The Connecticut School Shooting ... A Question.

Yet another violent, senseless tragedy. I want to pose just one question that I believe I understand the answer to in ‘big part’, it’s what this blug is about, but don’t ‘quite’ grok entirely.

Read the second and third paragraphs of my by-line above, then consider this:

So many of these shootings, in the US at least, occur in schools: the bastion of the progressive, political Left, program. Perhaps we start by figuring that out? Because there is a valid connection, and 'something' deeply significant in this.

For the record I despise guns and the sickening culture that goes with guns, I won't allow a gun in my house, but it is not the guns, or gun laws (including lack of) that is the cause of these tragedies; it’s the culture behind the gun. And so to lead you down the line my thought is taking, finally, consider the question I have posed above, in the context of one of my favourite quotations found over 2012. From pages 77 and 94-95 of David Schmidtz’s contribution to David Schmidtz’s and Robert E. Goodin’s important 1998 book, Social Welfare and Individual Responsibility: For and Against:

If communitarians are right to say Western society has been atomized, then surely one of the causes has been the state’s penchant for making itself (rather than the community) the primary focus of public life….

What explains market society’s unparalleled success in helping people to prosper? The key, I have argued, lies in background institutions, especially property institutions, that lead people to take responsibility for their own welfare….

The welfare state would have made people better off if it had led neighbors to rely on each other and on themselves, but it seems to have done the opposite.

Disaffected youth, mental illness, the myriad of causes leading to the alienation that will have led to this, can only be improved by stronger, inclusive and self-reliant families and communities that attend to and 'take in' their disaffected, but ironically, stronger families and communities are what have been weakened by a burgeoning welfare state, and the ethic that the state must be the first call and final enforcer in our every relationship and transaction. Something goes wrong around us now, and we ring the council, or CYPS, or whatever government agency is set up for that particular thing, then we go about our lives and forget about it: the state will deal with it.

It doesn't work.  

Upon this disintegration of the self-reliant community built of responsible individuals, mental health issues have become a gun unto us all.

Update 1:

Here's how healthy debate is shut down by null-minded, emoting blackmail. From Twitter:

 @Juha Saarinen ‏@juhasaarinen

 That's tasteful of you to mint political coins out of little children dying. 

My response:

 @MarkHubbard33 What offensive BS. I'm not allowed to raise a legitimate question? We just go on shooting? You're beyond contempt.

I've not seen one tweet from Saarinen - whom unsurprisingly I seem to remember is somehow involved with the MSM for his work - attacking those advocating the 'political coin' of gun control that is filling up Twitter this morning - his concern is selective, apparently. Our society desperately needs to be thinking - thinking, as opposed to emoting - about these issues, and beyond the simplistic solutions such as gun control laws: because the problems here go much deeper than how easy it is to buy a gun - it's about philosophy, it always is. And I'll never stop asking questions I see as important in the face of emoting bullies, because I want to live in a decent society where this does not happen. Questioning causes in the face of this is more important than the politics of point scoring such as Saarinen has tried to silence me with. Those of us not personally involved with the tragedy, are the ones who can now make the dispassionate analysis that is sorely needed regarding that growing, disaffected, part of our society at the heart of such sad incidents.


Update 2:

@juhasaarinen's latest tweet to me was  for me to, quote, FOAD. This was after he tweeted a 'politicised' link relating to this event, and I called him on the double standard. I had no idea what FOAD meant, and as it ended up,  that was because it's something I would never say to a complete stranger with whom I was debating ideas: it means (sorry mum, swearing coming) Fuck Off And Die.

The Left, we're going to make you care, or else ... you can FOAD - (yeah right).

As a peacenik classical liberal, myself, who believes passionately in the non-initiation of force principle as the constitutional foundation for the free, voluntary society, I will never understand a mind like this. As I will never understand the cruel contradiction which is the brutality that underlies all Left politics.

Though Saarinen's real problem lay with his profession: an event like this is precisely the time to question everything about the direction Western society is traveling in. What's the alternative? To wait a fortnight when it's disappeared from the MSM and the world has forgotten about it?

What's the purpose and rationale of the MSM, if not this?

Plus Whaleoil has made a good point this morning about MSM journos slamming bloggers for daring to give an opinion on this shooting, while their own employers are filling front pages with it. It's called hypocrisy.