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Thoughts and Prayers Because The Kids Are Not Alright
Americans ages 18 to 20 account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murders. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young (almost always) men who wield them. Any possible starter solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm.
There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70 percent of school shootings since 1999 having been carried out by people under 18. The median age of school shooters is 16. It’s our kids shooting other kids, whether because they are left out, bullied, teased, or angry at some slight or offense, it is kids killing kids. Since these killings tend to be “local,” typically the shooter and the dead share a racial and/or social-economic background, leaving “white supremacy” as a cause in the dustbin alongside blaming heavy metal records and Satanism. There have been at least 554 school shooting victims, with at least 311,000 children exposed to gun violence at school in the U.S. since the Y-in-the-road game changing Columbine High School massacre, all spread across 376 schools. The frequency of shootings has increased, with a surge of 46 incidents in 2022, the highest in any year since 1999. The safest year was 2020, when most schools were closed and parents needed only worry about Covid taking their kids.
Since it’s not the guns per se but young men who are to blame, more traditional gun control is unlikely to make much of a difference. Already under the Federal Gun Control Act (GCA), shotguns and rifles, and ammunition for shotguns or rifles may be sold only to individuals 18 years of age or older. All other firearms can be sold only to individuals 21 years of age or older. Licensed sellers are bound by the minimum age requirements established by the GCA regardless of state or local law. However, if state law or local ordinances establish a higher minimum age, the gun seller must observe the higher age requirement.
Background checks vary in quality from state to state but generally seek to prohibit sales for reasons such as a history of domestic abuse or violent felony convictions, crimes unlikely to snare the shooters just out of middle school. No background check is going to catch someone seething with rage. Checks also are at the time of purchase and gun ownership can be forever. There is the private transfer loophole that bypasses most background checks, though no evidence budding mass killers seek out this method of gun acquisition.There is also the Columbine divide that somehow factors in to kids killing kids. Pre-Columbine America saw school shootings number only approximately 300 instances in 150 years. Post-Columbine shootings number 331 in only 24 years. Something big is very wrong in America and our kids are not alright. Add in teen suicides (many involving guns; suicide is the third leading cause of teen death, with homicide in the number two position, add those together and guns are Number One), and you have more than a crisis, you have a nightmare.In the absence of Federal statistics, the Washington Post has kept records of all child-related shootings. It found school shootings disproportionately affect black children; black students make up 16.6 percent of the school population but experience school shootings at twice that rate. At schools with majority black student bodies, shooters typically target a specific person, limiting the number of people shot — and the subsequent media exposure. Mass shootings (four or more people) tend to be a white kid’s domain.But as we approach the “what should we do” portion of the discussion about guns, here is perhaps the most important statistic: in cases where the source of the gun could be determined, 86 percent of the weapons were found in the homes of friends, relatives or parents. Where else could an elementary school student get a gun after all? Federal and many state laws limit long gun sales to 18-year-olds, many setting the bar at 21. There is no evidence that gun shows are where children get their guns. They get them at home.There are two kinds of parents in these cases, those who fail to treat their guns responsibly and those who fail their children. One avenue of exploration would be much tougher penalties for adults who fail to secure their guns and ammunition, in line with penalties for selling drugs to minors or child neglect. States could consider trigger-lock or other safety oriented giveaways, and make purchasing such tools a requirement for buying a gun. Of course some people will fail to use the safety tools, either on purpose or by accident, but the process of protecting ourselves needs a long term solution in spite of short term failures.A second avenue of exploration is to expand red flag laws (Extreme Risk Protection Orders) for parents who suspect their children are headed down the wrong road to call on which would place one more hurdle in the way of acquiring weapons. Red flag laws enlist parents, gun salespeople, teachers, and peers in spotting students who should not have ready access to firearms. A red flag law allows people to petition a state court for the temporary removal of firearms from a person who may present a danger themselves or others. A judge makes the final determination.Such laws exist in 19 states and D.C. at present (14 states of those states adopted red flag gun laws after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida) with considerable variation. One of the most significant variations is who may petition a court to take someone’s guns away. Every state currently allows law enforcement to do so, but California is the only one which includes family members. None of the laws in place allow teachers, clergy, doctors, coworkers, or school peers, people who may well know a young man’s intent best, to petition. A Federal law which standardizes such criteria is badly needed. Basic red flag laws are judicially sound, and have, for example, been used in Florida nearly 6,000 times since 2018 and survived a state Supreme Court challenge. And Florida has had no mass school shootings since the law went into effect.Unlike laws banning whole classes of weapons (i.e., “assault rifles”) new laws focused on the shooter may be one possible path forward, at least concerning kids shooting kids at school. Advantages include:— Red flag laws allow for early intervention before an individual with mental health or behavioral issues can cause harm to themselves or others.— Red flag laws can help reduce the number of firearms in the hands of individuals who are at high risk of harming themselves or others.
