People and tragedies

Today two very horrific acts happened in elementary schools on nearly opposite sides of the globe.

In Connecticut, a 20-year-old male with a gun killed 26 people, 22 of them children (as of latest reports)

In China, a 36-year-old male with a knife wounded 22 children (as of latest reports).

In both countries, the children were supposedly at a safe place - school.  The entire globe should take at least a few moments to grieve over these tragedies.

I know I have.

While the rest of the world takes a look at these tragedies from the perspective of "what makes these tragedies different is the fact that in one children died and in the other they were seriously wounded but survived" with side notes of "and what does that mean for gun control," I'd like to look at it from another, slightly skewed, possibly too politically-incorrect too-soon point of view.

Let me preface this with the statement that I lost my brother in a horrific car accident when he was merely 17 years old, and perhaps that's why I choose to "go there" right now.

It's altogether way too interesting how individual people and the general populace internalize the tragic loss or near-loss of life by others.  Individual deaths of young people and children occur all around us all the time.  People, our youth, children, our future, they die all the time.  It's always a tragedy when a life is cut short.  However, it seems like it only really hits home to all of us when it's a lot of lives cut short at one time. It's always bothered me that we choose, collectively, to ignore small, common tragedies, because they are small and common, and instead choose to empathize, get freaked out about, and attempt policy change because of large uncommon tragedies.

Because my family suffered a small, common tragedy, and statistics show that you are much more likely for your baby to die in a car accident than in a school shooting, it seems to me that it would benefit us all greatly more from better road safety than more stringent gun control.  Obviously both are needed, but as long as we're looking at tragedy influencing policy, let's not stop at a gun control discussion but also look at the other things that are killing our youth in much greater numbers than random shootings by crazed people.

While we're looking at road safety, let's look at drunk driving.  While the Freakonomics crew showed in their Super Freakonomics sequel that drunk walking kills more drunk people than drunk driving does, they also freely proclaimed that drunk walking does not typically kill innocent passerby while drunk driving not only can but all too often does.  It's been demonstrated time and time again in jurisdiction after jurisdiction that harsher punishments, stricter sentencing, etc... do not serve as adequate deterrents against driving drunk.  It appears that people who are too drunk to drive are also too drunk to conduct a simple cost-benefit analysis on the whole "getting home from the bar" thing, no matter how high the cost could be from not simply calling a cab.  A simple, but effective, deterrent from driving drunk would be for insurance companies to voluntarily reduce rates, potentially for only a small "at-risk" demographic, for insurees who chose to voluntarily install an ignition interlock device in all their insured vehicles.

For those of you unfamiliar with IIDs, these are apparently unwieldy but very simple things that hook into your car and require you to conduct a breathalyzer test before the car will start.  I've never even seen one, but once I heard about them I knew they were a pretty great idea.  My friends and I fall into two rough categories: those who think they can have up until they "start to feel it" and still drive, and those who rigorously adhere to the strictest measures of "I can have one beer then wait three hours and then drive," rule.    Life would be a lot easier (and a lot safer) for everyone if our cars just told us when we should go drink some water and dance for another hour before hitting the road.

Anyway, all I wanted to do tonight was remind people that small tragedies occur all the time, and that we should remember to try to prevent them as we also try to find ways to prevent the large tragedies like what occurred today.  Both types of tragedies are horrific to those that experience them, but apparently the larger public only recognizes large-scale, uncommon tragedies.  I'd like it a lot more if we could recognize and prevent more than just the uncommon ones.

My heart goes out to all who experienced tragedy today, particularly to those in China and Connecticut who have an unfortunate thing in common today: that nearly two dozen of our children in each place were either hurt or lost entirely to a madman.