"The pump don't work because the vandals took the handles."
Bob Dylan, Subterranean Homesick Blues
Robo-calls, Spam e-mail, and School shootings.
A free and open society is subject to vandalism.
My first phone call of the morning was at 6:21 Pacific Time. I was awake and at my computer. My wife was asleep. This was a live caller, not a tape recorded voice of "Amy, from Account Services." Robot calls are recognizable with practice, and I get lots of practice. A friendly, clear, all-American robot voice introduces him or her self, and starts to make a pitch. I ask if the person is a real person, and ask them to add two plus three. That stumps a robot call, and they hang up.
This morning's early caller was a live person in a room with voices all around him--a boiler-room. He spoke English with a south Asian accent. He said he was calling from "U.S.Medicare" and he wanted to know if I had a new Medicare card. He, and people like him, call two or three times a week regarding my Medicare credentials. He says he wants to confirm my new number, date of birth, and Social Security number, so that I would be "all set." I tell him I am already "all set."
More often the callers want access to financial information. I get two or three phone calls every single day from people purporting to warn me that I had bought something expensive from Amazon earlier that day. New incoming calls sometimes come within minutes of hanging up on a previous call. They warn me that I had just purchased something--frequently an I-phone--via Amazon, and ask if I confirm or deny the purchase. This is basically the same scam as similar calls warning me that Paypal or Apple Pay or some other payment program has been hacked. Whatever the entry justification, the callers want to guide me through a process to give them access to my desktop computer "so they can remove the tracking device" or so they can "remove the false charge." The goal is to get me to enter a website address in the search bar, click enter, and give them my computer credentials. The website address has an innocuous and reassuring name, like "SecurityTeam." Googling that website address reveals it as the entry point for an active scam phishing fraud.
I get about 20 spam emails a day from hot women who want to have sex with me right now, companies with penis enlargement drugs, or companies that will fix toenail fungus.
People can call or e-mail me. That is the point of those utilities. Spammers and fraudsters have taken advantage of their openness. They have degraded them and risk ruining them. They are vandals.
School shooters are a grotesque and exaggerated form of vandal. They take advantage of our openness.
I used to drop my son off at elementary school. I considered that he was going from the presumed safety of a family to the presumed safety of a school. I considered it very different from, say, dropping a ten year old off on a downtown Medford street corner and telling him to have fun, learn stuff, and that I would see him in seven hours. Elementary schools are not cocoons, but they aren't prisons or a psychiatric lockdown, either. School playgrounds are outside. Parents come and go from the school. Children leave for doctor appointments and return. There are band and choir concerts that parents, grandparents, and the community attend. There is soccer practice and soccer games all day on Saturdays. People gather.
It would be impossible to harden an elementary school sufficiently to stop a body-armored, AR-15-carrying intruder who might come at any time children are around, inside or outside. It would take a multiple SWAT teams on high alert twelve hours a day. Impossible.
Yet, in the face of the apparent impossibility of changing our country's relationship to mass ownership of guns, the public debate is looking at changing schools by turning them into fortresses. I read suggestions that schools need a single entry point. We need more armed guards, Ted Cruz suggests. Possibly schools should to hire teachers with the dual skillset of education and armed interdiction of armed intruders.
The news today is all about the inadequacy of the police response to the shooting in Texas. There is a lesson here, if we pay attention. We see that people have a very reasonable reluctance to charge into an unknown situation to confront a man shooting a gun. Police were not mentally or tactically prepared to confront the shooter until they had overwhelming force. I draw an inference. The idea of armed defense of schools is better in theory than in practice. The Texas school had an armed guard. So did the Parkland, Florida school. The notion of "hard" school is a false path, or certainly a leaky one. Not only is it a budget disaster, adding pay for guards on top of pay for educators, it is a practical impossibility because children will gather in places that are designed to be accessible to the public, not places that are hardened against a surprise visit from an armed and armored intruder. And if school classrooms are hardened, what about birthday parties, baseball fields, summer camps, or kids playing outdoors alone or in groups, being unsupervised kids playing cowboys and Indians, the way I did 60 years ago.
We can harden airplanes but we cannot harden childhood. We need to look in a different direction for any real solution. We will always have vandals but we need to change our attitudes and expectations about guns. We need to change minds. It may take decades. It took decades to change attitudes toward smoking. It may be impossible, but that is the task ahead for Americans.
What has happened to our society? Want to see a movie -- you will find most of the movies showing in your local theaters are violent shoot'em ups; want to watch TV - - good luck finding something without murder involved; video games - - they are only fun if they involve war or mayhem. We are so immersed in violence is there any wonder that males act out by murdering people? Can you name a mass murderer who was female? I don't know where the reset button is.