Beset on All Sides by the Iniquities of the Selfish
Anguish in every direction
Bad Gets Worse
Everything we’re learning in the aftermath of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, seemingly makes the situation worse.
For one thing, the husband of one of the slain teachers died of a heart attack in his grief; leaving their four children orphaned. I simply cannot imagine.
And the more we learn about the actual logistics of the shooting, the more rage-inducing it becomes. I sort of wondered aloud on Wednesday, “How did this guy even get into the school? Shouldn’t the door have been locked?” It turns out that the door was, in fact, unlocked, and contrary to initial reports, there was no police officer on campus.
As if that weren’t tragic enough, the more we learn about the response of law enforcement, there more I think a case could be made for negligent homicide. The Wall Street Journal has a lengthy piece (if you have an iPhone, you can read it here) about how parents arrived on the scene to find police essentially doing nothing, and then did more to restrain parents than they did to confront the murder. A representative for the Department of Public Safety later went on television and said, somewhat inexplicably, that officers didn’t enter the school for fear of being shot. I simply don’t know how these officers can ever look at themselves in the mirror ever again, or if they’d even have reflections. Given that it’s Texas, if I were these officers I would be concerned about being on the receiving end of some old fashioned vigilante mob justice. Thanks in part to the inaction of law enforcement, more teachers died defending these children than police. Just utterly incomprehensible.
Constitutional Pedantry
There’s so much going on that it’s been difficult for me to have fully formed thoughts on any one thing, so I’m just going to spout off, albeit shortly, about various things that have been bothering me the last few days.
First, whenever something happens involving guns, everyone suddenly becomes self-appointed constitutional experts who are utterly certain that we’ve been misinterpreting the Second Amendment all this time and that an individual right to bear arms does not exist.
Well, pish posh. I’ll admit, it’s not the most eloquent text by modern standards:
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
But it’s pretty straightforward: The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
People get hung up on various things like “It says ‘well-regulated’! That means we can regulate guns!” Even though that’s not what well-regulated means in this context — well-regulated at the time meant, essentially, disciplined and practiced.
Similarly, some people focus on the “militia” bit and take it to mean the Second Amendment was recognizing a right to be part of a militia. Which is true as far as it goes, but membership in a militia was not intended to be a prerequisite for keeping and bearing arms. Again, it says the right of the people. Not the right of the states, or the right of militias, but the right of the people. The Bill of Rights recognizes individual rights, and this was reiterated after the ratification of the 14th amendment to essentially say “no really, these rights apply to former slaves and their progeny as well, so don’t even think about trying to deny them these rights.” (Spoiler alert: A whole bunch of people thought about trying to deny them these rights.)
And finally, the argument that the Founders were “only referring to muskets” and “couldn’t possibly have envisioned modern weaponry” and therefore the Second Amendment is obsolete, is just wholly unpersuasive to me. For one thing, “arms” was generally defined as any readily available weapon at the time. It was not meant to mean “these kinds of weapons and only these kinds forevermore.” Moreover, that’s not a standard we apply to any other enumerated constitutional right. The Founders surely could not have envisioned radio, television, or the internet, either. But the First Amendment still applies to those media. No one would ever argue with a straight face that the First Amendment only applies to the printing press or that the Fourth Amendment doesn’t apply to automobiles. It doesn’t take a great deal of intellectual effort to comprehend how constitutional principles from the 18th century apply to modern life; yet some people are apparently determined to insist otherwise.
Beto O’Rourke: Unbelievable Schmuck
Texas Democrat and candidate for governor Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke pulled a political stunt on Wednesday where he crashed a press conference regarding the Uvalde shooting by incumbent governor Greg Abbott in which O’Rourke shouted from the audience various things about how Abbott and Republicans were responsible for the shooting. And I just…what’s the plan there, Beto? You’re already at a distinct disadvantage as a Democrat in Texas. And your plan to bring people to your side is to…interrupt a solemn event by shouting and generally being unpleasant? I mean I understand the urge to rile up your base — a lot of whom, it should be noted, don’t live in Texas — but just as an electoral matter, there aren’t enough Democrats in Texas for a candidate to win by pandering to the Left. It’s a strategy, I guess, just not a successful one.
Intentional Obtuseness
There’s been a weird scandal on social media the last few days of people objecting to describing the Uvalde shooter as “mentally ill.” We shouldn’t use that term, the argument goes, because it lumps the psychotic murderer in with people who suffer from, say, anxiety and depression. And I’m sorry but that just strikes me as incredibly silly. Thanks to my speech disorder — which I don’t think I’m even supposed to call a disorder anymore — I can be classified as “neurologically diverse.” Which is the currently accepted politically correct nomenclature for “my brain is weird.” But it’s also used to describe people with all manner of challenges, from dyslexia to ADHD to autism. It’s an umbrella term and shouldn’t be used interchangeably to refer to specific conditions. Similarly, describing someone as “mentally ill” is not to make a moral comparison to all other people with mental illness. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that an 18-year-old who murdered 19 children — as best we can tell, just because — has some sort of mental or psychological illness. I’m not aware of any actual diagnoses, but a normally functioning brain does not have such thoughts. But for people to take exception to that description, like “how dare you compare that monster to me an my anxiety” just strikes me as people looking for something to be upset about. Don’t we have enough to worry about as it is?
