The Mahablog

Politics. Society. Group Therapy.

The Mahablog

Thoughts on the First Night of the Hearings

I believe the only revelation from last night that was completely news to me was that “multiple” GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Scott Perry (R-Pa.), had asked Trump for pardons regarding their role in trying to get him another term. Perry is denying this, of course; I assume the committee has proof. I believe I’d heard some version of the rest of it before. I wasn’t even surprised by Ivanka’s testimony that she believed Bill Barr about the election results over her father. I predicted yesterday that she or Jared might throw Daddy under the bus, or partway under, anyway.

But Jared is in deeper doodoo, it appears. See Rolling Stone, Jared Kushner Wasn’t Just Involved in Trump’s Push to Overturn 2020. He Helped Start It.

According to four people familiar with the matter, in the week following Election Day in early November of that year, Kushner took charge in overseeing the development of plans to keep Trump in office — Kushner just wasn’t publicly ostentatious about it in the way Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others were. During that first week, Kushner repeatedly met with Trump and other high-ranking aides to the then-president to discuss and map out possible strategies for multi-pronged legal battles and a scorched-earth messaging war against the victorious Biden campaign, the knowledgeable sources tell Rolling Stone. …

…“Jared was directly involved,” one of these sources, a former senior Trump aide who worked on the effort to nullify the election outcome, said. “There was a [brief] window…when it seemed like he was positioning himself to be the Jim Baker of this fight … It didn’t last long. He backed away from it, but he was there and got his hands dirty like everyone else did.” (Baker, a towering figure in the Republican Party, helmed the legal team for George W. Bush during the chaotic Florida recount that ultimately handed Bush the presidency.)

“Jared helped create what then morphed into the Rudy clown show,” the source added.

Now Jared is trying to wash his hands of the mess, seeing as how he’s running a legitimate olive oil private equity business. But as in most things in his sorry-ass life, Jared screwed it up before he walked away.

There’s a lot of good commentary out there, along with a lot of pathetic excuses on right-wing sites. As I said in a comment yesterday, I think the first two hours of the hearings did what they needed to do, which was to establish that the January 6 insurrection was seriously dangerous and not just a protest that spun out of control. It was an attempt at overturning the election. Trump was in the middle of it, and the Big Lie really is a big lie.

Worth noting — Philip Bump at WaPo says that Trump’s inactions on January 6 may have been the most damning evidence of the night.

Trump, Cheney said during Thursday’s hearing, “did not call his secretary of defense,” “did not talk to his attorney general,” “did not talk to the Department of Homeland Security,” “gave no order to deploy the National Guard that day” and “made no effort to work with the Department of Justice to coordinate and display and deploy law enforcement assets.”

Pence demanded action. Trump demanded nothing.

Why? Why wouldn’t the president want immediate action to stem the violence? Messages from allies were flooding his chief of staff’s phone, demanding he do something. But he didn’t. Why not?

It was Pence, not Trump, who made multiple phone calls demanding that Homeland Security, the Justice Department, and everybody else please send reinforcements to the Capitol. Pence was in danger, of course, so I don’t blame him. He’d also talked to Gen. Mark A. Milley at the Pentagon. Trump did not.

Trump could have done three things on that day. He could have kept pushing the rioters forward, offering more tweets like his one soon after the Capitol was breached disparaging Pence. At the other end of the spectrum, he could have done what Pence did, demanding immediate action to protect the safety of legislators and the security of the Capitol. Or he could have done what he did: little to nothing, avoiding criticism for actively stoking the riot as it was underway while reaping the benefit he enjoyed — seeing his furious supporters fight to keep him in office.

I have a hard time understanding how Trump supporters can’t see they were just being used.

Liz Cheney said that Trump was employing a “sophisticated seven-part plan” to overturn the election, and these would be explored in the future hearings. Here are the seven parts, according to Matt Shuham at TPM:

1. President Trump engaged in a massive effort to spread false and fraudulent information to the American public claiming the 2020 election was stolen from him.

2. President Trump corruptly planned to replace the Acting Attorney General, so that the Department of Justice would support his fake election claims.

3. President Trump corruptly pressured Vice President Pence to refuse to count certified electoral votes in violation of the US Constitution and the law.

