The Aurora shooting

This without a doubt is a tragic event, and no doubt one that'll kick up a lot of emotions.

But before emotions get the better of us, lets step back a moment and really take a look at what happened. I've seen many people arguing that "assault weapons" should be banned. But would stricter gun laws have prevented this? This is a guy who had his apartment booby trapped with homemade bombs. He was set on killing and hurting as many people as he could regardless of the method. Just because guns are banned doesn't mean rampages don't happen. In Japan, people can't own guns the same way they can in the U.S. and yet instead they have people going on rampages with a knife. In Akihabara one guy stabbed and killed 7 people. Another Japanese knife rampage saw a guy get on a bus and stab 12 students. In 2001, in Santa Barbara California, David Attias drove his car into a group of people and killed 4.

There is something going on here far beyond gun ownership. The real issue isn't gun control, but why this happened to begin with. James Holmes is clearly a disturbed individual. And that is where the focus should be, on the perpetrator, not the means. What would drive someone to such acts. What would drive Holmes and Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech infamy) to carry out these acts?

To prevent these kinds of rampages, we need to deeper, much deeper than just gun control. Is there something broken in our culture? 

I don't have an answer for this one, but I can point out the direction where we need to go to answer the question of why did this happen and how can it be prevented. It's easy to become overcome with emotion in tragedies like this, but acting upon knee-jerk emotions won't prevent it from happening again. 

Unions, what are they good for?

Well unions brought us the weekend, 40 work weeks, and a whole host of other things.

But today Unions are catching a lot of heat, and a lot of blame, plus all this talk of "right to work", and during all this, people are forgetting their history. What was it like working without a Union. Well it isn't really history since it's still going on.

Years before the Manx Cat went to law school he worked as software tester for two of the big titans of the video game industry. There were no Unions for the Quality Assurance department. QA is a very strange monster, because of this fact.

Many companies will hire QA workers as temps because California requires several things to be provided for permanent employees. So typically a worker will get a job for about 9 or so months, then get laid off, take unemployment and reapply for their job again in three or so months. Sure at first it sounds like a sweet set up with 3 months "vacation" but on the other hand there's no guaruntee you'll get your job back.

The next issue is forget about upward mobility. You can also forget about getting a raise. You could get fired for next to no reason. When the project shipped, other departments like those (in the opinion of the Manx Cat) assholes in marketing get a bonus while we got the pink slip. If there were any issues with the project, the QA dept always, always got the blame. Essentially you were at the mercy of the management, which on more than one occasion was somewhat incompetent.

Most of all you are expendable, if they get rid of you there is always someone else there to replace you. Job security is really non-existant, you slack off too much, you get canned. You work super efficient and get the project out early, you still might get canned. The only hope for job security is getting into a different department.

It's almost like something out of a Charles Dicken's novel, just without ghosts of Christmas and beat downs by Pinkertons. On the plus side though the wages are good for what it is, one company paid $12 and hour, while another paid $11 and hour.

Nature of the beast? Maybe. But the beast would certainly be much different if there was a Union. If you think "right to work" is great, if you think Unions are bad, go work as a Quality Assurance tester in the video game industry, where you have no Unions to represent you.