Month: July 2016

Citizen stops potential mass shooter, Snopes quibbles.

by

Gotta say I’m pretty pissed at Snopes about this one.

Jody Ray Thompson shoots into a crowd, injuring three. Then a citizen with a conceal carry permit shoots Thompson. Now one side says the  citizen “stopped a mass shooting.”

When people quote the outrageous number of mass shootings that have happened in a short time frame, they’re usually using the Shootingtracker.com (FBI-derived) definition of “mass shooting”: “FOUR or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location, not including the shooter.”

So Thompson shot three people and was stopped. He didn’t reach the level of a mass shooting (four people), but he was as close as you can get when he was stopped. So it seems pretty reasonable to say the citizen who shot him “stopped a mass shooting.”

But Snopes isn’t so sure, because now, for some reason, they’re defining “mass shooting” as: “one or more gunmen deliberately setting out to indiscriminately kill multiple randomly-selected victims.” [Emphasis added.] Snopes goes on to claim it’s unclear Thompson intended to kill anyone. [ref]Even though he purposefully shot repeatedly into a crowd of people. I mean who is to say?[/ref] So is it really a “mass shooting”?

Snopes even has a previous article discussing the different definitions of “mass shooting,” and, spoiler, none of the definitions they review discuss motive.  Yet in this Thompson article they assert that motive is “typically” part of the definition. Just not typical enough to have been mentioned in their article about mass shooting definitions.

It was annoying enough that I could only find this story on Fox and Washington Times (traditionally conservative outlets) and no other major outlets. Even more annoying that Snopes would grasp at straws so hard to avoid simply marking the story as “true.” Snopes in a nutshell:

Well technically I guess a legal gun owner stopped another dude from shooting more people but the shooter wasn’t a psychopath per se, so this is iffy.

What a bunch of crap.

Left: Playoffz night club where the shooting occurred. Right: Jody Ray Thompson, the shooter.
Left: Playoffz night club where the shooting occurred.
Right: Jody Ray Thompson, the shooter.

The Uncertainty of Brexit

by

Over at The Washington Post, GMU law professor Ilya Somin has a great piece on Brexit that touches on similar points I made in my first post on the subject. After taking a look of political theorist Jacob Levy’s fantastic arguments against Brexit, Somin makes several important observations:

  • “First, he implicitly assumes that the UK will not become significantly more pro-free market than it was before Brexit. If you think that a Conservative government led by Boris Johnson or Theresa May will adopt much more market-oriented policies than it did in David Cameron, then its possible that the leaving the EU will facilitate such reforms. So far, however, I see little evidence of any such free market revolution in the offing.”
  • “Conversely, it is also possible that, even if the EU has not made British economic policy much more interventionist so far, it might have done so in the future had Britain voted for Remain.”
  • “Finally, it is possible that free trade and migration will be preserved intact if Britain joins the European Economic Area – the so-called “Norway option” favored by some Brexit proponents. EEA membership requires free trade and migration for EU citizens, and would also subject the UK to many (though not all) EU economic regulations. From a libertarian standpoint, the Norway option retains most of the good features of the European Union, while freeing Britain from at least a few of the bad ones. “

In short,

there is still a lot of uncertainty over the long-term impact of Brexit. But Jacob’s analysis should at least give pause to those who expect that Brexit will lead to a more libertarian Britain, or a more free-market Europe more generally.

 

Revolutionary Leaders and Mass Killings

by

Revolutionary leaders are more willing to commit mass murder than nonrevolutionary leaders according to a new study by political scientist Nam Kyu Kim. While this may not come as a surprise to anyone paying attention to history, it’s always nice to have confirmation. The abstract reads,

This article argues that revolutionary leaders are more willing to commit mass killing than nonrevolutionary leaders. Revolutionary leaders are more ideologically committed to transforming society, more risk tolerant, and more likely to view the use of violence as appropriate and effective. Furthermore, such leaders tend to command highly disciplined and loyal organizations, built in the course of revolutionary struggles, that can perpetrate mass killing. This study uses time series cross-sectional data from 1955 to 2004 to demonstrate that revolutionary leaders are more likely to initiate genocide or politicide than nonrevolutionary leaders. The violent behaviors of revolutionary leaders are not limited to the immediate postrevolutionary years but also occur later in their tenure. This demonstrates that the association of revolutionary leaders and mass killing is not simply indicative of postrevolutionary instability. This article also provides evidence for the importance of exclusionary ideologies in motivating revolutionary leaders to inflict massive violence.

The full paper can be found here.