No, “feel good” remedies won’t solve the problem. As noted over there, an attempt to confiscate Americans’ guns would be tantamount to the government making war on its own people. It would not end well.
[Update a few minutes later]
No, there were not 273 “mass shootings” by any sane definition. There were nine.
What life might be like on it.
Not sure this was the 21st century I was looking forward to.
The first lawsuit has been filed against them for the Vegas shooting. There will be more, and they’ll have to settle. Three days of “Do Not Disturb” and no attention paid to all that luggage going in and none coming out does appear to me to be negligent. Particularly since it seems to have been a comped room. I think the real lesson here isn’t about gun control, but better security in high locations near entertainment and event venues.
[Friday-afternoon update]
Karl Denninger is unhappy and unimpressed with the Vegas authorities. To put it mildly.
They’re not worth banning, but no one really cares about them that much:
Bump stocks, says Mr. Valone, “are an amusement, because they don’t under normal circumstances turn an AR-15 or another rifle into a killing machine, because you can’t hit anything with it. Only when you are presented 400 yards away with a field of uninterrupted humanity would something like that even be effective.”
Hard cases make for bad law.
Glenn Reynolds has put together a short video.
A couple points: The FAA has only been regulating space since the mid-90s; prior to that it was done by a separate office that reported directly to the Secretary of Transportation. I recommended in my book that the office be taken out of the FAA and restored to its original place in DoT. Others (including NASA administrator nominee Jim Bridenstine, who told me in February that he read the book) have recommended this as well, as has the commercial industry, but they’re (unsurprisingly) getting pushback from the FAA. Over a year ago, I had an op-ed in The New Atlantis in which I said that the FAA should keep its head on the clouds, and hands off space.
If Elon really does build BFR, and wants to use it for point to point, it’s going to raise some very interesting regulatory issues. Under the current law, because it’s suborbital, it will be regulated by the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, not the aviation portion of the FAA. There will be no certification of the vehicles; they will operate under a standard launch license, and the spaceflight participants (aka “passengers”) will fly in an informed-consent regime, without the same expections of safety they’d have with an airliner. We’ll see how long some in Congress will find that acceptable.
A lot of idiots claim that the NRA wants everyone to be armed. They’ve never advocated that, as far as I know, but there is a case to be made for it.
[Update a while later]
It’s not new, but Glenn Reynolds co-wrote a paper on this a while ago.
Yes, based at least on initial reports, it does appear to be very, very strange.
[Update later afternoon]
The Vegas shooting and the attack of the carrion crows.
Every.Single.Time.
[Tuesday-morning update]
Mass shootings are a bad way to understand gun violence.
And Nick Gillespie says that this is the time to defend the Second Amendment and less-strict gun control. Because gun control is not, and has never been, the solution.
I have a crazy idea that if you’re going to propose a policy or law in response to a tragic event, you should have to explain how it would have actually prevented that event. Everything this guy did and used was already illegal, as far as I can tell.
A useful primer on the cryptoeconomy, which will have tax collecters and regulators quaking in their jackboots.
…is sitting on the biggest crime ever committed by a sitting president.
As many have pointed out, this is the Democrats’ Watergate, where the president actually committed the crimes of surveillance and siccing the IRS on his political enemies (unlike Nixon, who simply attempted to). Beyond that, one of the reasons why Lynch refused to let Clinton be prosecuted is that it would have almost certainly implicated Obama as well.
[Late-morning update]
Unmasking, yet another abuse of power. It may not have been illegal per se, but it was certainly that.
I was wondering if anyone had been carrying. Apparently not: “The usher ran and got his gun and held the gunman at gunpoint.”
If he hadn’t had to go get it, it could have ended sooner.