In the wake of another terrible tragedy, one solution seems to stand out above the rest.
People are demanding legislation to stop tragedies like the recent one in Oregon. It occurred to me, the only solutions that have been proposed are restrictions on 2nd Amendment rights.
So while we’re thinking of restricting rights, maybe we’re looking at the wrong one. I think we have to move up one space and go after the real culprit: the 1st Amendment.
Certainly the Ft. Hood shooting and the Boston Marathon bombing could have been prevented if we had eliminated that free exercise of religion part. I know it would have punished millions of innocent law abiding Muslims, but isn’t that exactly what we’ve been doing to gun owners? Trying to stop criminals by regulating the law abiding?
More importantly, we need to regulate the Media. 24 hour news cycles have made celebrities out of these maniacs. In fact, the last two killers admitted their crimes were a last ditch attempt to seek the fame they couldn’t acquire otherwise. Both of them knew full well, the 24 hour News cycle would reward their request.
So rather than continuing on the same path, and following the definition of insanity wrongly attributed to Einstein, I propose the following common sense restrictions:
- Background checks for all News Anchors. Who are these people? We really know nothing about any of them, or whether they suffer from mental illness that should disqualify them from reporting the news.
- A limit on the size of News Magazines. Right now News Magazines have unlimited capacity. That’s why these shootings are so important to them. If we limit magazines to no more than six pages, (or ten minutes for televised magazines), sensationalist stories like this one will not qualify as news.
- Airports and Schools should become Media Free Zones. We don’t allow anyone to bring guns into the airport, why should anyone have access to CNN? And do we really want our kids exposed to it? We need to put our children first.
- Eliminate the News Show Loophole. If there is no new information about a shooting it is no longer news. Nothing to report here, time to move on.
- Seven Day waiting periods. In their rush to broadcast, misinformation is constantly repeated. We need a cooling off period. By law, any shooting that occurs shouldn’t be reported on for a full week after it happens.
- Failure to abide by these restrictions will be a felony, and violators will forfeit the right to ever own an anchor desk again.
And while we’re at it, we need to recognize that speech has to be regulated. There was no way the authors of the First Amendment, 200 years ago, could have envisioned the stupid things people might say in a modern society. They never could have imagined powerful modern inventions like the microphone. The simplicity of the Amendment was based on their antiquated perspective.
The President shouldn’t be allowed to rush to the microphone every time there is such a tragedy. It only encourages more tragedies. The reason why he’s had to speak out about gun violence 16 times is because he spoke about it the previous 15 times. It’s hard to get the attention of the Commander in Chief (especially if you don’t know how to disassemble an alarm clock). Yet every mass murderer has been able to get the President of the United States talking about him. For this reason, the President is more responsible for these murders than the NRA.
Not a single one of the laws being proposed by legislators today would have prevented the Oregon tragedy. But I’m fairly certain these proposals would.
It makes more sense than doing nothing.