'Wrong place’ shootings make the strongest case for new gun laws
Plus: Plastic in our flesh, babies on planes, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here are this week’s five items for you.
1. A take I haven’t written elsewhere
‘Wrong place’ shootings make the strongest case for new gun laws
I don’t really write about the gun control debate. Looking back at a decade of work, I can think of a single time I’ve touched on the subject in any depth, a column at The Week in which I examined whether an assault weapons law that had been suspended in court could’ve prevented the 2021 Boulder, Colorado, supermarket shooting. (My conclusion after looking at the details of the law: It wouldn’t have mattered a whit.)
My silence here is partly about awareness of my own ignorance. I can only write knowledgeably about so many things, and I just don’t know that much about guns or gun laws, nor do I especially care to learn. My wheelhouse is inevitably limited, and this issue doesn’t make the cut, though of course I recognize its importance.
I also don’t have a strong view on gun policy—at least, not compared to the strength of my views on other issues. I don’t see guns as a linchpin of liberty, like many libertarians do, significantly because I don’t find the tyranny resistance argument against gun control persuasive. I can’t imagine a critical mass of Americans having the skills or inclination to actually fight the federal government. Yes, wildly outgunned fighters in places like Afghanistan have stymied the U.S. military. But most of us can’t and won’t do what those guys do.
At the same time, however, I’m wary of any moves toward ignoring what strikes me as a pretty clear piece of the Constitution. I don’t think prohibitionary policies will magically work for guns when they don’t work for other desirable goods, like drugs and liquor. And I expect any kind of confiscation or mandatory buyback program would be futile at best and extremely dangerous at worst.
All that to say: I don’t have any clear agenda here, and that doesn’t make for very interesting writing. But it does, perhaps, make it easier for me to see something people more invested in this debate seem to miss: that “wrong place” shootings make a far stronger case for new gun laws than the big, planned attacks which tend to dominate this conversation.
If you’ve missed these stories, there have been at least four in recent weeks:
In Missouri, a 16-year-old buy named Ralph Yarl was shot when he knocked at the wrong house by mistake while trying to pick up his younger siblings
In New York, a 20-year-old woman was fatally shot after she and friends drove down the wrong driveway looking for a friend’s house late at night
In North Carolina, a 6-year-old girl and her parents were allegedly shot by a neighbor who was angry a stray basketball rolled into his yard
And in Texas, two teenage girls were shot in a grocery store lot after one mistakenly tried to get into the wrong car
What unites all four stories is that the victims—many of them children—seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time because of the sort of innocent confusion that might happen to anyone. They each encountered an apparently fearful, trigger-happy person with a gun ready to hand.
Gun rights advocates often argue that the sort of person who wants to murder will find a way to do so no matter the law says. And when it comes to mass shootings, my instinct is that this logic is basically right. Anyone far gone enough to plot to murder little kids at school will, I suspect, find a way to get their hands on a gun, probably a semiautomatic rifle, regardless of legality.
But these “wrong place” shootings are different. They’re spontaneous, almost random, the result of a split-second decision that couldn’t have been premeditated. The weapon available matters quite a lot. This is the kind of marginal case more restrictive gun laws likely could prevent.
The man who allegedly shot Ralph Yarl, for instance, might have gone for something like a knife or a baseball bat if he couldn’t have a gun—and Yarl, seven decades his junior, would’ve found those weapons easier to dodge. He may not have been injured at all.
I don’t know if it’s possible to craft a constitutional gun restriction in this country that would actually be effective and not have negative unintended consequences. I certainly don’t have any good ideas on that front. But if I did, the “wrong place” shootings are where I’d start to build my case.
2. What I'm reading this week
“There is plastic in our flesh,” by Mark O’Connell for The New York Times. An except:
Maybe it’s nothing; maybe it’s fine. Maybe this jumble of fragments—bits of water bottles, tires, polystyrene packaging, microbeads from cosmetics—is washing through us and causing no particular harm. But even if that were true, there would still remain the psychological impact of the knowledge that there is plastic in our flesh. This knowledge registers, in some vague way, as apocalyptic; it has the feel of a backhanded divine vengeance, sly and poetically appropriate. Maybe this has been our fate all along, to achieve final communion with our own garbage.
Read the rest here.
3. A recommendation
This piece from
on TikTok as the new chain letter/old wives' tale/sensationalist local news story.
Especially:
[T]here is this false notion I sense from TikTokers that we are far more discerning than we might actually be. That we can handle all this information that the algorithm throws at us. … TikTok has the power to make generations feel like they’re not like Boomers or others before them, but that hubris only carries if we couldn’t see clearly the same behavior being repeated in 2023. Millennials and Gen Z love a good sensational story just as much as previous generations.
4. Recent work
Resharing this Christianity Today column because the case in question is scheduled for oral arguments at SCOTUS today: These states are devouring widows’ houses
Of course Washington and Moscow are fighting a proxy war | Reason
Is this how Tucker Carlson runs for president? | The Daily Beast
Why China wants more nukes | Defense Priorities (newsletter)
My big print piece about the foreign policies of declared and anticipated 2024 GOP presidential candidates is available online for Reason subscribers now:
5. Miscellaneous
Babies on planes discourse is going another round on Twitter. Mostly it’s the same stuff it always is—if your 2-month-old hasn’t aced etiquette school, stay home vs. babies are people too, you know—but the final tweet here is a new and noteworthy contribution with broader relevance:
P.s. my 2019 column about what it’s like to be the person bringing two babies on a plane is here.
