Curated Outrage

How the Press and social media tell us when to get angry.

San Jose, California's City Council just voted for a couple ordinances that would require the city's 50K gun owners to pay an annual fee and to carry liability insurance. Both, I expect, will face Constitutional challenges, but such a possibility rarely stops do-gooders from infringing on the rights of the law-abiding.

The laws were first proposed after the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting in July 2019, wherein a human piece of excrement decided to vent whatever rage he had concocted in his polluted skull on a crowd of people, killing 3 and injuring 15.

The day before that crime, (at least) two people started shooting at a festival in Brownsville, Brooklyn, killing one and wounding eleven.

Both those stories made the national news, with the equivalent of above-the-fold headlines on major sites. Meanwhile, the 71 people who were shot (12 fatally) in Chicago that same week barely registered a blip of coverage. Nor did the 11 homicides in Baltimore.

A couple months ago, another piece of human garbage drove an SUV into a parade in Waukesha, WI, killing six and injuring more than 60. By victim count, it was one of the largest mass-casualty crimes in recent history. But, because the perpetrator didn't use a gun, it didn't make the "mass shooting" lists that are popular in the anti-gun-rights segments of our culture, and it all but vanished from the news cycle, for reasons I recently discussed.

We have always been victims of the news gatekeepers' predilections and biases. It's hard to react properly to news that you don't hear, that no one shares, or that is presented with editorial bias. There was some hope that the massive increase in data-rate proffered by the Internet would address this, and it has to some degree, but then social media came along, and the demands of the outrage junkies overwhelmed the plain-news flow.

Those demands have been gleefully fulfilled by the likes of CNN and MSNBC on one side, and Fox News on the other. Along with a plethora of similar (and often even more screechy) outlets that emerged to feed rage-addictions.

Hand-in-hand goes the "never let a crisis go to waste" school of political activity. So, San Jose writes laws that its own mayor (and originator of the ordinances) admits that "this won’t stop mass shootings and keep bad people from committing violent crime." The excuse for the fee is to fund mental health services (to the tune of a million bucks or so, which is noise in a $3B annual budget, but which will help the city figure out who has guns (there is no rifle registration requirement in California). The insurance mandate will serve as a deterrent against legal ownership (which I'm sure is quite intentional).

There will be no outrage from the Left at these violations of the rights of the law-abiding (being required to spend money to exercise a Constitutional right is definitionally "infringement"). The Right will, of course, make much political hay of this (and the gun rights groups will rattle their donation cups). Meanwhile, productive policy efforts to counterweigh shooting incidents such as Gilroy don't happen, nor does their dearth get reported. When was the last time we heard of someone who failed a firearm purchase background check being prosecuted, for example? Why did it take a change of mayor in New York City to reinstitute an effort to track down felons who have guns? Why haven't the slack laws that left the Waukesha mass murderer on the street after a gun-parole violation and a domestic violence incident not been revisited?

Rhetorical questions, of course.