According to one of those Facebook apps, these are the words I use the most on Facebook:
I can’t even begin to put together a sentence from that.
No comments on What does this mean?
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The dead weren’t even finished dying in Las Vegas before the left swooped down to feed on gun control politics.
So rather than allow even one day to reflect and mourn, rather than allow us to consider the heroism of the survivors and first responders in that Las Vegas nightmare, politics saw an opportunity and took it immediately.
But the murderous retired accountant Stephen Paddock, 64, the lone gunman, wasn’t all that impulsive.
Paddock took days to plan. He was meticulous, arranging a 23-gun arsenal — some guns fully and illegally automatic — in his room on the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
He worked out his fields of fire, even set up cameras to alert him to police. He stocked up on thousands of rounds, and authorities said he also had components used to make bombs in his home and his car.
And then, when he was ready, he unleashed hell, shooting down on thousands of innocents at that Sunday night country music concert across the way.
At least 59 are dead now, more than 500 injured.
As of this writing — days after his killing spree —authorities could not offer a motive. This is especially odd, because in such cases motives are usually released within hours; the shooter was a madman, or he had political associations and resentments forming the latticework of motive.
But not with this one, not with Paddock.
Yet even when the preliminary count of the dead was still in the 20s, as loved ones desperately tried to find the missing, listening to the terrible sound of cellphones ringing with no answer, the politicians made their moves.
Hillary Clinton, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, pundits by the deplorable basketful and others seized the moment to press for advantage.
This includes you, Mark Pocan, scumbag.
The universal and hateful hot take came from Hayley Geftman-Gold, CBS vice president and legal counsel, on Facebook.
At least she was honest in her tribalism, upfront about it, using “Repugs” for Republicans and blaming them for not supporting blanket gun-control legislation.
What’s not legitimate was her lack of sympathy for the dead.
“I’m actually not even sympathetic bc [because] country music fans often are Republican gun toters,” Geftman-Gold wrote. Later, she was fired.
And in the morning following the massacre, even as victims lay dying in hospitals, Clinton was busy virtue-signaling on Twitter.
“The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots,” tweeted Hillary Clinton, still seeking relevancy. “Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRAwants to make it easier to get.”
She must have been thinking of a Jason Bourne movie, of silencers whispering death, a sound just a bit louder than the munching of popcorn.
But Hollywood isn’t reality. Jason Bourne movies are not proper foundation for policy.
There is Republican-backed legislation to make suppressors for long guns easier to obtain — still requiring governmental approval and fees.
A suppressor doesn’t make a gun silent like the weapon of a Hollywood assassin. The Washington Post reported a suppressor would reduce the sound of an AR-15 round to that of “a gunshot or jackhammer.” There’s nothing silent about a jackhammer.
Should we have more debate? Certainly. Let’s have it. There are more guns and more gun crimes in America than any other place in the world.
But let’s not forget that most killings aren’t committed by some lone sniper without apparent motive. The killings happen on the streets of big cities like Chicago, a city of strict gun control, where street gangs continue their slaughter and City Hall is powerless to stop them.
And America is numb to what happens in Chicago.
There are guns in the suburbs and in rural areas, and yet the suburbs aren’t killing fields. So if we’re going to have another gun debate, can’t we at least discuss culture, too?
And, can’t we wonder about what pathology drives so many mass shootings in the past few years?
Blaming the NRA is good politics for the left. It helps with fundraising, stokes outrage and helps herd voters into tribal camps. But is it possible that it’s incomplete, like blaming airplanes for the 9-11 terrorist attacks?
There may be something in our culture that is wrong and sick and festering. And recent mass shootings may be a symptom of larger cultural illness.
We know that we’re become increasingly nihilistic, and isolated from one another on our electronic devices. We know we’re divided into politically warring tribes, as the political center crumbles, as the Washington establishment holds desperately to power.
We know that attendance continues to drop at traditional centers of worship. And even so, the political/cultural elites who frame our gun and other debates often mock the remaining faithful as “religious fanatics.”
As America abandons religion for entertainment, we consume unprecedented amounts of pharmaceuticals, from opioids to mood altering drugs, to mask our emotional and mental pain.
Aren’t you curious as to how this impacts culture?
Even so, when the shooting began in the Mandalay Bay massacre, as the country music crowd stampeded in fear, as people died, Americans selflessly helped each other, comforted each other, risking and giving their own lives to save each other.
If only we’d been allowed a day or two to mourn, to reflect on the goodness even in the midst of the horror, before the politics swooped in.
