Future historians (if that ends up being a thing) will, I hope, look back at the events in Newtown as the turning point for a nation that had become so insulated against any external threats that it became its own most dangerous enemy. It's clearly gone way past the moment when we as a country need to address not only our sick addiction to amassing enormous amounts of firearms that civilians have no business ever handling, but also the way we approach mental health, the way we treat our educators, and the manner in which our media and our leaders represent and react to violence. And while the first point is obviously the most pressing of all of these, it is over the latter problem that I am currently most incensed.
The sad fact that horrifying massacres like the one in Newtown last week have become almost routine in these modern United States says more about our national character than we ought to be comfortable with. But what's just as depressing to me is the way in which our media has reacted to the death of 20 children and 7 adults. And I'm not talking about the actual reportage: the mad rush to break the identity of the shooter first, leading to several piece of inaccurate information being widely circulated is an occurrence so common these days as to be unremarkable. I'm talking about the opinioneers, the villagers, the pundit class. The group of people whose sole responsibility it is to speak on behalf of the rest of us and to the rest of us. I'm talking specifically in this case about the Daily Beast's Megan McCardle.
In what is (so far) the most incomprehensibly pointless and stupid thing anyone with fingers has written as a response to the Newtown massacre, McCardle, who has written for a number of dinosaur publications like Newsweek and should therefore know better, argues that there is basically nothing we can do to prevent these kinds of mass shootings from occurring so we are all idiots and should just shut up and let the NRA hand out free assault rifles. Her "think piece" starts with an illustration of the fundamental mental disorder that leads certain people to become libertarians so perfect it should be encased in lucite:
Most crimes are motivated by unlovely impulses that are at least comprehensible: the desire for money, sex, respect, revenge. We don't do these things because we have been taught that "good people don't do that!"--and we want to think of ourselves as good people, or at least have the neighbors and our parents think of us as good people. Or perhaps we're merely afraid of getting caught and punished.
Notice something missing from that argument? No? Perhaps the fact that Ms McArdle seems not to have even entertained the idea that at the most basic level possible, beyond any externalized moralities or system of penalties, most people (and even some animals) recognize that it's not ok to commit crimes against other people because we humans are imbued with this thing called empathy that allows us to put ourselves in the shoes of another person, and when we do that, we can imagine how bad being the victim of such a crime might make that person feel.
Wait, hang on, maybe she is in fact familiar with that empathy thing:
But we can understand why people want to--we know what someone is after when they hold up a liquor store, or even kills their spouse for the insurance money.
More brilliance below the fold!
Moving on, the professor enlightens us as to why empathy fails in situations like this in a mischaracterization so overly simplistic it should secure Ms McArdle a retroactive post as Bush's press secretary:
When one tries to picture the mind that plans it, one quickly comes to a dead end. Even if I had been raised with no moral laws at all, even if there were no cops and no prisons, I'm pretty sure that I still wouldn't want to spend a crisp Friday morning shooting cowering children. Trying to climb this mountain of wickedness is like trying to climb a glass wall with your bare hands. What happened there is pure evil, and evil, unlike common badness, gives an ordinary mind no foothold.
Get that? The reason we can't grasp crimes like Newtown is because IT WAS EVIL. It wasn’t a severely unhinged individual with unrestricted access to firearms that killed all those people, it was SATAN HIMSELF. And since we can place events like this on a binary scale of good and evil, since we can treat the perpetrator of this crime the same way we might approach the villain in a Disney movie…
Since we can't understand it, we can't change it. And since we can't change it, our best hope is to box it in.
She goes on to argue the idea that policy is impotent to in any way prevent tragedies like this from happening in future by quoting a poem by Samuel Johnson, who died three years before the US Constitution was written. She then performs an act of rhetorical and logical acrobatics so astounding it would make Mitt Romney blush:
In this case, there probably is a policy which could stop mass shootings. But we are not going to implement that policy. And since nothing else is going to work, we are not going to pass a law that will stop these sorts of mass shootings. We may pass a law, mind you. But whatever we do pass, we will have more of these evil happenings ahead of us.
Let's see if I can parse this:
1. Laws won't prevent mass shootings. In fact, laws don't actually do anything.
2. Laws could prevent mass shootings.
3. We won't actually pass those laws.
4. Those laws won't work anyway. Laws won't prevent mass shootings.
5. We might pass a law that would prevent mass shootings.
6. Even if we passed a law that would prevent mass shootings, there will be more mass shootings.
7. Also evil.
Does your brain hurt yet? Yes? Well suck it up, because there's more.
McArdle goes on to list, in detail that "breaks my heart to even type", the "knowns" of the shooter's history, including the fact that unlike every other american male under the age of 35, he was "fond of violent video games". It's also very important to her that we're made aware of the fact that the shooter had not been left behind by the system, had access to mental healthcare, and that his mother had been increasingly involved in his life. What doesn’t seem to merit mention is the fact that none of the people the shooter was surrounded by apparently identified the risk in allowing a person with violent tendencies to live in a house that might have doubled as a small arsenal in the case of a zombie apocalypse.
Then, after pointing out that we're all idiots because McArdle literally does not understand how porous the gun laws in this country are, she demonstrates how stupid we all are for wanting more restrictions on gun ownership and better access to mental health treatment for potentially violent people:
I've seen calls to punish people who don't secure their guns properly, but no suggestions about how you "properly secure" guns against an adult child who lives in the house, or acknowledgement of the fact that Nancy Lanza is beyond punishment. Presumably if she's thought her son would do something like this, she'd have gotten rid of the guns long since.
