Streets of El Paso...and Dayton

A few points to bring in on the signature events of the weekend.

• We've got the availability of guns baked into the US Constitution. Until there is a national consensus to amend the constitution, we're stuck with them.
• Eileen's working at the Sugnet building this summer, which hosts a karate class. Their ad sign leads with "Don't be a victim." The desire for self-defense is that gave us the Second Amendment. That's hard to crack; the Mennonites have tried to preach peace for 500 years and it hasn't worked to date, as pacifism has a niche market.
• The Dayton shooter had a history of thinking about violence, both murder and rape. 20-20 hindsight says that folks should have worked harder to get that streak out of his system. Taking that into policy would mean both doing more to punish lesser violence in youth (running counter to anti-punishment streaks on the left) and spending more money on psych help for kids with violence streaks (running counter to both the limited-government streak and anti-psychology streak of the right).
• One takeaway from Parkland was that such prevention was needed, but that's neither sexy nor simple. Maybe we'll work on it this time if we don't let the gun-control and racism angles be the only talking points.
• Trump called Dayton Toledo by mistake. I get Dayton and Akron cross-wired all the time, and I lived in metro Akron (Kent State) for six years in grad school. That's well down the list of things to rag on Trump for.
• On top of that loooooong list is the immigrant-bashing and minority-bashing that has become Trump's stock in trade. The El Paso victims aren't in good position to sue him over it, but Trump's rhetoric has given aid and comfort to bigots the world over.
• That is not to excuse the El Paso shooter. It's one thing to call immigrants crime-prone [hell]-hole refugees, it's another to go to the lives-unworthy-of-life level of Nazi lore. Trump likely helped that radicalization process along a bit, but he didn't pull the trigger.
• It was a ten-hour drive from the shooter's metro Dallas home turf to El Paso. Premeditated as all get-out and sneaky-effective in getting Mexico proper riled up; a lot of the Whites First crowd are hope for a race war and hope to spark it. I'm not a fan of the death penalty, but its use here wouldn't shed too many tears.
• There's nothing special about having northern European ancestry. "There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus."  I didn't see Paul add "but White and Wetback, that's another thing." Saying otherwise has the Holy Spirit wanting to kick the cat, but He'd have mercy on the cat.
• Back to Dayton. One policy prescription is "red flag laws" that can take guns away from folks with a violent streak. Sounds good at first blush, but it can easily lead down a path were gun ownership stops being a right and turns into a privilege that only a select few get; in heavy gun-control cities, only elites have the money and connections to get permits. Medieval law limited commoners ability to own weapons lest the nobility lose their monopoly on effective violence; that's what the Second Amendment wanted to prevent in part. 
• That being said, red flag laws are still worth looking into. That's on the table in Ohio.