Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Saturday, August 3, 2019

And Another

I was thinking the other day that it had been some time since the last horrific mass shooting in America.  And now it looks like another.  Police have a 21 year old white male in custody, because of course they do.  It's impossible to tease out cause and effect on what is effectively an epidemic, but it seems to me that America has two problems: easy access to weapons of mass murder and a masculinity problem.

Back in the '90s, there was a rush to blame movies and video games, despite the fact that these movies and video games are global, and we are the only country to slaughter each other on a Saturday afternoon in a WalMart.  It's not just the guns and it's not just the fragile man-boys.  The guns are easier to address via policy - mandatory safety licensing, owner and seller liability, universal background checks - but we have to do something about these homicidal young men wandering our streets.

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