Putting the NSA to Work — Protecting Us!
Instead of my emails and your texts, lets have our e-spies watch something that’s actually dangerous...violent video gamers.
I don’t deny some of what the NSA is doing may be good. I can’t know how many terrorist incidents have been prevented and lives saved by the NSA’s domestic spying campaign. I also can’t know how intrusive and abusive it is, but as long as it’s there, I’d like to use it for something undeniably good.
On February 14th Nikolas Cruz walked into Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida with a barely concealed AR15 and shot 17 of his former classmates dead.
It wasn’t unexpected.
He owned several guns, and he’d left enough tracks on the internet to earn at least two calls to the FBI, and he’d been the object of at least 3 dozen police visits. He’d told his chatroom buddies he wanted to kill people. One of his friends said he escaped from the real world by playing violent video games “eight, twelve, even fifteen hours a day. It was kill, kill, kill, blow up something, and kill some more, all day”.
So why was nothing done?
Because even though he’d raised lots of flags, until the day he entered a No Gun Zone with a gun, he hadn’t committed a crime, and since 1972, when ACLU’s lawsuits shut down almost all involuntary mental treatment it’s next to impossible to incarcerate someone who hasn’t committed a crime.
We can’t lock up people for being crazy, and we don’t have enough FBI agents to shadow every kook who spouts off on the web, so we do nothing.
It doesn’t have to be that way.
Apart from murdering a collective 197 mostly random strangers, and wounding hundreds more, what did —
Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Robert Steinhauser, Eric Auvinen, Robert Hawkins, Seung-Hui Cho, Tim Kretschmer, Jared Lee Loughner, James Holmes, Adam Lanza, Nehemiah Griego, Elliot Rodger, Christopher Harper-Mercer, Gavin Long, Allen Ivanov, David Sonboly, Michael and Robert Bever and now Nikolas Cruz
— have in common?
They were first person shooter video game fanatics who left web tracks signaling their game violence was about to spill over into the real world.
Harris and Klebold, the Columbine Killers weren’t our first mass killers, but they were the first whose stated goals were to run up the score (kill more than previous mass murderers) and to replicate their video game experiences.
Harris and Klebold went into battle with a pistol, a rifle, two shotguns and 99 bombs, intending to beat Timothy McVeigh’s Murrah Building score of 168.
Yes, they hid this from their families, and most friends, but no, they didn’t hide it from the web. That’s where they posted their threats.
And though law enforcement had been alerted to them, no one noticed what they were posting on the web — until after the fact. No one realized instead of immersing themselves in real life, they were immersing themselves in Doom and dreams of being famous mass killers — for hours and hours every day.
They failed to beat McVeigh because their bombs failed to go off, but they still got their fame by killing 13 and wounding 21—well short of some other mass killers, but setting the standard for modern wannabes —
— all without an AR…
Banning ARs isn’t the answer. In fact, though ARs are effective weapons, they haven’t been the weapon of choice for most of our mass killers.
Allow me to condense years worth of mass murder history into a few pages.
Andrew Kehoe killed 44 and injured 58 by dynamiting a public school in Bath, Michigan. Howard Unruh, hearing voices, killed 13 with a Luger pistol, both before the advent of the AR.
The AR was first produced in 1959, but the first AR mass killing didn’t come until 1982, when George Banks, a former convict and prison guard, shot 13 people (his children, girlfriends, relatives and a bystander) to death.
ARs then dropped out of mass murder sight for over 20 years, mass killers showing a preference for other weapons.
James Huberty killed 21 and wounded 19 with two pistols and a shotgun. Patrick Sherrill killed 14 and wounded 6 US Postal workers using two seven shot pistols. James Pough killed 12 and wounded 4 using an M1 carbine and revolver. George Hennard killed 23 and wounded 27 using pistols. Mark Barton killed 12 and wounded 13 using a claw hammer and four pistols. Jeffrey Weise killed 9 and wounded 5, mostly students, using two pistols and a shotgun. Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 and wounded 17 at Virginia Tech using two pistols.
Not until 2009 do we have another mass killing using an AR, when Michael McLendon killed 10 and wounded 6 using a pistol, a shotgun and an AR15.
Jiverly Antares Wong killed 13 and wounded 4 using two pistols. Nidal Hasan killed 13 and wounded more than 30 others using two pistols.
James Holmes killed 12 and wounded 70 using a pistol, a shotgun and an AR15-which jammed. The bombs in his apartment didn’t go off, saving many others.
Adam Lanza killed his mother, 20 children and 6 teachers using a rifle, a pistol and an AR15.