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You had better get on board for the number one song today in 1970:
The number one song today in 1973:
Britain’s number one album tonight in 1984 was David Bowie’s “Tonight”:
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The number one album today in 2002 was “Elvis Presley’s Number One Hits,” despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that Presley had been dead for 25 years:
Strangely, “Elvis Presley’s Number One Hits” didn’t include this number one hit:
Just two birthdays of note, and they were on the same day: Kevin Cronin of REO Speedwagon …
… was born the same day as David Hidalgo of Los Lobos:
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In the Facebook Friends of Best of the Web Today group, Steve Aunan asks:
When are we going to pass common sense mass media reform? Despite repeated warnings by psychiatrists and criminal justice experts to avoid sensational reporting, American journalists behave like Pavlov’s dog every time a mass shooting occurs. If our Democracy is to survive the rampant spread of Fake News and Constitutional illiteracy, America needs sensible lawmakers to enact the following regulations:
* common sense restrictions on the kinds of stories the mass media can publish
* enhanced background checks on J-school grads
* renewable permits on journalism licenses, subject to proof of competency by the permitting authority
* a mass buyout program to take irresponsible journalists off the street
* a central database of journalists to track psychotropic drug prescriptions and domestic abuse allegationsThe First Amendment guarantees freedom of the press, but the Founders never imagined that journalists would have Internet-connected cellphone cameras and instantaneous worldwide distribution of sensational – and often false – reporting.
Anyone who objects to these sensible reforms is both misguided about, and intolerant of, the Democratic principles that this country was built on.
The Internet? Cellphones? For that matter, the First Amendment was created well before radio, TV and magazines existed. Perhaps the First Amendment should only apply to newspapers.
Additionally, there should be limits on how many media outlets are permitted in one market, as well as how many people are allowed to blog, and how many comments anyone should be allowed to post. How many opinions do you really need?
As a 30-year journalist educated at a world-class university I certainly believe I am better qualified than some blogger somewhere to report about and comment upon the news. Allowing untrained professionals (who may or may not know much about English grammar, let alone the five Ws and one H) to report on the news, let alone to express opinions about the news, is potentially dangerous to the public. The public must be protected from the menace of untrained journalism.
Hopefully by now readers realize that what you’ve read up to here is as valid a proposal as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. And proposals to curb gun violence by abridging our Second Amendment rights make as much sense as fixing some social ill by abridging our First Amendment rights.
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Kevin D. Williamson‘s observations could apply to nearly any politician-created crisis:
In a podcast the day after the massacre in Las Vegas, Michael Graham asked me what supporters of the Second Amendment ought to do in reaction to such horrifying events. My answer at the time was: nothing. And nothing that has transpired since then has shown me cause to modify that position. It is in the nature of reactionaries to react, but very often the right course of action is inaction.
To my friend Michael, that’s cold-fish stuff. What’s needed, he argued, is passion: an emotional discharge in the service of a proactive agenda. While bookish types such as myself are mustering evidence and reason behind a dispassionate analysis of the facts, he argued, the gun-grabbers and other demagogues are getting the rubes all riled up (I am rephrasing) to do . . . something. “We have to do something!” he insisted.
Of course his argument is not without some merit, especially if you are running for office. (Consider who is president of these United States in anno Domini 2017.) Passion is helpful if you are trying to animate a crowd, either to vote for you or to tune in to your radio program or television show. Consider how fond Rush Limbaugh is of the word “passion,” which he describes as the essential key to success. He is not wrong about that: The love of the thing itself is necessary and irreplaceable for the development of any talent or enterprise. Who doubts that if Rush Limbaugh would give Winslow Homer a run for his money if his passion were watercolor instead of broadcasting, or that LeBron James would be a master cordwainer if his passion were making shoes instead of making shots?
But our passions can run away with us, especially in politics. Politics is not about policy: Politics is about tribe. Turn on Thom Hartmann’s radio program some time and, if you can stomach two minutes of it, you’ll understand what politics really is for many people: a license to hate. The indulgence of hatred is, for a certain kind of person — not an uncommon type, either — extraordinarily pleasurable, as is the expression of outrage, disgust, and indignation. You probably have seen this, in someone else or in yourself: In the course of detailing some outrage or act of buffoonery, one lists each detail, building up to a crescendo, and then — the smile. A big, wide smile of serene satisfaction announcing that the day’s outrage has been duly and deeply savored.
Politicians, and their media minions, have good reason to keep us stirred up, to keep our passions in a state of constant excitation. If we stopped and thought about things for a minute, we’d tar and feather the lot of them.
