Good people are leaving this country

[DirkGently]

44. No. It's irrational to reduce violence to statistics.

We don't lump every societal ill into one bucket. Many people die in car crashes, but we need cars, and therefore accept that risk. Or, to counter the latest pro-gun propaganda, we need doctors, and therefore accept that some of them will make lethal mistakes.

To reduce the problem with gun violence or mass murder to the "likelihood" of it happening to one particular person is a specious variety of "pragmatism" accepted by virtually no one, because we make qualitative distinctions in our civilization. The same logic would say that any social ill is irrelevant, compared to natural causes.

Why worry about murder at all, when cars and heart disease are vastly more "likely" to hurt people?

Because we have zero need for heavily armed paranoid people shooting up our neighborhoods, schools, and shopping malls.

Because we have no use for stupid men with rifles meandering around fast food restaurants.

Because we do not accept the risk that people will absorb so much rightwing propaganda that they will actually murder a pair of cops eating pizza "for freedom."

Because we have zero need for mass murder, and it does harm beyond the immediate list of casualties.

There is no tradeoff for these things. They are the selfish and stupid results of the worst of human impulses.

And of course, none of this is just a question of the "number" of deaths. It is the atmosphere of rage and senseless violence, and the poisonous, rationality-killing rhetoric that goes into supporting it.

You don't end up with a horrible culture because you have a lot of cars, and a corresponding number of auto accidents. You get a horrible culture when people do horrible things.

Every risk is not the same. Every death is not the same. Life and culture and society are not a set of numbers.

We know better than this.