Aaron Alexis killed 12 and wounded 3 using a pistol and shotgun. Chris Harper-Mercer killed 9 and wounded 8 using five pistols.
Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik killed 12 and wounded 22 using two pistols, homemade bombs and two AR15s.
Omar Mateen killed 49 and wounded 58 using a Sig Sauer MCX and a pistol.
Stephen Paddock killed 58 and wounded 422 using 21 AR style rifles, 1 bolt action rifle, and a revolver.
And in 2017 Devin Kelley killed 26 and wounded 20 churchgoers using an AR15.
Bringing us to Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 and wounded 14 with an AR15.
Eight mass murders involved ARs, fourteen didn’t. Only two were committed solely with ARs.
The AR is a common thread a third of the time, so banning it might save some lives, but most of the casualties listed above were caused by other weapons, widely available, as effective, cheaper and easier to conceal than the AR.
I’m not an AR fan. I’ve never owned one, but sometimes I think I’m the only one. There are twenty million of them out there, probably more, because it’s possible to assemble them from parts, unknown to law enforcement.
And there are hundreds of millions of other firearms out there, more guns than there are people in the United States, and the pool of weapons grows larger every day. We’re not going to sop them up. Start confiscating and they’ll go underground, where many are already.
Bans are easy to talk about, but impossible to execute. Look at prohibition and the war on drugs, both abject failures. Those who want them, got/get them.
Besides, Michael and Robert Bever (whose stated goals were simply to beat Harris and Klebold, then run up the score as high as they possibly could before being killed themselves) failed a background check, and couldn’t buy any guns at all, so they killed their targets with knives and hatchets.
Should we ban knives and hatchets?
So, if banning ARs won’t stop the killing, what are we to do?
Above I listed nineteen mass murderers, and two common threads.
1)They were all first person shooter video game fanatics, who shot imaginary people using imaginary guns for many hours every day.
2)They all posted threats and chatted about murder on the web and bragged that their body counts would outdo others.
They all eventually used real weapons to kill real people, some using AR style weapons, most using something else, some not even using guns, but they were all first person shooter video game fanatics and posted threats on the web.
And in their time, they’ve accounted for half of our mass murder victims.
Allow me to make a proposal:
Instead of using all of the NSA’s computing power to track all of our phone calls and emails and snapchats and texts, why don’t we divert just a tiny bit of that power to monitoring first person shooter video gamers?
I know, there are hundreds of millions of gamers around the world, but let’s let the Europeans worry about their own mass killers (they have them) we’ll concentrate on ours, besides, the NSA’s already watching them, they’re just not paying attention.
Gamers have licenses, and when they go on line the NSA can see them and their IP addresses, and track their hours. If they end up like Nikolas, spending eight to fifteen hours a day killing imaginary people, the NSA can check their web behavior, even anonymous messages originating from their IP addresses, and if they’re like the nineteen on the list, threatening violence, the NSA can gather up the data and send the case to the FBI and local law enforcement.
We’ll use the NSA to monitor the nexus of first person shooter video game fanatics and people who post violent and threatening speech on the web.
And the FBI and local law enforcement will do — nothing.
True, at the moment, but that can change. If we’re talking a small enough number of people, the FBI and local law enforcement might have the manpower to watch them. If not, local law enforcement might be able to restrict their access to the people they’re threatening.
And, with the right legislation, we might be able to take away their weapons, temporarily, until a psychological assessment indicates they’re ready, or permanently if they’re assessed to be long term dangers to the rest of us.
Notice most mass shooters run out of will before they run out of ammo? A few die by cop, but most quit with ammo to spare, and plenty of time, and either kill themselves or surrender. It’s as though at some point reality creeps back in, it’s not a game anymore, and they can’t go on, they don’t want to go on.
At some point their humanity returns, and if we can just catch them before they fire that first shot, maybe we can keep them from becoming inhuman.
This isn’t a universal solution. There will still be murderers amongst us, just maybe fewer mass murderers trying to outdo each other’s body counts.
The even easier thing to do is limit school access and put armed guards in them. We have guards in banks with a few dozen people, and grocery stores with a few hundred people, why not in schools with thousands of people? There were 3,300 kids in Marjory Stoneman Douglas High. It would have cost all of 3 cents per student to have an armed guard on campus 8 hours a day.
Why are we so much more willing to guard our money than our kids?
I’m all for the First and Second Amendments, but when your First Amendment behavior and violent gaming habits lead us to think you may be a danger to others, maybe it’s time for us to suspend your Second Amendment rights until your First Amendment behavior convinces us it’s safe to be around you again.
QED
