Wicked Bad

I woke up Monday morning and the first news I heard was about a mass shooting in Las Vegas. I found out quickly that it had happened at an outdoor concert downtown on the famous "Strip".
My younger brother works for a company that does the technical rigging for lighting and scaffolding for just such events in that area.
I picked up my phone and I sent a single text: "you alright?"
A short time later when my brother awoke and read my text he replied: "I'm good; I was working a different event further down the strip"
As simple as the exchange of texts may seem, the fact is that I was checking to see if he was alive...for real. This is what it's like to have it hit pretty close to home. It was just a matter of time.
I thought about how my brother and his young daughter now live in the community that just experienced one of the worst mass shootings on record. How will things change for them? What sort of new security measures will be taken to assure that this can't happen again? Will there be new legislation to strengthen gun regulation?
The sound from the hundreds of shots that were fired from the 32nd floor of a Tropicana Street hotel will echo through the streets for years to come. The only sound to rival the horrors of yet another automatic weapon used to commit mass murder is the sound of deafening silence coming from the White House and the Halls of Congress.
The issue is that many legislators in the House and Senate, members of the Administration, the Judiciary, powerful lobbying groups and other parties with converging interests would like you to believe that gun control is a "wicked problem".
After reading the selected chapter from Wicked Problems and Social Complexity (Conklin, 2005), I began to see how the political spin on the issue of gun control is meant to make the problem seem intractable and that powerful forces are at work to create the appearance of social and technical complexity. It is held that this complexity makes any reasonable attempt to solve problem likely to have a negative impact on something else of equal or greater concern. Talking points are aimed at creating confusion, ambiguity, and equally distributed blame across many social influences. The ultimate goal of these efforts appears to be for profit and political expedience.
 The truth is, gun control is not a wicked problem at all. There is nothing intractable or technically complex about sensible firearm regulations and the only negative impact will be on the bottom line of a gun manufacturer's profit and loss report and on the reelection campaign coffers of the many unscrupulous lawmakers who enable these massacres through inaction and willful ignorance.

Refernces:

Conklin, J.E. (2005). Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. 

 

  Rittel & Weber, (1973). Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning