Going to Hell In a Hand Basket
Jeez I’ve been gone for only four years and Omaha is falling apart.
gunman killed eight people and wounded five others Wednesday at the popular Westroads Mall in Omaha, Nebraska, before apparently turning the gun on himself, police said.
I really hope that the media covers this extensively so as to encourage more of these tragedies.
Actually this give me an opportunity to make another point. While I think its bad for MSM to cover these tragedies extensively because its encourages this kind of behavior, I would not vote for legislation to control it. To enjoy freedom of the press I accept the noise of the press encouraging mass killings. There are other ways to constrain behavior other than through regulation. The most obvious is news editors recognizing the wisdom of not celebrating these killings through extensive coverage.
My prognostic skills tells me that some of you will respond that capitalism drives these editors to cover these events extensively. I think that is probably about right. However, markets are only an indicator of what people want so clearly there is a demand for this kind of coverage. In this regard, I would suggest one refrains from excessively indulging in this coverage so as to reduce the overall demand and in turn send the proper market signals that this kind of coverage is not desired. One can convey displeasure with a tragedy being transformed into a circus without using state coercion.
Speaking of wishing editors had wisdom, the way they played into the hands of terrorist in Iraq was despicable. Basic prudence suggested that the news editors realize they were being played like a fiddle and to find ways to cover the news in Iraq without so readily assisting our enemies. As such, they found way to magnify our enemies efforts while minimizing our own. A precedent that continues today with the surge being mostly ignored along with the improvements it has allowed.
Inevitably, this mass shooing will be covered through the gun control angle. Some of you will find yourselves sympathetic to passing gun control laws in an attempt to reduce mass shootings. However, I would argue that it might in fact be more effective to pass laws regulating how the press can cover these kind of killings. Setting up the argument this way pits one cherished right against another. Many of my readers would show disgust at the suggestion that the state should regulate press to save lives, but have no problem trampling all over the second amendment for the same purpose. As a libertarian, I favor neither. The government really needs to spend less time tinkering with my rights every time an unwise person thinks saving lives justifies diminishing my rights
December 5th, 2007 at 10:06 pm
As someone that doesn’t define themselves, I say let the media report so long as it sells product and let the 2nd amendment live on…. Now, if the guns used in the tragedy were acquired due to a lapse in the system (bad background checks or illegal acquisiton) I would say that we need to tighten restriction. Tight restriction is not anti 2nd amendment.
December 6th, 2007 at 12:23 am
By mean tighter restrictions you mean to say ensure that current laws are strongly enforced. That I can agree with.
Your post in general has the lovely scent of libertarian to it.
December 6th, 2007 at 12:29 pm
“The government really needs to spend less time tinkering with my rights every time an unwise person thinks saving lives justifies diminishing my rights”
It’s an interesting contrast, how you don’t want anyone to mess with your rights in order to save lives, but you want the US to not grant any basic human rights to non-citizens in order to save lives. While I’m sure that on technical legal level your position is tenable, I still feel a great moral contradiction between your positions.
December 10th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
As stated before, rights only make sense when they are used to define the relationship between the state and citizenry. To be more precise in definition, rights are used to stop the state from abusing it’s monopoly on individuals that live on it’s territory.
Defining things this way shows why granting rights to a non-citizens is preposterous. The non-citizen does not live under the coercive force of the state and therefore needs no protection from it’s potential abuse.
I’m sure many of you are now freaking out about this position because it leaves me open to the criticism that instances where the state controls foreign land the state may abuse its coercive force on those people. However, I think the state should be unconstrained by rights when attempting to win the peace in a recently conquered land. Certainly over time the state should give rights to the people but if the truth be told, I would prefer the state pull out completely while at the same time instilling a locally democratically elected government that explicitly states the rights by which the state’s coercion is governed.
It seems to me that this is a real fancy way to say that citizen rights are not a moral issue per se. They are more about keeping the coercive monopoly of the state in check. I don’t support citizen rights to prevent citizen death, I support it to prevent the intrusive force of coercion mindful of the fact that many of those intrusion will eventually lead to citizen death.