Guns make money. According to Statistic Brain: Firearm Industry Statistics, annual revenues of $11 billion. Moreover, prominent media events (including the election of democrats and acts of violence) drive impulse buying of weapons, due to the threat of new regulations.
Violence makes money, too. We spent over $600 billion in 2010 (Wikipedia: Military budget of the United States), and we have spent over $3 trillion on the actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
When you add in the money spent on police and private protection, prison, and the legal system, the numbers grow even further. Opportunity costs for all of these things, and you’re talking about vast amounts of human capital and funding that could propel society far into the future.
It costs us all something, to have these overgrown industries. And in the wake of tragedy our instinct is that it’s not enough. We need more guns, we need more police, we need more security. We need to double down on violence. It’s a loser’s bet, though.
What we need to double down on is science. On societal transformation beyond simply barring or allowing the presence of weapons. We need to recognize that we can and will move past violence (or the world will move past us). It’s only a question of when and how.
We need to have a serious discussion about… guns? Really? We need to have a million serious discussions about society. But it’s always a bait-and-switch. Nobody can be bothered to reimagine society writ large. It’s always, “what can we do about these damn guns but keep everything else the way it is?” Or, “how can the government pay its bills without decreasing services or raising taxes?”
What we call that in Computer Science is an overconstrained problem. Professors like to cite the Kobayashi Maru (Wikipedia: Kobayashi Maru), from the original series of Star Trek. This was a fictional test at the Star Fleet Academy. It was a rock and a hard place proposition where you either attempt to rescue the crippled Kobayashi Maru and risk provoking war, or leave it to certain destruction.
On his third attempt, James T. Kirk reprogrammed the simulation to allow a successful outcome. The point being, you shouldn’t always rely on initial constraints; don’t take a perceived mountain as truly immovable.
And we shouldn’t do that with our society, particularly the leaders. They have aides and colleagues telling them what won’t work, leaving them with a very narrow path to take. They look like utter schmucks, or at least untrained mimes, trying to walk a tightrope down a wide path. They never attempt to engage the people beyond some short-sighted resolution to avenge the deaths of the innocent. Never attempting to avenge the lives of the innocent, who currently want and need a real, functional government.
That is, the people of the Kobayashi Maru, that can still be saved.
It’s our choice, whether we succumb to the test constraints, deciding either not to risk saving them, or to risk it and face certain death, or take the third option, toss out the constraints and find some other way. It’s plain which path I think is best. What about you?