— By temporarily removing firearms from individuals who are considered a danger to themselves or others, red flag laws can help increase safety for both the individual and the general public.
— Red flag laws can be effective in preventing suicides, as individuals who are at high risk of self-harm can have their firearms temporarily removed.
— Red flag laws typically require a court hearing before firearms can be temporarily removed, ensuring that individuals have the opportunity to defend themselves and that their due process rights are protected.
And so a day after a typical mass shooting, schools remain closed or on some heightened state of alert. Flags fly at half staff. People leave flowers, notes, and toys at the door. Red flag laws would seek to take guns away from kids before all that, and have been legally tested. As a potential national-level solution they do not restrict gun ownership among most adults, and barely open the Pandora’s Box of the Second Amendment. They are as apolitical as anything to do with guns in America can be and are supported by 72 percent of Americans. Protecting our kids from our kids has to start somewhere.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Negotiations Continue on Guns and Abortions
We don’t really negotiate much in the U.S. and so we’re bad at it. Even when we are forced to “haggle,” we employ rituals, like the salesperson at a used car dealership “checking with his manager” on our offers, or the dance between real estate agents that goes along with buying a house. Car offers come back from the mysterious manager as impossible, and offers on a house are just refused, no chance to talk because two layers of agents stand in the way. That’s why we cannot find any common ground on abortion and gun control. We do not know how to be reasonable.
The American style of negotiating is to demand everything and settle for nothing less. So we’re taught to make our first offer the final offer (it works a little different when the issue is simply money, then we ask for an outrageous amount and “bargain down” after the other side offers an equally outrageous small amount. Starting anywhere near your actual price is considered a sign of weakness.) We don’t like gray areas and we don’t like to feel we’ve lost out on something. So being asked to support something on its face reasonable like allowing two people in love living together in a home they co-own to marry means buying into a whole LGBTQIA2+ agenda that somehow includes forcing kids to listen to drag queens read stories aloud about sexually ambitious caterpillars and their same-sex tadpole pals. Seeking restrictions on abortion ends up cruelly forcing rape and incest victims to carry to term.
We do the same thing in broader swathes, when reporters who misuse pronouns or support the Harry Potter author are not just sidelined or argued with, but canceled, deleted, defunded, disenfranchised, literally thrown down the memory hole to just take their opinion and go away, leaving only your opinion standing. The presumption is even on the most ideological of arguments there is a clear right and wrong only. We have evolved speech to match this mindset, things like “my way or the highway,” “all or nothing,” and “in or out.”
Back in the day when I worked for the State Department every summer embassies abroad had to ask for funding for summer hires to help us catch up on clerical work. There was only so much money around and not everyone could get all they wanted. At first I did what was standard, ask for ten people knowing I only needed five, with all sorts of silly justifications I had to eventually walk back. One year I played it different. I wrote in detail what five people would do, what would not get done with only four, and why six would be a waste of personnel. That year and the ones that followed were the easiest ever; Washington and I jumped right to the meat of the problem and nobody was forced to belittle the other on the road to negotiating a compromise.
That’s what did not happen recently in overturning Roe v. Wade. Though Roe was poor jurisprudence and Constitutionally hilarious, it was the product of negotiation. First trimester abortions were basically allowed, second term were generally allowed, and third was more or less up to the states. Roe produced a workable solution to a very complex problem, uniquely American as it combined religious, moral, and Red and Blue thought into what was often falsely presented as a binary decision — abortion was legal or not. The compromises in Roe were far from perfect or widely accepted, simply the output of a beleaguered Court willing to talk about something the rest of America would not.
