The Fallacy of the Magic Shield

If you’re interested in what the blogosphere is saying about the mass murder at Virginia Tech, Jules Crittenden has a pretty complete roundup of links.

One of the thought-provoking discussions whizzing about the web today is that of defense and action. Some are criticital of the state of Virginia (and rightly so, I believe) for banning firearms on campus. Some are wondering what has happened to our youth that few of the students that day tried to fight back at any point and why that job was left to a 71 year old Holocaust survivor (and I believe the answer lies in the last two words).

I’m not sure what to make of it. It’s clear, as we’ve learned more the past two days, that the killer was completely bugnuts crazy but held it together well enough to operate in public on his own. We know he scared the bejeezus out of his teachers and fellow students. We know he fantazied in an intensely personal way about violence, that he stalked women on campus, and that he was quick to cry “suicide” when the law came ’round.

So, yeah. The guy was mad. But so what? What could we have done to him? He had, as best we know, broken no law so we couldn’t lock him up. He wasn’t posing a threat to himself or others. We can’t simply grab up anyone who makes with the angry talk to the people around him. Our national “debate” has pretty definitively decided this for the here and now. If we could, we would have capped Mad Mahmoud a couple of years ago and Saddam Hussein would have been pushing up daisies in 1992 or thereabouts. The crazy guy outside your office building may be a nuisance and he may give you the screaming willies, but the police simply can’t yank him up and throw him in the poke until he gets sane.

That’s the deal we make in a free society. We don’t lock people down and, in exchange, we take responsibility for our own protection by giving the squinty eye to the guy in the next row who’s doodling skulls and muttering about blood in the streets and knowing that, if he snaps, we may have to deal with him ourselves.

Unfortunately, our betters believe that they must limit our tools of defense, thinking that by doing so they are preventing the nutballs from getting those tools, too. We all can see the gaping hole in that line of thought but that doesn’t prevent them from invoking it often and pretty effectively.

Virginia Tech was a so-called “gun-free zone” where students (who are being referred to mostly as “children” in the MSM despite that about 3/4 of them by my estimate are legal adults capable of voting and serving in the military) were assured by the authorities that they would be safe. The authorities lied to them blatantly and willingly, though with the very best motivations.

One of the things I’ve learned in 18 years of being a police dispatcher is that the police cannot keep you safe. There aren’t enough of them. There are too many of you. The laws weren’t built to allow the police to take the sort of aggressive action required to keep you safe. We could rewrite those laws. Indeed other nations have and we call them “police states”. They’re bad and we don’t want to live in them.

Except that we kind of do. What we seem to prefer these days is a soft, mushy police state where we disarm the citizenry because we suspect that everyone could be a mass murdering maniac but we don’t want to actually come out and say that we don’t trust the average citizen with the means to protect himself from the actual mass murdering maniac. We invoke the police as a Magic Shield: capable of keeping us all safe, taking the bad guys off the street before they hurt us or our property, and never once infringing on anyone’s civil rights. Of course, when those same officers fail to do the impossible things we seem to expect of them, we come down on them like a ton of bricks. We can’t imagine, with our unerring hindsight, how police officials could have taken decisions other than the right ones. We blame them for not being mind-readers, for their inability to teleport great distances in the blink of an eye, and for not being able to look an hour into the future at all times. We treat them like they are omniscient, omnipresent, and all-powerful and hammer them when they prove to be anything less.

I’ve kind of wandered off the point, so let me come back to it. We don’t know exactly what happened in those classrooms. We only know that one old man had the time to throw himself at the attacker. I can suppose that other young and fit men had similar opportunities. They decided not to. They ran away, or worse, sat still and died. We can argue all the live long day about gun control and the Second Amendment (and oh my goodness, we certainly will do that) but it’s a lot harder to argue that it’s good that only one old man, while surrounded by the young fit and strong, could find the gumption to try to stop the killer and save some lives other than his own. It’s not like his classmates didn’t have plenty of warning signs. They just assumed that the Magic Shield would protect them.

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Category: The Good Old US of A