Pun Salad

After two recent mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, President Trump said his administration would ask social media companies to develop tools that could detect potential mass shooters.

While delivering a speech on the recent violence, Trump said “we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs,” and he suggested social media companies could develop new ways of catching “red flags.”

“I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partnership with local state and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike,” Trump said in the speech.

In reality, the overwhelming majority of gun sales already require a background check. Anyone who buys a gun from a licensed dealer — whether in person or online, in a store or at a gun show — must be cleared by the FBI before the weapon is delivered. Every year the federal government conducts more than 25 million such background checks — more than 320 million since the system was put in place. The only time the requirement doesn't apply is when someone acquires a gun locally from a private individual, such as a friend or relative. That's the so-called "gun show loophole," which has nothing to do with gun shows and isn't a loophole, since it doesn't apply to anyone in the business of selling guns.

Enacting "universal" background checks would mean forcing private citizens, people who aren't gun dealers, to go through the FBI before they can sell a gun to their next-door neighbor or their sister-in-law. That would impose a considerable burden on the personal affairs of private individuals. But would it "do something" about mass shootings?

Transparency advocates argue that by allowing the public to see who donates how much to which campaign committees and ballot initiatives, voters can better understand the motivations and incentives of officeholders and the relationships between special interests and the government. The stated justification of campaign finance transparency, in other words, is not to publicly shame private individuals for their political preferences.

And yet this isn't the first time that campaign contribution data has been used to punish private individuals for their political donations. Former Mozilla Firefox CEO Brendan Eich was forced to resign in 2014 after it was revealed that he gave $1,000 in support of a 2008 ballot initiative to ban gay marriage in California.

The ability to punish people for supporting or opposing particular political campaigns is one reason a lot of libertarians oppose making political donations public.

So now "boys will be boys" is something like two or three times removed from the original source, namely the opinion of a single journalist at Newsweek's competitor. To a reader coming late to the story, "McConnell campaign's ‘boys will be boys' defense" is simply a fact, a fact they'll tweet and retweet and will take on a life of its own, etc. All thanks to journalists and politicians acting in bad faith at every step.