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Did you know that 10 people were killed by a (potentially transgender) school shooter in Canada yesterday?
There is hardly anything about this in the American media today. It’s the third-billed story at best, behind Nancy Guthrie kidnapping updates and the FAA closing airspace over El Paso. Right-wing influencers have mentioned it, but it almost seems as if they are going through the motions. It’s not even trending on Twitter. I don’t feel the raw anger and hatred from when the Catholic school in Minnesota was hit.
The only explanation I can think of is that the shooting happened in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, which is in the middle of nowhere. Nobody wants to send reporters to Yukon-lite in February, so we get no coverage.
No wonder Bezos laid these people off.
American media fails to publish story about news likely to be highly damaging to the preferred narrative of American media, news at 11.
Canadian media already fucked up and said too much about who the shooter was, so it's too late to deny it. The fact they haven't reported anything else suggests the other facts of the case are likely not in the regime's favor.
Canadians are a lot more passive-aggressive than that.
Given the ubiquity of linking That One Onion Article every time there is a mass shooting in America, I'm always darkly tempted to post it when there is one elsewhere (it's not that infrequent). Frankly, I feel bad even making the reference here: it's a shitty, inaccurate headline that makes people feel morally superior in their smugness and does nothing for the real people who have died, and their loved ones having to live through it.
I recognize I'm not doing much better in this regard right now, but clearly Canadian gun laws as they stand didn't stop this one (or the last one a few years ago, nor Australia's laws the Bondi massacre, and I could go on). I'd like to think good law could do better, but it's hard to design non-authoritarian systems that cope with the idiosyncratic and sometimes violently unpredictable failure modes of the human psyche. Sometimes there are signs (which would have lots of false positives to aggressively filter on), and sometimes people just break, it seems.
I was more surprised than anyone else to find that, per capita, Australia reports 80% of the deaths from mass shootings as does the US. And that's after multiple gun buyback schemes which supposedly prevented mass shootings altogether.
"The only country", indeed.
As an Australian (I cringed writing that phrase, but I suppose it's necessary), I am consistently annoyed both by local firearms discourse and by the way foreigners try to weaponise it. The 1996 buyback as far as I can tell made little difference - firearm deaths were a straight line trending downwards prior to Port Arthur, and continued their descent afterwards, with no visible change. There's just no particularly strong evidence that the policy change did anything.
I've come to interpret most tightening of laws after a tragedy as being symbolic. The buyback after Port Arthur probably didn't have much effect, but it was expressive. The point was for the government to communicate, "We care, and we are taking this seriously." The reforms currently being proposed after Bondi are the same. Both additional firearm restrictions and additional speech restrictions have the same effect: they are very unlikely to actually reduce gun violence or anti-semitic feeling, but they signal, "We, the government, care about this, and are taking action."
The only people who lose out of these trade-offs are, well, the public. People whose rights to own what they want or speak what they want are shaved back another millimetre.
In the article, I said that the buyback program must be judged a roaring success in the limited sense of reducing mass shooting deaths in Australia, even if it's only a qualified success relative to the equivalent metric in the US. But correlation obviously does not prove causation, and it's entirely possible the steep decline in mass shooting deaths after Port Arthur was just a particularly pronounced regression to the mean and the gun buyback program was coincidental. But even if the scheme did have an effect, its success relative to the US has been vastly overstated. The way progressives (namely John Oliver) talk about the scheme, you would think that mass shootings literally never happen in Australia anymore, as opposed to them occurring 20% less often per capita compared to the US.
Agreed, it's just the politician's fallacy.
I'm skeptical of drawing strong causal conclusions around mass shootings if only because the number of mass shootings is so low. If we just look at Wikipedia's list, in the 1990s there are seven after Port Arthur, and twelve before. Counting Port Arthur itself, that's twenty, for a total of two per year. I think that's too low to draw any sensible inferences. If we go past that, Wikipedia lists fourteen shootings in all of the 1980s, versus six in the 2000s, and ten in the 2010s.
14-20-6-10 is overall a decline, but one that I find perfectly plausible in terms of the overall decline deaths by firearms (both homicides and suicides) over the period. Overall I tend to agree with RAND's conclusion - the evidence that the NFA reduced firearm deaths is weak at best.
For what it's worth I don't think NFA-style reforms in the US would accomplish very much, and I'd tend to support Australia moderately loosening up our firearms laws. I don't feel very strongly about firearms and I'd be happy to trade it away as part of a compromise on some other issue, but I think we could safely do it, and in principle I'm in favour of people being able to own things that they want, unless there is some pressing reason why they shouldn't. I'm more exercised about speech, personally, where I do think our record is unimpressive, and I look at the American First Amendment with mild envy.
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