Tag Archives: regulation

Red Flag Laws, Again

Posted on by
Reply

Now The Wall Street Journal is beating the drum for red flag laws that would authorize seizure of weapons from anyone, and anyone associated with that one, that Government, or a Government-appointed/approved body deems a threat.

Consider one of the three cute anecdotes the WSJ cited via its drumbeat.

Police were tipped off by school officials that a 14-year-old boy had praised mass shootings. He used campus computers to search firearms and terms like “white power.” Taken to a psychiatrist, the student said he was joking.
The boy’s father owned a rifle and a pistol. A short-term red-flag order was obtained, and the two firearms were relinquished. After a hearing a one-year order was issued. [In all three anecdotes cited, the outcome was a “one-year order.”]

The WSJ right wondered whether

the father whose guns were handed over suggest[ed] that he was unable or unwilling to secure them from his 14-year-old son?

Then the Editors dismissed this trivial concern.  I ask, though, what happened to the father’s Second Amendment rights? I answer with dismay: they seem to have been trampled without a fare-thee-well. His firearms were taken for no better reason than that someone associated with him was deemed maybe a threat sometime in the future. The boy’s claim that he was joking seems to have been dismissed just as out of hand.

There are larger problems, though, than just a few carefully selected anecdotes.  What about false positives? Where will the wrongly accused—whether mistakenly or maliciously—go to get his reputation back?

What about false negatives? Now the true threat is both warned and angrified—and in the same household, perhaps, as the one who accused him.

With true due process, how can the system act quickly enough to forestall an imminent threat?

The WSJ‘s Editors closed their piece with—perhaps—a glimmer of understanding:

…red-flag laws are no panacea for mass shootings. But…if reasonably drafted, they appear to be a step forward: gun control for the dangerous and unstable.

But then they demonstrate their fatal misunderstanding.  Red flag laws cannot be reasonably drafted, not only for the reasons above but for the WSJ‘s rationalization of that step forward: the laws focus on the tools a dangerous and unstable person might use and not on the dangerous and unstable person.

No system is perfect, certainly, but no system should be put in place that threatens the liberty and fundamental rights of all of us because a tiny per centage of us are bent on mayhem, especially when that system is so badly flawed as the one proposed here.

The energy being pumped into this euphemism for an assault on our 2nd Amendment should be focused instead on finding ways to deal specifically with those tiny few dangerous and unstable persons.

Gun “Control”

Posted on by
Reply

The Wall Street Journal‘s student-written Future View column turned to gun control recently, and Rasmus Haure-Peterson, a philosophy and economics major at the University of Oxford, had a thought in his letter.  He wrote, in part,

Given the spree of mass shootings, some targeted gun-control measures are needed for the sake of a safer America, even if they curb some people’s rights on the margins. But gun-rights advocates won’t make that concession unless they know that giving an inch won’t cost them a mile.

Haure-Peterson was on the right track until he got to the first part of this. It’s wrong, morally and legally, to punish—especially under the insidious guise of “restrictions,” or during the hysteria of “mass shootings”—everyone for the crimes of a few. Go after the few.

He got back on track with the last. As long as the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party flat refuse to say what their gun control limiting principle is, the only possible conclusion is that they’re after the natural limit: taking all of our weapons.

There’s Surveillance

Posted on by
Reply

…and there’s surveillance.

The FBI is looking at ways to scan Facebook (and Twitter, et al.) postings with a view to proactively identify and reactively monitor threats to the United States and its interests.

In late 2016, following an investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union into social-media monitoring done by outside developers on behalf of law enforcement, Facebook and Twitter cracked down on those services and explicitly banned the use of their data for surveillance purposes….
Facebook’s ban allowed law-enforcement agencies to look at public profiles manually but not use software designed for large-scale collection and analysis of user data.

Because

the restrictions reflect a growing understanding that even information posted to a public social network can be misused when gathered in large quantities and paired with outside data sources.

But Facebook’s objections (and they’re not the only Big Tech objectors) are just a bit precious and not a little bit hypocritical. Facebook does exactly that sort of surveillance—with software, mind you—explicitly with a view to selling those connections to advertisers, and others.

The only difference is claimed purpose.

If such surveillance is a bad thing—and it most assuredly is—Facebook, et al., need to cut it out, too.

Suicide Pact

Posted on by
1

Now The Wall Street Journal has joined the bandwagon.

Gun rights need to be protected, but the Second Amendment is not a suicide pact.

Indeed, they do, and it is not. But violating the Second Amendment as a matter of routine, or gutting it as the Progressive-Democrats want to do (background checks? Where would the Progressive-Democrats stop? They refuse to say, they refuse to articulate their limiting principle) certainly would be national suicide.

…those in the gun lobby who claim that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates individual rights.

This is a cynically offered straw man. No one in the gun lobby argues that denying access to guns from those with a history of mental illness violates the individual rights of that person with that history. Their argument is that the definition of such a history is too vague for practical applicability. More broadly, their argument is that the laws don’t adequately protect the individual rights of those surrounding or otherwise associated with the individual in question.

Better is the Enemy of Good Enough

Posted on by
Reply

In the aftermath of Boeing’s failure with its 737MAX, the FAA—and foreign jurisdictions—are on the verge of entering that larger failure regime.

As Boeing Co and safety regulators push to complete long-awaited fixes for 737 MAX jets, testing has expanded to cover increasingly unlikely emergencies including potential computer failures pinpointed by overseas authorities, according to US government officials briefed on the details.
The broader risk analyses and simulator scenarios, some details of which haven’t been reported before, show the lengths to which leaders of the Federal Aviation Administration, in coordination with their foreign counterparts, are going to verify the safety of the MAX fleet before allowing the planes to fly again.

And one thing that is not being addressed in the lengths to which these leaders are going is the adequacy of training that pilots are required to undergo to receive certification.  Instead, excuses are offered.

Ali Bahrami, the FAA’s top safety official, told a Senate subcommittee during a hearing that the June tests “identified a very remote failure case,” adding that FAA pilots decided “the level of proficiency that is required to recover from this event was exceptional” and could overwhelm average airline crews.

Which raises two questions. One is how “very remote,” and when does that criterion cross the Better-Good Enough line?

The other (stipulating that line is not crossed here) is why “average airline crews” would be so inadequately trained?  Where, too, are pilots trained to disconnect from the computers, and disconnect the computers from the aircraft, and go manual? And: what is the adequacy of the manual backups?

In the end, though, demanding Better before going to production too often prevents going to production.  Demanding perfection first—rather than questing after it (or merely after Better) constantly and iteratively while iteratively producing the outcome of those quality iterations—prevents serious efforts to produce.