This pretty much refutes the headline .
It’s a false dichotomy to begin with, but if stupidity’s biggest issue is that evil can manipulate it, clearly it’s the preeence of evil that’s a bigger threat than the presence of stupidity.
This could probably be refined a bit; you're on the right track but the logic doesn't work.
I think we can all agree school shooters are Evil. They almost always commit suicide to avoid arrest. Damage to others is extensive, damage to self is mortal, and yet they go through with both planning and execution.
Mitigating all risk of collateral damage in the commission of an evil act is not a requisite for Evil. If anything, acceptance of harm to self makes it more evil.
> "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
Your boy Carlo has clearly never been through an acrimonious divorce.
There is a question where evil ends and insanity begins. Totally self-destructive actions such as this strike me as insane.
It would be a different story if the school shooter wanted to establish his own gang rule by sheer terror (say, in a country where law enforcement is weak or absent, e.g. Haiti). That would be textbook evil.
That being said, stupidity is still far more common than evil, so the damage done by the stupid-but-not-evil probably outweighs whatever damage mitigation we experience from the stupidity of evil people. (And it’s worth noting that many if not most evil people are quite stupid, at least in terms of common criminals.)
That gets nebulous though. Even a murderous schizophrenic isn't evil. Failed military offensives that end in your execution aren't the product of insanity. Firefighters aren't insane for running into burning buildings. Self-destructive actions can be rationalized. Whether you agree with the rationale is not the point.
Like terrorism, school shootings are intentional and initiated to do as much damage to others as possible, usually in response to some personal grievance. There's always a shitty "reason" for it.
Insanity--real insanity--would be more like sending a pipe bomb to a random daycare center for absolutely no reason whatsoever. There is zero predictability. Nobody did anything to "deserve" it.
I've seen some kids try to play at "insanity" by doing shit to people for no apparent reason (and being all "tee-hee I'm so insane lmao #murder"), but when you dig into forensics you find they researched the eventual victim and only engaged once they say or do something objectionable (the new face of "hate crime," perpetrated by the types most likely to call others out for the same). This is not insanity, it's very-calculated evil.
Most of the school shooters aren't schizophrenic. They usually aren't complaining about hearing voices or hallucinating. When the media claims they had a "history of mental illness" it usually means mild to moderate depression, anxiety, ADHD, things of that nature.
Some of them will claim to have a political or ideological cause but most of the time their manifesto (if they bother to write one) consists of something like "Everything is meaningless bullshit and I am going to prove it by killing a bunch of random people for no reason".
I think this comes down to motivation. Are they causing losses to other people just because they didn't think, or miscalculated? That's being stupid.
Or are they causing losses to other people because of spite? That is, they may not gain in any material way, but they may gain in satisfaction. That's being evil.
I’m not sure I would buy the argument for the inverse.
They said “guns are made for killing people” which is absolutely a true statement, many guns are specifically made for killing people.
As a consequence guns can be used as a deterrence as well. Since their primary purpose is to cause great harm, people that value their lives and not commit stupid actions.
Stupid is irrational.
I find it hard to discuss stupidity and evil without mentioning Donald Trump, who is well endowed in both. Both his malice and his stupidity have done a lot of damage, but there have also been times when his malice was thwarted by his stupidity.
Especially in matters of economics, the most dangerous people seem to be the most educated. They can’t leave it alone and perpetually try to refactor society for some non-economic purpose. When you finally get “an idiot” who removes the boot of the government, unsurprisingly (to everyone except the economists), the result is economic growth.