The exercise of the emotions is enjoyable in the same way as the exercise of the muscles, and probably for the same reason. That is what makes drama so engaging. To Aristotle we owe the idea of drama as catharsis, a word we use to mean a kind of transformative release. The Greek word was used to denote the pruning of trees or the clearing of land for cultivation, and hence was applied metaphorically in Aristotle’s time to a medical procedure: purgation, or therapeutic evacuation. As Aristotle understood catharsis, theater was a kind of emotional laxative. And there is a whiff of castor oil around Broadway. The idea survives into earthy modern English, in which a person who is having an emotional outburst is described as “losing his” — you know.
Passion is what drives us to “do something,” exclamation point implied. It is also what causes us to misunderstand politics as a contest between white hats and black hats: Think of how much of our political discourse is dedicated to explaining the other side as some sort of conspiracy, with the Right talking about “Alinskyites” and “Cloward-Piven,” the Left whispering darkly about the Koch brothers or, this week, NRA money lining the pockets of politicians.
The National Rifle Association is in fact barely among the top 500 political contributors (it is No. 460 at the moment) the organization and its affiliates having made barely $1 million in contributions in the 2016 cycle. Never mind the numbers — we have passion to express!
Passion makes you stupid.
It also makes you president. (Those are not mutually exclusive.)
We could do with a good deal less passion in our public life. The alt-right knuckleheads rallied behind Donald Trump not for reasons having to do with policy — they have no serious policy agenda at all — but because he gives voice to their passion, that passion being the desire to shock and annoy the politically correct busybodies and transnational economic elites by whom they feel condescended to. Trump was sworn in as president in January; it is October, and it already is obvious that he is as tired of the job as the country is of him and his schoolboy antics. “He fights!” they said. And, indeed, he has spent a great deal of time taking swings at cable-news figures, who enjoy the attention, and at Jeff Bezos, who doesn’t notice. By “He fights!” they mean he runs his mouth and tweets angry dopey things. And he does. Does he do anything else? Can he?
Do we really want to find out?
The NRA, which to its great discredit got into bed with Trump early and enthusiastically, ought to be concerned about his passion, which is a fickle thing. Trump was a gun-control advocate to the left of Hillary Rodham Clinton until shortly before he decided to run for president as a Republican. He was a supporter of a ban on so-called assault weapons, an advocate of waiting periods, and a critic of Republicans who “walk the NRA line.” Some of his associates already are worrying that Trump will revert to his old Manhattan Democrat ways on the question, because Trump’s passion is seeking the approval of crowds, especially the small crowd that edits the New York Times. Cutting a deal with his new best friends, Chuck and Nancy, in the aftermath of Las Vegas, might be appealing to that passion, especially if he could do so in some low-cost way such as opposing the NRA-supported Hearing Protection Act, which would make it easier to buy noise suppressors for firearms.
The passionate man is an unreliable man. Trump has been on both sides of gun control, abortion (he famously took five different positions on the question in three days), the Afghanistan war, Syria, the Electoral College, NATO, Beijing’s purported currency manipulation, tax reform, single-payer health care, the Export-Import Bank, and whether the president should play golf, among other things. (He finally got it right on golf.) Emotions are running high at the moment, and Trump is a captive of what Marcus Aurelius called “the animal soul,” writing in his Meditations:
To have sensible impressions exciting imaginations, is common to us with the cattle. To be moved, like puppets, by appetites and passions, is common to us with the wild beasts, with the most effeminate wretches, Phalaris, and Nero, with atheists, and with traitors to their country. If these things, then, are common to the lowest and most odious characters, this must remain as peculiar to the good man; to have the intellectual part governing and directing him in all the occurring offices of life.
… Passion is the enemy of good government — and the enemy of the civil peace, too. Good government is boring government: regular, orderly, predictable. To govern dispassionately requires a measure of mental serenity, which is hard to come by while Americans are still bleeding in Las Vegas. The easiest and surest way to equanimity is to let time pass. And, in the meantime, just do — nothing.
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Unlike the vast majority of pundits, politicians, and late-night celebrity talk show hosts who vaguely implore Republicans to “do something,” Nick Kristof of The New York Times has taken the time to offer eight ideas he believes would help alleviate mass shootings. In fact, the headline of the article reads “Preventing Mass Shootings Like the Vegas Strip Attack.” Alas, the column doesn’t fulfill its promise, though it is useful in illustrating the problem Democrats face in the gun-control debate.
The column gets off to an inauspicious start when Kristof points to Australia’s confiscation of guns as a model for policy — which is, of course, a non-starter in a nation with more than 300 million firearms and an individual right to own them. Every time a pundit mentions Australian gun policy he is, in essence, conceding that confiscation is the ideal we should be working towards. The success of the Australian program is highly debatable, and anyone who fails to mention that the United States saw similar drops in gun crimes and homicides during the same timeframe — despite a big spike in gun ownership — is already suspect.
