American Exceptionalism

First reports were, as usual wrong.

NBC and CBS identified the wrong person as the gunman.  He did not bring with him a semi-automatic assault weapon.  He had only a shotgun when he arrived.  He left the service with an honorable discharge, not a general discharge.

That's a consequence, at least in part, of the public's perfect willingness to accept rumor as fact and the media's conviction that satisfying the public's thirst for information is as well-satisfied by false information as true.  (And, by the way, I wouldn't guarantee that the current facts as I gave them in the previous paragraph are true. Caveat lector.)

In any case, the errors - careless, dishonest, whatever - aren't really to the point.

The point is that some guy (presumably Aaron Alexis, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it) entered the DC Navy Yard Monday morning and killed 12 people.  And he, himself, was then killed by the police.  Add it to the list.  

• Sandy Hook elementary school, 27 dead, 2012
• Aurora, Colorado, 12 dead, 2012
• Seal Beach, California, 8 dead, 2011
• Tucson, Arizona, 6 dead, 2011
• Binghamton, New York, 13 dead, 2009
• Omaha, Nebraska, 8 dead, 2007
• Virginia Tech University, 32 dead, 2007

That's just a not-quite-radomly selected list.  And just from the last few years.  And of course doesn't include the wounded who didn't die.  Or the merely terrified.

Someoneorother on the Diane Rehm Show yesterday said that of the 25 deadliest mass shootings of the last 50 years, 15 happened in the U.S.  I don't know if he was right, but nobody disputed the point.

American exceptionalism indeed.

And so 

SOMETHING MUST BE DONE.

There are, after all, dozens if not thousands of people in and around DC who are, as I type this, planning to take a shotgun into the Navy Yard and see how many people they can kill before the cops kill them.  Bar the gates!  Protect the women and children!

Put aside the question of guns.  People who want to kill a lot of more-or-less random people regularly find ways to do it.

Put aside the matter of mental illness.  Most people with even serious mental illness aren't dangerous.  And we're not particularly competent at figuring out who actually is dangerous.

Put aside the rush to prevent the last crime.  Mass shootings (mass killings of any sort) grab headlines and attention not because they're common but because they're rare.  Sure, they kill a lot of people at one time, but as anyone who actually looks at the data rather than the headlines knows, your children are a lot safer in school - and were a lot safer in school before the additional security measures following on Columbine and Sandy Hook - than they are going from home to school or school to home.  Military bases in the U.S. are remarkably free of murders despite what happened at Fort Hood.  There's really no need for metal detectors at the entrances to shopping malls even though there was a mass shooting at one. 

Risk assessment folks understand this.  We fear the wrong things, and because we fear the wrong things, those are the ones on which we expend our resources and energy.

That's not to say that we should go around arming the insane.  It's to point out that there's no reason to make me take off my shoes and throw away my bottle of water before passing through security at the airport.  The pretense of security may make a few people feel better, but it's pretense.

Security theater rather than security.

Understand, I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to control the proliferation of guns.  I'm not saying that we shouldn't do a better job of identifying and treating the mentally ill.  I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to implement real security commensurate with the levels of real threat.

What I'm saying is that there's a real question that needs to be addressed - with actual information (which I confess that I don't have) rather than gut feeling or random guesswork:

Why do we have so many people running around who want to kill and hurt other people?  What is it in the DNA of our culture?

When we can answer that, we're on the way to knowing what to do that will really make us safer.

Until then?  

I suggest moving to a cave.

BECAUSE YOU CAN NEVER BE TOO CAREFUL: The TSA Edition - or "Bomb? I don't remember seeing a bomb. Do you remember seeing a bomb? Oh, that bomb over there."

It was last February, you may remember, that a security contractor at a federal building in Detroit found a package outside and brought it in for safekeeping.  Tossed it in the lost and found.  Where it sat for a few weeks until someone thought to run it through the x-ray machine.

Then they called the bomb squad.

That was then.

This time it was guardians at LaGuardia.  TSA.  And these babies.

No, those aren't skillets on a stove.  They're plastic bins, the kind you stick the metal in before walking through the detectors.  Sitting on a radiator.

And those things in them?

