Rant: Sick & Tired

You've heard the news.  Some asshole decided to be the quintessential sore loser at a Madden tournament and killed four people, including himself.  And once again, the same waltz plays, over and over, with two sides taking absolutist positions which anybody with even a nanogram of sense has to realize will never come about.

I am getting mighty sick of this shit.

The Perpetrator

Let's take a look at what we know for sure about the person who caused this atrocity.  David Katz, 24, lived in Baltimore, MD.  He'd won a Madden tournament last year, but this year he traveled to Jacksonville and lost.  Upon losing, he apparently went out to his car, came back, and started shooting up The Landing game bar where the tournament was being held.  Gamestreamers accidentally captured the crime as it happened.  After killing three people and injuring eleven others, Katz killed himself.

Everything beyond these bare facts is merely speculation.  Did he expect to lose?  Did he deliberately throw the game so he could justify shooting people to himself?  I'd like to think I'm a fairly imaginative guy, but I cannot for the life of me think of a reason somebody would be carrying a gun in their car unless they had planned on using it from the get-go.  The possibility of somebody thinking, "I'm going to compete in a video game tournament.  I'll do my best, but if I lose, I'll fucking execute every last person in the place," seems literally too bizarre to believe.  So completely alien, I can't even begin to comprehend it.  What, was he going to shoot somebody, win or lose?  If that was the case, it's mind-boggling, not only for the depraved indifference to human life, but to the degree of premeditation involved.

I don't know what this guy's circumstances were, but they can't have been that bad if he's driving down to Jacksonville (or up to Buffalo last year) to compete in game tournaments.  That's not exactly the mark of a person in desperate financial or logistical straits.  Was he mentally or emotionally disturbed?  Difficulties with mental health issues?  Bad reaction to an anti-depressant?  Had a fight with his spouse or paramour right before he left?  Can't begin to tell you.  But, again, I can't fathom what drug interaction or relationship grudge is so awful it moves somebody to kill but isn't so traumatizing it waits till you're hundreds of miles away before it finally kicks in.

When the final details come out, I'm certain they will be banal to the point of absurdity.

The Shouting Match

Already the shouting match has resumed.  It can be summed up thusly.

• Anti-Gun: "Guns are evil things that take control of your brain, turning you into a crazed killer!  Ban all the guns now!  Think of the children!"
• Pro-Gun: "Video games rot your brain, turning you into an amoral sociopath!  Ban all the video games now!  Think of the children!"

You begin to see why I'm so utterly disgusted.  Both sides are looking for simplistic solutions to what is almost certainly a deeply complicated problem, and neither one of them is right.

For the anti-gun crowd, pointing to other countries and saying, "see, they don't have this much gun violence!" is a false equivalency.  They may not have that much gun violence, but they also don't have the same cultural and historical baggage.  They don't have precisely the same governmental and social institutions we do here in the States, and the ones which may seem similar do not necessarily operate in the same fashion as they do here.  Even countries within a certain region (Scandinavia, for example) can have distinct differences of sufficient degree as to render any comparison imperfect.  I don't think Anders Brevik could have come from anywhere but Norway, given the legacy left by Vidkun Quisling during WWII.  It's highly unlikely somebody like him would have turned up in Sweden or Denmark, to say nothing of Finland.  More to the point, they have more cultural and historical baggage than we do.  We sometimes forget that Norway has existed, in one form or another, for over a thousand years.  The current system of government is relatively recent, not much older than the US if we go by the adoption of their constitution, but Norwegians as a people have had a culture stretching back before the end of the First Millennium.  Compare that to the US, which I would argue still doesn't have a distinct cultural identity even after 242 years.  Things may have changed over the course of a thousand years for Norwegians, but they have had a good long time to change, and there's no guarantee that their current culture will remain as it is right now a thousand years in the future.

For the pro-gun crowd, pointing to video games as the source of all ills is not merely a straw man, but an exceedingly ill constructed one.  As gamers, we've been shooting things since Space Invaders.  Hell, even before video games were around, you had kids playing cops-and-robbers, cowboys-and-Indians, and "army guys" without some teenager or young adult deciding to turn their game into a bloody reality.  Kids have been playing chess and go for millennia, abstractions of violent warfare which has not led to actual violence beyond the occasional flipped table by a sore loser.  You had Risk and Battleship, and to my knowledge nobody ever killed somebody because their opponent called E5 and sank their last boat.  Sure, there may have been some harsh words when somebody invaded Australia with three armies, but nothing harsh enough to make a kid think he needed to blow little Bobby's brains out for it.  Consider this: Sony recently celebrated a milestone with the PlayStation 4, having produced half a billion of the units.  Not all of those units went to the US, to be sure, but if video games are that insidious, the incidence of video gamer violence should be through the goddamned roof.  Sony shouldn't have been able to produce half a billion units because their audience would have brutally reduced itself well below a point where the company could make a profit on them.  Factor in PCs, mobile devices, Xbox and Switch consoles, and the video games industry should have snuffed itself out from all their customers going on killing sprees ending with their own suicides.  The fact is that every new form of media consumption has prompted anguished cries about the end of civilization, if not all life on Earth, and it has never happened that way.  If people like Gutenberg and Edison couldn't destroy the world with books, movies, and recorded music, video games aren't going to do shit.