In any event, Kristof has eight additional ideas for us.
“1 – Impose universal background checks for anyone buying a gun. Four out of five Americans support this measure, to prevent criminals or terrorists from obtaining guns.”
This is tantamount to pleading for the existing ban on “machine guns” or “automatic weapons.” In 1993, Bill Clinton created the National Instant Background Check System. Since then, although there are some exemptions, the vast majority of gun owners go through a background check. There were 27,538,673 of them in 2016 alone (pdf). The reason Kristof throws in the word “universal,” I assume, is that he believes there are “loopholes” in this policy at gun shows and interstate purchases.
Yet, as my colleague Sean Davis has explained:
If you purchase a firearm from a federal firearms licensee (FFL) regardless of the location of the transaction — a gun store, a gun show, a gun dealer’s car trunk, etc. — that FFL must confirm that you are legally allowed to purchase that gun. That means the FFL must either run a background check on you via the federal NICS database, or confirm that you have passed a background check by examining your state-issued concealed carry permit or your government-issued purchase permit. There are zero exceptions to this federal requirement.
What’s more, Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock did not, as far as we know (and these things can change as reporting is ongoing), have a criminal record. According to numerous reports, he obtained all his firearms legally and without raising any red flags while passing numerous background checks. In fact, most of the mass shooters who have terrorized Americans in recent years didn’t have any criminal records. Most could pass background checks, and did. Some were radicalized and known to the FBI. Most were mentally anguished rather than criminally inclined, which is an exceptionally difficult thing to define, predict, or control.
It is true that occasionally the system failed. This happened in the case of Dylann Roof, who should have been stopped by a background check, but a breakdown in “paperwork and communication between a federal background check worker and state law enforcement” allowed him to purchase a handgun. Make the system we have better.
“2. Impose a minimum age limit of 21 on gun purchases. This is already the law for handgun purchases in many states, and it mirrors the law on buying alcohol.”
Well, some of us believe it’s absurd that 18-year-olds can support themselves, have families, and join the military, but are prohibited from buying a beer. But that’s another debate. Many states already have age 21 limits on purchasing guns. Not that it really matters. The vast majority of the mass shooters over the past decade were over 21. Most of them were well over 21.
The ones that weren’t, like Adam Lanza, illegally obtained their guns from legal owners. Lanza stole his guns from his mother, who had legally registered every one of them. I couldn’t find a single major mass shooting (this is typically defined as four or more people killed or injured by gunfire, which includes many criminal events that most people would not associate with what happened in Las Vegas, but that’s another story) who had legally purchased weapons as an 18- to 20-year-old. It seems dubious to suggest that passing such a law would do anything to “prevent” mass shootings.
“3. Enforce a ban on possession of guns by anyone subject to a domestic violence protection order. This is a moment when people are upset and prone to violence against their exes.”
Taking someone’s rights away because he or she is “upset” or potentially violent might work in the “Minority Report” but it is likely unconstitutional here in the real world. In fact, in some ways, a case about just this topic sparked the idea that grew into the Hellercase and ended up properly codifying the Second Amendment as an individual right.
It came in 1998, when a doctor named Timothy Joe Emerson was in the midst of an acrimonious divorce and his wife requested a restraining order against him from a Texas court. At the time, Emerson had been collecting guns for years and legally owned around 30 firearms. What Emerson didn’t know was that federal law at the time forbade anyone under a domestic restraining order from possessing firearms. He was arrested. Emerson’s court-appointed lawyer argued that without any judicial finding that his client posed a danger to his wife, Emerson still had a constitutional right to own a gun. And he won. It was the Emerson decision that sparked a number of libertarian think tank legal scholars to challenge DC gun laws.
“4. Limit gun purchases by any one person to no more than, say, two a month, and tighten rules on straw purchasers who buy for criminals. Make serial numbers harder to remove.”
This is like limiting soda sizes. The idea that shooters will be stopped because they can only purchase two guns per month seems dubious considering many of these shootings have been meticulously planned, none more, it seems, than Paddock’s mass murder in Vegas. There is also the problem of arbitrarily limiting citizens from practicing their constitutional rights. This would be like arguing that we should limit columnists to practicing their freedom of speech to only two columns a week because words are mightier than the sword.
“5. Adopt microstamping of cartridges so that they can be traced to the gun that fired them, useful for solving gun crimes.”
To my understanding, every mass shooting incident has been solved. How this regulation would prevent more is unclear. The rest of Kristof’s suggestions focus on gun safety measures that have nothing to do with mass shootings.
