Of course, gun laws shouldn’t change in Wisconsin, or anywhere else. Those are not rights given by the state for the sake of the state, they are individual rights to defend themselves in the face of oppression and tyranny, and in all honesty, the employees shot dead at the Molson Coors campus Wednesday of this past week should have been able to carry concealed weapons. There is nothing for anybody to believe that workplace violence won’t continue well into the future, behavioral needs almost guarantee it, and that is what caused the mass shooting at the Wisconsin brewery where the shooter, Anthony Ferrill shot the people he was arguing with dead at a shift change. Things obviously were out of control between all the employees if Ferrill thought that some of his rivals were breaking into his home and messing with his property, and it sounds like the antagonism was going both ways. Likely there was some mental illness playing into the scenario, but what was the employer supposed to do about that, send Ferrill to a mental hospital out of suspicion? So long as people have conflict with one another, justified or not, killings will occur by gun, by knife, or by fist. A full Coke can fresh out of a vending machine can be a deadly weapon in a fight, it’s the desire to fight that is the problem and no law can protect society from the effects. Especially more gun laws. Its quite the opposite need, gun laws need to be looser to keep the world much more balanced.
But it didn’t take long for the Democrat governor of Wisconsin to politicize the tragedy pointing straight to the Republican majority leader standing in the way of gun laws moving through the senate. The continued belief by Democrats and all gun grabbing activists is that tragedies like this brewery shooting would never happen if only they could get rid of all guns everywhere, which of course is impossible. Most of the people at that brewery likely have enough skill to build their own guns and manufacture their own ammunition with mini machine shops set up in their homes. We can’t uninvent guns, but to defend the good Republican Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, gun laws can be made available to give everyone equal access to defend themselves. In short, if Anthony Ferrill wanted to kill some of his co-workers during this long running dispute, it sounded as if he was smart enough to devise a way. If the guns weren’t available on the market, he could build them, or find someone who could. When you are planning a suicide effort, which he obviously was, who cares if its illegal. But what’s missing is that other workers onsite while the shooting was going on should have been able to stop it on the spot. That is where gun legislation needs to go, not the other way around.
The way human behavior works is that people tend to treat each other better when they know that death is only a trigger away. In a workplace protected by layers of human resource rules and regulations there is a lot of room for passive aggressive nonsense in day to day bickering that can add up to an explosion of anxiety at some point. The best thing to do is to discharge those emotions gradually so that they don’t build up. And when everyone knows that everyone else is carrying guns, the conversations are a lot more polite moment to moment. The way to improve behavior is to have a lot less gun free zones.
But politicians like Tom Barrett don’t really care about the victims, only in that the tragedy happened on their watch. What they do care about is making the state more a part of the day to day maintenance of people, and by removing guns from the society, they believe they can have better management control over the population. It’s a fantasy of course, but it is something that most of them think is possible, politicians who lean toward the liberal end of things. So when something happens like this shooting it is published as a mass shooting that should incite more gun control instead of what it really is, a situation of workplace violence that is much more symptomatic of real problems between people and how they interact with each other.
Really to get to the deeper issues of psychology liberals are frustrated that all their rules and regulations have not produced a safer world, and they continue to believe that they are just a rule or two away from the perfect society. The management of the plant where the shooting occurred should have been dealing with the ongoing conflict, but as we all know by now Anthony Ferrill was a man of color who was making claims of racism, true or not. That nearly paralyzes a human resource department from taking action because overcoming that negative is nearly insurmountable, which likely caused this conflict to brew literally out of control until the deaths occurred. All it took was for Ferrill to have one bad day before he just snapped and had a WTF moment and decided to kill himself and others. There are tempers flaring right now in nearly every workplace across the country, fortunately they don’t end the way Anthony Ferrill’s did. Most people reason through it with just a bit of self-preservation giving us all a buffer from the extremes. But this is all very much a behavioral problem and it won’t be solved with more gun laws. Quite the opposite happens, the more laws that create a victimized status in the minds of people like Anthony Ferrill, the more potentially dangerous they become.
But why would more victimization laws make people like Anthony Ferrill more dangerous, more of a potential killer when the intent is fairness? Well, likely below the surface in Anthony Ferrill, which now that he’s dead we’ll never know, but there was likely mental health problems hiding behind his many good deeds, such as helping his elderly neighbor fix things around the house, or in his employer believing that his good work was indicative of a healthy mind. Rather to the professional mind analyzer, such good deeds are often conducted to create barriers to mental neurosis that is a result of many undealt with tragedies haunting the inner thoughts of a victim. When a victimizing social trend such as racism is introduced to the mind of such people, they now have somewhere to hide their true demons and can now point to racist trends to be the mask that protects them from much needed judgment. And when they feel that mask no longer works, they feel exposed emotionally and act on that vulnerability in a negative way. That’s usually what happens when someone snaps, whether death is the result, or someone just quits their job one day, or they divorce a spouse of 30 years and leave everyone high and dry for no apparent reason. These are the problems that simple political laws can’t deal with and are the reasons why gun laws need to be loosened not strengthened. Once a person arrives at that point of desperation, they must know that the other person is just as armed and that they won’t get a chance to be the most powerful person on the planet even if its just for a few seconds. Because ultimately, that is the only thing that really keeps us all safe, the promise of mutual destruction and the negotiation of peace because there’s no other alternative.
Rich Hoffman