President Donald Trump responded to the weekend’s two shooting atrocities by decrying hatred and making five substantive proposals.
“They include tools to identify early warning signs in mass shooters, reducing the glorification of violence, reforming mental health laws, enacting ‘red flag’ laws to stop dangerous individuals from gaining access to firearms, and enacting the death penalty for mass murderers,” the Epoch Times summarizes.
But how useful are these?
- The “early warning signs” of a criminal are often identical to grumpiness and even righteous indignation in others — “tools to identify” could easily serve as excuses for unwarranted meddling and worse.
- Who would enforce lessening the “glorification of violence”? The federal government that is always at war?
- Is it mental health laws that should be reformed, or the practice of putting whole generations of boys on Ritalin and worse … made especially ominous by the percentage of shooters on such drugs?
- Denying “dangerous individuals … access to firearms” remains problematic under any semblance of due process and the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ principle.
- Since “death by cop” is often one of the apparent goals of many would-be shooters, how much of a deterrent could death by sterile procedure actually be?
But if you are looking for even worse reactions, look beyond Trump. The Democrats took the occasion to raise funds.
And complain to the New York Times, which “changed a headline on its front page because it presented Trump in a neutral light,” reports independent journalist Tim Poole. “This was in response to far left activists and Democrats expressing shock and outrage and demanding everyone cancel their subscriptions to NYT over it.”
Ideological bias or old-fashioned market pressure?
If it is in tragedy that we find our greatest tests of courage and wisdom, the weekend’s shootings show a lot of political and media failure.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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2 replies on “Courage and Wisdom?”
“ This was in response to far left activists and Democrats expressing shock and outrage and demanding everyone cancel their subscriptions to NYT over it.”
Because without Democrat lib-progs to read the NYT, nobody would.
haha, says it all. Good meme.