The problem was Roe’s supporters and opponents almost from day one set about trying to take a compromise solution and make it an absolute. States latched on to their freedom to dictate third semester rules by gleefully promoting gory end term abortions where a viable baby was aborted. There can be good medical reasons to consider this, but the issue was not presented that way, it was “a woman’s right.” Same on the other side. Clever legal tricks were deployed so that, sure, you can get a first trimester abortion, only not where clinic regulations and hospital affiliations were manipulated to make it near impossible to meet the standards. As was intended. No one was going to sit back and allow compromise to stand.
The Court itself is not immune; in combination with the gutting of Roe (another all or nothing type decision) Judge Clarence Thomas opened the door to ending Federal law allowing for same sex marriage. If you can’t have all the rights you should have none of them he seems to be saying to the Left. Specifically, Thomas was threatening Griswold v. Connecticut, a 1965 decision that declared married couples had a right to contraception; Lawrence v. Texas, a 2003 case invalidating sodomy laws and making same-sex sexual activity legal across the country; and Obergefell v. Hodges, the 2015 case establishing the right of gay couples to marry. How again are those directly related to the hyper-complex issue of abortion?
More importantly, has anything changed in society that requires a new look, something gone amiss? No, the only thing that has changed is a different side now holds a majority on the Court and wants to run with it. They have no more interest in compromise than the demonstrators massing around Justices’ homes in hopes of harassing them into compliance with the mob, or AOC on TV screaming people are going to die.
Same for gun control, the other recent Supreme Court decision. In New York State Rifle v. Bruen, the Supreme Court again swung widely. The existing law, basically saying the right to bear arms in the 2A did not automatically mean a right to openly carry arms in public, had been misused by anti-gun states. In Hawaii, for example, every single open carry permit had to be approved personally by the chief of police. Multiple chiefs over a period of recent years found no reason to approve even a single permit and in the past 22 years there have been four open carry permits issued in Hawaii; all or nothing, as if somehow not one applicant in recent memory was capable of safely openly carrying a weapon. So the response from the now-conservative Supreme Court was to do away with provisions governing carrying a weapon. The counter-response from those states who are anti-gun, such as Hawaii, is to promise to jerry-rig their laws with outrageous training requirements or exorbitant fees to somehow get around the Court’s perceived free-for-all, and to cite recent mass shootings (which had nothing to do with handguns or open carry laws) as fear-inducing excuses. Nobody sees any of the middle ground of reality.
And that is why the Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion and gun carry law resolve nothing. In the extreme progressives will simply wait it out until it is 1973 again, and the Court will have turned over to a more liberal group of jurists who will reinstate black to replace white or vice-versa. The real answer on abortion, a rough and robust debate in Congress followed by a set of compromises, or an equally rough and robust debate at the state level, will never come. Americans are not very good at negotiating and so usually pay more at the car dealer than they should. The same problems plagues us on much more serious issues regarding abortion and the Second Amendment and that ends up costing us a lot more.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
School Shootings: It’s Not the Guns, It’s Kids Killing Kids
Americans ages 18 to 20 account for only four percent of the population but 17 percent of murders. School shootings and their equivalent at Walmarts get the most attention. The problem is not just the guns. It is the young men who wield them. That means any possible solution rests with the shooter, not the firearm.
There’s a pattern inside those sordid statistics, with some 70% of school shootings since 1999 have been carried out by people under 18. The median age of school shooters is 16. It’s kids shooting kids, whether because they are left out, bullied, teased, or angry at some slight or teacher’s offense, it is kids killing kids. Since these killings tend to be “local,” typically shooter and the dead share a racial and/or social-economic background, leaving “white supremacy” as a cause in the dustbin alongside the 1990s blaming “heavy metal” and Satanism. There have been at least 554 school shooting victims, with at least 311,000 children exposed to gun violence at school in the U.S. since the Y-in-the-road game changing Columbine High School massacre, spread across 331 schools. The frequency of shootings has increased, with a surge of 34 incidents in 2021, the highest in any year since 1999.
Since it’s not the guns per se but young men who are to blame, more traditional gun control is unlikely to make much of a difference. Already under the Federal Gun Control Act (GCA), shotguns and rifles, and ammunition for shotguns or rifles may be sold only to individuals 18 years of age or older. All other firearms can be sold only to individuals 21 years of age or older. Licensed sellers are bound by the minimum age requirements established by the GCA regardless of state or local law. However, if state law or local ordinances establish a higher minimum age, the licensee must observe the higher age requirement.