“6. Invest in ‘smart gun’ purchases by police departments or the U.S. military, to promote their use. Such guns require a PIN or can only be fired when near a particular bracelet or other device, so that children cannot misuse them and they are less vulnerable to theft. The gun industry made a childproof gun in the 1800’s but now resists smart guns.”
This suggesting is irrelevant on a number of levels. For one, smart guns would do little or nothing to “prevent” most mass shootings. Second, no major Second Amendment advocacy group or politician I know of opposes the production or promotion of “smart guns” — they oppose the state compelling people to use them. There are a few other problems: They don’t work yet. They are impractical. They are intrusive to law-abiding gun owners.
“7. Require safe storage, to reduce theft, suicide and accidents by children.”
It’s unclear how these requirements would “prevent” mass shootings, but often the proposed safe storage legislation makes it virtually impossible for gun owners to protect themselves or their family. Regardless, many states already have such laws and every state already has laws covering negligent behavior regarding children.
There is no correlation between gun ownership and suicide rates.
“8. Invest in research to see what interventions will be more effective in reducing gun deaths. We know, for example, that alcohol and guns don’t mix, but we don’t know precisely what laws would be most effective in reducing the resulting toll. Similar investments in reducing other kinds of accidental deaths have been very effective.”
Again, there is no evidence that mass shootings are fueled by alcohol or substance abuse, but rather that they are fueled by mental illness and radicalism. There are already numerous studies regarding gun use and abuse, and one hopes others study the data, as well. But if Kristof is suggesting that the centers for Disease Control participate, the answer is that there is no reason to further politicize the agency. Because no matter how well-intentioned people try to be in this debate, that’s almost always the case. That includes Kristof’s column, which fails to offer a single idea short of confiscation that would stop mass shootings in the future.
Jim Geraghty has a suggestion:
When you express skepticism about the value, legality, or effectiveness about gun control proposals after a mass shooting, you’re often asked, “okay, smart guy, how would you prevent the next one?”
When you look at the more infamous mass shootings in recent years, you see a disturbing pattern.
“The threats seemed to be underneath the surface. They were not explicit,” she recalled. “And that was the difficulty that the police had. I would go to the police and to the counselors and to student affairs and everywhere else, and they would say, ‘There’s nothing explicit here. He’s not actually saying he’s going to kill someone.’ And my argument was he seemed so disturbed anyway that we needed to do something about this.”
In Aurora, Colorado: “When [the Aurora shooter’s] psychiatrist warned campus police at the University of Colorado how dangerous he was, they deactivated his college ID to prevent him passing through any locked doors.”
Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik told ABC News that campus police had to get involved at the college where [the shooter] once attended after a number of complaints.
“All I can tell you is that teachers and fellow students were concerned about his bizarre behavior in class to the point where some of him were physically afraid of him,” Dupnik said. “He was acting in very weird fashion to the point where they had several incidents with him to the point where law enforcement at Pima College got involved and they decided to expel him. And they did.”
In Isla Vista, California: “Last month, the 22-year-old wrote, his mother was so concerned about his well-being after seeing some of his videos on YouTube that she contacted mental-health officials, who dispatched sheriff’s deputies to check on him at his apartment in Isla Vista, an enclave near the University of California at Santa Barbara.”
The Sandy Hook shooter made unbelievably bloody and disturbing drawings. In case after case, we see fairly clear signals that the shooter is deeply troubled and in many cases is growing obsessed with violence.
A stunning number of school shooters since Columbine indicated an obsessive interest in that shooting. Fascinating and disturbing research by Mother Jones found that the shooting inspired “at least 74 plots or attacks across 30 states” and “in at least 14 cases, the Columbine copycats aimed to attack on the anniversary of the original massacre. Individuals in 13 cases indicated that their goal was to outdo the Columbine body count. In at least 10 cases, the suspects and attackers referred to the pair.”
We have all heard the slogan, “If you see something, say something.” Lots of people do say something; quite a few of the infamous mass shooters of recent years had already been reported to police for strange, threatening, or troubling behavior. Unfortunately, the police did not see sufficient reason to press charges or have the person placed in a mental institution.
What will stop the next mass shooting? The family, loved ones, peers and psychologists of the next shooter taking their disturbing or threatening behavior seriously, reporting it to the police, and the police taking it seriously.
Were there warning signs or strange behavior in the case of the Las Vegas shooter? Maybe.
Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock encouraged his girlfriend Marilou Danley to leave the country before his attack that left 58 people dead, her sisters told CNN affiliate in Australia 7 News.
The sisters, who spoke to 7 News exclusively, did not want to be identified by name and requested their faces be blurred.
