Whole New Conspiracy Theory...

 I am no statistician.  I'm not even a conspiracy theorist.  I don't wear a foil hat, and I'm not particularly clued in to either side of most political debates.

But the thought rolled through my head the other day when I saw news of yet another young man gunned down.  He was on his way to a bus to protest the police shooting of another young man.  Both of these young men were not law-breaking citizens by any stretch of the imagination.  One had his own firearm which he obtained legally and had all the necessary permits.  The other was an honors student, an athlete, who was according to most who knew him a good guy.  Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

And then I started to think back about it a little bit.  It occurs to me that, most of the time when I see the faces of people who are killed, or who are accused of doing the killing, there are some things that tend to be similar.  The first is that if the shooting is not at the hands of police, it is usually someone whom we used to call "a minority" - and the shooting was usually allegedly committed by another person of a similar, or different, "minority". 

Which is where the ugly thought burbled through my brain.  

Is it possible that the continued, and extensive availability of hand guns, is a plot by some who see these weapons as ways to keep a certain segment of the population in fear of their lives, too worried about what someone else might do to them, and therefore, unable to organize themselves into a more cohesive group to speak out and request change?

I mean, think about it.  When the mass shooting suspects rise out of the carnage, they're almost always white males.  Men who, for whatever reason, have some petty concern which they use to justify mass murder.  And these are usually higher-end weapons which are used.

When it's a smaller situation, a young man walking to a bus who is shot in the head for no reason other than wrong-place-wrong-time, what in the hell is going on?  In the most recent case, locally, the young man was a high school student, a basketball player, who was on his way to a public bus to head downtown to protest the recent Minneapolis Police shooting of a young man who was napping in his cousin's apartment.  This young man, who possessed a legal handgun, was asleep when police barged through the door, and within 9 seconds of breaching the door, this young man, who was NOT the focus of the warrant or even suspected to be involved, was dead because he chose to take a nap at his cousin's apartment.

Both of these deaths bother me.  In part because they show yet again that we have, through sheer stupidity, chosen to glorify the gun over safety.  The warrants issued for the police to search the particular location included information such as one of the guns they sought to find was possibly involved in an earlier murder, and was known to be loaded with bullets which could rather easily pierce police body armor.  So I would argue the police had a legitimate fear of a potential shootout in an apartment building.  Now, I am no expert on construction, but I am intimately familiar with practical building traditions and how many buildings are assembled.  

In most of the construction over the past half-century or so, any wall you find in any building that is not built entirely out of brick or concrete is typically covered with something called drywall, and composed of a piece of pine lumber which is about three and a half inches thick and called a "stud".  As those thicker pine boards are, typically, separated by a gap that is about 15" wide, the odds of you hitting a stud are pretty slim, as in 10%.  That's because your average stud is one and one half inches thick.  And ten times that width is how far apart it is to the next stud.  So if you're shooting at an angle, the odds do go up, but the drywall skimming the wall is typically a layer of heavy paper - not cardboard, but paper - which is backed by pretty much dust.  It's called "plaster" or "gypsum" but it has very little structural strength.  

I know this because of three reasons.  The first is the half-summer where I worked for a drywall finishing company.  That is, I was usually part of a two or three person crew who came into a newly sheet-rocked room - sheet-rock being that which the drywall is rather laughingly referred to.  Rock not being any sort of representative or illustrative word when it comes to describing the quality of the stuff.  It is rather thin and flimsy, if you aren't careful.  On very small jobs, I worked with my boss to transport in, "hang" and then finish rooms.  Sheet rock often comes in two sheets of the same thickness, four feet wide by up to twelve feet long.  If you are in any way familiar with plywood, it might interest you to know that the thickest sheetrock we dealt with, 3/4" sheets, lacked the structural strength that was given by 1/8" plywood.  That is, if you had a piece of 3/4" sheetrock, and a piece of 1/8" plywood the same size, the plywood would hold more weight.

In fact, if you laid a sheet of sheetrock over one sawhorse in the middle, it would snap in half if you laid it flat.  It's that structurally weak.

The other two reasons I know this stuff is just a joke structurally is because I have, in the past, had to sheetrock areas.  And made mistakes.  Like the time I put sheet rock over some spot that it shouldn't have gone.  Rather than firing up a power tool, I pulled out a pocket knife and trimmed out where I needed.  

And I've seen kids put their arms through sheetrock walls.  Accidentally.  None were mine, none were injured, but it's just not all that strong.  Were I in any sort of position to be building a house that had some sort of structural need to be in any way bulletproof, I'd definitely be looking for concrete structures which were skim-coated on the inside with standard construction, that is, a stud topped by some other form of sheet material.  It would look as a standard house would, but it would also be far more structurally safe.  That is, if I sought to live somewhere out and away from a lot of the guff and crowds, I'd want something that maintained some basic fireproofing.  Which would mean the exterior might be brick-covered concrete, with a metal wood, so that none of the exterior was readily available to catch on fire, should one happen to pass by.  But I'm a rather practical fellow - if I had to live in someplace like California, where wildfires seem to be as much an annual hazard as blizzards are here, you can be absolutely certain I'd have a concrete exterior, a metal roof, and most likely some large metal tank of water up on a metal tower some ten to fifteen feet above my roof, and metal plumbing would carry that water to metal lines on my roof so that I could open a valve if a fire neared, and the roof would be kept damp by a trickle of water that would continue to soak and eliminate the threat of any sort of ember or spark which might choose to land on my roof.  Enough heat applied in a small enough spot over a long enough time can melt metal, causing the material behind it, if flammable, to catch flame.  And I'd rather not see that happen, if I can avoid it.  But I'm paranoid, I suppose.

So to get back to the point, bullets of any caliber are very capable of flying through walls and into other spaces in an apartment or really any building.  When large capacity magazines are used, that puts an awful lot of damage downrange from the shooter.  And depending on the time of day, the amount and likelihood of damage goes way up.

But my central point is this - is it possible that there's a group who are utterly convinced and committed to insuring that many of our lower-income neighborhoods are filled with gun violence.  These acts serve the purpose of keeping people of different neighborhoods and ethnicities afraid of one another, and highly unlikely to join together to seek common ground and overall improvements in culture and public safety.  And they also keep tax rates high because communities require police, some of whom are put in danger every single day from these weapons, so we can therefore further justify the cost of expensive technologies and tools to protect them, while at the same time, the technology which will defeat those protections is also a driving force.

It's just the sort of twisted thinking that could make a hell of a point.