Uncle John keeps inspiring me.

Here’s why we need to stop focusing on gun control as a remedy for mass shootings. I do NOT mean to entirely dismiss the concept of common-sense laws surrounding firearms, mind you, but I think we should take a step back from the pinpointed outrage and figure out where that energy belongs.

The cause of the WI event John just discussed was not the weapon. In fact, this applies to every single mass shooting. Every single one. Everyone says “the gun didn’t do it” so I won’t just say that and move along. I’m interested in performing a little exercise… Because we can think of a mass shooting as a catastrophic failure at the top of a fault tree, we can analyze the root of the failure the way an aircraft engineer might analyze a plane crash. We’ll look for the single point of failure and work to mitigate that failure by addressing its cause. Whatever the root cause happens to be, that is what we need to address.

I’m going to try and describe a fault tree for the mass shooting event to illustrate that access to a gun, or failure to secure a gun from the assailant, is not a single point of failure. Bear with me:

There are other things that have to “fail” in parallel to the gun access to result in the catastrophic event. There are multiple failures on one branch of the tree. There’s failure to restrict the autonomy to act. There’s failure to restrict the material needed to act. And there is a reason.

Autonomy – You can fail to lock a person up and not realize the event, but you have to fail to restrain a person for him to cause the event. What led to the failure to contain the assailant? Poor security in a mental health facility? Or a prison? If we follow that branch we could arrive at a root cause. But let’s move on, since we’re talking about guns.

Material – You can fail to take a gun from a person and still realize the catastrophic event. On the material branch, we might have a knife, a car, even bare hands in addition to the gun. And what connects them? An “OR”. This is important because digging down that gun branch you’ll get into gun control. But you see, it won’t necessarily mitigate the event because of the “OR” situation. Cross out the gun; you still have a car, and it still flows up to the event. You’ve removed one twig of the tree by removing access to the gun. To remove ALL the “OR”s you’re basically going back to autonomy. If you can access the person you want to attack, you can attack them through any number of means.

Reason – So what’s the other “AND” failure? A reason. Could be a personal motive “AND” a psychological reason – or just a psychological reason. The motive probably needs some parallel psychological condition to trigger it. So, mitigation of the “failure” of a psychological nature – a psychotic break – can, in itself, notionally stop the event from happening. That is a single point of failure! Now, if it is a spurious failure/break, it’s a little harder to dig deeper… genetics? Hard to mitigate. There might have been no warning signs.

But what else might have led to that failure? More likely, the psychotic break could be caused by failure to recognize a dormant mental health issue. What led to THAT failure? Poor parenting? Failure of the criminal justice system? Child services? The school counselor? These are “AND”s. All of these possible safety nets have to fail before we can flow up the tree to the top.

Can we dig deeper? Why did the school counselor fail to catch this? Maybe the counselor is overwhelmed with too many students? Is that a root cause? Is there a possible mitigation of that root cause?

Let’s see. We could properly equip the school with counselors and psychologists such that the mental health issue can more likely and efficiently be recognized, and the child is put on medication and/or receives proper health care. If that happens, we mitigate the chance of psychotic break, which would have been necessary to get to the top of the tree and realize the catastrophic event. It’s not a 100% mitigation (nothing is) but by taking these steps and others to address all the other “AND”s on this branch, we’re taking the best, most critical, immediate steps we can take to address a root cause.

In summary… The critical issue to resolve is not the gun; it is the root cause. Failure to secure a gun appears much higher in the fault tree and with a bunch of other possible “OR” conditions that can also trace up to the catastrophic event. You can’t completely mitigate the catastrophic event by taking gun control measures. In fact, it is a small mitigating factor.

That said — It’s still a mitigating factor, and it would have more impact than, say, taking away knives, because the gun can potentially lead more efficiently and effectively to the catastrophic event. So, I don’t think the “gun control” issue is super black and white. It’s just foolish to think guns are the ultimate problem.