The Washington Post hired Megan McArdle this week, who famously said we should not ban guns, but should rather train children to gang rush shooters in schools. I shit you not.
Democracy dies in darkness.
If she said that, then it's pretty stupid.
You'll probably disagree with this in general, as someone far to my left - and that's okay. However, on a general note, I actually think that McArdle is a pretty good person to read if you're left-of-center, as a pretty intelligent right-of-center voice. I've been reading her on Bloomberg View for years for that reason. She's no GOP partisan - she comes out very negatively against Trump, and falls closer to Dems on some issues, such as climate change and a lot of social stuff. And a lot of her commentary is not so much anti-left wing economic policy as much as pointing out legitimate tradeoffs in left-right economic debates. Obviously, I disagree with her on plenty of things, and I think that some of what she says is not only wrong but clearly so (e.g. the aforementioned gun thing).
However, given the drivel that most of the American right-wing spits out nowadays, I think she's a pretty good voice for understanding generally-conservative arguments. Maybe you [general usage of the word "you"] don't want to do that, and that's okay. But, in my mind, the American right isn't going away any time soon, and I'd rather read someone like McArdle than, like, watch Fox News, in order to have an idea of conservative thought. And hopefully be challenged by it, even if I don't normally come to agree with it. Full disclosure that I consider myself moderate to center-left, but fall into the camp of never even considering voting for Republicans due to their general disconnect from reality.
To the new of the week, though: the Republicans' reaction to the shooting yesterday has been abhorrent, but no surprise there, right?
This is a difficult topic to break into, but I do have to wonder if the best solution is ideally something beyond what even mainstream Democrats have been proposing: generally heavily restricting gun purchases, even of normal guns, even to "normal" people. I think of yesterday: have we heard that this was any sort of semi-automatic device? I don't think we have, have we? And the guy might have been on the FBI's radar, but would he have legitimately failed a decent background check? The point is, I'm not sure if "background checks" and "restricting semi-automatic weapons" really goes far enough. It makes me wonder if a much more gun-free society, like most of the rest of the Western World, is really the solution here.
Of course, I say this as an upper-middle-class urban-dweller who is legitimately out-of-touch with a lot of the interests of people who use guns, so I suppose there are tradeoffs here. But yesterday gets me thinking in an interesting direction.