“I know that she don’t know anything as well like us. She was sent away. She was away so that she will be not there to interfere with what he’s planning,” one of Danley’s sisters told 7 News from their home in Australia’s Gold Coast region.
“In that sense, I thank him for sparing my sister’s life,” she said, adding her sister was “really in love with Steve.”
The other sister said Danley, who arrived back in the US from the Philippines on Tuesday, “didn’t even know that she was going to the Philippines, until Steve said, ‘Marilou, I found you a cheap ticket to the Philippines.’”
Do people often urge their significant others to leave the country suddenly and out of the blue?
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The number one song today in 1959 …
… came from a German opera:
The number one British song today in 1961:
The number one British song today in 1974 came from the movie “The Exorcist”:
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The number one U.S. album today in 1974 was a collection of previous Beach Boys hits, “Endless Summer”:
The number one song today in 1991:
Birthdays begin with Carlos Mastrangelo, one of Dion’s Belmonts:
Richard Street of The Temptations …
… was born one year before Milwaukee’s own Steve Miller:
Brian Connolly of Sweet:
Brian Johnson of AC/DC:
Harold Faltermeyer:
Lee Thompson of Madness:
Dave Dederer of Presidents of the United States (though none of the band’s members have ever been president):
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In the wake of the Vegas mass shooting—the deadliest in U.S. history—anti-gun activists are out in force. “There can be no truce with the Second Amendment” reads a headline at The New Yorker. “How should we politicize mass shootings?” asks The New Republic. “Dear Dana Loesch, shut up” proclaims a piece at Refinery 29 name-checking a prominent spokeswoman for the National Rifle Association (NRA). Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, who recently made an appeal to maintain or even expand Obamacare, told his audience on Monday, “There are a lot of things we can do about [gun violence]. But we don’t.”
Who can blame them? Of course Second Amendment defenders (I’m one, despite my visceral unease around guns of any shape or size) say that this isn’t the time for an emotion-laden discussion of horrific violence. Shouldn’t we resist “the grotesque urge to immediately transform all human tragedies into a political agenda” before we even know what happened, I asked just yesterday. Seven years ago, in the wake of the shooting of Arizona Rep. Gabby Giffords and the instantaneous and erroneous linking of Sarah Palin’s bland go-get-em campaign rhetoric to the rampage of a deranged shooter who turned out to be an MSNBC fan, I sounded a similar note, arguing that the “the goddamn politicization of every goddamn —thing not even for a higher purpose or broader fight but for the cheapest moment-by-moment partisan advantage” was one of the major reasons that Americans increasingly hate politics and politicians.
I stand by all that. It’s wrong, I think, to immediately pivot to what are inevitably pushed as “common-sense” policy responses to gun attacks, such as banning “assault weapons” (a class of guns that doesn’t really exist, have been banned in the past with no impact on violence, and detract from other, arguably more effective regulations). Thoughts of tearing up the Constitution clearly come more from the heart than the head and should be resisted until the passions calm at least a little. If hard cases make bad law, then public tragedies make terrible policy, whether we’re talking about mass shootings, acts of terrorism, or celebrity drug overdoses.
Yet libertarians who believe in their arguments should also advance their case that strong protections for gun owners are a good thing even as we pay condolences to the dead and think about ways to minimize similar events. It’s not cold-blooded or Vulcan to point out that we remain in the midst of an unprecedented deceleration of violent crime and gun crime. Surely that has some connection to policies over the past quarter-century or so that have made it easier for a wide variety of people to legally own and carry guns.
“From 1993 to 2015, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older,” says the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its most recent comprehensive report (published last October, using data through 2015). Over the same period, rates for crimes using guns dropped from 7.3 per 1,000 people to 1.1 per 1,000 people. The homicide rate is down from 7.4 to 4.9. These are not simply good things, they are great things. They are the essential backdrop of all discussions about gun crime and mass shootings, even as we grieve the people killed nonsensically in Vegas.
By one count, seven of the 15 deadliest mass shootings have occurred in the 21st century alone, despite the fact that it’s not even two decades old yet. It is not clear at all whether mass shootings are actually more common than they used to be, although there is evidence that they are more deadly. Last June, after the mass shooting at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub, CNN published two charts showing mass shootings to date in 2016. Using an expansive definition that counted all incidents in which four or more people, including the original gunman, were wounded or killed, there had been 136 incidents as of June 21. Using a more restrictive definition that excluded domestic violence and gang incidents, there had been three shootings involving four or more casualties. Partly as a result of such wide parameters, the overall decline in gun violence has gone largely unacknowledged by many people, including Donald Trump, who delusionally campaigned as “the law-and-order candidate” who alone could reverse a non-existent increase in violent crime.
