Spree Killers

This is obviously in response to a recent event, but unfortunately, what I'm going to say is pretty timeless, so I won't bother linking to the specific stories that inspired this post, since it's almost certainly going to apply equally well to whatever recent mass murder has captivated the public eye at the time a reader finds this. 

I have something of a history of empathizing with the manifestos of spree killers more than most folks are willing to admit.  I look at their arguments and say, "that all sounds reasonable up until the point of the random mass murder".  Over and over again.  Makes a person a bit paranoid when no one else around you seems to think there's anything but crazy and evil in there. 

I have never gone on a killing spree.  I have fantasized about doing so.  I've been tempted numerous times.  The world isn't a just place, and it's easy to just say "fuck it, let's burn the whole thing to the ground" rather than commit to the impossible Sisyphean task of fixing everything that's wrong with the world. 

I'm the sort of person who thinks the world ought to be reasonable, equitable, and just.  That belief crops up in almost every one of these spree killer manifestos that I see.  They look at the world, see that it isn't fair, and can't deal with that fact.  This isn't about entitlement, at least as far as their writings go.  They don't just think the world's unfair TO THEM, though that's usually what made it impossible to miss that the world was unfair.  They think the world's unfair to whole categories of people, and once those proverbial scales have been ripped from your eyes, it's a long journey of seeing all the ways the world is unfair and unreasonable. 

I was in elementary school when I got my first taste of this.  I noticed age based discrimination.  It was compulsory education I noticed first.  The problem, as I saw it, was not that I was being forced to attend school.  It was that people who lacked the knowledge base that I was supposed to be aquiring in school were not being likewise forced to attend simply because they had passed an arbitrary age line.  I considered violent revolution as a potential solution to this problem, since history classes had made it clear that was how you accomplished change on that scale.  I lacked both the martial skills and the personal charisma to organize such a revolution while in elementary school, so that plan didn't get anywhere. 

The problem I was looking at wasn't just childishy whining that I was being forced to go to school.  It was recognizing that an entire category of people, of whom I then happened to be a member, were being systematically discriminated against, and deciding that something needed to be done.  I was repeatedly told I'd change my mind as I got older, but the fact of the matter is, I'm still that young boy who saw a problem, and occasionally toys with the idea of violent revolution in order to fix it. 

The reason I never went on a shooting rampage is that I came to the conclusion it wouldn't be effective.  I've seen so many of these spree killers over the years, and each time it's the same thing.  People handwring over "what could have brought this on" and then people utterly ignore the efforts those killers made to explain exactly that, instead preferring to cynically exploit the killing spree as a means of advancing their own pet issues. 

I'm still looking for a way to fix the obvious injustices in the world.  I've eliminated random mass murder as a likely avenue.  Irrationally, I hold out hope that one of these days I'll find a tool that will work. 

The History of the Age of Consent

I see it over and over again.  The idea that the age of consent must be there for a reason.  That whoever put those laws in place must have known what they were doing. 

The law is not a divine commandment.  The people who write laws are not unknowable wise men with inscrutable wisdom far divorced from the ability of the common man to understand.  The entire point of studying history is so that we can follow the progression, the whys and wherefores that lead us to the world we live in today. 

The age of consent came into being in the days of women as property.  Marriage was a business transaction between the groom and the bride's father, with the groom paying a bride-price to her father.  A virgin bride commanded a high price, and thus anyone who had sex with a man's daughter was literally diminishing the value of his property.  The age of consent was a way of protecting the investment, not protecting the person. 

Come the turn of the 20th century, a group of religious conservatives, terrified of the idea of women in the workplace, lobbied hard for the age of consent to be raised to its current level.  Their writings are still around explaining their concerns.  To summarize, they were afraid that women working outside the home might meet men and want to have sex without getting married.  They used the age of consent to push their social agenda.  That's why to this day there are still states which have exemptions in their ages of consent if the parents consent, or if the couple are married. 

After that, the age of consent was fiddled around with to discriminate against homosexuals.  Ages of consent were made different for different depending on the genders of the partners and the acts performed.  It was a way of hurting gays where legislation couldn't be passed to ban such activities entirely.  The famous Stonewall riots were partially a response to this kind of discrimination. 

The age of consent has never been the well-reasoned compromise between the twin noble ideals of individual sexual liberty and the protection of the vulnerable that its supporters claim it to be.  The age of consent is a historical accident built on a foundation of social mores our culture rejected long ago, and discrimination that even the bigots of our day at least pretend to be ashamed of. 

It's long past time we wrote a law that reflects what informed consent actually means.  Long past time we actually had the reasoned discourse that everyone who blindly accepts the age of consent as it stands assumed happened at some unspecified point in the past.