Yesterday’s murder of children and teachers at the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde doesn’t require an ethics verdict. The shooter was a monster, by any rational definition. The reactions and public statements provoked by the tragedy do require ethics verdicts, and they are largely the same. There was an immediate rush to embrace appeals to emotion, excusable with regular citizens, irresponsible for public officials, celebrities, and anyone who has enhanced influence in society.
Particularly revolting was how much was assumed or declared before the facts were known…and there still isn’t enough known, which shouldn’t be surprising since less than 24 hours passed. There are some things we can assume, however. We can assume that there will be another media-fueled freakout more or less exactly like the reaction to the Parkland shooting, but even more extreme because Democrats are desperate to find a distraction from the markers of their incompetence and failures before a reckoning can occur in November. We can assume—indeed we have already seen—that the exact same cliches, vague nostrums and deceitful statistics will reappear and be repeated, and from the same agents. I assume Don Lemon will be weeping soon on CNN, if he hasn’t already.
Primarily, I assume that the Barn Door Fallacy will take over, like it did after the Oklahoma City bombing, 9-11-01, and the George Floyd fiasco. The public, law makers, demagogues, pundits and news media will clamor for and maybe cause to come to pass draconian measures that will make life and society in the USA less free, less healthy, less conducive to human interaction, more expensive, more inconvenient, and more generally rotten, on the theory that a random catastrophe authored by a small number of human aberrations can be retroactively prevented. Barack Obama’s fatuous “if it saves one human life” nonsense will again make sense. The hope is that this tragedy creates an opportunity to eliminate obstacles to other Democratic policies. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) said the quiet part out loud: “Abolish the filibuster and pass gun safety legislation now.”
If I permitted myself to respond to this near-certainty in kind, I would write something like the audacious conservative assassin Ace of Spades posted this morning…
Ethics Alarms 