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The issues of gun regulation and marijuana legalization have an interesting overlap, even as they head in opposite directions. To increase regulation of the former, advocates insist that we focus on the implements used for harm (the guns) and eschew — sometimes with great vehemence and insult to those who disagree — the notion that…
Policy arguments driven by emotion will often have incoherent gaps in their logic, and the Ulvade shooting exposes a big one. Emotional people tend to focus on the most-dramatic element in a scene, which in this case is the shooter, and the solution appears to them to be removal of the gun. The problem is…
When government officials allow a business to shift its risks onto taxpayers, the people can never be certain about how the costs will be “unexpectedly” driven up, but news like this is a near certainty: The cost of building a professional soccer stadium in Pawtucket has risen to $124 million, the city said Friday, $40 million…
I’m as keen to lament the deterioration of our broader community as anybody else, but reactions to a recent cell phone video taken in the New York City subway seem to me to overstate the inaction of the bystanders. In summary, a guy who is obviously disturbed walks through the subway car shouting. He sits…
Reviewing the details of school shootings, the other day for an online conversation, I was struck by how clearly banning a particular style of gun or access-related regulations will not solve the problem. They may or may not be justified on their merits, but to treat such policies as if they are obvious fixes is…
The problem is that they’re not founded in reason, but emotion. I’m not interested in developing solutions to our problems through the method of emoting alongside others. Emotion supplies motivation; it is not the process for finding answers. Yet, without fail, when progressives (or “moderates,” for that matter) articulate their emotions in the guise of…
When I returned to college in 1996, after two years of difficult, low-paying labor, I pledged a fraternity, and one of the brothers asked another pledge and me to remove a triangle rainbow sticker that somebody had slapped on the rear bumper of his truck. I had to ask what the sticker meant, and the…
Especially when done with calculation for political gain. When our nation experiences another school shooting, advocates — right up to the White House, at this point — refuse to give us so much as a day to process the emotions and gather information. They insist that they have the solutions, that they’re easy and obvious,…
Over the course of a day, readers of Twitter brush off many such tweets, but in this case, the writer is Ross Cheit, a political science professor at Brown University who was, until recently, the chairman of the state Ethics Commission: I imagine that anything that a GOP operative has in their possession can also…
There is no question that this young man, who is apparently on his way to a cushy six-figure job in the near future, has learned how to leverage his power and privilege to muster a defense of his personal honor: The Graduate Center Bar apologized on April 27 for removing three black students who were…