4. President Trump corruptly pressured state election officials, and state legislators, to change election results.

5. President Trump’s legal team and other Trump associates instructed Republicans in multiple states to create false electoral slates and transmit those slates to Congress and the National Archives.

6. President Trump summoned and assembled a violent mob in Washington and directed them to march on the US Capitol.

7. As the violence was underway, President Trump ignored multiple pleas for assistance and failed to take immediate action to stop the violence and instruct his supporters to leave the Capitol.

Those who are deeply invested in believing the Big Lie are unlikely to ever admit to the truth. They’ll always find some excuse to cling to. And it’s known Trump is pretty skilled at not leaving his own fingerprints at crime scenes. But let’s hope there are enough people not so invested who will appreciate what the hearings are showing them.

Tonight’s the Night

I keep trying not to get my hopes up. There is a lot of opinionating in media today that people will tune out the hearings or will see it as a political stunt. People are more interested in gas prices than in the January 6 insurrection. Certainly the hard-core right wing will insist it’s just a political stunt, no matter what.

If the committee is smart, they will have saved some big-deal revelation for tonight that will get enough headlines and buzz that people not terribly interested will hear about it, and at least think, WTF?

We’ve been told to expect to see taped testimony from Ivanka and Jared. It wouldn’t surprise me to see those two throw Daddy at least part way under the bus.

If you want to comment before, during, and after tonight’s presentation, feel free.

Update on the Missouri Senate Primary from Hell

Today’s primaries are in California, Iowa, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Here’s a preview from Steve Benen.

Here’s an update on the Missouri Senate Primary from Hell: So far, the various Republican creatures posing as “candidates” have not been spending a lot of money on television ads, or else they aren’t running ads in the St. Louis media market. All of the political ads on television here are for elections in Illinois, which is holding primaries on June 28. The Missouri primary isn’t until August 2, so maybe the Missouri campaigns are holding back until the election is closer. The illinois ads are obnoxious enough, though.

In Illinois, BTW, there are a mess of Republicans running to be nominated for governor to run against incumbent Democrat J. B. Pritzker. All the Republicans are running against CRIME and also promise to do the usual things nobody needs doing, like keeping trans women out of sports and Critical Race Theory out of elementary schools. I’m kind of mildly interested in which one of these bozos actually attracts votes. And I sincerely hope J.B. Pritzker gets another term. I understand he has a primary challenger but haven’t seen any television ads from her.

I understand that former Missouri governor Eric Greitens is the front runner for the  nomination for retiring Roy Blunt’s Senate seat. State Attorney General Eric Schmitt is close behind, and U.S. Representative Vicky Hartzler is a close third (all three discussed here and here). It looks like any one of those three has a shot at the nomination right now, and they would all be disasters in the Senate. Polling in single digits are U.S. Rep. Billy Long, state senator Dave Schatz, and Mark McCloskey, who is scraping the bottom of the polls at around 2.5 percent. Billy Long is the fellow who resembles a talking potato and who believes abortion rights are the leading cause of mass shooting. There was talk that Long had received Donald Trump’s endorsement, but that announcement may have been premature. The alleged endorsement doesn’t seem to have moved any needles for him, at any rate.

There are a bunch of declared candidates in the race for the Democratic nomination, but the only ones considered viable at the moment are Lucas Kunce and Trudy Busch Valentine. Valentine is an Anheuser-Busch heiress, a daughter of August “Gussie” Busch Jr., who has worked as a registered nurse but has not run for elected office before. Lucas Kunce is an “antitrust advocate” and former U.S. Marine who also is new to politics but seems to have a knack for campaigning and has had a few guest spots on MSNBC.  Valentine has gotten a lot of endorsements from the state Democratic establishment, but she seems shy about public appearances. Either one would be an acceptable senator, especially in comparison to the freak show the Republicans are running, although neither is quite as liberal/progressive as I would like. I understand Kunce is the current frontrunner.

What’s interesting about state polls is that while Greitens is the front runner for the nomination, he is also the most vulnerable to being beaten by Kunce in head to head polling. But a lot can happen between now and August, never mind November, so I’m not making predictions.

Guns, January 6, and the Big Picture

Yesterday’s mass shooting was in Chattanooga. Saturday’s was in Philadelphia. We seem to be in an epidemic. I’ve read several times over the past few days that one highly publicized mass shooting seems to trigger several more. And here we are.