Which of course gets us precisely nowhere as we contemplate the dozens killed and the hundreds wounded on Sunday night in Vegas. Are there policies that might reduce the likelihood of such terrible acts without eviscerating not just constitutional rights but developments that have correlated with a much, much safer America? Perhaps, but they aren’t immediately obvious or pragmatic. As Jacob Sullum noted yesterday, most of the ideas pushed by anti-gun activists would have no conceivable impact on mass shooters such as Stephen Paddock. Raising the minimum age for gun purchases to 21, limiting the number or purchases allowed each month, and developing “smart gun” technology have nothing to do with what we know (so far anyway) about Vegas, or virtually any other mass shooting. And the policy prescriptions that might—such as barring individuals with serious, documented mental problems or convictions for domestic abuse—would not have snagged Paddock. Dreams of confiscating the more than 300 million guns in private hands, thus creating a country where only the police (who have their own problems with using firearms responsibly) would require the creation of a police state every bit as bad or worse than the ones implied by The Patriot Act and the nonsensical urge to rid the workplace of illegal immigrants. Gun-control proponents like to point to rigid controls put in place in Great Britain and Australia after mass shootings. But they fail to report that, as scholar Joyce Malcolm writes, “Strict gun laws in Great Britain and Australia haven’t made their people noticeably safer, nor have they prevented massacres. The two major countries held up as models for the U.S. don’t provide much evidence that strict gun laws will solve our problems.”
Denouncing those of us who counsel waiting until all the facts are in before implementing bold new policies whose real effects are often unintended is understandable but misguided (read this about Australia’s widely mischaracterized gun-buyback program). Jimmy Kimmel and others who agree with him mean it when they say things such as:
There are a lot of things we can do about [gun violence and mass shootings]. But we don’t. Which is interesting, because when someone with a beard attacks us, we tap phones, we invoke travel bans, we build walls. We take every possible precaution to make sure it doesn’t happen again. But when an American buys a gun and kills other Americans, then there’s nothing we can do about that. Because the Second Amendment. Our forefathers wanted us to have AK-47s, is the argument.”
Their anger and sadness, which is heartfelt and shared by everyone I’ve spoken with, is understandable but it misdirects them. Who exactly are the people clamoring for presumably fully automatic AK-47s, which are already virtually impossible for most people to own, in every home? That’s not the argument from the NRA and certainly not from me. And when you start to look at the policies Kimmel and people like him use to justify doing something now, the examples are plainly terrible. It’s not a good argument to say that since we are still overreacting to Muslims because of 9/11 and to Mexicans wanting to work in the United States, we should follow suit when it comes to mass shootings.
As a country and as individuals, we need to pay our respects to the dead and wounded in Vegas. But policy cannot be a form of therapy that will neither bind our wounds now nor make us safer in the future.
But don’t believe Gillespie. Read Leah Libresco:
Before I started researching gun deaths, gun-control policy used to frustrate me. I wished the National Rifle Association would stop blocking common-sense gun-control reforms such as banning assault weapons, restricting silencers, shrinking magazine sizes and all the other measures that could make guns less deadly.
Then, my colleagues and I at FiveThirtyEight spent three months analyzing all 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States, and I wound up frustrated in a whole new way. We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.
I researched the strictly tightened gun laws in Britain and Australia and concluded that they didn’t prove much about what America’s policy should be. Neither nation experienced drops in mass shootings or other gun related-crime that could be attributed to their buybacks and bans. Mass shootings were too rare in Australia for their absence after the buyback program to be clear evidence of progress. And in both Australia and Britain, the gun restrictions had an ambiguous effect on other gun-related crimes or deaths.
When I looked at the other oft-praised policies, I found out that no gun owner walks into the store to buy an “assault weapon.” It’s an invented classification that includes any semi-automatic that has two or more features, such as a bayonet mount, a rocket-propelled grenade-launcher mount, a folding stock or a pistol grip. But guns are modular, and any hobbyist can easily add these features at home, just as if they were snapping together Legos.
As for silencers — they deserve that name only in movies, where they reduce gunfire to a soft puick puick. In real life, silencers limit hearing damage for shooters but don’t make gunfire dangerously quiet. An AR-15 with a silencer is about as loud as a jackhammer. Magazine limits were a little more promising, but a practiced shooter could still change magazines so fast as to make the limit meaningless.
As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them. I couldn’t even answer my most desperate question: If I had a friend who had guns in his home and a history of suicide attempts, was there anything I could do that would help?
