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Notes -
"Root causes" are excuses to do nothing
I've written before about the problems facing the TTC, Toronto's public transit system (examples from here: 1 and less directly 2). I'm a big transit advocate, think cities built around the automobile are awful, and car dependency is a big cause in western social malaise. Yada yada yada, you can fill in the rest. The problem I have is that my supposed brothers-in-arms on the transit crusade seem to think it's optional that transit actually be safe, clean, and enjoyable; this has been hashed and rehashed before so to put it simply my views are that if you want transit to work, you cannot tolerate anti-social behaviour on it.
Last week a 16 year-old boy was stabbed to death in a random, unprovoked attack. The assailant was a homeless man who was out on probation for multiple charges, including most recently a sexual assault two weeks prior, and had previously been issued weapons bans and ordered to take mental health counselling. You can imagine the response: various flavours of outraged, upset, sad, conciliatory, exhausted, in all their various permutations as they slithered through the filter of ideology.
The next day a mass shooting happened in the US, which has been picked over for its culture war nuggets already. But in the periods both before and after the killer's atypical identity was revealed, it reminded me very much of the reaction to the stabbing the day before. There is a certain type of person, who when confronted with an incident that they (consciously or not) are intelligent enough to realize might clash with their worldview, employs a kind of motte-and-bailey to defend it. They cannot outwardly exclaim that "This changes nothing!" in the aftermath of a tragedy, because it would appear cruel, heartless, or at the very least tonedeaf. Instead they insist that the real root of the problem is some vast, society-wide, rooted-in-the-depths issue that has to be tackled first. An obvious example is that (almost) every time there is a mass shooting in the US, 2nd amendment types all of a sudden become very concerned about the mental health of the nation, and proclaim it to be the fundamental cause of the problem that must be addressed before anything else changes. Now in general I'm actually very receptive to this line of argument; I think it is mostly a social/mental health problem. Again this has all been re-litigated a thousand times, but these kind of mass shootings are mainly a product of the last 25 years, and countries other than the US seem to have little issue mixing widespread gun ownership with low rates of gun crime.
But obviously this argument is an excuse to do nothing. These people care not one whit about mental health all the other days of the year, and if they were so serious about the problem in the first place maybe there would be a means to achieve some kind of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that would, if not prevent mass shootings, at least stop them from being so damn easy.
Likewise, I've seen dozens of similar sentiments in the past week explaining the deep-seated causes of why a mentally ill homeless man randomly killed a teen: it's due to the federal government no longer funding social housing, it's due to a lack of compassion for the dehoused, it's about a lack of community, and of course We All Know it's really about capitalism itself. OK, great. But these all feel like excuses to do nothing. This kind of random violence on the subway wasn't an issue before COVID. Do we have to wait for ten years of elevated federal housing funds to act? Do we have to rebuild social trust first? Do we have to dismantle the corporations of the Laurentian Elite into worker co-ops before we do a goddamn thing? I like the sound of all these ideas, but I think there are more direct and immediate ways to prevent kids from getting murdered, so how about we do those first!
But of course the people voicing these sentiments don't actually want those actions taken. Or perhaps really, they perceive that those actions being taken might vaguely benefit the social and political capital of groups they don't like, and so construct an excuse to oppose them.
The bridge near me used to be suicide capital of Toronto. In North America it was second only to the Golden Gate Bridge as a venue for people to end their lives. So in 2006, the suicide nets went up, and there's only been one death since. I wonder whether if that solution was proposed today if we'd get the same kind of inane pushback: no, first we have to tackle the opioids, or too much screen time, or cyber-bullying, or whatever the root cause of the problem was. The nets are ugly: not only as a reflection of our society's problems, they also get in the way of a good view. But it would've been cowardly inaction to insist the root cause of the problem had to be solved first.
Maybe I'm just one of those people, but I feel the need to push back on your examples.
Your first case is a person who had repeated, severe interactions with the justice system, to seemingly no consequence what so ever until they murdered someone. To any layman's understanding of how things should work, there is no excuse for him being out to have committed that murder in the first place. Do you not have bail? Was someone asleep at the wheel? What the fuck happened?
Gun deaths in America are... well not what you think. Going purely off the numbers the most effective way to reduce gun deaths in America is keep them out of the hands of black male teens. Just not let them have guns. Period. But those aren't the gun deaths you hear about, and it would be "racist". Well, probably actually racist. No quotes needed. But still a good idea, were we willing to just be racist.
