To solve problems without causing unexpected damage, you have to have some reasonable explanation for the circumstances.  This recent anti-gun tweet from Democrat Congressman Seth Magaziner illustrates how politicians are moving farther and farther away from problem-solving:

If you’re accustomed to analyzing data visualizations, it might take you a moment to understand Magaziner’s point.  The most conspicuous observation from this time-series data is that gun deaths among kids remained largely flat for twenty years — even after the 1994 “assault weapon” ban lapsed in 2004.  So, what is Magaziner claiming happened in 2019 to cause a problem that more “gun safety bills” will solve?

The answer is probably “nothing.”  He’s just picking a discouraging datapoint (the 50% increase in gun deaths over the two latest years), assuming his audience will agree that gun availability is the problem, and demanding a policy that has long been part of his political party’s platform, regardless of the data.

But if something else is causing the increase, cracking down on constitutional gun-ownership rights probably won’t reverse it.  Meanwhile, unknowable consequences ranging from increases in crime to erosion of civil rights to worse political division may emerge.

One suspects Democrats like Magaziner don’t actually want to explore the causes of such problems because they may whipsaw against their own political interests.  Ideological takeover of our education system, soft-on-crime and anti-cop policies and district attorneys, and radical deconstruction of social norms may be destroying the mental health of upcoming American generations, and discovering such a thing would undermine the careful work of their party.

On the other hand, it serves Magaziner’s party very well if its policies cause social instability that results in ongoing fear, tragedy, and division that Democrats are then able to exploit to crack down on civil rights and cause more instability.

Featured image by Taylor Turtle on Unsplash.