Hate for Hates Sake

In the wake of the horrific event in Las Vegas this week, I found of few nuggets of wisdom, truth and looked within.

First off I must say, Las Vegas Metro Police Department and their public safety partners did an excellent job managing this enormous crime scene. They were better than textbook and credit should go to the Sheriff directly and those managing the incident in its infancy. Amazingly brave, solid and steady work by those heroes. 

Here in Hollister we have a large public gathering once or twice a year. We plan, discuss, go over possible scenario’s and train almost all year for the rally. It is a huge undvertaking by our staff to handle this event and keep it as safe as we possibly can. I am barely able sleep for the week prior and during the rally. I age like 6 years each rally I work as the Chief (last year was my 5th rally as Chief). In Las Vegas, a large event, is a Sunday in autumn....perspective.....

I often talk about my love for people, community and always struggling and trying to be a good example. I try to see the good in every person, situation and to truly learn from the experience. 

With what happened on October 1st in Las Vegas. I don’t have much of anything. We did see tremendous acts of heroism. We saw destruction. We saw our worst fears. We saw death.

Ambassador Sarek in Star Trek IV surmised it was difficult to come up with an answer if one did not understand what the question was.

I believe we are there. We are seeing these atrocities and terrible things that are occurring all over the world. We ask ourselves why, but we don’t know the answer because we’ve never asked the right questions.

Questions like causality. How do we come up with answers if we do not know what causes people to do these things. Is it ideology? is it because we listen to heavy-metal music? Is it because we have been desensitized as a nation and really as human beings in general because we’ve allowed violence to permeate our lives through video games,the media, through movies, through books and other sources? In the last 25 or 30 years what breakthroughs have we made in mental health? What have we done for these folks that suffer so long hard? How much funding is there for the study and treatment for folks with mental health problems? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I do know that we are suffering. Our hearts are hurting and many families out there tonight are in a state of unrest because they’re missing their loved one(s). 

We must study Causes. We must ask the right questions. We must be smarter than a problem. That is the battle and the war we must wage.

The low hanging fruit in this is of course guns. Many folks will argue that if guns were not there then this tragedy would’ve not of occurred. That’s correct, the person in Las Vegas use firearms to commit these horrific acts. I would ask what about IED’s? what about Timothy McVeigh using fertilizer? What about the knife attacks in 2014 in China that left 29 dead and over 130 injured. How about a group of men wielding box cutters that together took down four airliners, killing 3000+ people. Moral to the story is, killers will always find a way. 

Endless possibilities; It’s about motive, it’s about hate, it’s about ideology, it’s about mental illness. it’s about a lot of things.

 I think, like Aristotle said “true knowledge begins when you realize you know absolutely nothing.” We actually do not know much about causality in this arena. If we did, we could start addressing the problem. 

I’m not gonna say that instrumentation in these attacks doesn’t matter. Firearms, knives, fertilizer and other materials for IED’s were used in attacks in recent years. To me the important question is “How did we arrive here?”

Once again we grieve for the losses. We pray for the victims, the families and friends. We pray that someday we can make sense of this and reduce or eliminate these acts of violence. 

I hope I live long enough to see the day that those in my chosen career are no longer needed in the world. I hope we can live in peace someday. But for now I’ll stay prepared, I’ll be ready, I’ll stay vigilant, train more heroes and WE will run towards the threat, towards gunfire every single time.

Be good to each other,

Chief