Shootings evil, whatever the motive

Can we say anything helpful about the Toronto mass public shooting? We’re starting to get some answers. But do we have the right questions? Starting with “What shall I do about the fragility of life?”

We imagine ourselves hurrying about, preoccupied with small urgent matters, perhaps being brusque not courteous, and suddenly some stranger shoots us and, as we lie there hoping it’s not fatal, shoots us again and again until we die with “Why” half-formed on our lips. Then we think what if it was my daughter or brother, father or friend? Then we consider that it was somebody’s, and grieve for the loss of strangers.

Alternatively, we rush for a pat answer. Like Toronto mayor John Tory blaming guns and asking why anyone needs one. So police can shoot the bad guy being the incredibly obvious reply, a better question would be: given that bad guys commit havoc and are not scrupulous about means, how shall we protect ourselves? And does history really teach that the safety of normal people is best guarded by arming only agents of the state?

Another question is why shootings keep increasing in Toronto, and Ottawa. Guns haven’t become more lethal and Canada’s fairly strict gun laws have not been significantly relaxed. So is it cultural changes, weaknesses in law enforcement, the spread of nihilistic doctrines, or what?

Then there’s the terrorist angle. The Toronto Sun’s Joe Warmington says the killer was familiar to three different police forces over online activities and past violence. So perhaps red flags were again missed.

We do not know whether he was motivated by ISIL or some similar group. But the possibility brings me to the misguided “terrorism or insanity?” meme trotted out in such situations.

This question relies on the peculiar notion that there are both legitimate and illegitimate motives for gunning down random innocent strangers on a Toronto street. As with, say, the Baader-Meinhof gang or the Red Brigades, even to ask it is to mistake sickness in the soul for sickness in the brain.

To say so is not to excuse it. Rather, it is to suggest the problem lies somewhere else. In Richard Weaver’s highly pertinent phrase, “Ideas matter.”

There is such a thing as organic brain disease that renders a person literally incapable of grasping the practical or moral implications of their deeds. But beheading the person next to you on the Greyhound to save mankind from aliens is not in the same category as shooting capitalists to “save” the masses from exploitation, or gassing Jews to “save” mankind from racial pollution. Bolshevism and Nazism are “insane” in the vernacular but not the technical sense. Ditto jihad.

Someone who beheads infidels on camera is clearly instrumentally rational, having formed and carried out a clear plan with specified objectives whose essential failing is moral not practical. Terrorism, like genocide, can “work” and yet be completely wrong.

Evidently determined to pile Pelion on Ossa when it comes to clichés, the Toronto mayor also called the attack cowardly. But slaughtering innocents takes strong nerves. Seriously, would we be safer if terrorists or psychos were braver? It’s just trite babble.

So is the predictable academic expert saying thank goodness it wasn’t an “assault” weapon, a cosmetic category and implied sneer at Americans’ unwillingness to ban big bad rifles. In fact per capita mass public shootings are worse in many places than the U.S., including some European countries with strict gun control.

TO COPE WITH EVIL, WE NEED THE COURAGE TO CALL IT BY NAME.

More fundamentally, in novelist Andrew Lytle’s words, “The great puritan heresy puts evil in the object, in a deck of cards, in a woman’s hair, in dancing, in that great invention whiskey ... Evil cannot be in the object. It must be in the mind and heart ...”

Arguably it takes less courage to shoot unarmed civilians than, say, storm a military base or police station. But the problem isn’t cowardice. If anything it’s the opposite, a peculiar and brittle hubris about your own righteousness that gives you the gall to set aside other lives as worthless.

What we are dealing with here is evil. It takes many forms, from political ideology to personal resentment. But it is by dwelling on evil thoughts, making the circles they run in within our minds ever deeper and smoother, that we take ourselves into the realm of evil actions. So if we’re going to cope with evil, we need the courage to call it by name.

Even if we do, and find some practical solutions to individual outbreaks of violence, life will remain fragile. We cannot banish accident, disease or malice, including misfortunes that do not kill or cripple our bodies but do maim our spirits.

So have we, today, cherished one another and all the moments we are given? There is the big question every tragedy or outrage poses.