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My father is like that.
Heck, half my hometown is like that. They wore safety pins for two weeks after the election and didn’t understand why anyone would object to demonstrations before the inauguration when there was nothing to protest except the election results.
Oddly enough, the other half of the town probably voted for Trump. It’s been an interesting year.
I agree with your objection that there’s no way to deny guns to ‘creepy dudes.’
It’s not the answer many pro-gun people seem to think it is. I get the impression many people believe that these people are clearly emotionally disturbed, and therefore it must be the case that most mass shootings could be prevented with mental health screenings.
No.
As a practical matter, mental health screenings only eliminate:
The Gabby Gifford shooting could have been prevented with a mental health screening, but that is the only case that I can think of. Normal people will become emotionally disturbed temporarily if the right stressors are present. They can become permanently disturbed if they’re in the wrong environment long enough.
Neither the shooter from this weekend and the guy from the Las Vegas shooting would not have been screened out on a mental health basis. They weren’t sick. They were “sick people” who did sick things, but that means that they were sickening not that they were ill.
The Sandy Hook and Isla Vista shooters had mental illnesses, but not ones you’d likely put on a list to screen for violence. Remember that at any point in time one in six Americans have some kind of mental health issue and over our lifetimes it’s around 40%.
After these events seem to reassure themselves by thinking ‘there were warning signs,’ without realizing that those are only clear in retrospect. In practice for every case where it was a sign of mass violence, there’d be tens of thousands (or more likely many hundreds of thousands) of ‘false positives’ – cases where a combination of friends or family being concerned about someone becoming withdrawn and non-delusional mental health issues only meant that the person was troubled but not a danger to society.
I find it odd that people with a ‘libertarian’ view of gun rights often recommend the government focus on mental health. If we take the idea seriously (not as just a cynical talking point) and really wanted to prevent shootings that way, it implies shoring up gun rights by weakening habeas corpus (making it easier to hold someone involuntarily based on health rather than violating the law) and empowering a surveillance state (to investigate people’s state of mind and the probability of becoming a criminal).
Seems like it’s more libertarian to give up guns.
Michael, I think you make an excellent point that emotional revulsion for multiple mass murder situations has the potential to cause a majority voter request to implement legislation that restricts gun ownership. The speed with which the majority position changed on same sex marriage should be a warning. Your guest Cam Edwards responded by saying no projected recommendation would prevent a future occurrence. He missed the point that the suggestion was not to propose a solution to prevent a future occurrence, but to look like you cared about these deaths and were willing to do something. Why the gun lobby does not actively support banning bump stocks is a mystery to me. It might be good policy, but it is bad politics.
Thanks very much for a great podcast.
They don’t support the bills that are intended to ban bump stocks because politicians can’t write a bill that only targets bump stocks. They always throw in weasel words that lead to judges finding penumbras to ban whatever they want. Bump stocks aren’t the most effective killing tool. In fact, they might quickly render a gun useless through jams and overheating. That is why the military changed the M-16 from full auto to burst.
There is a vast gulf, as conservatives know, between politics and principle. Defending principles often means making political decisions that are less than optimal. Passing a few, small laws (bump stock ban, smart mental-health checks, etc) give pro-2A advocates tools to fight back. They neutralize the argument that gun-rights people “just don’t care.” They make it easier for the vast majority of Americans–who don’t own guns, don’t particularly like guns, but don’t want to take yours away–to stand with the pro-2A community when lefties start railing against the NRA and “evil gun makers.”
Or we can all just clench our sphincters and hope for the best. The smart political move is to have a better response to horrific mass shootings than “well, stuff happens.”
Take his parents’ house in a civil forfeiture action.
#eherring I don’t think legislation is necessary. The Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearm and Explosives allowed bump stocks. It could just reverse that decision. It wouldn’t be permanent, but it would get them off the market.
A couple of modest proposals …
It might be possible to enlist gun sellers in the effort to identify potential mass murderers. Better than anyone else, they know what normal gun buyers are like, and are more likely to get a weird vibe off a psychopath.
In this particular case, of course, authorities had ample evidence that this guy was a violent maniac, but dropped the ball.
Given that becoming famous is one of the motives behind mass shootings, I kind of like the idea of legally renaming the killers to something like “Worthless Scum” or “Vomit Q. Excrement“. It’s the “Hogan’s Heroes” principle of fighting evil by ridicule.
Point about “bump stocks”. Bump stocks are just a spring and a technique. You can do the exact same type of firing using your finger and a belt loop. A rubber band also works. Any legislation that would ban bump stocks is an exercise in futility and merely virtue signalling. If you take the “gun” out of the phrase “gun violence” you still have violence. Violence is the problem and should be the focus of the discussion but no one wants to put the focus where it should be because it is too hard and there is no “thing” to focus on. Remember, Switzerland is virtually awash in firearms, to include fully automatic ones and gun violence is almost unheard of there. But if the gun is the problem, why isn’t Geneva worse than Chicago?
How about we put men who beat up their wives and kids in prison for a good long stretch. Then they won’t be able to pass a background check and buy a gun.
Dear Michael Graham,
I am very sad that a criminal lunatic was able to buy guns and kill people because some Air Force/DoD person did not file the appropriate paper work, so the lunatic was able to pass a background check. Incidentally, said lunatic also lied on the forms he filled out when he bought the guns, which is a felony, and if reports are true that he was involuntarily committed and escaped, people in charge of filing paper work at that institution also did not do their jobs. I will be very surprised if the erring DoD personnel or mental hospital personnel are punished in any meaningful way for contributing to the massacre in Texas, though they ought to be. If any thing happens at all, it will be taxpayers paying to settle lawsuits against the DoD or state government.
The reason that Americans will not give up their guns is simple: progressives hate us, want to kill us, and take our stuff. The proggies cannot crush us and complete their destruction of western civilization if there is armed resistance, and they know it. Do not tell me that they are good people with wrong ideas, they are not. They are vile, violent, totalitarian Bolsheviks, who cannot be trusted to do any thing but lie.
By the way, the reason so many Progressives are still so angry that they shake when they think about Trump winning the election is that Trump’s election thwarted their rosy dream of crushing conservatives forever and ever. The “nice lady” who sat at your table would smile as she murdered you and all your family for wrongthink if she knew that you would not be allowed to defend yourself. She wouldn’t feel bad about it for a moment, as she experienced the righteous glow of satisfaction derived from ridding the world of a deplorable and his progeny.
The Progs are mad because Trump prevented them (at least for the time being) from visiting an American Holodomor on the red states, and red counties in blue states, and they were so looking forward to it.
So even if you never want to own or shoot a gun, the Second Amendment and the bitter clingers who support it are all that is keeping you from being starved or beaten to death in your own front yard.
We can also point out to the left that the reason they get so little support from us is they are dishonest arbiters. They know little about guns, they lie when they say they don’t want to take our guns away, they want to ban things that aren’t dangerous but contribute to safety, and they are letting criminals back on the streets to attack us.
Charles CW Cooke expounded on this concept in yesterday (Nov. 8, 2017)’s Mad Dogs and Englishmen podcast.
It’s unspeakably frustrating that there are so many bureaucratic errors in this situation, the correction of only one of them might have prevented the horrific mass murder. And yet there are so many who advocate more bureaucracy as the solution.