Miss Manners: Etiquette lapse can lead to violence

DEAR MISS MANNERS: How long after a tragedy, such as the shootings in Aurora, Colo., is it appropriate to begin a discussion on the root causes and preventive actions to be taken?

Just as happened in Tucson, time cools the passions until the public forgets about it. This is more important than holding your pinkie out when drinking tea.

GENTLE READER: It seems to Miss Manners that such discussions always begin immediately, often before it is known exactly what happened or who did it. Sense, as well as taste, would suggest that the reaction of shock and sympathy should not …

DEAR MISS MANNERS: How long after a tragedy, such as the shootings in Aurora, Colo., is it appropriate to begin a discussion on the root causes and preventive actions to be taken?

Just as happened in Tucson, time cools the passions until the public forgets about it. This is more important than holding your pinkie out when drinking tea.

GENTLE READER: It seems to Miss Manners that such discussions always begin immediately, often before it is known exactly what happened or who did it. Sense, as well as taste, would suggest that the reaction of shock and sympathy should not be augmented with analyses and cures until the basic facts are established.

But surely what concerns you is that after everyone has voiced already-fixed opinions about gun control and mental health, and agreed that the event is “a wake-up call,” the public dozes off until the next alarm.

Not everybody has forgotten. Not the bereaved, no matter how often they are urged to “move beyond” it. And not those who are professionally or personally dedicated to studying human behavior in the hope of anticipating, if not restraining, its worst manifestations.

What you notice is that a particularly horrific tragedy becomes less the topic of general talk as smaller, yet fresher examples of problematic behavior appear. Then it is most often cited, as you did the Tucson shootings, to show that nothing has changed.

Yet we keep hoping, and we keep studying behavior and trying to keep it within safe bounds.

Etiquette is a major force in this, you will be amazed to hear. An astonishing number of violent acts develop from transgressions of etiquette. Just the other day, Miss Manners read of a murder that was the eventual result after two strangers traded insults because one of them had broken into a line at the grocery store. Violence on the road not uncommonly follows one car cutting off another. And a typical explanation in gang warfare attempts to justify crime as a legitimate response to being “disrespected.”