RangerDave wrote:
I've never understood this "exploiting a tragedy" critique. When there's a bridge collapse, it's appropriate to consider design and maintenance policiies to help prevent another collapse; when there's a terrorist attack, it's reasonable to review security policies to try to stop the next attack; and when there's a mass shooting, it strikes me as equally appropriate and reasonable to discuss possible causes and policies in order to help prevent future shootings. It's not exploitation to react to a tragic event by trying to figure out how to prevent similar events from happening in the future.
While it's not unreasonable to conduct after-action reviews (for lack of a better term) in the wake of the tragedy, the exploitation comes in when people with an axe to grind start talking about reviewing specific issues, or worse, proposing new laws, regulations, and restrictions when there hasn't been
any review.
If a bridge collapses, trained engineers examine the wreck and determine if changes are needed, if those changes have already been made (i.e. the bridge was built before better practices were discovered), and if so, what changes have been made. The entire review is conducted with a dispassionate scientific approach. Even in such circumstances, however, you're likely to find people who are either in an emotional tizzy over loss of life if there was any, trying to cash in, or both, the media being foremost among them.
In cases like mass shootings and terrorist attacks, its all the worse because unlike a bridge collapse, there's human factors to approach. No dispassionate review has been conducted yet, and it will probably take the Connecticut State Police and the FBI and/or whoever else is involved some months to do a thorough one, much like the 9/11 report to quite some time to appear.
Much like 9/11, however, the report will be mostly ignored by the media and the public. Instead, both the media and the public are leaping to demand action on their favorite demons, guns and video games, and mental health gets short shrift. Public health care is an important issue to most of the same people, but while pro-public-healthcare people want it as a societal good, anti-gun people
hate and fear guns. Even people who are not really anti-gun but just want more gun control treat gun control as an end in and of itself rather than a solution to a problem.
This is where it turns into exploiting the tragedy. The cart is put completely in front of the horse. People start talking about what gun restrictions are needed when A) the event has not even come close to being properly evaluated yet and B) the gun restrictions are treated as the goal, and reducing mass shootings is treated as an additional reason to have them, rather than reducing the shootings being the goal, and gun restrictions being treated as one possible means.
This is also why the proposed gun control measures focus on such irrelevancies as "assault weapons" and how many bullets a gun can hold. Contrast the Lautenberg amendment, which restricted who can have a gun, and did so based on an actual behavior for which the person was liable rather than "mental health evaluation before buying a gun" that both makes mental health problems secondary to whether the person tries to buy a gun and makes all sorts of unlikely assumptions about a correlation between developing mental problems and gun acquisitions. That, in turn, is better than stupid 10-round magazine limits that are the mass-shooting equivalent of trying to prevent nuclear war by quibbling over how many warheads are on any one missile.
While the Lautenberg amendment is foolish and restrictive in its own way, (it was passed subsequent to VAWA and is part of the general distortion of domestic violence into "uncontrollable men beating and killing helpless women" that feminists love, and which was not yet being seriously contested in the 1990s, and the essentially lifetime nature of it is excessive), the fact that it restricts people from owning a gun based on a past violent offense is not one of its problems. But that's not what we're getting. Instead, we're getting the slobbering glee for an "assault weapons ban" or capacity limits, or a restriction, any restriction!
That's what's exploitive. The tragedy is being used to push a specific "solution", because that solution is a goal in and of itself.
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