Background checks vary in quality from state to state but generally seek to prohibit sales for reasons such as a history of domestic abuse or violent felony convictions, crimes unlikely to snare the shooters just out of high school. No background check is going to catch someone seething with rage over race or his grandmother. Checks also are at the time of purchase and gun ownership can be forever. There is the private transfer loophole that bypasses most background checks, but no evidence that young mass killers seek out this method of gun purchase.There is also the Columbine divide that somehow factors in to kids killing kids. Pre-Columbine America saw school shootings number only approximately 300 instances in 150 years. Post-Columbine shootings number 331 in only 23 years. Something big is very wrong in America and our kids are not alright. Add in drug use and overdose deaths, and teen suicides (many involving guns; suicide is the third greatest cause of teen death, with homicide in the number two position), and you have more than a crisis, you have a nightmare.Though the Columbine killers had few friends, it is doubtful no one (including parents and siblings) had no idea about the thoughts running through their heads. Later this would all be blamed on the then-new shooting games like DOOM (a “murder” simulator) and heavy metal music. But it seems much less a surface problem and more something deeper and thus ironically more visible. In other words, in Columbine and likely in many of the other 331 modern-era school shooting, somebody should have seen it coming.Therein lies several potential solutions. Lessening gun access in specific, targeted ways may help, such as raising the Federal age for long guns to age 21 or older. Provide tougher penalties for anyone who illegally sells guns to those under age, and for adults/parents who do not secure their guns. Such measures are statistically supported, do not affect most current gun owners, and simply require the sacrifice by legitimate young hunters of safely using dad’s old rifle another year.But real change will require enhanced red flag laws, laws which enlist parents, gun sales people, teachers, and peers in spotting students who should not have ready access to firearms. A red flag law allows people to petition a state court for the temporary removal of firearms from a person who may present a danger themselves or others. A judge makes the final determination. Such laws exist in 19 states and D.C. at present (14 states of those states adopted red flag gun laws after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida) with considerable variation. One of the most significant variations is who may petition a court to take someone’s guns away. Every state currently allows law enforcement to do so, but California is the only one which includes family members. None of the laws in place allow teachers, clergy, doctors, coworkers, or school peers, people who may well know a young man’s intent best, to petition. A Federal law which standardizes such criteria is badly needed.Opposition to red flag laws tends to fall on standard grounds, specifically that not all states allow the gun holder full due process at his hearing (easily remedied by a Federal law that does) and the generic concern about the government having the ability to take a gun anyway from anyone. Yet gun confiscation via a hearing, though likely needing a Supreme Court decision of its own for clarity, appears to be an example of presumptively lawful regulatory measures (such as regulating concealed weapons, prohibiting possession of firearms by felons, etc.) already permissible under Heller v. District of Columbia. Basic red flag laws are judicially sound, and have, for example, been used in Florida nearly 6,000 times since 2018 and survived a state Supreme Court challenge there. And Florida has had no school shootings since the law went into effect. New York’s current red flag law, had it been properly implemented, could have stopped the grocery store shooter.School shootings almost always involve a delineable type of shooter: 16-18, male, loner. Red flag laws are designed to take guns away from people before they commit crimes, and have been legally tested. As a potential national-level solution they do not restrict gun ownership among most adults, and barely open the Pandora’s Box of the Second Amendment. They are as apolitical as anything to do with guns in America can be (and are supported by 72 percent of Americans. Donald Trump has backed red flag laws.) In the search for answers following the latest school shooting, a Federal red flag law is worth a… shot.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Asian Hate Crime or White Supremacy? No.
Following yet another mass shooting in America (Atlanta, not Boulder or any others this week), we turn to the most important question: how it can be politicized?
That means reflexively declaring the murders in Georgia a hate crime against Asians, triggered within a mentally ill white man by remarks Trump made months ago labeling COVID the “Wuhan Flu.” The women killed, with a mix of Korean and Chinese names, some of whom may have been American Citizens, simply are first turned into generic “Asians” by the media, and then ubiquitous victim-props of, well, Trump, white supremacy, maybe all Fox viewers. Of the eight shot, two, one-fourth, are not Asian at all and are quickly falling out of the media’s focal point as not tracking the narrative. Trump’s direct culpability may be grounds for another impeachment. The mass killing in Boulder, which appears mostly white-on-white, holds little interest for the nation.
