Like anyone, I was shocked and saddened by the shootings in Highland Park, IL on July 4. I watched Twitter explode. I watched politicians like JB Pritzker explode. Pritzker was predictable. Platitudes and no solutions except the same old shit.
I am not an expert in law, nor am I a gun expert. I try to objectively inform myself. I know that we have Second Amendment rights, but I also know there is nobody that wants, appreciates, or condones people using guns to kill other people violently.
How do we solve the problem within the constraints?
I’d ask classical economists to create a structure around the problem so people could objectively decide what to do about it. Why classical? Because they are objective and they put more faith in individual actions to create a solution rather than a centralized power.
Think Thomas Sowell's way of framing and thinking versus Paul Krugman's.
Can someone tell me how many of these murders across the country were committed by people with concealed carry permits? I’d like to know.
I am also realistic enough to know human nature. We pay taxes and we have government programs that are “supposed” to take care of all these problems. As citizens, it allows us to ignore it and wash our hands of the problem. You wrote a check and put your confidence in the government to solve it.
In the past many years, I have seen the Medical Industrial Complex be called upon to medicate young boys with drugs like Adderall. As those boys get older, they can get cannabis and other harder drugs. Cannabis is legal now and conveniently when we shuttered boys up in bedrooms for two years due to Covid they could still get pot because the pot stores stayed open.
The message to those boys was to take their medicine and be quiet. They were ignored. I remember my father telling me a story about a teacher he had. My father was and is a high-energy person. He was getting in trouble in class and so the teacher had him do things like beat chalkboard erasers to keep him busy. But, it solved a problem, didn’t it. It gave my father something valuable and dignified to do. The teacher wasn’t ignoring him, though he was out of her hair for a while.
My daughter was a high-energy kid. When we moved to the city, she went to a very expensive and exclusive private high school. The fifth-grade teacher called us in after the first couple of days of school. She recommended that we put our daughter on Adderall or some other drug to “cure her behavior problems”. The teacher wanted to drug our kid so she could ignore her. We didn’t do it and I am glad we didn’t.
What a difference between the two teachers of different eras. One problem solved, the other wanted a panacea to paper over things so they could ignore them. Our society wants the same thing for big problems.
Objectively, our long-term institutions that have long given our society stability have been under assault by people who want to tear them down since the 1960s. The other day, the mayor of Chicago said “Fuck Clarence Thomas” from a concert stage and then yesterday said we have to create civil discourse in public.
Sorry, Ms. Mayor but that ain’t happening with how you define civil discourse. My guess is Thomas Paine’s essay Common Sense wasn’t considered very civil back in the day.
That is but one example and there are plenty of others. It’s so prevalent that David Burge tweeted this:
Here are some objective facts to chew on.
Objectively, for the last two years, we have socially isolated people. I think the Covid lockdowns were absolutely stupid based on the data but maybe you don’t. Covid was a killer for old people and obese people, but not really anyone else. But, more importantly, we locked down people and the ones that were already antisocial with problems became even worse. Not only that, we couldn’t see their progression and they were ignored.
It should not surprise anyone that we have a lot of social problems coming out of Covid after being locked down for two years. The lockdowns exacerbated the problems that were already there in plain sight if they hadn’t been ignored.
Objectively, boys have been told they suck for years in school, in media, and in social discourse. Boys are problems. They discriminate and women are the underclass. Not only that but in the last ten years it is not just boys, but white boys. White boys are the problem because of colonialism or something like that.
When you have been bullied your entire life and told “you suck”, what happens to your personality? What happens to your self-worth? What happens to the way you view the world? What happens to the way you view other people?
What happens when you apply for a job and you are told, “We are only hiring females or this victim group or this victim group?”
Boys aren’t even going to college at the same rate as girls now and when they get there they are confronted by an Educational Industrial Complex that is left-wing and doesn’t value them.
I read some friends’ Facebook posts. One friend who thinks she is being controversial said she will “never vote Republican again” because of gun laws and abortion and all the violence. What party does she think has run Illinois, Cook County, and Chicago for the last 60 years? Highland Park is overwhelmingly Democratic for what it’s worth.
But, being Democrat or Republican doesn’t matter. Both parties buy into the Ignoring Society.
The Ignoring Society is enabled by the Media Industrial Complex which gaslights the topics it wants to be magnified and sweeps under the rug the things that make it and the other Industrial Complexes look feeble and bad.
When it can’t the Media Industrial Complex shoots the messenger. That allows a SCOTUS nominee to say “I am not a biologist” when asked what defines a woman.
I read some columns. They are very good. Please click the links and read them yourself.
John Kass wrote a great one here. John is correct that the politicians with the power to do anything about this in a meaningful way choose not to. The Industrial Media Complex which prefers clicks to ads versus reporting meaningful news critically and objectively gives them cover. John writes, “In Chicago over the July 4 weekend there were at least 60 shot, 10 dead, and police were ambushed. So much for Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s “Summer of Joy” in the city where she’s demonized the cops, while endorsing their nemesis, Cook County States Atty. Kim Fox, the non-prosecutor.”
Matt Rosenberg wrote a great piece here. He lists objective facts as it relates to guns, mass shootings, and killings in America. Matt writes, “Therefore, just four percent of all Chicago homicides to date this year have resulted from mass shootings. The data align with 2016 through 2021 locally, and 2020 nationally.” If you think Matt’s data is wrong, show your work or understand that you are suffering from recency bias in your analysis.
I have seen people call for a ban on assault weapons or AR-15s. We know that doesn’t work. What’s an assault weapon anyway? Any gun can become an assault weapon. Not one mass shooting in the US, either the shocking ones or the ones that happen every day in urban areas, used an automatic military-grade weapon to murder people.
If you are interested in why an AR-15 is just like the pretty semiauto shotgun someone uses to shoot birds or skeet with, this is a pretty good discussion.
I have seen people demand “common-sense gun laws” and I wonder what they really mean. No one wants to see people killed but everyone wants to point to “our rights and liberties” when it suits their cause. When it doesn’t they want to repeal the right.
Our society ignores all these problems and issues. We just want them to go away. When problems happen, we blame the object instead of the people or the underlying causes of why it might be happening. When someone takes them on or talks about them, the left-wing accuses them of being racist.
Eliminate a do-gooder government program that accomplishes nothing? You are racist. Talk about the fact that kids are increasingly born out of wedlock, have terrible education opportunities, and have no hope? You are a racist.
Criticize the BLM riots, you are a racist. Criticize the way government-run schools want to teach our children about sex and you are a homophobe. It goes on and on.
The problems aren’t race or gender in the US. Young black boys are shooting people in their neighborhoods, and now young white boys are doing similar in theirs. Why? Once you know the why you can start to tackle it.
We need a drastic rethink of how we solve problems in the US. It cannot fall on the back of government agencies, because they don’t solve anything.
Nothing will change unless we are willing to confront what we are ignoring.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2022/07/gallup-trust-in-institutions-hits-a-new-low/ Trust in institutions hits new low..
Part of the movement of people from urban areas to rural areas is symptomatic of The Ignoring Society. But, the problems are in rural areas too. It's just more isolated and spread out.