On Not Being Forgotten...

It's a harrowing sort of posthuman luxury that we are able to read the words of the dead so quickly. Following the tragedy in Colorado, I felt my insides squirm as I clicked the link to Jessica Redfield's twitter-feed, poring over her final tweet with a real-life dramatic irony that nobody should reasonably be able to have.

Then, I found her blog, and was shaken to the core. She had survived a prior mall-shooting by a random whim, which carried her previous "sushi-mission" toward the less healthy pursuit of a burger/poutine combo - a girl after my own artery-clogged heart - and thus brought her outside to miss the carnage by three minutes.

So when I see people posting things about how less gun-control is an appropriate reaction, or more gun-control, for that matter, I have to stop and ask myself the underlying question that makes both of these responses seem secondary:

What kind of society do we live in when a girl in her mid-twenties can be first-hand witness to two individual and unrelated mass-shootings at public places?

Think about it: you are 2,000 times more likely to die from heart-disease than from a motorcycle accident. That is a triumph of modern civilization. We zoom around on small, controlled explosive devices practically every day of our lives, and yet organ failure exponentially outdoes us compared to more violent demises. Was Jessica Redfield just that unlucky?

In 2010, 6 people died from melting underwear. That's hot.

No. Although sharing her surname with a fictional family who tends to get attacked by the undead at a seriously unusual rate may make you want to point to conspiracy theories, the sobering reality sets in when you realize how many public shooting-sprees have taken place in America.

Since the 20th century, there have been 92 "Rampage Shootings" - not including school shootings - in the United States, and over half of them have been within the past 50 years. Not all of them claimed lives, but these are situations where individuals have suddenly and without discernible reason taken out a weapon and began firing into crowds of completely befuddled bystanders.

Rambo: Murderer? Yes - but at least you know why
he's doing it... even if you can barely understand him.

This means we have created a society that manages trillions of tons of high-velocity tonnage speeding around at distances of often mere inches from one another better than we have managed to provide against the apparent inevitability of highly armed individuals attempting the mass murder of virtually everyone within their purview.

And people want to blame the movies. And the TV. And the video-games. And Marilyn Manson.

"Dude, that was so last decade. Leave me alone."

But not the guns. Nobody wants to blame the guns. Now, I'm not a statistician, but I can tell you that there's only one common link between every spree-shooter from now since the beginning of time - can you guess what it is? Need a hint?

Very good, Keanu. Now work on having more than one facial expression.

This is not, much to most people's surprise, leading to some tired paean calling for more gun control. I'm not even going to try and argue that controlling the amount of guns entering and being sold within the country leads to less gun deaths - because I don't have to: it's basic math.

Really, the problem is that we already do have a lot of guns in this country. 270,000,000 of them, by current estimates, and that's just the privately owned ones. We could literally put a gun in the hands of every single adult in the entire country, and still probably have enough for the larger of the children to carry in case we don't have time to reload. That's the kind of statistic that would make even Ted Nugent raise an eyebrow.

Cat-Scratch Fever: the bath-salts of the 1970s.

Now that we've established that it's possible, though, we might as well take up the argument of how, exactly, America should respond to this national tragedy. The way I see it, it boils down to two main possibilities: the "private citizen-vigilante" approach, and the "governmental legislation" stance.

Option A: Private Citizen-Vigilante

"...Not to mention I'm in my forties. I don't really make a Santa-list."

It's ironic, really - after all, Bruce Wayne is pretty much the ultimate in vigilantism, and it is his brand of self-possessed retribution against evil that I'm certain people imagine themselves emulating when they make the argument that we need more people armed in order to protect ourselves from the people who are also armed. It kind of goes like this:

Is it just me, or does the "problem" look a lot like Eminem?

Okay, so let's take this argument at face-value and apply it to what happened. What people are apparently suggesting is that if there were more people in that theater who had weapons, they would have just stood up and capped James Holmes in his riot-geared ass, and thus ended his killing spree before it got too far.

So, okay - even this raises questions. Never mind the fact that he gassed the audience before firing, or that he prepared far enough ahead to actually wear an armored vest and helmet before bursting in through the emergency exit. How many people do they think would be saved in this scenario, and how many armed movie-goers would it have taken? One? Three? A third of the audience? I just don't understand the logic here when you bring it down to the level of practicality: even if several people stood up the moment he threw the first canister and drew their weapons, he would still have shot a lot of people. Even if their aim was utterly perfect, and they managed not to hit any innocent bystanders in their collective ad-hoc execution of this cretin, he would still have shot lots of people.

Adding more guns to the equation does not produce a viable solution. What they're really saying is that they feel safer when they have their guns, because they imagine that they are protected against the terrible people in this world who might try to exploit their general trust in humanity, and then they just superimpose that fantasy onto the real-life scenario without really going over the details first. It's perfectly understandable.... but it's wrong.

'Nuff said.

Option B: Governmental Legislation

Yes, you're reading this correctly: the average ratio of police to resident is 2/1000. And Newark, for once, looks good.

Can you imagine being responsible for the safety of 500 people? Even with a gun, the numbers here paint a picture more befitting a Left 4 Dead sortie than the expectations of a real-life, honest-to-pete peace-officer in the city of Aurora, Colorado. Yet, these are the actual figures of police presence in the very city where this tragedy occurred. Now, given the average theater capacity of 200, and the number of screens at the Cineplex where it happened, we're talking about 3,200 people at a major event if every showing is sold out.

But, of course, they were only showing it on three screens, so we'll go with the conservative estimate of 600 people watching the movie and maybe a few hundred standing in line. Let's say a total crowd of a thousand or so, adding in for the other showings and such. According to the present metrics, that's two officers they can reasonably expect to be dispatched to oversee the crowd.

"I'm getting too bureaucratically under-funded for this!"

Now, you might think that two officers for a single multiplex is more than enough - but then we look at what happened with the Aurora shooting, and ask how Holmes got into the theater with a militia's-worth of weapons in the first place: he came in through an emergency exit.

Note how there are four sides, and a lot of ground to cover.

It only takes a brief visit to Google Maps to realize what the problem was: there weren't enough people monitoring the people. It's pretty clear that two cops are not going to be able to patrol nearly enough ground to be able to catch everyone who's skulking around this major media event, and the worst-case-scenario happened.

The answer? Double the police. At least. It would take four officers to even cover each side of the thing, much less be able to respond to suspicious characters in a reasonable amount of time to prevent them from bursting into the emergency exit. But they'd at least be able to sound an alert, or run in and apprehend them - you know, the thing we pay taxes in order to be able to expect?

Increasing the staffing minimums for city police would be the most efficient and productive way to respond to this tragedy. It wouldn't be popular. It wouldn't be cheap. It wouldn't be sexy. But it would work.

Okay, maybe it would be sexy... and it would work.

Most of all, this blog is about not being forgotten. I don't know if Jessica Redfield suffered from athazagoraphobia, but I do know that she cherished every waking moment, and that she loved living. I know this because I read her blog. And that's what she said.

So, before people start using this event to bolster their favorite politician, or rail against the fear of losing their precious second-amendment rights, or whatever particular item of demagoguery it is marshaled into supporting the cause of, I just want to put it out there that we don't have to keep letting this happen. We have the capacity to provide the oversight that would prevent these things from occurring again and again, and if even one city decided to increase police presence at public events, then I'd like to think she'd be glad to know it.

This dark night does not have to rise again.

Yeah, I know. Sorry, Batman.