Kidding. Of course the anti-Asian hate crime politicization is wrong.
What we should agree is the proper politicization is guns are simply too easy to obtain in America. While the media was focused on the three quarters of the victims who were Asian, working hard not to say something cliched as they gleefully mispronounced the “foreign” names (#SAYHERNAME, nah, too hard) and reaffirmed sex work and the trafficking that drives it are A-OK (the media sang a different song about rub ‘n tug joints when Patriots owner Robert Kraft was caught in one), they wasted valuable time not tracking down the gun store where the killer got his weapon. They skipped the interview with the owner in a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert tee saying he had followed all the regulations, or maybe the bad dude at the gun show in his QAnon fan gear saying there were already too many laws against gun ownership. This could have been followed by a long discussion about whether the killer used an “assault rifle” or a “military-style weapon” and whether his clothing was “tactical.”
But that politicization would have meant leaving out the “this will keep happening until we get full socialized medicine, including mental health care” politicization. CNN would have wasted no time tracking down the killer’s neighbors, who would say either a) he was crazy as a drunk bedbug and everyone knew this was gonna happen someday or b) he was the quiet type, kept to himself, and that’s what worried them. Either way, had he lived in Sweden mental health care would have saved those poor Asians and any other races shot. With thoughts and prayers, we ask when will we learn, Chris, when will we learn? Back to you.
The mental health politicization is a good one because it dovetails well with the dangers of social media (it used to be heavy metal and satanism) and white supremacy politicization. No doubt the killer posted more than cuddly kitten pictures on his social media. This would all be tracked down by some Social Media Hate Crimes Task Force who would no doubt locate some pretty odd stuff online (bonus points if it was Parler.) If the guy had any friends/followers, at least one of them would be flashing some sign which we would assured was a symbol of white supremacy, such as scratching his nose. The links would be clear: social media causes white supremacy. The problem with this one is the victims are really not that important to the narrative, just background players, and America is demanding a racial angle to loop Trump’s viral remarks in.
Politicization in most any form also means the media can have fun being racist. Ignoring that many crimes against Asians appear to be perpetrated by blacks, the killer is not just white, he’s that kind of white — you know, the really bad kind, him being from the South, rocking that Joe Dirt cosplay look. And he was a Southern Baptist who told a roommate he worried about falling “out of God’s grace” for basically watching too much porn (bet it was the nasty stuff, too, not the good kind that encourages foreplay.) We all just know he has a confederate flag on his bumper, or tatted on his shoulder, or at least thought about getting one after he cashed his last welfare check whilst complaining about gay socialism.
Some deep-thinking Op-Ed will call him a part of a “maligned minority to purchase firearms in the fear of worse to come as the pandemic deepens.” Sooner or later we’ll learn the killer was afraid of losing his high status as a white man, marked by a lifestyle that included cheap massage parlors and a flip phone. All followed by someone calling white people a “public health crisis” and another chiming in “White fragility is a disease, and it just killed six Asian women.”
Every proper politicization benefits from a religious angle. So the NYT visited the killer’s church to reveal its “bylaws include a lengthy passage on marriage and sexuality that condemns ‘adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s sex.'” And the Times dug deep to find the church’s lead pastor preached a sermon about gender roles in September, drawing on a biblical passage which instructs women to dress modestly and to “learn in quietness and full submission.” For those reading outside of Austin or the coasts, that’s all progressive code to say the killer’s natural sexual urges were warped as a child by some messed up religious doctrine which is why he killed people, just like all those raised in a conservative church eventually get around to doing. Had he only been allowed to attend more drag queen reading events things might have ended differently. Religion radicalized him, like with ISIS.
To be fair, there is debate within the oppression olympics community over which politicization scheme is best employed. “People on here literally debating if this was a misogynistic attack against women or a racist attack against Asians,” tweeted the founder of an Asian-American feminist and pop culture blog. “What if — wait for it — it was both.” Others also tried for a rich word tapestry of blame, coming up with “racialized misogyny” and “male supremacist terrorism.” One prominent feminist author wrote “I don’t care that the shooter told police his attack wasn’t ‘racially-motivated.’ This was a racist misogynist crime.” She also said “we should sideline white male reporters when it comes to mass shootings because they obviously can’t be objective.” Democratic Senator Tammy Duckworth agreed that the evidence be damned if it does not fit the storyline. She expressed doubts about FBI Director Chris Wray’s assessment that the shooting may not constitute a hate crime because “it looks racially motivated” to her from several hundred miles away.
