By Noah Rothman
Monday, August 05, 2019
Shaken by a weekend marked by two mass shootings in over
just 11 hours, Donald Trump sought to assuage American fears by throwing policy
proposals against the wall and seeing what stuck.
The president began his remarks today by advocating
stricter restrictions on gun ownership in the form of a stronger background
checks regime. He complained of media sensationalism contributing to an
atmosphere of “anger and rage.” He warned of “the dark recesses of the
Internet,” including social media, where “radicalized disturbed minds” resolve
to “perform determined acts.” He condemned “gruesome and grizzly video games.”
He described the need to reform America’s mental health laws to make it easier
to commit involuntarily those who might pose a danger. He asked Congress to
strengthen “red flag laws,” which allow police or family members to petition
law enforcement to confiscate firearms from the demonstrably unbalanced. He
promised to demand that the Justice Department seek capital punishment for
people who “commit hate crimes and mass murders” without the delays imposed on
the process by the right of appeal.
The president’s response to the weekend’s violence
included a little of what those on both sides of the political aisle want, so
it’s certain to please almost no one. And yet, few seem to be looking to the
president for programmatic solutions to mass gun violence. Many observers
instead demanded an exploration of the ideologies that motivate these
shooters—in particular, the white nationalism Trump has been accused of
accommodating.
The president took a step in this direction by singling
out the El Paso shooter, an avowed white nationalist who targeted Hispanics.
“In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry and white supremacy,” he
declared. Trump has often failed to forcefully denounce those he views as
members of his coalition who also exhibit racial anxieties, so his scripted
condemnation will be greeted with skepticism. It is, nevertheless, valuable
when the president calls anti-social racist violence by its name. It is
likewise incumbent on Trump’s center-left critics to confront the radical
left-wing ideology to which the Dayton shooter subscribed. If he was
politically motivated, he wouldn’t be the first of the president’s opponents to
commit ideological acts of terroristic violence.
Neither shooter was by any means a classical liberal.
They advocated stringent (albeit politically divergent) methods for organizing
society that conflict with America’s constitutional ideals and obligations.
It’s especially confounding that acts of terrorism in service to tyranny are
met with calls for slightly softer authoritarianism.
It’s highly unlikely that the right to appeal a
conviction creates an incentive for potentially suicidal mass murderers.
Likewise, constitutionally dubious “red flag” laws must be narrow if they make
proper accommodation for due process rights, at which point they run the risk
of also being toothless. Those on the right and left who argue for outright
bans on “assault-style weapons” are stymied by their inability to define what
those weapons are in a way that doesn’t capture most of the tens of millions of
semi-automatic guns in private hands. Only private individuals are uncovered by
America’s strict system of federal background checks, and none of these
shooters had a criminal background that would prevent them from owning a
firearm. Neither dispassionate researchers nor the Supreme Court found a
compelling link between violent video games and acts of real-world brutality
sufficient to justify censoring them.
Perhaps the most disturbing part of the president’s
grasping effort to appease anxious Americans is his attack on the Internet.
“The perils of the Internet and social media cannot be ignored, and they will
not be ignored,” he said. This missive dovetails with an effort led by
Republican Sen. Josh Hawley to tackle social media’s excesses in legislation,
which includes recommendations ranging from limiting user time spent on these
sites to just 30 minutes and dictating to technology firms the colors and
graphics they can use to maximize clickthrough rates. And yet, even without the
heavy hand of government dictating terms to private Internet companies, the
firms that host the online forum 8Chan where the El Paso shooter posted his
manifesto have withdrawn their services—isolating the site and exposing it to
attacks.
Many believe the very existence of insular,
self-radicalizing communities like 8Chan—or Twitter or Facebook, for that
matter—has become intolerable. But skeptics of these sorts of forums risk
creating an ideological black market that they cannot police.
The unregulated arena of free speech and ideological
expression, its critics contend, functions in the same way as the economic
marketplace. The competitive arena of ideas occasionally allows dangerous ideas
to rise to the fore. The critics’ solution is the equivalent of a command
economy for ideas. They would impose regulations on speech and expression to
keep people safe from the corruption of anti-social beliefs. That’s the result
of a common misconception about how top-down prohibitions work; which is to
say, they don’t.
The ideologues who demand adherence to logically flawed
jingoistic constructs like ethnonationalism are the first to apply censorship
in order to maintain strict devotion to their preferred belief structure. By
contrast, a societal commitment to the exploration of ideas and a willingness
to confront opposing viewpoints, not to criminalize them, augments social
cohesion. It should be intuitive that the willingness to suppress views that
are deemed dangerous or disruptive is a leading indicator of other forms of
authoritarian intolerance.
It is axiomatic that any effort to combat paranoia and
repression with paranoia and repression will fail. A commitment to liberty is
hardest to maintain in a climate of fear. But if freedom’s advocates silence
themselves today for fear of running afoul of the national mood, they’ll find
the platforms available to them severely diminished when the going gets easier.
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