It looked like last Saturday night was going to be rather ordinary, perhaps even a little dull. We, she and I (you know who she is) would probably just check on the Blue Jays, watch a little TV or read the stuff on the net and then crash. And it started out pretty well. The Jays had won their game against Cleveland, a good sign after a season when they lost the World Series only by an inch.
But that all changed about nine o’clock when we heard about the latest shooting in the US. We learned recently in Tumbler Ridge, of course, that not all the crazies are in the US; we have our share in Canada, too.
But is it ever going to stop? It seems that what started at Columbine in ’99 just keeps on happening, with pretty consistent regularity.
And this one could have been a bad one. Had the gunman gotten inside the main ballroom in DC, he could have killed a huge number of people. I know all shootings are bad, but this one could have been really bad, because there were so many people packed very tightly into one room. And how do governments protect their people without challenging some human rights that we have grown to consider sacrosanct?
The question is, where do human rights stop on the side of the crazies, and potential victims’ rights come into play? And we aren’t talking here about rights that are just conveniences or inconveniences. This isn’t just a Ford or Chevy issue. Which car do we like the best? We’re talking about life and death in many instances, such as this one on Saturday night and the tragedy in Tumbler Ridge, and all the other shootings that have occurred over the last twenty-five years or so.
Considering changes to human rights is not a small issue, because when governments start playing with people’s rights, they often go too far.
But again, how do governments protect their people? How do we figure this out? And it isn’t just a big city issue. Tumbler Ridge isn’t big.
And we have to figure it out so that we can prevent these tragedies. It’s one thing to throw the book at people once they have shot a bunch of innocent kids in a school or parishioners attending a church, but it never brings the ones back who have had their lives stolen from them and their families.
I know it’s a very difficult problem and probably one where people’s human rights come into conflict with one another. Isn’t it amazing that we have done the research to build rockets that can fly around the moon, yet we can’t understand the human mind to the point where we can know how these shootings occur? We can understand all the mechanical things, all the electrical things, all the chemical things, all the natural laws, such as speed, motion and light.
Just not people.
And it may be because we just haven’t done the research.
And I think it’s there to be done.
We have all kinds of human behaviour that we could look at. There are all kinds of things in our lives where people interact with each other, where there are conflicts and where human rights likely come into conflict with other human rights. They usually get worked out amicably. Unless an individual decides that they will work it out the way they want to, and will use a gun to do it.
But there are likely many other avenues of human behaviour that could be studied in search of solutions to these shootings.
It seems to me that one of the key elements in solving this issue is to enlist the involvement of the families of disturbed people. It’s family members who know the most, as did the family of this recent shooter. They knew that he had a manifesto. They knew that he would often talk about ‘doing something’ to deal with his concerns. There were several signs that, in all likelihood, only they knew about. They could have alerted authorities, and especially so if there was a pathway for families in such situations to follow. A pathway which would protect the public and, at the same time, protect a family’s relationship with their loved one.
Here’s a little story about another issue that the world has struggled with, and it’s the issue of the legalization of recreational drugs. Maybe more than just recreational drugs, I don’t know. It too was and is a human behaviour issue which has taken the lives of far too many people.
I heard that in Singapore, drugs are very carefully controlled. So in the context of this piece, I did what you might do: I went to Google. I saw that in the write-up, a question was asked, ‘Are all recreational drugs illegal in Singapore?’ The answer was short. “No exceptions.” They even have the death penalty for trafficking. How did Singapore get to that position? I don’t know, but it is interesting to see that some countries have different policies for dealing with some of these human problems that we don’t have in North America. And in the Singapore situation with drugs, I doubt that it got there without doing some homework.
My issue here is not drugs; it’s about mass shootings that never seem to stop. But as I said above, they are both national problems of human behaviour that few countries, certainly not Canada or the US, have been able to figure out. But it’s one we must figure out, or we’ll be having these tragic events continue to happen, and we’ll never know when they will happen in our area.
Until it does.
