This Is Actually a Story About Guns, Not Phones

[Content Note: Guns; shooting; violence.]

I am the multitasker to end all multitasking—but one thing I will not do is look at my phone while I am driving, or while I am crossing the street. Every near-miss traffic accident I've had in the past few years has been with someone looking at or talking on a mobile phone while driving. So I am fully on-board with awareness-raising around the dangers of being absorbed with mobile devices.

But I have a real problem with this story being used as an opening salvo to an SFGate article on that subject:

A man standing on a crowded Muni train pulls out a .45-caliber pistol.

He raises the gun, pointing it across the aisle, before tucking it back against his side. He draws it out several more times, once using the hand holding the gun to wipe his nose. Dozens of passengers stand and sit just feet away - but none reacts.

Their eyes, focused on smartphones and tablets, don't lift until the gunman fires a bullet into the back of a San Francisco State student getting off the train.

Investigators say this scene was captured by a Muni camera on Sept. 23, the night Nikhom Thephakaysone, 30, allegedly killed 20-year-old Justin Valdez in an apparently random encounter.

For police and prosecutors, the details of the case were troubling - they believe the suspect had been out "hunting" for a stranger to kill - but so too was the train passengers' collective inattention to imminent danger.

"These weren't concealed movements - the gun is very clear," said District Attorney George Gascón. "These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They're just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot. They're completely oblivious of their surroundings."

So, long before mobile devices were in common use, I commuted on the Chicago El train for 10 years. Back then, in the age of the dinosaurs, commuters weren't chit-chatting and engaging with one another and paying careful attention to their surroundings: They pretty much had their noses in books and newspapers and magazines, or giant laptops precariously balanced across their knees, composing emails they would definitely send once their techno-bricks were plugged back into a wall. People being absorbed by whatever on the train isn't a new thing.

And neither is people pretending to be absorbed by something in their hands to avoid getting involved in some sort of trouble on the train.

I'm not saying that the passengers in the above scenario weren't so genuinely absorbed in their devices that they didn't know what was going on near them. I have no idea. But what I do know is that there are a lot of people on public transportation (or anywhere) who react to the potential for some sort of violence, or any kind of uncomfortable or inappropriate behavior, or someone exhibiting signs of a medical emergency, by pretending they don't see it.

Maybe because they don't know what to do. Maybe because they don't want to get involved. Maybe because they're assholes. Maybe because they're scared.

Lots of women use headphones or mobile devices or books or whatever to try to avoid getting harassed, by making themselves look unavailable for approach. And lots of those women will look, to a casual observer, like they're totally engrossed in whatever while they're actually acutely aware of their surroundings. It's a survival skill.

So, yes, maybe the passengers on that train didn't even notice that there was a man with a gun in their midst. Or maybe they (or some of them) noticed—and were trying their best not to call attention to themselves so that the man with a gun wouldn't hurt them.

Because, really, what were they supposed to do, even if they noticed? What is an average person who gets on public transportation just hoping to get from A to B going to do when someone pulls out a gun? Charge him and try to wrestle the gun away? Scream and cause a scene where someone will almost certainly get hurt? Stare at their mobile and hope that the man with the gun gets off at the next stop, or hope that they can quietly get off at the next stop and phone police without alerting the man with the gun?

What are the great options available to the terrible people looking at their phones, standing in a closed space with a gunman?

Like I said, I'm all for awareness-raising about the dangers of absorption in mobile devices, but this is not a relevant example. This isn't a story about modern technology. This is a story about guns—and a society with ever more of them brought into public spaces by people intent on using them.