But my sister in law died of cancer, and so the problem is cancer. They should find a cure for it. Spot the fallacy?
My cousin died of a drug dependency and drug overdose. They should ban drugs. Spot the fallacy there?
There's not one cause of cancer. She had bone cancer. My aunt had colon cancer. What works against one is unlikely to work against the other. There's no such thing as "cancer" except as a generalization that misses so many facts that the word itself becomes an impediment to those on the outside. The way to deal with cancer is to first figure out the categories of cancer, their causes and how they develop and grow. Then you can prevent and treat.
I didn't say if my cousin died of an overdose after being dependent on heroin or Vicodin, whether he got it from the guy at the bar a couple of miles from his house or the doctor a couple of miles from his house. But we could easily ban all the tools he used for his particular self-murder. We tried that. The problem isn't what he used, the problem is that he was (a) dependent on the substance, (b) had a physical need that he couldn't control and (c) felt a psychological need to return to some substance even after he'd been clean for years. The way to treat this is to find a substance that reduces dependence but ultimately to reduce the factors that made him turn to it when he was 16, when he was 26, when he was 36, when he was 46, and when he was 56. Problem is, there were *different* reasons, at least on the surface. The first time was youthful rebellion and wanting to be cool. Another time, because he was exposed to it while he was a petty criminal. The last time, his mother, who was his supporter, encourager, and keeper, had died (of colon cancer) and he couldn't deal with the grief. So "fixing the problem" is complex and would have required the entire family to be close and to help him, not be a bunch of dysfunctional misfits.
Even with drugs banned, we still have people doing the same thing with alcohol, and we saw how wonderful Prohibition was when it came to government dictating and regulating its citizens' behavior in terms of a "higher" morality.
There's not one cause of violence. Eliminate the guns, and you eliminate a tool used for it. It's like eliminating drugs. And when you look at the causes of violence, you find all kinds of reasons for it.
In some cases, it's a loner or an "incel" (a nice dehumanizing word for somebody who feel bad because we set up social standards of physical attractiveness and sexuality that few can live up to, and then pick on those who are less than us ... we defend girls who lack appropriate social skills and body image and pile on the guys). Their grievance isn't with a particular person, but with "society". There's an amorphous "them". Try to imagine Westerns with "them" being the target of some gang member--typically there's a specific gang, the sheriff, a personal vendetta, or the "them" are Indians or some outside group. These kids think of "everybody else" as their other. That's new; I have trouble wrapping my mind around that kind of group thinking, seen both in some of the shooters and in the Parkland kids. It's all "us versus them", not seeing "us in them". And they claim greater empathy, thus showing they never actually looked up the word's traditional meaning.
In other cases, it's somebody who thinking self-expression and acting out one's personal grievance against another person is a good thing. No, it's not. It leads to punches, stabbings, and shootings. But it's a different sort of thing from the mass shootings. We confuse them for politics, but it's like "cancer funding" campaigns that ignore the difference between cancers, or anti-drug campaigns that ignore that alcohol and heroin dependencies have much in common or that banning heroin and crack won't eliminate the underlying pathology. (Yes, I consider that kind of dependency a pathology.)
Then there are shootings because of some criminal activity or suspected criminal activity gone wrong. Maybe it's a drug dealer swindling his supplier, maybe it's a store clerk shooting the robber, maybe it's a guy shooting somebody at the front door because there's a history of break-ins. (The history in this case is important; bad time to be absurdly existentialist and deny that prior actions matter.) That's yet a third category, and it's one that many progressives like to make because the underlying social ill in *some* cases isn't greed but poverty. (It's most often still greed, but that's because we absolve some poor people of greed. One can be poor and content, but that makes no sense to most Americans, esp. those who think that mankind's native condition is prosperity in large abodes with all kinds of nifty toys. Go back 10k years and lifespan was shorter, wellbeing mostly shorter, warfare common, and 'prosperity' meant that half your kids survived to have kids and you weren't nearly starving by the time summer came along.)
Don't know where to put turf wars and "I'm gonna kill him because he's wearing chartreuse, while I'm wearing pink." It's like blue Kangs and red Kangs, green Drazi and purple Drazi. If you like Dr. Who or Babylon 5 you get the references. Both are affirmation of identity against some outside threat. But, you know, I could see somebody "wronged" by being kicked out of a gang unfairly going back and doing a mass shooting of the gang members. Which starts to sound a lot like school shootings, a need to assert self-validation and restore honor before the group that you think wronged you. (Meh. Zero-tolerance is a bad thing.)
= new reply since forum marked as read
