Shooting study causes police to adjust tactics

November 21, 1:05 AMConservative Politics ExaminerAmos Wright

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According to ABC, recent studies of school and other shootings has lead to new (or not so new, if you watch this sort of thing) profiles of school shooters.

So confident that the studies are reasonable and accurate, police forces are changing tactics to adjust to the conclusions. This is important because real, tangible consequences (like, say, getting killed) can result for responders who get this wrong. That is, unlike those who want Guantanamo prisoners released now, just not in their own neighborhood, the police may get killed or sued if their behavior doesn't dovetail with known risks.

Classified as "active killers," these attackers:

1. look for "gun free zones" because the likelihood that other civilians will be able to respond is small
2. people who are intent on killing human beings are not much bothered by the consequences and risks of breaking other laws
3. try to kill as many as they can as quickly as they can
4. expect to die in the attack
5. generally turn their guns on themselves as soon as resistance is encountered

"Now tacticians believe the signs themselves may be an invitation to the active killers" 

For police, the studies tell them that aggressive action must happen as quickly as possible as the killers are likely to quit the fight if the police or civilian resistance shows up, or, they will rack up a body count for as long as armed resistance doesn't materialize.

People who think about the world in terms of their pretty intentions endanger the lives of the rest of us, for murders are unconcerned with the trivialities of gun control policies. For policy makers, it means that gun free zones can kill people.

For civilians, it means we should hold policymakers personally responsible for deaths that occur in gun free zones as a result of an inability to guarantee the safety of the public. It is unjust to tell people they cannot possess the means to defend themselves and then fail to do an adequate job of defending them.

THIS IS ALL QUITE PREDICTABLE

Not to paint with too broad a brush, but one of the differences between Conservative and Progressive thinking is that the former deals in incentives and the latter deals in intentions.

The behavior of active killers matches up perfectly with the expectations of Conservative thinking.

1. effects have causes and people will do awful things if you give them opportunities
2. laws that are designed to restrict both the innocent and the guilty are more likely to harm the innocent, and will do so to a greater extent, because the guilty don't care about laws in the first place
3. lawbreaking is often an indiscriminate act of moral cowardice (thus, the first line of defense against lawbreaking is moral instruction, which is hampered by Progressive amoral relativism)
4. extreme lawbreaking tends to have no connection to reasonability. In these cases (as in the case of suicide jihad), the premeditating killer is certain of the extreme cost (personal destruction), yet is willing to absorb that cost for the non-guaranteed opportunity to kill others. In such cases, few incentives - if any - exist that could change the killer's mind. You can't talk a man down from a ledge from which he has already jumped.
5. see #3 above

All of these things are based on a fundamental idea that one can derive from Judeo-Christian principle or from Neo-Darwinism: humans are violent, ugly creatures capable of horrendous evil. Call it The Fall or the inherited traits of our cannibalistic, extraordinarily vicious relatives in the animal kingdom, it all amounts to the same thing: civilization is clothing on a hairless monster.

What I would be curious to see is how these issues are understood by Progressives. Can Progressive ideas about the world explain these results? I think #1 above is particularly problematic. Most of the responses I see to this issue gloss over the fact and recommend extending the absurdity of "gun free zones" to the entire population. That is, since creating a small gun free zone only resulted in massive deaths committed by killers who brought guns into the gun free zone, the conclusion isn't that gun free zones get people killed, but that they should be extended to the entirety of the country.

With the caveat that the State will have all the guns, and therefore a monopoly on the power to deal death. All for the greater good, of course. Don't you worry yourself none.

(The question then remains as to whether that is effect or intent.)