The Hitch

It's been over 20 years since Columbine, and I am no closer now to understanding the behavior which moves somebody to do something like this than I was back then.  There is no cognitive or behavioral psychological model I can construct which doesn't completely fall apart when applied in a larger context.  There is no socio-economic or political theory I can think of which accounts for every single instance of this lunacy.  There is no cultural phenomenon or anthropological principle which provides any kind of insight.  What might explain things on the individual scale fails in the main, and vice versa.

College students who take psychology courses are usually admonished not to try and diagnose themselves or others with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual until they've received a sufficient degree of training.  This recommendation comes about because it's entirely too easy for people to simply look things up in the book, compare it to their own experiences, and say, "Oh shit, I'm a sociopath! I never knew!"  It's like taking a Facebook personality quiz, only it's somehow more "real" because there's a book involved.  For a time, there was a distinct feeling of "there but for the grace of God" whenever similar incidents happened.  Geeky, bullied, not one of the "cool" kids, far too many points of congruence for me to feel comfortable, I tried very hard to figure out how it was I'd avoided pre-dating Klebold and Harris.  Even now, being well past the average age of the people who perpetrate these atrocities, I still wonder.  Perhaps the ability to ask the question is what kept me from being like them.  Or perhaps the small differences, rather than the similarities, are the secret.  There might be an answer there.  Or there might not.

Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying the Internet is "the largest experiment in anarchy that we've ever had."  I've struggled with the possibility that the grand experiment has fallen afoul of the Law of Unintended Consequences.  That in creating an unlimited canvas for human thought and communication, we have unwittingly created a dangerous key which unlocks not only the best of human potential but the worst as well.  We haven't created a monster, but more the means to unleash the monsters within us; more Henry Jekyll than Victor Frankenstein.  When I say that incidents of this sort didn't happen when I was growing up, I say so quite earnestly.  My generation was the first to have something like the Internet introduced to us at a formative period in our lives, and perhaps there is still a trace of that pre-Internet existence around us.  The ones who came after have never known a world without it, and having never known anything else, there is perhaps a blind spot for the younger generation, one which doesn't have that frame of reference to rely upon. 

The Last Argument

As far as the two sides of the Great Argument (I will not dignify the shrill screeching of both sides with the word "debate"), the problem centers around the first two amendments in the Bill of Rights.  Both are important.  Both have limitations which are established in case law and precedent.  And neither side is willing to concede the other might have a point.  There's days where I want to shake some people silly, begging them to consider (in the words of Oliver Cromwell) that they might be wrong.

The common refrain from both sides boils down to, "There ought to be a law!"  It's not exactly surprising from the Pro-Gun side, since they tend to be law-and-order types who fetishize law enforcement to the point of embarrassment.  It's a little more surprising from the Anti-Gun side, since there's a large amount of overlap with groups who have been excoriating the police for their behavior and uneven application of existing laws.  In what universe do police who can't execute a traffic stop consistently with regards to the color, gender, or economic status of a suspect suddenly become competent executing the mass confiscation of firearms in an evenhanded fashion?  In what reality does a government which can't seem to keep a lid on the files for 3D-printed weapons have any chance of trying to keep violent video games out of the hands of people?  Laws are not precision guided weapons which eliminate problems forever.  They are all too often the equivalent of baseball bats wrapped in rusty barbed wire and studded with shards of broken glass dipped in poison, always in easy reach of people in positions of power, always ready to be swung down towards an individual rightly or wrongly.  They are violence in the form of words.  Even at their most well crafted, there are follow-on effects which can cause at least as many problems as they solve.  If you believe you can pass a law which will be properly enforced in every jot and tittle simply because of the purity of your motive, regardless of what side of the divide you fall on, you might wish to consider strengthening your contact with reality.


King Louis XIV of France, during his reign, had the words "Ultima Ratio Regnum" inscribed on the backs of his cannons.  "The last argument of kings" was intended to refer to the power of a monarch to declare war on a hostile nation, but it also unintentionally referred to the consequences of using those weapons.  I would say a similar argument extends to anybody owns a firearm.  It should be almost a mantra, "Ultima Ratio Civium," a reminder to one's self that a situation should never get to the point where that last argument is the only way to reach a resolution.  And even with that mantra, even with that desire, there will undoubtedly be situations where the last argument must be invoked.  The fact that inevitability will come to pass at some point does not absolve us of the responsibility to try to prevent it as much as humanly possible.

This may be a little anarchic of me, but I'm going to suggest we don't make a law.  I'm going to suggest we stop handing more baseball bats to the government.  Instead of using the limitless potential of the Internet to try and destroy those we feel are a threat to us, we hold back that impulse which moves us to attack people whom we can only recognize by screen names and forum avatars.  We take the time to ask not merely the people closest to us how they are doing but those whom we feel are the farthest away from ourselves.  We take the time to write out, "good game" rather than simply "GG" to avoid the suggestion of the derisive "git gud."  We take the time to remind ourselves that setbacks are not the end of the world, and that as long as we are breathing, we are capable of hope.  If we are to make a hashtag, which seems to be the only way to get any sort of social movement done these days, make it something which those who are on the edge of atrocity can reach out towards, to say "Help me save me from myself!"  Make it one where somebody answers without scorn, without judgment, but with the honest desire to do a mitzvah for a person who is in need.