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Who Is to Blame for Buffalo?
Before the blood was even dry in Buffalo, Democrats were asking the most important question:
“How can we well-heeled white progressives most effectively use the murders of all these black people to our personal and political advantage?”
The murderer in Buffalo didn’t kill anybody you’ve ever heard of, and so the first thing to do if you want to exploit the deaths of all these people — and that is what Democrats intend to do — is to connect the crime to some famous name or prominent institution. It doesn’t matter if there isn’t any actual connection: Just assert it, and that’s good enough for the newspapers and the cable-news cretins and the impotent rage-monkeys on Twitter. And so New York governor Kathy Hochul blames social-media platforms. Amanda Marcotte blames Tucker Carlson. Other hack Democrats blamed Donald Trump, the Republican Party, Fox News, the National Rifle Association, etc. The usual suspects.
Democrats are looking for something — anything — to cling to politically at the moment, because they are terrified that they are going to get wiped out in the midterm elections. And they probably are going to take a beating: Never mind that the Republican Party doesn’t deserve to win — the Democrats deserve to lose, and that’s what matters at the polls. What can Democrats do about that besides pray that Marjorie Taylor Greene has an extra shot of espresso in her moonbat latte this morning? There are options, but they are tough, and apparently it has never crossed Governor Hochul’s mind (such as it is) to try a different approach: Rather than cheap demagoguery and shunting great streams of public money into her husband’s company, she might try competent governance and see how that works out.
Apparently, that never occurred to her. Apparently, it never will.
Apparently, it never occurred to anybody in New York to keep an eye on the lunatic who showed up at school wearing a full hazmat suit. The kid who already was on the radar of the state police and the mental-health bureaucracy. The kid who was asked about his post-graduation plans and answered: murder-suicide.
As with so many shootings of this kind, the massacre in Buffalo didn’t exactly come out of nowhere. The same is true for the less dramatic kinds of shootings, too: There were at least 33 shootings in Chicago over the weekend, and, when the data are in, we’ll almost certainly find that the victims were almost all black and that the shooters almost all had extensive prior criminal records, including prior weapons violations in many cases. This stuff doesn’t just fall out of the sky. It is predictable as the change of seasons. You won’t see a lot of headlines about those 33 shootings, and that is, in one horrifying sense, entirely appropriate: They aren’t really news. News is something unusual, something unexpected.
We talk a great deal about crime in Chicago, because it is a big, dangerous city, and it is one of the five U.S. cities that the national media ordinarily pay attention to. Buffalo is a smaller, more dangerous city, with a homicide rate just slightly above Chicago’s: 18.38 per 100,000 vs. 18.26 per 100,000.
The vast majority of murders in these United States are no surprise at all — we know with actuarial precision who is going to do the killing, who is going to do the dying, when the crimes are going to be committed, etc. We even know what policies would likely be effective in preventing these crimes — for example, enforcing the gun laws at the state and federal level, particularly the straw-buyer laws — but we don’t do that, because that would be hard work and take up a lot of resources that could be used for more important things, like paying cops to eat Doritos and shoot Jim Beam on the taxpayers’ time and dime, paying cops to impersonate garage doors, paying Philadelphia homicide detectives in excess of $300,000 a year, and buying armored attack trucks to patrol the mean streets of Norman, Okla.
There is much that could be done, if anyone were willing to do it.
Here’s something I am not willing to do: I am not willing to renegotiate the Bill of Rights every time some sexually frustrated loser with a 5.56mm death-boner has a homicidal temper tantrum.
Set aside, for the moment, the inevitable attack on the Second Amendment: Governor Hochul is targeting the First Amendment. Never mind enforcing New York gun laws or funding more proactive policing measures or maybe asking some more pointed questions about the kid who showed up to school in a full hazmat suit, Governor Hochul intends to focus on an area in which she has no authority, expertise, or influence: policing speech online.
From the New York Times:
When pressed on how she planned to confront such hate speech online, without impinging on First Amendment rights, Ms. Hochul noted that “hate speech is not protected” and said she would soon be calling meetings with social media companies.
The New York Times being the New York Times, that “noted” obscures more than it communicates. She didn’t “note” anything. She made something up out of whole cloth. She lied.
(And I have my doubts about the word “pressed” in that sentence, too, unless there was a New York Post reporter on the scene.)