“Do Something” Really Means “Do THIS Thing”
As expected, the people who respond to mass shootings by loudly proclaiming “do something” have settled into what they wanted all along — a ban on readily available guns. It’s a defensible position, as far as it goes, I just wish they would be honest about that’s what they wanted and make the argument earnestly. We could at least have that debate.
But when we’re told that we must “do something,” and then people offer solutions other than “ban guns,” we’re told that we just want to “do nothing.”
To wit, there have been two non-gun related suggestions in the wake of the Uvalde shooting: 1. Making schools structurally safer; and 2. There is perhaps a cultural cause to this relatively recent phenomenon of mass shootings.
But these suggestions have been met with ridicule, such as:
These are not dumb people, so I can only presume that their failure to understand the concept of single-point-of-entry is intentional. I was in high school when Columbine happened. And I don’t remember if it was a new policy or it was already policy, but we could only get into the school through the front doors. It wasn’t a single door, it was a set of doors. And there were plenty of other doors on the building that opened out but were locked from the inside. We weren’t trapped inside like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, nor did it feel like prison (anymore than high school already does). It was a common sense measure to make it more difficult — not necessarily stop completely! — for outsiders to get inside the school. My daughter’s school has a similar setup, as does the school where my wife teaches. It’s a pretty common scenario, as far as I can tell. Plus, given that the Uvalde shooter walked unimpeded through an unlocked door, where there was no school resource officer, it seems perfectly reasonable to me that school safety protocols would be part of the discussion. But instead, people like those above would rather ridicule the idea because it doesn’t incorporate their preferred gun policy.
Similarly, the talk of a cultural cause is met with derision. A Washington Post op-ed called the idea “surpassingly stupid.” But unless I’m taking crazy pills, it’s self-evident to me that there is some cultural factor at least contributing to the mass shooting phenomenon. Guns have existed for centuries. Semi-automatic rifles have existed for some 130-plus years. Adults have had fairly easy access to them for decades. And yet the phenomenon of young men using guns to murder multiple strangers in public (or at schools) in a single event only started becoming a thing around 20 years ago, i.e., since I was in high school. So certainly something changed in our culture. To simply handwave away evidence staring us in the face because it detracts from our political priorities is not the mark of a serious discussion.
It’s just irritating to me because so many of the people shouting that we should “do something” about gun violence actually mean “do this one thing.” And when we’re not on board with doing that one thing, they accuse us of wanting to do nothing, which is simply not true.
If the only acceptable way to “do something” is to legislate against guns, at least have the courage of your convictions to say so. As I said, we can at least have that debate. I wrote on Wednesday about the various logistics of implementing such legislation, so I won’t rehash all of that again. I’ll simply remind you that there are two main obstacles to legislating against guns in this country: 1. A large majority of Americans believe they have a constitutional right to own guns; and 2. The Supreme Court agrees with them. If you want to change either of those realities, you have to change the minds of the people who make up those constituencies. It is a positively Sisyphean task, but it’s your only choice if anti-gun legislation is your goal.
On that subject, I notice that a lot of people like to trot out that apocryphal “Albert Einstein” quote about the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. (I always hated that saying, not only because there’s no evidence that Einstein actually said it, but also because it’s kinda stupid when you think about it. We repeat various actions all the time and expect different results. When you push the button on the TV remote and the TV doesn’t turn on, you don’t immediately change the batteries or throw the remote away. You push the button again expecting different results. That doesn’t make you insane. But I digress.)
But for the people who use that quote as a criticism for our response to gun violence — the implication being that we never do anything that actually affects gun violence and then are shocked again when there’s more gun violence — you would think they’d take their own advice. In the aftermath of each of these acts of violence, they immediately stake out their position as opposing guns, and it never works. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, you’d think these people would’ve tried a different angle by now. But here they are, still running into that brick wall.
Granted, I don’t think the issue of gun rights is settled simply because nothing in American law is ever completely settled. So while it may not be accurate to say that gun opponents have lost the debate over gun rights, it’s safe to say that they have been losing it for decades and have quite a hole to dig out of. They are currently at an incredible disadvantage both politically and culturally, and aren’t — from what I can tell — doing much to, uh, reverse their fortunes. If your strategy is simply belittling people for praying and accusing your opponents of abetting the murder of children, you’re going to continue to be disappointed.
Occasional Trivia
Answer from last time:
Category: Jobs
Clue: Walter Bagehot, a Victorian who wrote on central banking, had this profession and edited the magazine of the same name.
Economist
Today’s clue:
Category: Biblical Numbers
Clue: According to Genesis, there were this many people on Noah’s Ark.
Dispatches from the Homefront
I try to prevent my daughter from developing bad habits much in the same way, I presume, Pope Urban VIII tried to make the universe revolve around the earth. It’s a hopeless struggle. The other day while I was driving her to school, I noticed she was picking her nose. I gently suggested that she shouldn’t do that, to which she replied “I’m just trying to get rid of my boogers.” It’s hard to argue with that sort of airtight logic, so I just let it go.