Another perspective

In all the debate about guns and whether they should be further controlled and some banned outright, postmodernists would argue that this polarisation between those who want to keep the status quo and those who want it modified to some extent is the standard binary distinction of moral identity, of Self and Other, where each side arrogates to itself an ethical superiority over the arguments of those with whom they disagree.


Foucault may have gone further. His concept of biopolitics could be applied here. Whenever this horrific slaughter in the school is mentioned I feel like crying but Foucault might argue that I had not even a scintilla of connection with any of the victims, nor did 99.999% of anyone who offers an opinion on the subject. Rather, the modern state measures people in terms of their useful productivity. This is why many European states have banned the death penalty including, surprisingly in an authoritarian state, Russia. When it is said of the children in particular, ‘they had their whole lives ahead of them’ this is partly in terms of what they could contribute.

Such a viewpoint would be described as callous at best, monstrous at worst, but postmodernism isn’t about value judgements, it is about uncovering the reasons for our reasoning and, thus informed, from there to make value judgements, all the while admitting one’s own lack of objectivity. I still think that this is a heinous act and that children should never ever be targeted, that my heart is filled with sorrow, but maybe I’m afraid to dig too deep as to the cause of this. Just as our minds are conditioned by our civilisation, I refuse to forget the dozens of nursery children stabbed to death recently in China. I acknowledge my bias against the possession of guns, believing them to enable greater carnage and this is why I say had the Chinese madman used a rapid-reloading weapon, his nihilism may have killed more.

Postmodernism cuts to the heart of the gun control debate too. How can we be sad about future victims of gun massacres when they are nameless, faceless and still, so far, alive? Biopolitics would suggest we are trying to minimise damage to society’s productivity (and not just economic productivity either). Proponents of gun control, of which I count myself one might think that the Republican senator who suggested all teachers should be armed is a retard, given the dangers of accidents and innocents getting caught in a crossfire of a situation from which escalation is inevitable, yet from his way of seeing it, we are retards. Each of us has arrogated to ourselves a superior moral plane, hence the other side’s arguments are inherently inferior, but both sides are seeking to limit death, which is bad for productivity. I’m not saying I agree with this fully but it does offer one way of clearing the fog of rhetoric.

One of the biggest ironies was that the mother of the killer, who was the first victim, had been hoarding guns as she believed economic and societal collapse was just around the corner. Yet her ‘survivalist’ outlook led to her being killed by the very guns she thought would protect her. That so many more innocents died to expose this irony is not acceptable and I wish it had not happened but it has all the same.

Another aspect, is that the killer left a shotgun in the car when he arrived at school, taking with him semi-automatic pistols and an automatic assault rifle. This is presumably because the shotgun had a cumbersome reload which he had not fully thought through when first he pilfered it from his mother’s arsenal. Any ban or restriction on these high calibre weapons will take decades to filter through. Banning or heavily taxing ammunition would have an immediate effect though for the Second Amendment says nothing about bearing fully loaded arms and it is possible to pistol-whip someone to protect oneself.