However, the next-largest set of gun deaths — 1 in 5 — were young men aged 15 to 34, killed in homicides. These men were most likely to die at the hands of other young men, often related to gang loyalties or other street violence. And the last notable group of similar deaths was the 1,700 women murdered per year, usually as the result of domestic violence. Far more people were killed in these ways than in mass-shooting incidents, but few of the popularly floated policies were tailored to serve them.
By the time we published our project, I didn’t believe in many of the interventions I’d heard politicians tout. I was still anti-gun, at least from the point of view of most gun owners, and I don’t want a gun in my home, as I think the risk outweighs the benefits. But I can’t endorse policies whose only selling point is that gun owners hate them. Policies that often seem as if they were drafted by people who have encountered guns only as a figure in a briefing book or an image on the news.
Inevitably someone will say that SOMETHING MUST BE DONE! regardless of whether or not that thing, or things, would prevent something like Sunday’s horror, or whether it would infringe on others’ constitutional rights. That is 100 percent wrong. Doing nothing is infinitely preferable to doing the wrong thing. And as Ben Franklin, my favorite Founding Father, put it, “Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
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Today in 1957, the sixth annual New Music Express poll named Elvis Presley the second most popular singer in Great Britain behind … Pat Boone. That seems as unlikely as, say, Boone’s recording a heavy metal album.
The number one British song today in 1962, coming to you via satellite:
Britain’s number one album today in 1969 was the Beatles’ “Abbey Road”:
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In the hours and days after an incident of horrific violence—whether it be a coordinated terror attack or a “lone wolf” style terror incident like the one in Las Vegas that is now the deadliest mass shooting in American history—there is a natural human reaction to wonder why.
ational minds, then, search for meaning, search for motive, search for something, anything that would explain the inexplicable. It is why the media and its audience alike obsess over the perpetrator, scouring his background and social media footprint for clues as to what either set him off or inspired his evil.
What rational minds can’t often comprehend, though, is that evil is its own inspiration. Evil is the reason. Evil is the motivation. There is nothing deeper, nothing more meaningful than that. In a broader sense, however, evil is the deepest meaning behind horrendous violence. It lives in the blackened soul of one who could commit horrendous violence.
Evil is the reason that a man would fire on innocent concertgoers. Evil is the reason a man would join in a plot to commit a more organized terror attack. It is often difficult for good people to believe (and even more difficult to accept) that there is true evil in the world; that some of our fellow human beings simply want to kill, want to hurt, want to inspire terror in the rest of us, but it’s true. Evil drives them, evil motivates them, and a desire to be known and remembered as an embodiment of ultimate evil is their ultimate aim.
Almost invariably losers in life, they yearn for death—and in it a sort of immortality that comes with being remembered as one of history’s greatest monsters. They could never be heroes in life, so in death (or in the death they bring), they are content to be villains. And the rest of humanity unwittingly plays into this delusion of grandeur, speaking of these villains in hushed tones—a sort of reverent fear: Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris. James Holmes. Adam Lanza. Dylann Roof.
And now Stephen Paddock. Humanity will unfortunately remember his name, not because he deserves it, but because his evil was so dark, the way it manifested itself so massive. In a perverse irony, we can’t seem to stop speaking the name of unspeakable evil.
We want to understand it, and understandably we want to know what makes it tick so that somehow we can deconstruct it and stop it. Really, though, there’s nothing to deconstruct. The only way to stop it is to recognize it for what it is: evil itself. We can attempt to classify it as terrorism, mental illness, even victimhood after a lifetime of bullying, but evil is always there in its heart, guiding its actions, offering the dual temptations of getting even with an unjust world and gaining immortality through extreme violence.
This is the reason. Nothing more, nothing less. Whether it be a coordinated terror attack or a “lone wolf” style terror incident, this is always what evil seeks: To strike back at a world that it feels has wronged it and to be remembered forever as the force that struck the greatest blow.
That is the motivation, and the motivation is evil. Evil is the reason, evil is the why that the rest of humanity demands to know, but can’t always accept. This is why we search not for deeper meaning but instead settle on the superficial: A bad personal life, a political cause, easy access to guns. Yet personal lives are never perfect, politics are always acrimonious, and guns are mere tools of evil (just as they can be tools of good in the hands of those who rush in to stop evil whenever it strikes).
On a deeper level, we too are tools of evil if we spend our time denying it and, instead of confronting it, devolve into partisan bickering over what amount to trivialities. That’s precisely what evil wants: Good people fighting one another instead of uniting against a common enemy.
That enemy is evil–whether it lies in the heart of a terrorist network or a sad, lonely killer in Las Vegas–and the only way it can ever really be stopped is if good starts recognizing it for what it is.
The sophisticates, who believe in nothing bigger than themselves, will deny this truth. They are wrong.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 
