Idiots and Lunatics

/

I wish there were a better way to describe the people I encountered Monday online.​

I set up a Facebook event a few months ago to remind people to vote for my friend Dan Losquadro in the Town of Brookhaven race for Highway Superintendent.  It's no secret that Dan has been a lifelong friend.  He was my best man at my wedding.  And we've been friends since we were little kids.  I've known Dan and his family as far back as I have meaningful recollection, and I know that his integrity, his values and his experience make him the right guy for this job.​

I've been shooting many times.  Sometimes with Dan.  I wouldn't call myself a "gun enthusiast," but I have rifles and shotguns and occasionally go skeet and trap shooting.  At one point in my life, I got really good at it.​

You might also know that I'm very much into First Amendment issues, as a former newspaperman, journalism school grad and professional business writer.​

Yesterday, I saw an organized raid on the Facebook event I set up to remind people to vote for Dan.  And I did something I very rarely do - I deleted negative comments.​

It's a big deal when someone like me deletes comments.  I don't believe in censoring people's opinions, particularly when it's political speech.  However, I think it's important that anybody involved (or observing) understands the reasons why I did it.

The comments being posted were part of an organized harassment campaign.  There are people very angry at Dan for voting the way he did when Governor Cuomo pushed to be the first to pass gun control legislation in the wake of Sandy Hook.  Those people are determined to punish Dan for his vote, but not by putting up their own candidate for state assembly and supporting him, but by harassing his supporters in the completely-unrelated highway race.​

The comments made were posted to the Facebook wall of the event.  I let the first few go, but then it became clear that the comments were not being posted in an attempt to influence via honest discourse.  They were being posted, dozens at a time for each individual who had signed up to attend the event, in order to harass and intimidate.  Dozens were posted at a clip.  I'd delete them and they'd come back seconds later.  I even saw one that recommended sending personal messages to each and every one who had committed to turn out to vote for Dan.  This small group of 8-10 individuals were cutting and pasting comments and posting them, en masse, to each and every event response.  When this happens, the respondent gets a notification that somebody has posted a response to them.  They might get it on their computer, their mobile device or both.  And they were coming in at the rate of several a minute at one point, from several individuals at once.​

This was when I decided that they were harassing and intimidating, not trying to engage in any sort of discourse.  When I started to delete comments, that's when they started harassing me, claiming I was infringing on their First Amendment rights.​

Which brings me to my next issue - people who claim to be fans of the Bill of Rights, but who don't understand it.​

First off, deleting comments from a Facebook page where I'm the administrator does not constitute a violation of anybody's First Amendment rights.  Your first clue is that the amendment begins with "Congress shall make no law..."  We're talking about Congress here, not private citizens.  When someone disrespects a digital forum by organizing a raid on it and by harassing its participants, no one owes them a microphone.  It's not a violation of anyone's First Amendment rights to do that.  You may not like that your comment was deleted.  Guess what?  We didn't like it when you raided our event.  And we were respectful enough of your political views that we didn't raid your Facebook page, despite disagreeing intensely with the opinions posted there.​

So this isn't about the First Amendment.  It's about respect.  And that's part of why I think these people are idiots.​

The other part is that most of them seem to be absolutists when it comes to the Bill of Rights.  People, no right guaranteed under the first 10 amendments to the Constitution is absolute.  You can't falsely yell "Fire!" in a crowded theater without being held accountable for your actions.  So the notion that protections afforded by the Bill of Rights are absolute is idiotic.​

As such, there are controls on our 2nd Amendment rights that are sane, legal and probably a good idea, too.  Among them, mandatory sentences for using guns in crimes, requiring therapists to tell the government when they believe someone is a threat to himself or others, and requiring background checks.  If you go back and actually read the bill Dan voted for, it does more good than harm.​

It's not to say that the law isn't without legitimate criticisms.  I'm typically not a fan of legislation that's developed in response to tragedies, legislation that's rushed through without careful consideration, nor am I particularly confident in the ability of the state government to truly understand what constitutes an "assault weapon."  But it's possible to pass such legislation without infringing on someone's Second Amendment rights - the reaction needs to be a meaningful debate, not a hardline "from my cold, dead hands..." response.​

If you want to respond that way, it's your right.  But don't blame me for thinking you're an idiot when you harass people and expect some sort of constitutional protections for your behavior.  Nothing gives you the right to harass people and go hide under the guise of political speech.​  Especially when it's not the government preventing the harassment, but a private citizen who moderates the forum.

That's the second reason I think these people are idiots.  Now, as to why they're lunatics...​

Some of you may have seen that this Highway Superintendent race briefly attracted some national attention on Monday.  A blogger for MSNBC wrote a piece about how Dan's detractors stole one of his signs, brought it out to the shooting range and blew it away.  Because, you know, your highway department superintendent needs to be a Second Amendment absolutist or he can't get the roads plowed...

It's assholes like this who give people who like to shoot a bad name.​

A state politician helps to pass a law you don't like, so you steal one of his campaign signs, shoot it up and post the video to YouTube?  Really?​

Click through some of the other videos on this nutjob's YouTube channel.  Then watch him blow away Dan's campaign sign.  Then tell me this guy isn't giving people who shoot a bad name.​  Did you happen to catch the video of him reciting Patrick Henry quotes while showing us his *AWESOME* rifle?  Did it remind you of that scene where Private Pyle goes nuts and blows away his drill instructor in Full Metal Jacket?