The January 6 televised hearings begin this week, on Thursday. A question I’ve heard recently is whether the January 6 insurrection still has political importance.

Nearly everything going on in politics right now is tethered to right-wing extremism, so yeah. January 6 didn’t happen in a vaccuum. Our mass shooting epidemic isn’t happening in a vaccuum, either. It’s all of a piece. But seeing this may be a heavy lift for a lot of people.

 Greg Sargent wrote last week,

The Bulwark’s William Kristol and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait each posit that a fundamental shift is taking place within the Republican Party and conservative establishments. This shift means new reigning orthodoxies are taking hold at the highest levels, and dictating that the insurrection attempt simply did not amount to a serious offense against the country.

This shift also means new institutions are developing in the GOP and on the right that are expressly organized to promote a more militant refusal to accept election losses in the future. As Chait notes, we’re witnessing the “institutionalization of an insurrectionary movement.”

All this may sound very dramatic. But it can’t be dismissed, given that a large swath of the party will respond to the Jan. 6 hearings with a full-fledged propaganda effort to bury a serious political crime against the country — and to substitute a new story in which the true victims related to Jan. 6 are Trump and his supporters.

The gun craziness is feeding into this same institutionalism of insurrection, especially the fervently held false belief that the purpose of the Second Amendment is to be eternally prepared to overthrow the government. And not excepting election results one doesn’t like sounds like a good excuse.

Today Greg Sargent pointed to surging AR-15 sales in Georgia. The good ol’ boys are lining up around the blocks to buy one.

Folks were waiting at the door to purchase AR-15s,” a store manager says in the report, which was first flagged by Ron Filipkowski, a lawyer who closely tracks the right.

The manager also says customers should consider AR-15s precisely because they are semiautomatic. “If you deal with a mob of people possibly trying to take over your home,” he says, “to protect your family, you’ll want as much firepower as you can get.”

We are not, in fact, experiencing a great surge in mobs attacking private homes that I’ve noticed. But the firearm industry wants you to be prepared.

Our current moment is in part the result of the gun industry’s radicalization. It has marketed guns in a way designed to target younger demographics and to encourage the militarization of our culture, the increasing introduction of military-style weaponry into civil society.

But another component of the industry’s radicalization, as former gun company executive Ryan Busse argues, is its push toward ever-increasing firepower, toward a kind of fully armed society and the deliberate exploitation of social antagonisms to jet-fuel this trend.

You hear echoes of this in the customer’s suggestion that the AR-15 has become “America’s rifle,” and in the gun store manager urging the purchase of ever more firepower, on the idea that “mobs,” as opposed to lone intruders, will soon invade your home. You see, the threat can always be inflated further.

And, of course, talk of restricting gun sales even a little bit has ’em out stocking up. Sargent quotes one gun owner as saying “The way this president is driving this country, everybody needs to be carrying at this point.”

The perpetual stoking of fear of big, scary mobs — of whom? Criminals? Black Lives Matter? Antifa? Unitarians? — and the fear that government is going to take something away from white male people somehow keeps them buying those guns.

Whatever is presented in the January 6 hearings, we can bet that the hard-core MAGA heads and right-wing true believers will not believe it, not understand why it’s a problem, and possibly never even hear it because they won’t watch. So we’re not likely to have the kind of bipartisan “ha-HAH” moment some of us may remember from the Watergate hearings of long ago. But maybe the hearings will wake up some people. We’ll see.

Red State Culture and Cornered Animals

Following up the last post on what might reduce gun violence, and what won’t.

There have been several mass shootings since I started this series, including one in a Tulsa hospital a couple of days ago. What we’ve heard so far about that one is that the gunman had recently had back surgery and had been discharged. He had been calling his surgeon asking for help with continued back pain and was not getting a satisfactory response. So he purchased an “AR-15-style weapon” at a gun shop and went to the hospital. He shot and killed his surgeon and another doctor, plus a patient and a receptionist, and then killed himself.  So I guess he’s over the back pain now.

A big chunk of our problem appears to be cultural, and I’m not sure how to address that. But culture is somehow driving growing differences between red and blue states. See Paul Krugman, America’s Red State Death Trip, from December 2019.

