so cruising around the net this morning looking for more infotainment on this, i stumbled across this fine example of powerful deduction as the headline on cnn.com:
gee...you think so?
what idiots.....
anyway, more generally:
cant control arbitrariness folks. no way no how. you just have to accept that. no amount of fantasy concerning universal armament will change the simple fact that arbitrary shit happens. of course this is amurica, so it is easier for this arbitrariness to happen with guns than it is elsewhere. the fantasy of universal armanent is a fantasy of universal control looped through political conceptions of where ultimate control should lie--but the simple fact is that in this kind of situation, there really was nothing to be done.
another way: folk indulge the parlor game of ex post facto thinking because arbitrariness freaks them out. i think most are smart enough to see the problem with the logic, but they play the game anyway. it is therapeutic: rather than having to think about chance, you think about breakdowns in some order that could have remained perfect in its perfect control had errors not happened, and that can be imagined as still-perfect in potentia if such "errors" can be controlled for in the future. from this viewpoint, total state surveillance and universal armament turn out to be variants of the same logic, versions of the same thing.