Taking Off Our Blinders

THE HP COMPUTER COMPANY (you remember it) and one of their subsidiary contractors are having a war of memos, words, press releases and tweets, blaming each other for failing to predict that our latest mass murderer was going to do something violent, and stopping it. Said mass murderer had been employed by both firms, at one time or another, both of which, at one time or another, were responsible for his mental evaluations and security clearance status. You can begin to see a lot of potential for this blame game thing. If corporations can do it, so can anyone. What with the frequency of these shootings, and the american people seemingly (finally) up in arms over it, (no pun intended), now begins the process of trying to figure out how to stop it, and the current emphasis seems to be on mental health evaluations as a tool for predicting potential future violence by potentially violent mentally ill people, and stopping it beforehand, by preventing potentially, (probably gonna be) violent people from having access to deadly weapons. That's really where we are now, isn't it? That's our current thinking. God, what rot. Surely we can do better than that. Surely there will come a time, and the sooner the better, when everyone in the media, law enforcement and government, everyone everywhere, will stop, take a deep breath, and realize that we are a long, long way from being able to predict the future, particularly the specific future actions fo specific individuals. We may never be able to do it. It just can't be done, not yet. It may not be possible to predict the future. These mass murderers just pop out of the woodwork, totally unpredictably, no matter how hard we all may want to believe that they all leave so many red flags that we ought to be able to single them out, and stop them from murdering en masse, a priori. (you have to like a sentence which ends with French and Italian, back to back). The other day a guy walks into a local school near me and threatens to kill people. He had no gun, and was taken away. Nothing in his past predicted that kind of behavior. Just a regular parent; who snapped. Maybe we're all just trying to comfort ourselves by believing that we can stop individuals from being violent later on by predicting their violence in advance. W'll have to give that line up, and try something better, and the sooner the better. One place to start might be by realizing that, under the right circumstances, if the environment permits it and the perfect personal storm develops, we are all capable of violence. Its just that we might not be ready to admit that, yet.