Democratic-leaning areas used to look similar to Republican-leaning areas in terms of productivity, income and education. But they have been rapidly diverging, with blue areas getting more productive, richer and better educated. In the close presidential election of 2000, counties that supported Al Gore over George W. Bush accounted for only a little over half the nation’s economic output. In the close election of 2016, counties that supported Hillary Clinton accounted for 64 percent of output, almost twice the share of Trump country.

The thing is, the red-blue divide isn’t just about money. It’s also, increasingly, a matter of life and death….

…The death gap has, however, widened considerably in recent years as a result of increased mortality among working-age Americans. This rise in mortality has, in turn, been largely a result of rising “deaths of despair”: drug overdoses, suicides and alcohol. And the rise in these deaths has led to declining overall life expectancy for the past few years.

What I haven’t seen emphasized is the divergence in life expectancy within the United States and its close correlation with political orientation. True, a recent Times article on the phenomenon noted that life expectancy in coastal metropolitan areas is still rising about as fast as life expectancy in other advanced countries. But the regional divide goes deeper than that.

This was before covid, mind you. Covid hit the cities first, of course. But within a few months we were seeing the same red state-blue state death gap, with rates of hospitalizations and deaths from covid far higher in counties that voted for Trump in 2016 than in counties that voted for Clinton. And this trend continues. See For red and blue America, a glaring divide in COVID-19 death rates persists 2 years later by Arielle Mitropoulos, ABC News, March 28, 2022. Experts traced this to political beliefs. Blue state folks wore masks and got vaccinated at higher rates than red state folks, and so there is a death gap.

(I live in one of those red counties. Last week I decided it was time to get a second covid booster, and got it the same day, easy peasy, at no cost at a local Walgreens. Currently the vaccination rate in St. Francois County is only 44 percent, and the current positivity rate is 14 percent.)

Regarding suicide, a few days ago I wrote a post about the Southern Baptist scandal and ended up writing about the rot in the patriarchy. I quoted this:

The data also contains a sociological mystery even the experts are unsure how to explainfully: Of the 45,979 people who died by suicide in the United States in 2020, about 70 percent were White men, who are just 30 percent of the country’s overall population. That makes White men the highest-risk group for suicide in the country, especially in middle age, even as they are overrepresented in positions of powerand stature in the United States. The rate that has steadily climbed over the past 20 years.

Some clinical researchers and suicidologists are now asking whether there is something particular about White American masculinity worth interrogating further.The implications are significant: On average, there are more than twice as many deaths by suicide than by homicide each year in the United States.

Men have tended to have higher rates of suicide than women for a long time, probably since anybody started keeping track of rates of suicide. This suggests to me that in spite of our famous raging hormones, women on the whole tend to be more emotionally stable than men. But it seems to me that the gap between male and female suicides is a lot bigger than it used to be. And, as Krugman says, suicide rates are higher in red states than blue ones. It looks here like the more rural the state, the higher the suicide rate.

Krugman’s column referred to another 2019 column by Thomas Edsall, Red and Blue Voters Live in Different Economies. Much of this column discussed the 2016 election and the argument many of us had at the time about whether support for Trump was driven more by economic anxiety or by racial and cultural animus. Racial and cultural animus was a more obvious reason, but I don’t think you can separate the two. As Krugman pointed out, since 2000 the wealth gap between red and blue voting districts has been growing along with the death gap. Individual Trump voters may be doing perfectly well, but the communities they live in mostly aren’t.

And there is a connection between the economic deterioration and the rise of authoritarianism, along with racism and cultural animus generally. The two things are very much connected. I argued this in 2019 also. “If you want people to not become klansmen and nazis, think about how the economy is working for working-class folks,” I wrote at the time.

Red state voters are angry and think the rest of the country is cheating them or out to get them, somehow. They don’t trust the government except for the Republican side. They watch Fox News and get told everything going wrong is Joe Biden’s fault, or the Squad’s, or Hunter Biden’s laptop, or racial minorities’, or the fault of liberals in general. And the angrier they get the more guns they buy.

Because their states are run by Republicans the kinds of public investments that could attract new high-end business — such as in education and infrastructure — aren’t being made; instead, it’s all about cutting taxes and then cutting education and government services to pay for the tax cuts. So businesses that offer better payings jobs, businesses that require an educated workforce, communities employees want to live in, and good infrastructure, don’t come. It’s a downward spiral. (See How to Kill a State from 2016.)

