Tucson Shooting

Our thoughts and prayers go out to those victims and families of today's shootings in Tucson.

Today's tragedy in Tucson underscores by its rarity a fundamental strength of institutions in the US that support stability and work toward containing violence.

Contemporary to the shooting in Arizona, Africa presents the alternative case of violence centered societies with institutions that have evolved to incentivize violence - both random and predatory.

Darfur, the Ivory Coast and Nigeria present alternative frameworks for use and containment of violence in the political arena. The current stalemate in Ivory Coast is the most recent example and this NPR broadcast makes an all to common and regretable observation:

In Ivory Coast, the man who is widely believed to have won last month's presidential election is under UN guard at a city hotel. The man who is widely believed to have lost the election refuses to step down and retains control of the army. It's a political tinderbox that has sparked violence and reports of death squads.


The gunman that struck Tucson today, in contrast to the Ivory Coast experience of death squads, represents a violence that is individual, unorganized and notable as I argue for its relative unique nature in our society. In contrast to the endemic and organized violence in the natural state orders, our open access order limits the opportunity for this opportunitic and predatory violence.

Today underscores perhaps the most important and positive institution that the state brings to society - security. This security is manifest in both formal and informal institutions and that state by maintaining a monopoly on legitimate use of violence and force enculcates a sense of limitation for the acceptable application of violence.

Imagine what would happen in natural state orders upon the attack on a popular politician and death of a respected judge. We can think of India, Venezuela, Indonesia and the fears for Sudan next week among all to many cases of rioting, competing death squads and overwhelming violence.

Contrast that with the reaction in Tucson today.