And that's the type of nutjob we're dealing with.  The kind of guy who childishly steals, then regurgitates a bunch of quotes from long-dead patriots to justify his absolutism and unwillingness to think, and then shows us his questionably legal guns blowing away Dan's sign.​  (How many rounds in the banana clip on that semi-automatic shotgun?  Oh, and way to abide by the range rules by firing shotguns two feet away from the "Pistols Only" sign.)  

If I can't go skeet shooting in a few years, at least I'll know why - under-educated Second Amendment absolutists who reach for their guns when their elected representatives vote for something they don't like.​

​

Can BitTorrent Teach Us Anything About Gun Control?

/

Gun massacres seem to be getting worse.  I’m not certain that they are, statistically, but the emotional impact of elementary school children dying at the hands of an emotionally disturbed gunman is almost unimaginable.  As someone who became a father for the first time less than five years ago, I’ve had to make conscious efforts to avoid thinking about what would happen if my own kids were victimized in a similar way.  It’s just about the most unpleasant thing I can think of as a parent.

Instead of dwelling on the negative emotion, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about elevating my view of gun control.  The idea that we need to control access to certain weapons resonates with me, but its feasibility seems to be at odds with a lot of what I know about technology.  Permit me to expand.

As human beings, we’ve struggled with the notion of how we ought to deter and punish those who take another’s life.  As a species, we’ve historically struggled with the idea of “an eye for an eye,” sometimes resorting to the death penalty for killers, hoping it will be an effective deterrent and a fitting punishment, or some combination of the two.

Regardless of your particular feelings about the death penalty, it’s undeniable that “eye for an eye” starts to fall apart when one person is capable of mass murder.  Thomas Hobbes noted that the weak can usually find some means of killing the strong – in fact, this was one of his underpinnings for believing that men were created equal – but I doubt he envisioned a future where the weakest of us were capable of killing the strong in such great numbers on a mere whim.

What enables mass murder?  In large part, technology.  I think it’s right to acknowledge the role of large-capacity magazines in automatic or semi-automatic weapons when it comes to mass murder.  It’s what enables anybody with the requisite knowledge in our society to kill so many before anybody has a chance to do anything about it.

But if we look at the problem in the context of technology’s ever-accelerating march forward, it becomes obvious that we have a very serious problem to contend with.

At the end of last year, gun enthusiasts used 3D printing technology to create the lower receiver of an AR-15 rifle out of plastic.  They created only the lower receiver portion, and used standard metal parts to finish the rest of the gun.  Upon test-firing, the rifle got off six shots before the plastic parts blew apart.

3D printing technology is getting the attention of every futurist worth his salt.  Technology reporters are buzzing about curing disease by printing new organs from live tissue.  That’s right – instead of getting a pacemaker, perhaps one day it will be more effective to simply print a new heart and perform a transplant.  In the world of inanimate objects, 3D printing is already well-known to many who create product prototypes.  Affordable 3D printers can create small objects out of plastic.  Metal and ceramic is also doable today, though it’s likely cost-prohibitive for most of us to have that technology in our workplaces, much less our homes.

Watching all of this coming together makes me think about what the future looks like.  What happens when the plans for things we desire are freely downloadable from the Internet, and printable at home?

Think about it.  You want a video game console, so you download plans for an open-source console from the Internet and set your 3D printer to work.  You play some video games for a while, decide you’re bored with the console, and reclaim the raw material so that your 3D printer can build something else.

There are the wide-reaching impacts on business and society to think about.  There’s the demand for raw materials not at a production plant, but in our homes.  Product distribution as we know it would be upended.  Recycling rates for raw materials would be driven to all-time highs.

But what about when people print weapons?  What about weapons that weren’t designed by Winchester or Remington, or even Lockheed-Martin or Northrop Grumman?  What about weapons designed by ad-hoc teams of engineers collaborating on the Internet?

The technology doesn’t yet exist for the manipulation of complex chemical compounds, so it’s not as if people could use 3D printing technology to create gunpowder or TNT or Plutonium-231.  But technology marches forward every day.  And what of weapons that don’t require chemicals?  What about railguns that use magnetic fields to hurl metal objects at high velocity?  (The Navy is investing in railguns today.)

I’m sure the possibilities are mind-boggling, but what’s truly frightening is what we’ve already learned about technology’s march forward – it routes around controls.

We’ve already learned that a powerful entertainment lobby has been largely unsuccessful at preventing the peer-to-peer distribution of movies and music.  We’ve also learned that our government, when looking at whether or not it’s prudent to place controls on a given piece of technology, will examine both “legitimate” and “illegitimate” uses of that technology.

So what happens when technology that is used to print a new heart for Uncle John or an intelligent automobile can also be used to print weapons with the capacity for mass murder?  Will the sharing of files used to give instructions to 3D printers follow the path of Metallica bootlegs or digital copies of Iron Man 2?

How far will a government go to place controls on the sharing of knowledge and resources over computer networks like the Internet?  As a society, how we will control access to things that are dangerous?  Or will we?

In short, it’s not just the end products of technology – assault weapons, high-capacity magazines, armor-piercing bullets – that we should be wary of.  It’s the power that technology bestows on all of us at the individual level.  It’s the power to not only create, but also destroy.

Personally, I don’t think strict controls are in and of themselves the answer.  We have a lot of thinking to do about societal controls – everything from how we treat people who are mentally ill and present a risk of harming others, to how our economy works to how society values people at an individual level.