No wonder “great replacement theory” makes sense to them. From their perspective, there’s not much of a future for them. All the good stuff seems to be diverted elsewhere.

And then there’s good ol’ toxic masulinity. IMO a lot of the male suicide issue stems from a lack of relatable role models for 21st century American men. The old John Wayne / “Dirty Harry” / “Rambo” model of years past really has no function in the modern world. Nobody really needs men who don’t communicate, are emotionally stifled, and solve problems mostly by shooting them. I don’t know that anybody ever needed that sort of man, actually.

I’ve read enough history, and enough Civil War letters, to know that 19th century men weren’t nearly as emotionally frozen as men came to be later. Something happened to American men in the 20th century that wasn’t healthy. Maybe it was the two world wars. I don’t know.

Men, white men especially, are assumed to be the lords of the universe, but most of them aren’t. Most of them are just pawns in the mighty U.S. economy. Their lives are being shaped by forces way beyond their control that they don’t understand. They want to have some control, and they imagine they’ve been cheated of some control or power they should have had. It shouldn’t be a surprise that they seized Donald Trump as a hero, because like any good huckster he knows how to say what people want to hear. Trump articulated their frustration, and they project onto him strength and power and knowledge he doesn’t actually have. But he’s just using them, and they haven’t figured that out yet.

Let’s think about the young folks. We learned that the Uvalde shooter had been the victim of bullying. We also learned he liked to threaten teen girls online.

He could be cryptic, demeaning and scary, sending angry messages and photos of guns. If they didn’t respond how he wanted, he sometimes threatened to rape or kidnap them — then laughed it off as some big joke.

But the girls and young women who talked with Salvador Ramos online in the months before he killed 19 children in an elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., rarely reported him. His threats seemed too vague, several said in interviews with The Washington Post. One teen who reported Ramos on the social app Yubo said nothing happened as a result.

Some also suspected this was just how teen boys talked on the Internet these days — a blend of rage and misogyny so predictable they could barely tell each one apart. One girl, discussing moments when he had been creepy and threatening, said that was just “how online is.”

That’s just how it is. Almost sixty years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. I assume a lot of these boys don’t behave that badly around girls in real-world situations — I could be wrong — but all that rage and misogyny doesn’t go away. It’s part of the dysfunctionality of current male role models.

(Right on schedule — Rep. Billy Long, U.S. congressman from Missouri and Trump-endorsed Senate candidate, has declared that all these mass shootings are happening because women have abortion rights.)

All these angry, alienated young men are growing up in angry, alienated cultures, and their parents probably are too wrapped up in their own problems to be much help. They have no useful role models of masculinity to follow, and often the world doesn’t seem to have a place for them. There was a time in their own communities that a young man could graduate high school and pretty much be guaranteed a job at the local factory or mill or mine or quarry, if he couldn’t think of anything else he wanted to do. Often those were Union jobs, so he could expect to sail into adulthood with good wages and benefits that would support a family. Now, more often, there’s nothing but food service and other minimum wage, dead end jobs for this kid, unless he’s willing to move or maybe get some additional training somewhere. The adult world of marriage,  maintaining a household and raising a family must seem impossibly far away. That may be why so many seem stuck in adolescence well into their 20s and 30s.

See also Young men, guns and the prefrontal cortex at the Washington Post. This is worth reading all the way through, so I took down the firewall for this one. Basically, it says that the young men are going through adolescence feeling isolated and alienated from everything around them, and our culture doesn’t give them any guidance for handling these feelings except to be macho and aggressive. And, of course, social media acts as a reinforcement for alienation and aggression. Many of them drift into a violent fantasy world in which taking “revenge” on black church goers or Asian women may seem like a fine idea. Further, “for every mass shooter who fits a certain profile, there are millions more like him who never act violently.”

So what can these drifting young men do to feel like men? The firearm industry has an answer. In recent years they’ve increasingly turned to marketing firearms as “objects of masculinity.” And you don’t need a Ph.D. in Freud to see the firearm-phallus connection.

