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as information is emerging about this, i find it increasingly mind-boggling.
i dont see anything that could have been done that would have changed the course of this.
the notion of armed students is little more than a bizarre compensatory fantasy, the kind of thing that you might dream in a revenge fantasy kinda way, reflecting nothing more than a combination of anxiety and a desire for control over the conditions that you imagine responsible for it. the associations that make this kind of thing appear to be even sane--which it is not--reside there, in the desire for control, for the elimination of arbitrariness. which is in itself a delusion.
the abstract condition of possibility for this is self-evidently the easy availability of guns.
there is no getting around this.
i can understand why the guns=freedom set would want to be proactive and attempt to counter incoming information with scenarios that at first blush may appear rational, but this seems to me little more than damage control--whether the talking points are informally worked out or co-ordinated somehow is irrelevant.
it is however a sick state of affairs that there would have been enough incidents like this for the guns=freedom set to recognize in it a recurrent public relations problem.
at any rate, the condition of possibility--the easy availability of guns--is just that. i do not know that changes in this would function to prevent this kind of incident. but i do know that without ease of access to weapons--the handguns in this case--this would not have happened. i suspect that any conversation about this matter will immediately be streamed into the usual nra talking points concerning legal vs illegal guns, us vs them blah blah blah: none of which is relevant.
all this because at this point i am unclear that there is any wider meaning to be taken from this.
it is simply arbitrary.
the kid who did the killing is of course described as "a loner"....maybe he was, maybe he is framed that way in the press as a device for isolating him, putting him into some floating category of the Other, maybe a sociopath...maybe not a sociopath until he engaged in a self-evidently sociopathic action.
did he "snap"?
what does "snapping" mean?
for me, the only wider meaning i have been able to assemble from all this comes from relegating this to an example status which functions in the context of the rather vague sense that something is fundamentally pathological about the environment within which we function in the states. but that is structurally no different from any other attempt to work out a general meaning to something that appears, well, arbitrary.
i find it disturbing that folk seem to want more pervasive general security, that people actually believe that pervasive state security could somehow have changed anything. but i find that less disturbing than the inverse argument, that everyone everywhere shold wander about with a gun strapped to them...to bars, to parties, to classes on a unviersity campus; to meetings to discuss grades or to wrangle some administrative advantage; to dinner at a dining hall where you may not like the food. all that seems to me to be a recipe for is a tighter calibration between frustration leading to a sense of loss of control over a situation and escalation into violence and death. and where the guns=freedom set would prefer to see scenarios in front of kitty's saloon at high noon involving sober cowpokes admnistering rough justice to the black-hatted forces of Evil, i imagine shootouts at fraternity parties involving drunken, frightened kids.
i dont know. there seems so little to hold onto about all this. the arbitrary, the Singular is like that. and this is what makes it intolerable for many.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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