There are two criminal incidents that impacted me significantly while I was a young person. The first was an arson and the second, a shooting.
When I was in seventh grade a man in my town broke into his instructor’s home, doused the first floor in diesel fuel, lit the fuel, and left the home. In the ensuing inferno, two children, one in my grade, died on the stairwell from smoke inhalation.
This impacted me on a number of levels. My father is a college professor at the same school, though a different department than the intended victim. I could imagine one of his students, though I didn’t know and hadn’t met any of them, committing a similar wrong against my family. Many nights I thought about how I might escape from my second-floor bedroom, a room that was situated in my home in a similar location to the murdered children’s.
I thought a lot about how to stop the perpetration of crimes like arson and other forms of murder, and decided the best way was to become a cop. Since sixth grade I had been interested in police work, but primarily due to watching too much Hunter and Miami Vice on TV. I was aware that real policing was very different than these shows. Hierarchy, responsibility, paperwork and accountability were the reality, rebellion and vigilante justice the fiction.
To see what policing was really like, and to start my intended career path, I decided to join the Police Explorers. This was the career path that emphasized justice and used direct, targeted, and legitimate continua of force to enact good for all. This targeted direct force was in contrast to the indirect, destructive, unjustified and flippant use of force through the arson/murder.
I must say, I loved my experience in the Explorers, and I intended to stay in the troupe until I was 18, graduate from high-school, and go to the academy.
At the age of 14 my mother began taking me to the local Isaac Walton League to learn gun safety with a .22 rifle. I loved being in the out-of-doors at the range. It was in a beautiful wooded area in a valley (in a mostly flat midwestern state) carved out by the river that passed our town. I’d set up tin cans and staple some targets to the boards on the range and work on being non-reactive when the gun went off so as to hit the target at my point of aim. Quickly I learned that shooting isn’t anything like the wild shooting on TV. Shooting is about being calm and clear about your target and the backstop behind your target. Anytime anything other than calmness and focus enters your mind you lose accuracy. Everyone has heard about how Japanese Buddhists have used archery to practice meditation. I learned that shooting guns is the same.
When I was 16, in my sophomore year of High School, a peer was coerced by a parent to shoot someone. This peer was more “mature” than most of the other kids in class, and many of us saw our peer, prior to the shooting, as a good example of the freedoms we could look forward to in adulthood. Even more than that, some of the officers I looked up to most knew the kid and were friendly with the kid’s parents. Mentally I checked my peer off in the “good” category.
Thankfully, the shooting victim lived, but the court proceedings after were murky and complicated, and this pierced me to my core. I had no outlet to process such a complicated real-world experience. I was actually experiencing the world of policing that I set out to see, and I didn’t know what to think.
I locked my gun away and quit going to the range. I dropped out of the Explorers. I got involved in theatre, dance and the arts.
Eventually the rifle I learned to shoot was sold to a friend’s family whose son was in the explorers and he began going to the range to learn gun safety.
I didn’t think again about gun ownership, policing, or my experience in the Explorers until after September 11th, 2001. In the ensuing war on terror I began to again see the world through the unified view I had while in the Explorers. I began to see our individual responsibility to act for the common good in the face of moments of horror. I began to see that I could take the responsibility to step forward in the face of danger to protect others. I began to consider owning a gun and seeking a concealed carry permit.
In looking at incidents of crime and crime fighting, I see that individuals are more horrified by gun violence than other forms of violence such as arson. I think, although I’m not certain, that this has to do with several issues that can be teased out by visual-temporal design analysis of crime incidents.
If we look at an arson we can prove intent to murder, for example, through statements made by the perpetrator to others, by journal entries, by time of a crime (say the arson is perpetrated on a dwelling in which the inhabitants are sleeping at night). We can do the same in the instance of a homicidal shooting. With a gun we can prove a shooting was in self-defense against an imminent threat, however, there is never an incident that I can think of, wherein someone could light a building on fire in self-defense.
In terms of visual analysis, a fire and a shooting vary widely. A firearm shoots in a direct path that is understood by those who practice shooting. A fire burns in all directions consuming whatever flammable material is in its path. The path of a bullet is narrow, less than ½ inch in diameter, while the path of a fire is as wide as the fire can grow before it is put out. A bullet travels at velocities higher than a thousand feet per second where as a fire grows from a single spark into an inferno over an extended period of time. A bullet kills through a single means, impact, while a fire can kill with heat, flame, or smoke. The shooter is there at the site at the time of impact, while an arsonist may start a fire and leave the scene, not knowing the result of the fire until it is reported on the news.
I think that the fact that the path of a bullet is so narrow and that the time between pulling the trigger and the impact of the bullet are so short are the things that cause so many people to be horrified by shootings, whether those are justifiable instances of self-defense or acts of murder. With an arson it seems that more people can say, “Oh, that’s horrible,” but because the arsonist is able to start a fire and leave the scene, people may dissociate the act from its result.
To me, this is a flaw in the way people think. It may be a good reason to call for criminology classes as part of civic education in high school along with gun and archery safety classes in gym. We should understand fully the horror of temporally indirect crimes like arson and we should be able to differentiate between defensive use of arms and crime.
All citizens should understand our laws about crime, our rights in terms of self-defense, the dangers of guns and archery equipment and how to be safe. We aren’t learning these things the way we were in former generations because the population has changed and culture has changed. The way we learn about our rights and responsibilities around such issues should change as well.