Shoot Outs

So many of you have no doubt heard of the Omaha mall shooting. In the case it looks like the shooter was suffering from chronic depression and had just lost his job and been dumped by his girlfriend so it seems like he just decided to go out in a blaze of glory. I am only a couple hours away from Omaha here in Des Moines, less maybe from that mall so I suppose I could have gone over there to report directly for the blog but that would be a bit much even for me.

Anyhow, the point of this is that there are already some people (at Instapundit) arguing that if the mall patrons had been allowed to carry guns, things would have turned out better for all concerned. They cite in their defense a paper by Mary Rosh John Lott. Well that pretty much ends their argument right there but let’s throw up a counterpoint anyway.

According to them if patrons at the mall, while someone was shooting up the place, had drawn their guns and tried to attack the perpetrator everything would have been better. According to the paper, more guns means safety. So let’s assume that everyone in the mall of legal age and proper mental temperament has a handgun.

It’s a sudden situation. If you’re not right there, you don’t know who is shooting or at what. In such a situation it’s pretty easy to conjure a scenario where several gun-toting patriots, running to the scene start shooting at each other thinking the other person is the initial shooter leading to what I can only term a confused gun battle. As stray shots and chaos ripple outward from the shoot out, more and more people (with concealed handguns) rush into the combat zone and see people shooting at each other, and then pick sides or form a third side and try to shoot at everyone. Eventually as news of this battle spreads to the authorities, the police descend on them all with larger guns to force the peace resulting in potentially more mayhem.

This does not seem to me to be conducive in reducing casualties and ending the ordeal faster, but your mileage may vary.

Addiction

So as I continue on down here, I found myself taking time out more often to actually write some stories. I’ve always liked writing–or at least since I was 8 or so. I even remember why I started writing, I read the first Tracer Bullet storyline from Calvin and Hobbes and basically wrote a little derivative thing on my parents typewriter (hey it was the 80s!) with the fancy correct ribbon. Needless to say I wore it out in my flurry of two-fingered typing and so word-processing has largely been the order of the day since.

But even then I was afflicted with never finishing my stories. It was always such a chore because even though I could visualize the story clearly in my mind, I never had the patience to actually work through it. That changed a few years ago where, collaborating with someone else, we finished the first draft of a novel. It started as kind of a lark, but ended up being the origin story of a character that I’ve slowly been creating a world around since at least 2002. Of course that initial draft is going to bear only a slight resemblance to the finished product, but since then, I’ve written a few other things–nothing too original, some fan-fictions, some After Action Reports (using video-game still images and text to tell a story) but I’ve actually be completing things, and even getting praise for them.

It’s the praise that really gets to me. I love, can’t stop reading it. Addicted to it. I won’t even mind criticism because if I can make my writing better it leads to more praise. I finally understand when people who perform like actors of musicians say they do it for the applause. It’s almost more euphoria than I can bear and I need more of it. I suppose there are worse things to be addicted to and I hope I can use it to spur me on to more writing but it’s tough to balance that with my academic obligations sometimes.

So now, maybe with my new found spirit of finishing work I’ll be able to keep the blog up.

Live Again!

Yeah, I’ll try to write again. Will it work? Who knows. I’ll try for 1 post a day.

Hey it could happen.

Currently studying for finals and writing a paper. Wish me luck.

Also, new email. samoflange@fast-mail.org