As a matter of constitutional law in the United States, there is no such thing as “hate speech.” It is not a legal term at all — the words have no legal meaning. As such, there certainly is no exception to the First Amendment for “hate speech,” a fact that is well understood and attested to by boatloads of constitutional scholars holding many different political points of view. It is the unanimous position of the Supreme Court. This is not new. Governor Hochul, who has a law degree on her sad little résumé (Erie County clerk and bank lobbyist) ought to know better. Perhaps she has forgotten. Perhaps she missed that day in law school. Perhaps she is a cheap demagogue who ought to be ashamed of herself and of whom New York ought to be ashamed.
There is no such thing as “hate speech” as a matter of constitutional law in the United States, and the sort of thing that is classified as “hate speech” in countries that do have such laws is — pay attention, now — exactly the kind of speech the First Amendment is designed to protect: offensive, unpopular, detestable, the kind of speech that most people consider immoral and indefensible. The kind of speech nobody likes or wants is the kind of speech the First Amendment is there for — the other kind of speech doesn’t need any protection. Here is a useful heuristic: If you immediately want to suppress somebody’s speech, then that is probably the kind of speech the First Amendment was made for. We write down our laws for a reason, and that reason is because your gut instincts can’t be trusted and because we don’t want our civil rights to depend on whatever kind of daffy electrochemical misfire is happening inside that three-pound ball of meat Kathy Hochul calls a brain on any given Monday morning.
Like “hate speech,” “assault weapon” is a term without meaning. (“Assault rifle” is a term with a formal military sense, and if you think that we should not ordinarily sell them to civilians, then, rejoice: We don’t.) The shooter in Buffalo was armed with an ordinary modern sporting firearm, a 5.56mm semiautomatic rifle — the most common rifle in the United States. It was not, contra the Washington Post, “modified.” The Post headline reads: “Suspect in Buffalo shooting modified Bushmaster so it could hold more ammunition.” But as far as I can tell it was only “modified” by putting this magazine instead of that magazine into the rifle. (Magazines holding more than 10 rounds are illegal in New York State, but the law is effectively unenforceable, and it wouldn’t make any difference in these cases even if it weren’t. EDIT: He would have had to break the lock that keeps the fixed magazine in place, a simple task taking about two minutes, which is what he did. So I suppose the rifle was modified in the sense that a locked-up bicycle is modified when a thief breaks the lock to steal it.) The killer seems to have chosen the Bushmaster brand because it has been associated with similar shootings. This is a reminder that there is no major daily newspaper in the United States of America that is capable of writing about firearms competently.
Another line of argument that has been put forward: We shouldn’t let 18-year-olds buy firearms. I am open to that as a policy reform — we don’t let 17-year-olds buy firearms, and that doesn’t seem to me incompatible with the Second Amendment. But if we are going to treat 18-year-olds like children, then we have to go all the way and raise the age for voting, the age of sexual consent, the age for marriage, getting a tattoo, joining the military, etc. If we are going to take away 18-year-olds’ civil rights, then we have to take away their bank accounts and credit cards, too. The civil right enshrined in the Second Amendment isn’t something that some Supreme Court justice magically pulled out of his penumbra — it is right there, in writing. That means it deserves the highest level of protection and deference — and that means that there are a lot of things that 18-year-olds can lose before their explicitly constitutionally guaranteed rights.
New York already has a “red flag” law on the books. I think those laws are probably unconstitutional, but some legal scholars whose opinion I value disagree. In any case, nobody even bothered to try to take the shooter’s guns away under that law — even after he very publicly expressed his desire to carry out such a massacre.
But, by all means, let’s all go chasing around 4chan and Twitter and see if we can’t sort this all out.
Kathy Hochul is an unserious politician representing an unserious party in an unserious state in a largely unserious country that is kept on the road mostly by sturdy guardrails inscribed in an 18th-century document that some guy wrote with a feather. Events such as the one in Buffalo require a serious response, but there is nobody around to provide one, at least not in elected office. What we have is mediocrities, demagogues, and grandstanding ghouls happy to climb atop any pile of dead Americans, no matter how high or how mangled, to do a little TikTok dance in the blood and sing a verse of “Happy Days Are Here Again.”
But, really, I am sure this is all somehow Tucker Carlson’s fault.
Words about Words
Your interest is piqued, not peaked.
These are not the same word, but they are closely related, belonging to a set of words generally referring to that which is pointy: pike and picket are in the family, as are peck and the eating disorder pica. (Pica from the idea that, like a magpie — pica in Latin for its long, pointy beak — the person in question will eat almost anything.) The word poke may be a distant cousin, from the Middle Low German poken, to “stick with a knife.” Poking and sticking and stabbing and such invited applications to sewing and needlework, and, hence, through a longish but predictable etymological chain, you arrive at piqué, the fabric, which is derived from an Old French word for quilt.
