A CONGRESSWOMAN IS SHOT - SO WHAT?

Why do I find myself really not caring about the shooting of a Congresswoman (person, man, thing? I'm never sure anymore)? Really-I just don't care. I said a prayer for her and for the souls of those that died and I meant it but beyond that...

This will be used for political advantage. The anti-gunners will say that it's because of easy access to guns. It's not. The left will say it's the right and the right will say it's the left. It's not. Everyone that's in the business of politics will make it their goal to pass more laws and create more restrictions on our freedom but that won't do anything to stop the next shooting, bombing or stabbing.

Assassins seem to fall into two basic categories; hired killers or true believers. The guns for hire will always be with us and that's purely a law enforcement problem. Good luck on that because luck and hard work will get some of them before they kill and some will still get the job done. At least they have to be part of a network or organization because somebody pays them and that leaves a trail.

The true believers are a different thing entirely. They may be part of an organization (Weather Underground, Ku Klux Klan) or they might just belong to the little club they've created in their own head. The ones that have their own little club, with it's own little beliefs, are going to be damned hard to get a handle on. I suspect this weekends shooter falls into that category.

With modern social networking these guys should be starting to get a bit easier to recognize, that is if anyone is paying attention. But then, we all know someone that's a bit off the reservation. Hell, I'd guess that a bunch of people would put me in that category. What makes the true believer different than people like me and other bloggers and malcontents and how do we recognize it? How were Booth, Czolgosz and Oswald different in their day to day lives? Could the people that knew them, even tangentially, see something, anything that should have set off alarms?

American history is full of loners, eccentrics and oddballs. Some go on to do great things and some pass through life unnoticed. And just a few do evil. Is it possible to know one from the other?

My guess is that, for the most part, in a free society, the chance of violence is the price we pay for the freedom we allow the oddball on the off chance that he'll do something great. And to the extent that anyone uses this latest shooting to try to push new legislation restricting the freedoms of the vast majority to protect against the very, very few that are truly crazy, we'll all suffer.

So I guess that's why I just don't care much about the shooting this past weekend. It's no different in most ways than a train wreck or airplane crash. The risk can be managed, but only to a certain point. Beyond that we are left to fate and the chance of harm that we all accept as a price of our freedom. To eliminate the threat would be to suspend freedom and that I find unacceptable.

So I say tend to the wounded, bury the dead, punish the guilty and move on. This shooting changes nothing. I only wish that the opportunists, political and otherwise, would see it the same way.