Month: April 2007

[Megan]  A reader asks the following question:

I had a thought; if anyone can get a gun, and shoot people, even teenagers, and obviously psychotic people, then why haven’t any Islamist terrorists done so?

 

I mean, wouldn’t they?  If a jihadist can go into Walmart, buy a gun and ammo, go back to his car, load the gun, and go back into the Walmart and shoot everyone in sight, then why haven’t any of them done this?

 

Why?  why? why? I wonder!

 

I am starting to wonder, that maybe there aren’t any out there. Could that be?  I have been so programmed to be en-guarde against the threat of Islamic jihadists, that it is hard to believe that they are not out there, plotting against us.  But then, why haven’t they gotten guns to shoot us?  It would be so easy.

 

Could the threat be exagerated?  This question is not intended to be rhetorical; I would really like to know.

There are several possibilities:

1. Our excessive homeland security is actually doing a good job of screening out terrorists
2. The terrorists that are here can’t buy guns legally, because they are illegal aliens
3. The terrorists don’t want to shoot people.

I assume that all three are true, but I’d bet that number three has the largest effect.  There are lots of spectacular things that terrorists could do to severely hurt the American economy, or kill lots of people in accidents.  No, I won’t name any, but I can think of half-a-dozen off the top of my head, and I’m sure you could too.

But terrorists don’t want to kill people in, say, spectacular car wrecks.  They want to kill people in ways that are spectacular, fear-inducing, and hard to defend against.  Spectacular, so they can raise money and recruits; fear inducing, so as to produce the desired policy response; hard to defend against, because if they are a one-time fluke, they won’t induce fear.

Attacks like today’s aren’t actually that hard to defend against, not if they are common.  Arm the teachers; arm the students; put armed security guards in every building.  We don’t defend against them because they are rare, not because we couldn’t. 

Bombs, on the other hand, are very hard to defend against, which is why Israel has had such a difficult time doing so.  It’s worth noting that in fact many mass-shootings have been stopped by armed citizens, including one in Virginia recently.  Thus, while the attack might be easy to stage, it might have too low a probability of success to waste valuable human resources on.

Update: Another reader accuses me of missing the central question.  Let me clarify: I think that the threat from terrorism in America may be exaggerated (as almost any telegenic threat, like that of school shootings or forest fires, tends to be).  But this isn’t good evidence of that.  Terrorists seem to favour bombs over guns worldwide; the question is why we aren’t having more bombings, when a terrorist could surely slowly acquire the requisite amount of fertiliser as easy as this kid slowly acquired guns.

Cincinnati, Ohio, 3 pm.

[Ross] Amid the Virginia Tech coverage, the Asian American Journalists Association asks reporters "to avoid using racial identifiers unless there is a compelling or germane reason." Presumably they were hoping to avoid exchanges like this one.

(hat tip: The House Next Door)

[Ross] It’s entertaining and arguably even important (for the reasons T.A. Frank lays out here), but still … if you recognize all the names on the Washington Monthly‘s list of D.C.’s sizzlingest power couples, you’re spending way too much time inside the Beltway.

[Ross] Tyler Cowen speculates, with an assist from some recent social-science research. Its upshot:

Kohler found that mothers with one child are about 20 percent happier than their childless counterparts; and while fathers’ happiness gains are smaller, men enjoy an almost 75 percent larger happiness boost from a firstborn son than from a firstborn daughter . . . The first child’s sex doesn’t matter to mothers, perhaps because women are better than men at enjoying the company of both girls and boys, Kohler speculates.

Interestingly, second and third children don’t add to parents’ happiness at all. In fact, these additional children seem to make mothers less happy than mothers with only one child—though still happier than women with no children.

If you want to maximize your subjective well-being, you should stop at one child, concludes Kohler, adding that people probably have additional children either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too.

Europe seems to have this pretty well figured out. And I don’t mean to be flip – the European "let’s stop at one" approach to childbearing really is well-calculated to maximize a certain kind of parental well-being, narrowly defined. Of course, it’s also calculated to seriously diminish the "subjective well-being" of all the second and third children who don’t get conceived because their parents decided it wasn’t worth the trouble. And while the theory that parents have children "either for the benefit of the firstborn or because they reason that if the first child made them happy, the second one will, too" may be true in many or even most cases, it also reflects a certain degree of deplorable solipsism. The chief reason parents should take on the trouble of conceiving and raising a child is that the child is a good in and of itself – one of the greatest goods there is, in fact, in any moral scheme worth considering – not because they think that it will make them or their already-existing offspring happier.

[Ross] Jack Shafer defends the media coverage of Virginia Tech, presumably against attacks like this one. Meanwhile, Matt Yglesias defends the attempts to exploit the tragedy for crass political purposes.

[Ross] During the early confusion, a lone American reporter misidentified the Virginia Tech killer as a Chinese student who picked up his visa in Shanghai. James Fallows, our man in China, explains what happened next.

[Ross] The strange thing about that Jane Kramer piece that Reihan brings up was that nearly all the reporting she did was extremely favorable to Benedict XVI’s approach to Islam – yet she still felt the need to bracket the whole thing with the usual throat-clearing about the Pope’s supposed reactionary tendencies on unrelated issues, including not only the passage Reihan mentioned, but this loaded one-liner: "He wants to purify the Church, to make it more definitively Christian, more observant, obedient, and disciplined—you could say more like the way he sees Islam." It’s almost as if there’s some copy-editing program at every major media outlet that’s designed to automatically insert the words "birth control" into any piece about Catholicism, no matter what the actual subject of the story happens to be.

[Andrew] This I can’t embed. This I don’t even know what to say about. This certainly is NOT SAFE FOR WORK. But this woman can tell something called the truth about women, men and sex (and jack-rabbit sex toys). Especially, perhaps, black women, black men and sex. Think of it like XXX Oprah told by a preacher. Think of it as YouTube’s gift to those of us who aren’t watching public access TV in Atlanta in the early hours of the morning. Another warning: DO NOT CLICK if you are the slightest bit squeamish or sensitive about matters sexual. But I am in awe.

[Reihan] Several weeks ago, during SXSW, I saw one of the most joyful, raucous performances of my life.  The band was called Aqueduct, and they’ve fast become one of my all-time favorites.  Silly, brassy, loud and deeply strange, Aqueduct makes music for fist-pumping sing-alongs and quiet reflection alike.  The A.V. Club‘s Noel Murray placed Aqueduct, accurately, at the intersection of Pavement and The Beastie Boys: this will either make you cover your ears and head for the hills, or it just might be up your alley.  Thanks to the miracle that is Hype Machine, you can sample some of their tracks for yourself.  I recommend "Living A Lie" for starters.  I saw Aqueduct again this past Friday, and I danced like a lunatic.  At one point it occurred to me that I was fast becoming an embarrassment to the human race, not to mention my lovely companion, and yet the music was just too good.  Superego failing.  Id taking over.  Can’t … fight … urge to dance.