FIRST, STOP CELEBRATING THE TRANSGRESSIVITY.

As people were gathering at Northern Illinois University to commemorate the Cole Hall murders, the breaking news was of a similar event at a Parkland, Florida high school.

Predictably, all the usual pundits forted up in the usual silos.  Dan McLaughlin writes, "horrifyingly familiar story."  The policy fix, he writes, involves bad trade-offs.

The answers are not easy, and they inevitably involve a trade-off: accepting the unacceptable, or restricting our freedoms. The three big ones are freedom of the press (publicity gives oxygen to these kinds of acts, so restricting coverage will reduce copycats); the right to bear arms (guns don't cause human evil, but of course they make it easier to carry out); and due process (targeting potential mass shooters, or mentally ill people in general, is possible, but requires us to curtail Americans' civil rights before they have actually committed a crime).

It is by no means clear that any of these solutions would be more effective than the others, and each of them involves punishing a very large number of people in order to stop the evil-doings of a very small number of people.

Read on, though, and you'll see a thought that might merit more careful consideration.

Our exhibitionist culture may encourage disturbed people to perform acts of retribution that guarantee them maximum publicity; think of the mass shooter as taking a selfie of rage. But that genie can't be put back in the bottle, either, at least not without a massive campaign against freedom of expression.

Maybe, dear reader, it is in taking steps to restore a modicum of shame, or find ways to marginalize, rather than to celebrate and revel in, the most obvious forms of exhibition.  That might be what James "Long Emergency" Kunstler is thinking about.

Readers may wonder why I did not devote this space to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. It is exactly what you get in a society that wants to erase behavioral boundaries. It is especially dangerous where adolescent boys are concerned. The country has a gigantic boundary problem. We have also created perfect conditions — between the anomie of suburbia and the dreariness of our school systems — to induce explosions of violent despair. That’s why these things happen. Until we change these conditions, expect ever more of it.

Yes, the government schools are dreary.  Andrew Solomon for American Thinker:

No one seems to want to find the real cause, or ask the interesting questions, which are the most obvious ones.  Why do we have state utility farms called public schools?  Buses that resemble the ones used by penitentiaries?  Even the chow hall looks like a prison.  They call it a cafeteria.  Endless rows of lockers.

Nowhere in real society does a school represent anything that we will ever experience "on the outs."  It's not real.  It's a false world.  Nothing organically true about it.  And they want to add metal detectors and armed guards now.  Pretty soon, it will be a real prison.

The metal detectors and armed guards have been reality, particularly in urban schools, precisely in urban schools in the ghettos and barrios, for fifty years or so. That's a separate line of research, about the school-to-work, or school-to-prison, or school-as-factory-socialization, and we can conduct that research whilst impounding school shootings in ceteris paribus, as those have been a phenomenon for twenty (Columbine) or thirty (Winnetka) years depending on how you count it.

Mr Solomon's essay might be onto something, introducing the therapeutic, but not quite.  "Is it any wonder that little Johnny seems to be consistently taking out his aggression at on the very institution that makes him feel as though he's in One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest?"

That therapy, though it is sometimes about erasing behavioral boundaries: you will accept the new dispensation, or you will be medicated or re-educated, is not quite the erasure we ought be considering.  Here's my reflection, shortly after Cole Hall.  We have to be judgemental.  "Put another way, the burden on my colleagues upstairs -- nay, on higher education generally, will be lighter once the common culture recognizes that judging 'judgemental' behavior harshly is not evolutionarily stable."  "My colleagues upstairs" were the sociology faculty, who had particularly difficult times.

Put another way, be more careful about what sorts of difference you affirm.  The schools still look like conformity factories, and the shooting sports may be as popular now as ever.  At American Greatness, Joe Long expands on how the boundaries have been changed.

Predators and victims alike have been socialized to the idea that weapons are simply tools of murder—not designed for the defense of others and certainly not for the cultivation of civic virtues. A child of 1940, picking up a toy revolver, became in his imagination a Western hero in the Hopalong Cassidy mode, a figure of plain speech and chivalry; a child of 2018, if he has not been socialized in a manner contrary to general media influences and to the default zeitgeist respecting firearms, might much more easily imagine himself a monster—a gangsta rapper, a mass shooter, a figure of fear and intimidation, bound by no code of honor and able to impose his will.

Yes, Hopalong Cassidy was a big enough deal that Meredith Willson wrote him into a wish list.

Social media now makes it possible for a contemporary youngster, lacking socialization, to share his imagination more broadly.  It used to be more difficult to attract attention.

"Hunter of Fascists"

Marina Oswald photographs retrieved from John McAdams's Lee Oswald page.

Had there been social media in the day, these photographs might have come to light online as part of the police investigation of a shot fired into General Edwin Walker's house, rather than being discovered in November 1963, which was when the bullet recovered from that house proved to match the rifle you see in the pictures.

Mrs Oswald was less than impressed with Lee's request to take the pictures, and a worker at Militant headquarters, who received prints, thought the sender was "really dumb and totally naive."  (Bugliosi, Reclaiming History, at 685.)

It doesn't take an Act of Congress, or anything else, for people to respond to similar pictures today as "dumb" or "naive" or just plain wrong and a cry for help.  Or perhaps to encourage people not to think of themselves as figures of fear and intimidation.

Ultimately, Mr Long writes, it's about rediscovering the responsibility.  "A firearm is both a right and a responsibility; so is a vote. If we’re not raising people mature enough for both, it’s hard to see how they could really be considered mature enough for either one."

Regrettably, that's where the retreat to the silos has led.

We all had guns. We got BB guns when we were in second or third grade and hunting rifles by middle school, when most of us started hunting. Gun safety was no joke. In fact, we weren’t allowed to shoot a gun that we couldn’t take apart, clean, and put back together.

When you grow up hunting you have a very different understanding about the reality of guns. It’s not a video game—you know, and have felt, exactly what they are capable of doing. For my dad and the people we hunted with, the sentiment around automatic weapons and the big guns that people treat like toys today was simple: “You want to shoot those kinds of guns? Great! Enlist and serve.”

Now that I’m a parent, I can look back and see that what was equally powerful was the combination of our family rules concerning hunting and guns, and that we weren’t allowed to watch any violence on TV. I couldn’t see a PG movie until I was fifteen years old. The idea of romanticizing violence was out of the question. We didn’t have violent video games back then, but I can only imagine how my dad would have felt about them.

I loved and was proud of this part of my family story. And, like most kids, I assumed that everyone who was raised in a hunting and gun culture was raised with the same rules. But as I got a little older, I realized that wasn’t true.

Yes, and when people take to their silos, there's no working the problem.  (By all means, read the entire essay.)

Perhaps, though, calling B.S. on the "authenticity" or "transgressivity" of contemporary "Hunter of Fascists" selfies is only the first step toward regaining civil society more generally.

SECOND SECTION.  Andrew Klavan.  "The left wants to defend gangstas and 'transgressive' art and antifa thugs — but when the shooting starts, they blame the guns."

Relax, he's just getting started.

For fifteen years and more, I have been complaining that the right is silenced in our culture — blacklisted and excluded and ignored in entertainment, mainstream news outlets, and the universities. But the flip side of that is this: the degradation of our culture is almost entirely a leftist achievement. Over the last fifty years, it's the left that has assaulted every moral norm and disdained every religious and cultural restraint.

The left owns the dismal tide. They don't like the results? They're looking for someone or something to blame? Maybe they should start by hunting up a mirror.

Nah, they're too busy posting "hunter of fascists" selfies.