"Make more mental health resources available" or "early identification and treatment of troubled children" is a fine answer to many cases, but Adam Lanza had all that you could wish for in terms of resources. It didn't stop him from picking up a gun and going to that school.
I'm willing to bet any person with half a dozen working brain cells could respond to McArdle's conceit here with simple answers like "a gun safe" and "a mental health community that has the resources to ascertain whether or not a person that lives in a house full of guns is potentially violent", but what follows is so stunningly inane and fatalistic that it makes me wonder if perhaps Ms McArdle doesn’t require a visit from DSS herself:
What Lanza shows us is the limits of the obvious policy responses. He had all the mental health resources he needed--and he did it anyway. The law stopped him from buying a gun--and he did it anyway. The school had an intercom system aimed at stopping unauthorized entry--and he did it anyway. Any practical, easy-to-implement solution to school shootings that you could propose, along with several that were not at all easy to implement, was already in place. Somehow, Lanza blew through them all.
I can't, I just can't. Did he, Megan? Did he have "all the mental health resources he needed"? If someone jumps out of an airplane, pulls the ripcord, and discovers that her parachute is just a bag of socks, would we say that she had all the resources she needed? And I'm not even going to fall into your semantic trap regarding the difference between "buy" and "obtain", since it's pretty clear from the inaccuracy of your syntactical agreement that you knew exactly what you were doing there. What I take the greatest issue with is that if we were to follow your argument even one-tenth of the way toward its logical conclusion, all laws are pointless, since someone somewhere will find a way of getting around them. By her logic, speed limits are ineffective (
they're not), child labor laws are pointless (
they aren't), and the entire institution of law, the millennia-old concept of enforced common limits and regulations agreed upon by a society as a whole should be done away with.
But the stupid doesn’t end there.
After assuring us that she does in fact support stronger gun regulation, then letting it be known that the gun regulation she supports wouldn’t actually do anything to stop people from killing people, then hypothesizing about why people commit mass murders (so much for that whole "gives an ordinary mind no foothold" nonsense about not understanding the motivation), then arguing that institutionalizing the mentally ill is pointless because it wouldn’t be 100% effective, she finally gets to her pointless point:
That leaves us with the big one, the argument I've been circling around for 2,000 words: ban guns. Ban them all.
I'm not going to insult your intelligence by arguing that this wouldn't work. Guns do not create homicidal intent, as some people have argued, but they do make homicidal intent more lethal. A bullet is harder to stop, requires less physical strength to deploy, and does a huge amount of damage. And shooting someone takes a lot less time than stabbing or bludgeoning them. That is why we now arm the US military with rifles instead of big knives. Conservatives who argue that a total ban wouldn't lower the homicide rate are being ridiculous.
America would still have a higher homicide rate than anywhere else, because for whatever reason, America is an incredibly violent place.
But I think there's no question that our homicide rate would be lower than it is now, simply because fewer killings would succeed.
Confused? Unsure as to on which side of the issue our sage author aligns herself? Lost in a sea of casuistic claptrap because in the space of ten sentences, McArdle dresses up the old canard that "guns don't kill people", then argues that they do, however, make it easier to kill people, then says that even without the guns that make it easier to kill people, we would still find a way because we're violent by design, then counters herself by saying that without guns, we'd kill less people? Ready to cry yet? Fear not, your salvation is forthcoming:
So I'll merely point out what Jeffrey Goldberg has already said, better and at greater length, in The Atlantic: the discussion is moot. You can't ban guns. That ship has sailed.
So there you go. No point in even talking about it, since…hang on, what was the reasoning behind that?
You can't ban them because the Supreme Court has now ruled, twice, that you can't.
Oh, right, ok, sure, that makes sense. The Supreme Court has twice said it, so it's enshrined in law forever and always. Any other ironclad feats of sophistry to perform, Megan?
You also can't ban them because there are hundreds of millions of guns in circulation in the United States--no one knows exactly how many, but we are either approaching, or well past, one gun per adult citizens. Other countries that banned guns started with a less absolutist attitude towards civil liberties, and also, a lot fewer guns.
You know what else we use to have a lot of and now don't have so much of these days? DDT. We used to use DDT all the time, but we banned it because we determined that killing mosquitoes (more-or-less) effectively was not worth the risk of killing other organisms, like people. At one time, DDT was one of the most widely-used insecticides in the world. I challenge anyone to find me a can of the stuff today.
The rest of the piece is more of the same. Same setting up of strawmen just to slap them down, same argument that laws are pointless and ineffectual and have never changed ever before in all of history so why bother now, same demonization of any fool with the temerity to suggest that the murder of 20 children ought to act as a catalyst for social and political change. Time and again, Megan McArdle reasserts that she is not made of stone...
This is not because I don't care about dead children; my heart, like yours, broke about a thousand times this weekend.
…but that there's no way that this call to action could or should serve as a call to action for the people that don't like seeing little children murdered:
But they will not breathe again because we pass a law. A law would make us feel better, because it would make us feel as if we'd "done something", as if we'd made it less likely that more children would die. But I think that would be false security. And false security is more dangerous than none.
Anyone familiar with the internet might recognize this as the same kind of denial as we see so often in statements that begin "I'm not racist, but…"
Finally, Ms McArdle produces what, in a sea of specious arguments, logical fallacies, bizarre dialectics in which she acts as both players, and flat-out lies, might be the stupidest thing ever said on the internet by anyone:
I'd also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once. Would it work? Would people do it? I have no idea...
At least, on this one occasion, she has the good sense to admit that she's just talking out of her ass.
11:10 AM PT: In the time it took me to write this short dissertation, Steveningen wrote a much more concise and profound diary on the same subject, which you should read as well:
http://www.dailykos.com/...