It says something about our culture and its history that English has so many different words, with such fine shadings of degree, for wounded vanity. Pique can mean stimulate, as in piqued my curiosity, but it usually means something more like irritation, as in a fit of pique. The Century Dictionary links pique to umbrage and notes that in both cases the feeling is not necessarily linked to a desire to inflict reciprocal injury on the offending party; “pique is more likely [than umbrage] to be a matter of injured self-respect or self-conceit,” the dictionary says. “It is a quick feeling, and it is more fugitive in its character. Umbrage is founded upon the idea of being thrown into the shade or overshadowed. It has the sense of offense at being slighted or not sufficiently recognized.” The 1841 Webster’s dictionary (thanks again to my in-laws for this splendid Christmas gift) notes that pique “expresses less than exasperate,” and includes “to touch with envy” among its meanings. It also notes a now-lost sense of the word that, in the weird English way, means something like the opposite of the other meanings: “to pride oneself on something.” “Men pique themselves on their skill in the learned languages,” is the example Webster’s gives. There is also this from Matthew Prior’s “Protogenes and Apelles”:
Piqu’d by Protogenes’s fame,
From Co to Rhodes Apelles came,
To see a rival and a friend,
Prepar’d to censure, or commend;
Here to absolve, and there object,
As art with candour might direct.
So, pique, umbrage, exasperation, dudgeon, high dudgeon — more or less in that order, I think.
Rampant Prescriptivism
A correspondent points to a source of ambiguity:
The question is how to punctuate usage of qualifiers like “ex” or “anti” applied to phrases of more than one word.
For example, Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt referred to a candidate who was once described as “the anti-Kamala Harris,” which I initially parsed as applying to someone, surnamed Harris, who stood out among the Harrises for being unlike Kamala (and suggesting, also, that it is the nature of Harrises to be pro-Kamala). A favorite of mine is calling someone “an ex-prize fighter,” suggesting that he fights in order to win things that used to be, but no longer are, prizes.
Well-observed. I thank my correspondent.
Here is where typographic nerdery is very helpful. Normally, those of us using conventional word-processing programs have access to three basic kinds of dashes, which are, in ascending order of length, the hyphen (-), the n-dash (–), and the m-dash (—), the latter two so named in typographical convention because traditionally they are the length of an uppercase N and an uppercase M, respectively. The hyphen you will be familiar with, and the m-dash (or em dash) is what most people mean by dash, used in formulations such as: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass — and I’m all out of bubblegum.” You will also see the m-dash used — very often in this newsletter — as a kind of soft and less-formal parenthesis.
The n-dash, however, is a rare beast and a misunderstood one. It has a few different uses, but one very helpful one is forming compound modifiers. We use hyphens in formulations such as “an old-fashioned belief” and “a black-and-white picture,” but we use the n-dash for phrases in which more than one word is joined to a single word: “A fine example of Leave It To Beaver–era television,” “a Franklin Roosevelt–style cigarette holder,” “his Calvin Coolidge–like taciturnity.”
If we can use the n-dash at the end, I don’t see why we can’t use it at the beginning, though this is not common practice: “an ex–prize fighter,” “the anti–Kamala Harris,” etc.
Let’s make this happen.
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Home and Away
There is a recent film called Everything Everywhere All at Once. I like that formulation so much I stole it: What do you get if you do everything wrong everywhere all at once? Joe Biden’s economic policy. More in the New York Post.
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In Other News . . .
More than 1 million Americans have now died of Covid-19.
Recommended
More to come on this, but in the category of self-recommending books is a new one from James Kirchick: Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington.
In Closing
I joke about drinking a lot, but alcoholism is a terrible problem for people who are afflicted with it, and what is in many ways worse than the physical and emotional effects of alcohol abuse itself is the shame that goes along with it — it is that shame which in many cases keeps people from getting help. To die from shame is a terrible thing, and an unnecessary one. If you are someone who needs that kind of help, please do get it, and do not let shame keep you from doing so. However strong or important or stoical you think you are, stronger and more important and more stoical men have been brought low by booze, and the smart ones have done themselves the good service of getting help. The people who love you care more about your being happy and healthy now and in the future than they do about your failures in the past. Treatment isn’t painless or easy, but we do have relatively effective methods that work reasonably well for the people who want them to work. Call your doctor or a treatment center, or walk into pretty much any church in the country and someone will help you connect with appropriate treatment and support. There is some useful reading here. If you take one step toward the people who want to help you, they will take 20 steps toward you.
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