Oregon School Shooting at Silver Rail Elementary Results in Multiple Casualties
School Shootings, Self-Love, and the Duties of the State
When a father with a pistol must defend a classroom of five-year-olds, the problem is not courage but institutions and incentives gone awry.
A man walking past a primary school should expect, at worst, a noisy playground; in Bend, Oregon, he met a sixteen-year-old with a gun. He entered Silver Rail Elementary after seeing the youth go in, and by all accounts acted with great resolution. Teachers in their classrooms fought to shield children. Yet three children and a teacher were killed before the attack was stopped. The public properly praises such fortitude; but as one observer remarked, we should not have to have that. When the ordinary business of sending a five-year-old to school presupposes the possible intervention of a heroic stranger, the constitution of society itself is in question.
We are told that in this jurisdiction, a person under eighteen may have access to a gun when a parent or guardian has granted permission. The law thus supposes, not unreasonably, that affection for one’s own child will secure prudent conduct. But in The Theory of Moral Sentiments I observed that we are all much better judges of the danger to our neighbours than of the danger to ourselves; self-love clouds the eye. A parent thinks, not “what could my child do,” but “my child would never do that,” and the impartial spectator, if he could speak, would quietly disagree.
In matters of commerce I have advised that we trace every regulation to its effect upon prices, and ask who bears the burden. In matters of arms we must perform a related exercise with risks. The visible benefit of such a permissive rule is concentrated; a family that values firearms enjoys them with few legal impediments. The costs are dispersed: a general elevation of danger, a tax of fear upon every parent, a shadow upon property and neighbourhood. The sad event at this school is an extreme expression of that invisible levy, but it is not its only form. A constitution of law that discounts such unseen costs is dear bought, even by those who imagined they gained from it.
Some have argued that bullying is at the root of many such attacks, and that bullying itself is a cultural malady, not merely a “school problem.” This is plausible; those who have long endured contempt are apt to burn inwardly. Yet the passions of the injured, however inflamed, do not excuse the means they choose, and policy that rests upon converting every potential aggressor into a Stoic sage is policy built upon sand. In moral life, as I argued in my first book, character is formed by sympathy and example; in political life, safety is secured by institutions which do not require unusual virtue in order to function tolerably well.
In The Wealth of Nations I assigned to the sovereign three chief duties: the defence of society, the exact administration of justice, and certain public works and institutions, including those for the education of the common people. A primary school lies, so to speak, at the intersection of all three. Children there cannot contract for their own security; their parents cannot, individually, patrol every corridor. Where a youth of sixteen may enter with a gun, and a five-year-old may leave in a coffin, the state has failed in defence, whatever praise we owe to those who tried, at terrible cost, to repair its negligence.
What then is to be done? Here I must warn against both the man of system and the merchants of opinion. Grand designers, armed with a single report or a single horror, will propose vast, uniform schemes for a continent, as if human beings were pieces on a chess-board that can be rearranged at pleasure. At the same time, organised interests on all sides will present their favourite measures as the only alternative to chaos, though their chief concern is often to preserve their own trade, their own status, their own revenue. Such petitions deserve the most suspicious attention. Good policy will be humbler: local, experimental, attentive to how parents and youths actually respond to incentives, not to how pamphleteers say they ought to behave.
A school is also a little market of hopes. The division of labour that sustains a modern society depends upon such places; parents send their five- and seven-year-olds there in the expectation that peace today will enable skill, wages, and contentment tomorrow. When that space is stained by repeated violence, the extent of the market for trust itself contracts. Families who can withdraw do so; the labouring poor, who cannot, must bear a greater load of fear for their children than any impartial spectator would judge tolerable. The wealth of a nation is the annual produce of its land and labour as it is enjoyed by ordinary people; a polity in which small children require heroes with guns to reach adulthood has mistaken splendour for security.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions, including education for the common people) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The division of labour (the pin factory) as the engine of opulence, limited by the extent of the market.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise; to be loved without being lovely is worth nothing.