President Trump could take real action to stop mass shootings. Instead, he’s turning to the death penalty. zakcheneyrice writes
The scene near Midland and Odessa, Texas, after a mass shooting on August 31. Photo: Sue Ogrocki/AP/Shutterstock Thirteen people died over Labor Day weekend as a result of mass shootings. Eight were killed on Saturday when a 36-year-old gunman rampaged through Midland and Odessa, in West Texas. On Monday, five members of the same family were killed in Elkmont, Alabama; a 14-year-old boy — who was also a relative — confessed to shooting them all.
The shootings and their immediate aftermath are linked by three components: Aggrieved young men, easy access to firearms, and thus-far empty promises from President Trump to curtail their recurrence. The first of these factors calls for a societywide overhaul of how boys are conditioned to handle frustration.
So it’s fitting that he and his allies are now retreating further into the refuge of the unimaginative: the death penalty, and its false promise as a solution to the very violence it deploys. Following a proposal the president made last month to the same effect, Vice-President Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short told reporters on Monday that the Justice Department has drafted legislation to expedite capital punishment for people convicted of mass murder.
It makes even less sense as a strategy to stop mass shootings: According to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University — per its website, the FBI-designated national standard in active shooter response training — the majority of mass shootings end in suicide or the attacker getting shot. If mass killers are deterred by the prospect of dying, their behavior doesn’t reflect it.
This is even starker under a government that encourages casual violence so gleefully against such a broad range of people, and often for minor transgressions — including its political enemies and the desperate seeking refuge within it borders, as I’ve written about before.
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