Can we talk?
The Virginia Tech shootings dominate the news. As is the nature of shootings, they were carried out with some variety of firearm and there happens to be, in the US, a bitter debate on gun control, fought between two sides who are convinced that they are right and who wish to encourage or pressure Congress, state governments, other organisations and individuals to take stands on the issue. The VTech shootings are attended by massive news coverage of this undeniably shocking event which has left many people emotionally affected and, one might believe, somewhat suggestible; this means that any effort on the part of a campaign that can shoehorn their dog into this race* can result in enormous coverage seen by an audience at least part of which are going to be grasping at solutions. An ideal time, strategically, to present them with one. On the other hand, a lot of people just died; what about decorum? Not necessarily for the sake of the dead who, depending on your religious and spiritual beliefs, may not even care, but for the sake of the relatives and friends of the dead, who most certainly do? MSNBC run a trailer for Olberman’s show where he is angrily saying ‘How dare you spin 9/11′; does that popular sentiment not apply to tragic events in general, even if they are less enormous than the attacks of 11th September 2001?
There has been much blogging on this issue. The first I saw of it was when Sully linked, with disapproval, this Instapundit post suggesting that, had carrying guns been allowed on the VTech campus, the shootings might have been averted or at least reduced in severity. At this stage, Rojas and I briefly discussed it and decided that both sides of the gun control debate have to get their case made because not to do so would be to miss a march on the opposition and see their own cause set back. Bearing in mind that both sides of the gun control debate are pretty dedicated, I think that, by their own lights, the fact is that these shootings are less important than their overall cause. Volokh made similar points about strategy and points out that using tragedies for political debate is at least defensible in principle (although presumably we can disagree about particular events).
Chad Orzel is disappointed with the manipulation of the tragic events, a disappointment rather less delicately expressed in his next post where he makes the case that there is no real advantage to fighting the political battles now. The issues won’t go away, he contends, so why the need for the tasteless use of tragedy as a political weapon before the parents even know whether their kids are dead, let alone got to bury them? Things certainly did move quickly; other than the Instapundit link that Sullivan gave, The Bitch Girls have a post showing the anti-gun Brady campaign getting into the debate early, the Violence Policy Center gave a statement (via the Volokh post linked above), gets in on the act and most of the presidential candidates have statements up although, via Instapundit, the Dems got got theirs up first; a quick check doesn’t show anything on Romney’s site even today and McCain’s has a link to a statement, wheras Giuliani’s site goes straight to a statement from which you click through to the main site, where the statement is also displayed. The Republican candidates have been issuing statements, however.
I commented in Orzel’s second post pretty much the same things I will say here. My problem is one of logic rather than decorum, to wit, using extremely rare events like this (crazy person shooting up lots of people) to inform the gun debate, when events of this sort are, in fact, a tiny part of the wider issue because they are so damn rare (and ’school shootings’ rarer still). Wheras, for example, the Iraq debate is informed by the large numbers (much larger than have been killed in mass shootings) of innocent people being killed in bombings, because those bombings are part of a set of the sometimes interlocking, sometimes competing, strategies of various groups standing against our objectives; they are central to how things will turn out (and what might be done to affect that). On the other hand, shootings like this VTech one are not central to the overall gun debate; most deaths from shooting (or resulting from crime in general) are not mass shootings and, in fact, they are a tiny minority of gun- or crime-related deaths.
What makes events like this attractive for punditry and campaigning is, as I intimated in the first paragraph, that they get huge amounts of news coverage and are shocking and, I guess, leave at least some of the viewing audience open to emotional manipulation. Furthermore, as Volokh pointed out, because one side does it, or is likely to, the other side pretty much has to; aside from the general futility of expecting universal decorous behaviour, campaigners have no real choice but to strike when the emotional iron is hot. If they don’t, their campaign loses ground to its opposition and, if the campaigners really care about their cause, the decision isn’t that hard to make. So, I disagree with Orzel on the matter of whether there is advantage to politicising the event (or, at least, a disadvantage to not doing it) and I added in my comment that, in my opinion, it’s probably not even the least pleasant part of the making of the campaign/lobbying sausage.
For this sort of thing to stop, people have to become less susceptible to it or the individuals who donate money to the campaigns have to demand more of what is often called ‘common decency’. I just can’t see either of those happening.
*Mixed metaphors are always appropriate.