After admitting “very little is known about the motives of the Atlanta gunman,” the Times quickly added “but organizations that track hate crimes have paid increasing attention to misogyny as a ‘gateway drug’ to other types of extremism, such as violent racism” (for younger readers, the term “gateway drug” was last used seriously by anti-marijuana crusaders in the 1980s certain one joint would have you addicted to heroin within a week.) An organization which claims to be a “grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition” tried for a Theory of Everything, stating “Whether or not they were actually sex workers or self-identified under that label, we know that as massage workers, they were subjected to sexualized violence stemming from the hatred of sex workers, Asian women, working class people, and immigrants.” The term for all this share-the-blame is “intersectionality” to deal with problems like racism and sexism that overlap to create Venn diagrams of social injustice and apparently endless commentary that itself is so full of hate.
And if the story of the media creating a racist narrative t fit their needs sounds familiar, it is. Remember the Covington kids, whom the media cast without evidence as racist bullies who attacked an elderly Native American. It was not true, there was no evidence to support it and much to show it was wrong, but the MSM went on anyway, all the way to losing a defamation lawsuit, to show those white, Catholic, MAGA youth were the bad guys.
And as if you needed more proof of how this works, pay attention to the relative lack of attention paid to the Boulder incident. Where are the rallies, the ethnic celebrities to tell us what to think? Is Biden enroute to Colorado to sing Amazing Grace? Unless the killer has a wacky manifesto in his closet, meh.
Back in Atlanta, there seems little interest in weeping for the dead, unless that act too can be used for some political purpose amid more performance art journalism. The politicization of tragedies is so instant and so ingrained, even as the narrative shifts with popular whims, that it prevents us from ever understanding what really happened. Nowhere will we let this thing just be what it is, as if it is not terrible enough on its own, yet another mentally ill person in a violent, hateful, soulless, divided society.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
U.S. to Require Drone Registration; Guns, Nah
In a rush to solve a problem that does not exist with a solution that won’t solve the problem anyway, owners of recreational drones in the United States will soon have to register them, the government said on October 19.
Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) head Michael Huerta told a joint news conference they were setting up a task force to move ahead with the registration plans. “We do feel the level of urgency here is sufficient to move as quickly as we possibly can,” Foxx said. The task force, set to include representatives from the drone and aviation industries, has been asked to file its recommendations by November 20. Foxx said he hoped to have new “rules in place by the middle part of December.”The measure will all in likelihood apply to existing owners, he said, as well as the hundreds of thousands who are expected to acquire a new drone this holiday season. Certain types of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), as drones are officially known, could be exempt including “toys” and other small devices.
I have been unable to find any example of an American killed by a recreational drone; Google turns up a few minor injuries, though to be fair the search results are jammed with examples of U.S. military drones killing people overseas, so I may have missed one.Guns, which are not required to be registered with the Federal government, killed 12,564 American in 2014.
Yes, yes, bad things could happen with drones. They could happen with pigeons and snowballs.
But the dumbest part of the new registration rules is that will not stop dumb/dangerous drone things from happening. Simply registering a drone means nothing except the government has a name attached to a particular device. I guess that might make it easier to arrest someone after the fact, except of course drones will be stolen, bought unregistered on a black market, traded at drone shows, and existing drones will never be registered and all the stuff that happens with guns. Plus some kind of new bureaucracy will need to be set up to record all those millions of expected drone registrants.And to keep things interesting, if drones can be considered a “weapon,” aren’t they then protected under the Second Amendment? Also, if it is up to the states to regulate gun sales, driver’s licenses and all the rest, why are drones going to be registered at the federal level?
Meanwhile, there are lots of old-timey model airplanes which fly by remote control, and they have been around since the 1950s. Will those need to be registered as well?
Wait — so that means registering guns won’t really help either? Yeah, maybe. But the real point here is that the government is quick to act (stupidly, but they did act) on a problem that seems less of a threat, while taking no action on a problem that is a terrible, documented, ongoing threat.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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