In brief, we’ve got a perfect storm of conditions that cause firearm violence, and there are no quick fixes. Gun control will be only part of it. But making any meaningful change is nearly impossible because of red state culture and the way our Constitutional system allows red states to have veto power over progressive form. Joan Walsh wrote recently of what red state culture has become.

It’s a world where marriage is between a man and a woman, the man is king, LGBTQ people have no rights, and women few. Where abortion is criminalized and the social safety net shredded—so that the women forced to bear children must lean on men, or live in desperate poverty. Where guns are everywhere (parents and teachers should be armed to protect kids!), schools are private, medical care returns to private charities, and only the right (mainly white) kind of people vote. It’s an atomized world, where we rely on male-headed nuclear families, churches, the occasional self-interested generosity of oligarchs, and maybe local, homogenous mutual-aid societies—if we so choose.

It’s the dystopian opposite of the world most Americans want: a world where women, LGBTQ people, and non-white Americans enjoy full citizenship, the right to privacy, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness. Here, the Second Amendment is respected, but the right to carry lethal weapons is restricted in myriad sensible ways. Everyone who’s eligible can vote here, and everyone over 18 is eligible. And yes, there are churches, synagogues, mosques, and vibrant community-based organizations, but the most effective mutual aid resides in democratically elected governments, local, state, and federal, that guarantee health, safety, education, and economic security for everyone.

Red state culture is something like the last desperate aggressions of a wounded or cornered animal. It’s white supremacy and the patriarchy lashing out at cultural change that leaves no place for them. I’d like to think that in a couple more generations we will all have moved past this nonsense, but I’m not sure the U.S. will survive as a first-world democracy for a couple more generations. We’re living in terrifying times.

Getting Smarter About Gun Violence

There were some headlines last week about two 18-year-old boys commiting mass shootings — in Buffalo and Uvalde — within a few days of each other. That reminded me of a post I wrote just over a year ago — Two 21-Year-Old Men Killed People Recently — about mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder.

(A follow up to the old post — the young man who killed ten people in a Colorado supermarket in 2021, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, has been found incompetent to stand trial by two different panels of psychiatric experts. A diagnosis was not given, but courts don’t usually keep a trial from going forward unless the defendant is seriously psychotic, as in pretty much untethered to reality and unable to comprehend what he did. The prosecutors fought the incompetence finding tooth and nail. One of the people Alissa killed was a police officer. The most recent news stories say he’s going to be confined to a psychiatric hospital indefinitely. As I understand it, they might still try to prosecute him some day once his psychosis is under control.)

School shooters are nearly always teenage males. The average age of a school shooter is 18, I read this week. I read here than the median age of school shooters is 16. This page doesn’t have data more recent than 2020, but it says 95.7 percent of all mass shooters are male, and their average age is 33.2. Various studies have found that a quarter or more of mass shooters are under the age of 25. There have been a few in their 60s, also.

Also, just about three fourths of mass shooters used semiautomatic handguns and not AR-15s. That was true of last year’s shootings in Atlanta and Boulder. There has been some talk this week about an AR-15 ban, which I don’t expect to happen (although I wouldn’t stand in its way, if it did), but that still leaves a lot of mass shootings.

Josh Marshall wrote,

A stunningly large number of mass shooters are between the ages of 18 and 21. Uvalde shooter, 18; Buffalo shooter 18; Newtown shooter, 20; Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooter, 19. In addition to those in this three year age range many others are just above it. The shooter in the 2019 El Paso mass shooting was 23; the shooter in the AME Church mass shooting in Charleston, South Carolina was 21. This isn’t random chance. There’s a lot we know about the teenage and young adult male brain that makes those who are 18, 19 and 20 much higher risk for this stew of interlocking behaviors than men ten or twenty or for that matter even five years older. (Check out the actuarial tables that put a premium for auto insurance for men under the age of 25.) The shooters in Buffalo and Uvalde both appear to have waited until their 18th birthdays to purchase assault rifles to use in their massacres.

Of course young sociopaths can find other ways to get AR-15s. But getting them illegally is another way to get caught. You might say, “Well, they could still just buy a hand gun.” But in fact they can’t. Perversely, federal law requires purchasers of handguns to be 21. But you can buy rifles and shotguns (which includes all assault rifles) when you’re 18.

