Some folks questioned the sincerity or motivations of participants at the ‘March for Our Lives’ events. I didn’t see the event the way they did.

I was at the march and I wouldn’t characterize it as a “gun grab.” More than anything else, the speakers expressed frustration at Congress for not being willing to take action that might reduce the threat of gun violence in schools.

As far as people being denied an opportunity to speak, I have no knowledge of that, although it sounds bogus and I would be skeptical of it until I confirmed where the information came from. There’s a lot of bad info out there on all sides.

At the event in Cleveland, no speaker that I heard advocated “banning guns.” I did hear suggestions for more effective background checks, maybe banning sales to persons under 21, and re-imposing the now-expired ban on AR-15-type weapons. Several speakers did discuss other steps that could lead to meaningful change.

I think some of the frustration that the marchers (and others) feel stems from hearing the argument that since no single action can be guaranteed to stop all future shootings, we should therefore do nothing. It would be like going to the doctor and being told that you have cancer, but while there are several possible treatments that might be effective, no single treatment is guaranteed to work completely, so we’re not going to do anything.

My own opinion is that we need to address mass shootings in the same way we address other disasters. When a plane crashes, or a bridge fails, we conduct a comprehensive investigation to identify the root cause. Invariably, we find that the disaster was the result of multiple failures. Mass shootings are the same. They happen when the complex system we have developed to prevent extreme anti-social behavior fails at multiple points.

When discussing possible causes of disasters, please note that there is a significant difference between “contributing cause” and “cause.” Contributing causes contribute to the outcome, but they do not by themselves determine the outcome.

If a long chain of events has occurred where multiple opportunities to intervene have been missed or ignored, and as a result a troubled person finally decides to head back to his old high school and shoot the place up, a contributing cause will certainly be the availability of firearms. If he can’t get a gun, he can’t shoot up the school. That is irrefutable. A firearm didn’t cause the event, it didn’t motivate the person to act, it didn’t shoot people on its own, but it did make the ultimate disaster possible, so it was one of a number of contributing causes.

And yes, he could use a knife or a bomb, and in those cases the contributing factor would be the availability of bomb-making materials and the availability of edged weapons, but this discussion is about gun violence.

My point is that these incidents are the result of a long chain of events, of which firearms availability is just one, and certainly not the main one. Nobody shoots up their high school simply because they had access to a firearm. Mental health and school security are also contributing factors and should certainly be addressed in any comprehensive attempt to reduce the incidence of school shootings. There are many other potential contributing factors as well.

These events are thankfully rare because we do have systems in place to identify extremely troubled individuals and to intervene. It is only when these systems fail – often at multiple points – that we get these horrific shootings.

There is no simple solution to shootings in schools, churches, nightclubs, movie theaters, concert venues, office buildings, and other places. Focusing on a single factor, like the availability of firearms, is a dead end that won’t take us where we want to go. But denying the possibility that some reform of our current gun laws can be part of the solution is equally wrongheaded. We’re never going to be able to stop all shootings, but perhaps a coordinated effort to address many of the contributing causes can reduce the number of incidents. If it takes us fifty years to cut the rate in half, we will have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

March 26, 2018