deeper, tactical level, then that implies (the story goes) the person himself is likely to become a killer. Which is ridiculous, we come to our conclusions based on an analysis of the situation and an understanding of violence. If you don’t have that, you’re trying to tack a solution onto a problem you fundamentally do not understand. If there are forty different examples over the years of a school shooting, and knowing that a ban will never come to fruition (and wouldn’t solve anything, anyway) it is clearly something about how we secure schools that is failing and it is NOT that the cameras aren’t good enough.

This of course, leaves behind the fact that something has changed in culture between now and the olden days where kids are thinking that murder is the answer to their pain among other aspects of a person before anyone even gets to the incident. The Gun Control Act of 1968, and amendments to the National Firearms Act, as well as 1993’s Brady bill, and various other gun control expansions at the state and federal level are recent. They are responses to a change in culture.

But of course, nothing is going to change. Because one side is talking about tactics and the specifics of a situation as well as the broader issue about guns and concepts like defense of oneself and others, and the other is talking about how all violence is evil and a gun ban would’ve worked perfectly and solved all our problems because it worked in Australia, just like they have been for the last 30 years.

“This sweeping measure will solve all our problems with no downsides” is how we got the lockdown cult. Deeper analysis of a very serious situation is required.