The Distraction Tango
Unsurprisingly, as I’m putting proverbial pen to paper, we’re just about a week from the latest massacre of children and the GOP ghouls have pulled out their usual delay unto impotency tactics. Let’s look at the week that was in in sorrow- and sympathy-theatre that’s designed to hide the crucial fact: In this country, children dying in their schoolrooms is an acceptable sacrifice in order to make sure people can readily have assault weapons with magazines capable of putting a hole in every head.
Solemn Trump at NRA Convention in Houston
At the NRA convention, a mere 300 miles away from the liquefied corpses of Uvalde’s children, in my home city of Houston, the GOP’s gun-cucks did a lovely performance of solemnity when former President Trump read off the names of the eighteen massacred children.
I predicted a week ago:
And even when the doors are successfully “hardened”…[they will] blame the school for failing to harden by installing concrete pylons […etc.]
And Trump said:
Every building should have a single point of entry. There should be strong exterior fencing, metal detectors, and the use of new technology to make sure that no unauthorized individual can ever enter the school with a weapon.
By setting a series of ever-escalating standards for “hardening”, the profusion of guns never needs to come into question. It’s the victim’s fault for not being prepared enough against the outside world. I feel better, don’t you? 🤢
Apparently, after performing decency, Trump forgot that he was supposed to be doing sympathy-theatre and fell back into his usual narcissism.
When someone shows you who they are…
The Fully-Hardened Flaw
During the speech, where he wasn’t approximating the gestures associated with “basic human,” Trump was mouthing the NRA talking point about “single point of ingress/egress.”
As a systems thinker, this is beyond dumb. Ask anyone who read the story of the Trojan Horse, designs software, builds rocket ships that land on the moon, or is engaged in any form of engineering this simple question:
“Should a product have a single failure mode or multiple failure modes?”
The answer, true for every theatre on Broadway’s fire exits and every rocket in the Apollo program is that multiple failure modes are always desirable. By “failure mode” I mean, in the non-optimal state, can we reduce the severity of the damage? Submarines don’t rely on “there never will be a hull breach,” instead they rely on “if there’s a hull breach, we use this heavy door to contain the breach and assume we can sail (more slowly, perhaps noisily, perhaps surfaced) versus sinking outright. Compare this to the classic “impregnable” walls of Troy. “The solution to beating the Greeks is hardened city walls!” And that works great, until it doesn’t. Because all the security had been put into a single failure mode, when the unthinkable happened, the catastrophic was guaranteed.
So consider: If the single-door philosophy of school design fails, what then? “There won’t be a what then” is the answer, but, sorry Charlie, that’s not fucking good enough. We know from the Trojan war to the Titanic the unthinkable does happen, regularly. In the NRA/GOP’s “single hardened access point” proposal, if the single failure mode is compromised, then the single hallway out turns into a literal abattoir. The next hope for stopping the massacre is when the shooter runs out of bullets (and the Uvalde shooter reportedly came in with thousands of rounds), or when his finger gets tired, or when the gun overheats and malfunctions.
Contrast this to a system with multiple failure modes: when the pop-pop sound of the main door’s human security being compromised (i.e. shot dead) is heard, the student pour out from multiple one-way doors and run to designated muster points. The assailant finds himself freshly entered into an empty school, wasting time while authorities close on his location. With superior numbers, they turn the hunter into the hunted.
And, by the way, this is not exactly a new insight. Computer systems researcher and security systems guru Bruce Schneier called out the proper approach nearly a decade ago:
Resilience—building systems able to survive unexpected and devastating attacks—is the best answer we have right now. We need to recognize that large-scale attacks will happen, that society can survive more than we give it credit for, and that we can design systems to survive these sorts of attacks.
Schneier here is speaking of terrorism, but the principle holds.
Or, y’know, one could look at the natural world: rabbits build multiple exits in their warrens. Gophers too. Even the lowest critters — even those that lack the ability to have their basic decency bought out by campaign donations — know not to rely on a single failure mode.
Flying in the face of every basic principle of engineering and outright common sense, why are the NRA’s puppets in the GOP pitching this approach? It makes absolutely no sense to support this approach if your goal is to protect children. If your goal is, instead, to protect the NRA, protect its rating of you, and protect your campaign donation stream, then this kind of security theatre you pump instead of real security.
Blood on their hands.
The Fully-Hardened School
And again, never mind that the net upshot of all this hardening is that the school winds up looking like this:
Per Trump’s criteria:
✅ single point of entry
✅ strong exterior fencing
✅ metal detectors
✅ technology to make sure that no unauthorized individual can ever enter the
schoolprison with a weapon.
You’ve captured the sad truth of it. Trump’s traditional dad dance at the end of his speech is simultaneously tone-deaf, pathetic, and ghoulish.