Recall the mass shooting/killing just a few days ago on a Sydney beach. No one had firearms on that beach but the shooters, by design of the Australian laws. In the aftermath, we get this from Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese:

Albanese called for tougher gun laws, saying that leaders would discuss limits on the number of guns that can be licensed and a review of licenses over time.
“People can be radicalized over a period of time. Licenses should not be in perpetuity,” he said in a press conference Monday.

Recall, also, the unarmed man—all one of him—on that beach who charged one of the shooters and took him down and disarmed him. And was not allowed to shoot him, under Australian law, and so the shooter got away. Fortunately, the police, arriving later (no knock on them, but they can only react when called, so their arrival will always be minutes after shooting has been in progress) got that one.

If armed citizens had been present, and it would not have taken many at all, the one shooter could have been stopped much sooner with far fewer dead and wounded, and the other shooter perhaps also by the time the police arrived.

But Albenese’s solution in the face of such mass shootings is to further disarm Australians, making them even more defenseless, even more helpless, in the face of such attacks.

Via my wife, but entirely a propos here: The cowards never started, the weak died along the way, that leaves us.

A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Friday installment of its Letters section suggested a solution to our nation’s baby-birth dearth.

The problem isn’t finances—it’s perceived inconvenience.
Children are a responsibility: a limitation on us in an age of careerism and radical individualism. But they also contain a hidden wealth that exceeds anything else—and hope for the future. We need to stop framing decisions about childrearing as simply another cost-benefit analysis and present young people with a more beautiful vision of what family life can be and do for the world.

The problem, though, also includes this simple, critical fact: today’s young people have already experienced what family life is, not hypothetical “can be’s.”

It’s necessary to address that realized experience in these proposed presentations. Absent that, such presentations will be perceived as just another installment in the empty words of lectures by older generations.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram (which he controls through his Meta) claims to be protecting child users from predators.

However.

When Instagram began fencing off teen accounts last year for safety reasons, content from people under 18 all but vanished for adults.
Teen accounts were automatically private, and posts and reels from those accounts no longer circulated in the Explore tab and main feeds, except in the case of adults who were already following teens. Predators suddenly had a lot harder time finding targets.

Actually, not so much.

But two moms affiliated with the family-advocacy organization ParentsTogether Action discovered a workaround, which they shared with me: When a teen account comments on a public post or video reel, and an adult account that hasn’t already been flagged for suspicious behavior sees it, the adult can chat up the teen in the comments and even send that teen a follow request. If the teen accepts, the two can engage in private direct messaging.

Those direct messages can—as these tests also proved—include nude picture exchanges, and then the sextortion operations can begin.

Zuckerberg’s claims, through his Instagram team, regarding these exchanges:

When the test accounts shared nude images with one another, they initially appeared blurred in the teen account, but the teen account user could opt to view the photos. Instagram says its nudity protection feature—on by default for teen accounts and including warnings about the dangers of sharing such images—has encouraged teens to think twice. In June, more than 40% of blurred images received in direct messages remained blurred, the company says.

And 60% did not remain blurred, apparently. If Zuckerberg’s Instagram programmers are that capable of identifying the teen accounts, why are nude images allowed to be transmitted to them at all?

These “workarounds” are so obvious that I have to question how seriously Zuckerberg is taking these threats to our children.

Who tested this stuff? Apparently, no one qualified or serious.