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ongoing shooting in lewiston, maine
reportedly 22+ dead, 60+ shot. shooter is rumored to be an ex army guy. perhaps shaping up to be the next las vegas massacre. stay safe and prepare for the gun control debate to be revved up full force tomorrow
As it should be? Deeply tragic event downstream of stupid policy choices should definitely result in discussion of those policy choices.
Eh. We already have a bunch of examples of shootings, and also a bunch of examples of reasonable usage of guns for self-protection.
It will ramp up the discussion, but primarily among people who aren't tracking it. Hearing that X bad consequence happened doesn't actually give you much new information! It certainly incites the public, which can cause change in good/bad directions, but I consider that an antifeature of how common news media showcases events.
(Ideally, it should be a thing of: you can go read some big summary from different viewpoints, which has statistics for various interpretations of events but also estimated statistics + reasons for why doing XYZ is better than doing ZYX. You'd read these occasionally to get more information about your beliefs, and then use that to decide how you vote. But we don't have decent versions of these.)
Sure, but the idea is that one particularly shocking event can be a useful springboard to discuss the wider policy issues that contributed not just to that incident but to many others like it. This happens across all sorts of issues.
The basic setup of the debate is that the liberal right side is saying "liberty and somewhat-greater protection against tail risks outweigh some small amount of mass shootings" and the nanny left is saying "any amount of mass shootings outweighs any amount of liberty, and tail risks are negligible in the modern world".
You can probably tell what side I'm on there, but both sides do have points.
The "springboard" is really more of a lever; the nanny left knows that the liberal right's argument looks even more insensitive than usual immediately following a highly-salient mass shooting, so it increases the salience of mass shootings* and it makes sure to discuss policy in the immediate aftermath. This is an effective demagogic tactic, but ideally the purpose of theMotte is to try to rise above demagoguery.
*NB: there are some people on the liberal right who say that the nanny left deliberately increases the number of mass shootings. I think that's an overstatement and an Ideological Turing Test failure. I think that making mass shootings a salient thing and making them seem commonplace does probably increase their prevalence, but that this is not really an intended thing on the nanny left's part.
If this is demagogic then so is literally all of politics and I would hope gun control advocates don't put their gun down first, if you'll pardon the pun.
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