That being off the table, the second best thing you could do is keep guns out of the hands of people with suicidal ideations. But it's super important that medical records stay private, so that's off the table. Plus, it's not really suicides most people are upset about. It's threats to themselves. Despite that, red flag laws are only slowly becoming a thing... and many jurisdictions are enforcing them in such a way as to prove all the Cassandra's who cried about them right...
That being mostly off the table, yeah, I guess all we're left with is banning all guns. Because we apparently aren't allowed to keep them out of the hands of black male teens, and we can't trust the people who'd make the determination to not declare all their political opposition "mentally ill". Yet there are still more guns than people in America, and our own intelligence services have flooded criminal enterprises with guns because... profit?
So what's the average American concerned with their safety to do? The people with the highest statistical likelihood of hurting you can't or won't be stopped from owning guns. Might as well get a gun. It's a race to the bottom.
Let's say I am a very conceited and self-absorbed suburban mom, I don't care about Black male teens killing each other over turf, I don't care about older White males blowing their brains out over loans. But I am very worried about that miniscule chance of someone going postal in the local mall, local movie theater or worse of all, in the school my children go to. I am a single-issue voter, and I will vote for anyone who shows his measures will reduce this one-in-a-million chance to one-in-a-billion.
Right now I want to vote for Mr. Gun Control. He says gun licenses that require everyone to undergo psych evaluation every year will be struck down by the SCOTUS as being against something called 2A. However, he thinks a digitized federal gun registry that is integrated with health and social services is feasible. As soon as a worried social worker or a doctor has a sliver of suspicion that someone might be not exactly stable, they can press a button, and the police will come and take every gun away from that person's domicile until they undergo rigorous psychological evaluation, and giving your gun to someone who can't show a green checkmark in their federal gun registry app is a crime.
Can you formulate a counterproposal that will keep me and my children as safe from gun-toting crazies as this one?
I think you just make the process for acquiring a gun very onerous while technically not restrictive. You make people go, in person, to county clerks offices, different ones, multiple times over the course of several months, to fill out forms. It is impossible to fill out these forms in such a way as to deny you a gun, and at no point in the process can your application be denied. A high functioning and responsible adult on average can complete the process in three months. This is the only way that a person can buy a gun. I think this stops more 'school shootings' than red flag laws will, and without the negative side effects of red flag laws. I think in general people underestimate the power of trivial inconveniences/annoyance to shape human behavior. All the traffic fatality information in the world pales in effectiveness compared with an annoying beeping sound. All social engineering attempts that don't reduce down to annoying beeping sounds, should not be tried until annoying beeping sound solutions have been tried.
A fairly noble idea, but many places in America have already tried the "headache-inducing super-duper-annoying beeping sound" equivalent of gun laws, and the results aren't as inspiring as you suggest. If anything, one could argue the implementation only achieves the effect of annoying the shit out of gun owners and giving them splitting headaches instead of actually trying to reduce fatalities.
You would expect to see little to no reduction in fatalities from this kind of proposal, the point is to stop the Uvalde, "kid goes to a store, legally buys a gun, kills a bunch of children." Which is the most inflammatory possible news story that provides the most ammunition for gun-control advocates, even if it is a rounding error in terms of total gun deaths.
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First of all, there are plenty of problems with Red Flag laws.
First of all, they’d actually make people much less likely to seek help. If you knew that you’d lose an important right if you told anyone that you thought you were mentally unwell, more than likely you’d hide it. You definitely wouldn’t seek out help no matter what happened. And mental illness like most illnesses are much easier to treat if caught early.
Secondly, this kind of law is very likely to be abused. Someone you don’t like? Maybe an ex you’re mad at? You can red-flag them easily. Just call in a “tip” and the guns go away. And it could easily be months before they could prove their sanity.
Third, a check in an app can quite easily be given for expanded reasons that aren’t in the original version of the law. Maybe it starts with direct threats to individuals. Or threats of actual terrorism. But suppose that definition expands. Maybe you belong to a group “associated with terrorism.” Maybe a particular political or social opinion is “associated with violence”. Now the government can simply turn off your rights and take your guns.
My best solution is to make those targets as hard to attack as possible. You shouldn’t be able to just walk into a school. And I think having guards around malls and theaters makes sense. I’d consider arming teachers as well.
I am Karen, I don't own a gun and I don't care that someone loses access to their guns. Guns are black and scary anyway.
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