By Robert Verbruggen
Monday, August 05, 2019
Very briefly:
1.
Stop giving these people the infamy they crave.
These incidents are obviously contagious — a reality increasingly backed up by
good research — and we in the media need to do a better job of keeping killers’
names out of our stories and, in general, being less sensational in our
coverage.
2.
Monitor online activity for warning signs. There
have been three mass killings now tied to websites where individuals congregate
to celebrate such atrocities. The government needs to monitor these sites and
pay folks a visit when they give off warning signs. If these sites were to shut
down because various service providers stopped doing business with them, I
would not lose any sleep over it, however sympathetic I am to Big Tech’s
critics in a lot of ways.
3.
Keep guns away from dangerous people. Anyone who
thinks gun control is an obvious, surefire panacea should look at the RAND
Corporation’s enormous review of the gun-violence literature from last year,
which uncovered
“no qualifying studies showing that any of the 13 policies we
investigated decreased mass shootings” — and also threw
some cold water on the most aggressive claims about Australia’s gun
confiscation, a measure far more forceful than anything we could implement
here. One might also consider that guns are not the only way to commit mass
murder: Explosives were used at Oklahoma City, the Boston Marathon, and
numerous mass-casualty incidents in the first half of the 20th century here in
the U.S.; an arson in Japan killed at least 35 people just last month; and a
vehicle attack in France killed 86 in 2016.
But we could still do more to
keep firearms away from individuals who’ve shown themselves to be a danger. I
wholeheartedly support David French’s crusade for carefully crafted “red flag”
laws, which allow people close to a troubled individual to bring him to the
attention of the authorities, who, after providing due process, can take away
his guns. I am also a squish on universal background checks, though the
potential for good there is much greater for run-of-the-mill gun violence than
for mass shootings, as mass shooters generally pass background checks already.
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