“And liberals who deny that the media has been jumping on every murder* as an excuse to play politics are anti-history – which is to be on the losing side of science”

Before you put everything through your culture-war decoder ring, you might read the whole post. AMF said, “This post a prime example of why, though I am a cultural conservative, I find conservative cultural criticism infuriating”

So it wouldn’t be very responsible or logical to base law on events that occur infrequently.

The frequency isn’t the only consideration though. At the very least, you have to factor in the severity, and how difficult something is to prevent.

I mean, looked at as a proportion of how much driving gets done in this country, traffic accidents are pretty rare. But they can be can be fatal, and some common-sense measures like mandatory training, seat-belt laws, and so forth go a long way toward mitigating the danger. We could prevent more accidents by banning cars, but that would have other downsides that we’ve collectively decided outweigh the advantages of having cars.

I’ve deliberately not followed this most recent shooting. I have no idea if there are simple common-sense measures that would have helped prevent it. But I’d at least listen to proposals.

And liberals who deny that the media has been jumping on every murder* as an excuse to play politics are anti-history – which is to be on the losing side of science.

*exception: shooters obviously motivated by pro-left-wing political motivations are exempt from all commentary.

As to sides, I’ve read both calls for more gun control so the shooter couldn’t shoot and calls for less so the victims could shoot back. There’ll be time enough for that later.

The good choice, “This – being such – is to be done,” is intelligible, because intelligent; the act of the bad will is a surd, ultimately unintelligible. True enough, we can often trace its causes to instinctive or dispositional factors, but it remains logically incoherent.

I am not sure “madness” is a particularly helpful concept. Perhaps, we can say that there are certain physical conditions which we know to go with irrational beliefs or attitudes with sufficient regularity for us to call them their causes.

Hunters can use the weapons at gun shows, in accord with hunting laws. Many hunters go to gun shows to buy used rifles and shotguns at cheaper prices. Some people at gun shows are creepy survivalists/white supremacists/libertarians. But gun shows are safe places, a mass shooter wouldn’t last very long.

Figure out the percentage of guns bought at a gun show that are used in these crimes, and you would find that gun shows are not the problem. I can’t remember the details, but in some mass shootings, there have been people who have shot back, and halted the assault. The element of planning in these crimes seems to shows that the perp chooses areas where the chance of someone else being armed is low (schools, theaters, shopping).

As for the gun control angle, this seems like it would fall under “hard cases make bad law.” These sort of totally unprovoked mass killings are really pretty rare. They are certainly captivating in their horror, but they are not really a significant portion of deaths or even murders. So it wouldn’t be very responsible or logical to base law on events that occur infrequently.

But it is clear to me that it is utopian to think it is at all possible, “to stop things like this form happening again.”