This is in the context of arguing that raising the age to legally purchase any sort of “long gun” to 21 would do some good. It probably would. Raising the age to 25 would do even more good. I hear a lot of arguing that if 18-year-olds can join the military they ought to be able to handle guns, but in the bleeping military they are supervised. And on most military posts there are a lot more rules about personal firearms — registration, where they must be stored, where they can be carried — than is true in most right-leaning states. Troops living in barracks can’t keep their personal firearms with them but must store them in a base firearm storage facility, for example. Because the officers aren’t stupid.

There’s a fascinating interview in Politico with two criminologists who have studied mass shooters in depth. The young men are angry and alienated and see no future for themselves, but they aren’t “mentally ill.” They are troubled; they are badly socialized. But as a rule most aren’t crazy and would not qualify as “mentally ill” as medical science defines the term. One of the criminologists said,

“Early childhood trauma seems to be the foundation, whether violence in the home, sexual assault, parental suicides, extreme bullying. Then you see the build toward hopelessness, despair, isolation, self-loathing, oftentimes rejection from peers. That turns into a really identifiable crisis point where they’re acting differently. Sometimes they have previous suicide attempts.”

For most of them, the mass shooting is intended as a final act of defiance against the world they think has wronged them. They don’t expect to survive.

I don’t think most people realize that these are suicides, in addition to homicides. Mass shooters design these to be their final acts. When you realize this, it completely flips the idea that someone with a gun on the scene is going to deter this. If anything, that’s an incentive for these individuals. They are going in to be killed.

So arming teachers isn’t likely to work. What also doesn’t work is labeling the perpetrators as “monstors” or “evil.”

If we explain this problem as pure evil or other labels like terrorist attack or hate crime, we feel better because it makes it seem like we’ve found the motive and solved the puzzle. But we haven’t solved anything. We’ve just explained the problem away. What this really problematic terminology does is prevent us from recognizing that mass shooters are us. This is hard for people to relate to because these individuals have done horrific, monstrous things. But three days earlier, that school shooter was somebody’s son, grandson, neighbor, colleague or classmate. We have to recognize them as the troubled human being earlier if we want to intervene before they become the monster.

The Buffalo shooter told one of his teacher he was going to commit a murder-suicide after he graduated high school, and she didn’t report this because she didn’t think he was serious. He wasn’t “evil” or a “monster” to her. And if we’re going to round up all the 18- to 21-year old males who are angry and alienated and say threatening things, we’re going to need a lot more prisons. Maybe we should barb-wire Idaho and throw them all in there until they straighten out.

On the other hand, it would be great if schools had more resources to identify and help young males who show signs of fitting the profile. This is not just to prevent mass shooting, because most of them aren’t going to go that route. More of them may “graduate” to domestic violence or drugs or binge drinking and driving or other destructive behavior.

More from the interview:

Post-Columbine there’s been this real focus on hardening schools — metal detectors, armed officers, teaching our kids to run and hide. The shift I’m starting to see, at least here in Minnesota, is that people are realizing hardening doesn’t work. Over 90 percent of the time, school shooters target their own school. These are insiders, not outsiders. We just had a bill in Minnesota that recognized public safety as training people in suicide prevention and funding counselors. I hope we keep moving in that direction.

The past several posts have been about why more and more guns just make us less and less safe. Gun control laws do reduce gun homicides and other firearm deaths. Anything that can be done to make acquiring a firearm a bit more complicated — required background checks, waiting periods, raising age limits, licensing, etc. — would discourage some of the younger mass shooters. I’ve written in the past about why I’d like to see most if not all semiautomatic firearms be off limits to most civilians, although I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Regarding mental health services, what would be really useful is helping schools and other institutions recognize and provide counseling services to those who are moving into self-destruct mode. Building more psychiatric hospitals might be a good idea for our mental health system overall, but most of our mass shooters don’t have the kinds of “mental illness” that are treated in hospitals, Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa being an exception. And the last thing we need to do is to further stigmatize mental illness either by blaming it or creating a database of “mentally ill” people who aren’t allowed to purchase guns, which has been suggested in the past. Few mass shooters have been diagnosed with anything at the time of the shootings. Most of them don’t have a true “mental illness” so much as just being seriously maladjusted.

Since this is getting a bit long already, I’m going to do my “seriously maladjusted rant in another post.

Next: What to do about serious majadjustment.