They were in carry-on luggage.  Metal tubes.  With springs inside.  Carefully removed after screening because, well, you're not supposed to take pipe bombs onto a plane.

Philip Messing and Tim Perone had the story in (sorry) the New York Post.  They begin with the guy who found them.

“When I saw the image, I took a step backward and said, ‘What’s that?!’ ” one startled TSA employee said, according to police sources.
Another screener saw the objects, one gold, the other silver, and both 6-inches long with “springs” inside, and thought they could be bombs, the sources said.
The screeners promptly called their supervisor. He questioned the passenger, who claimed the pipes were for homeopathic medicine.
The supervisor bought the story and let the man board his flight without taking down any information, the sources said.

Because, really, what more might you want to know?

Anyhow, ever concerned for public safety, and not wanting to take any chances, they put the things into the plastic bins and set them on the radiator while they called the bomb squad went for lunch.

That was around 11:30.

It was about 3 o'clock when that same anonymous supervisor noticed the things still sitting on the radiator in the screening area and thought,

Holy shit! We could all be dead. CODE RED. Evacuate the place.  NOW!

Sorry, scratch that out.

But the supervisor, being a trained professional and all, thought

Hmm.  Maybe.

So he placed a call to the TSA bomb experts.  Who rushed right over.

Two hours later.

And they looked upon the tubes and thought,

Holy shit! We could all be dead. CODE RED. Evacuate the place.  NOW!

Sorry, scratch that.

But being trained professionals and all, they thought

Hmm.  Maybe.

So they called the Port Authority PD.  Who rushed right over.

And they looked upon the tubes and thought,

Holy shit! We could all be dead.  CODE RED.  Evacuate the place.  NOW!

Which they did.

Being trained professionals and all.

And then they took the tubes in the bomb truck to the police bomb range in the Bronx.

Six hours all told.

Until they blew up the homeopathic medical supplies.

Because you can never be too careful.

Feel safer now?

h/t Radley Balko

Your Secret's Safe With Me

When I was Legal Director of the ACLU of Ohio, I'd regularly be asked by reporters about some new idea for data collection.

• BMV wants more information about you before you can get a driver's license just to make sure you're a citizen.
• The Highway Patrol is installing license plate scanners at toll booths on the Turnpike to look for stolen cars.
• If you're charged with a misdemeanor the Sheriff's office will take a DNA sample.
• Red light cameras on the streetcorners.

That sort of thing.

Every time, the government agency that announced the plan or the legislators who cooked it up would explain that it was fine.  Once they ran the information through the instant-check database and determined that there was no problem, it was automatically deleted.  And if it was saved, it was secure.  Nobody could ever get at it.  It could never be misused.  They'd never change the rules.  We were safe at absolutely no cost to freedom.

Every time, it was a lie. 

What we know about data, I explained to those reporters, was that sooner or later it will be abused, misused, and maybe lost.  And I would point to your social security number which was, by law, when the system was first set up, to be used only for purposes of the social security system; to the guy who walked off with some government agency's laptop containing the personnel files (including social security numbers) of 500,000 people, to the private business that lost 1.3 million customer accounts including credit card records, to  the . . . .  You get the point.

So when the guys at TSA tell me that they can take take naked pictures of passengers and

1. nobody will ever be able to connect the picture to the face;
2. the picture can't be saved, and
3. it's all perfectly secure and totally safe,

I know that they're lying.  Even if they believe it.

Hell, at the Miami airport they were abused during a training session.  The victim of the abuse ended up charged with assault.  Gizmodo reports the story and includes the image that cannot be saved.

Need more evidence that pictures that will not be saved and cannot be saved are routinely saved.  Back to Gizmodo for 100 leaked body scans (although from a far less detailed system than the airports use).

Ah, but we're safer.

You know, take naked pictures of us.  Grope a bunch of us.  Keep us all safe.

Over at Popehat, Ken does the math by a thought experiment.  Imagine, he says, that pervert terrorists tell us they'll kill 450 Americans a year (roughly the capacity of a jumbo jet) unless we meet their demand, and we believe that they'll try.

America must select 25 million of its citizens per year. Those citizens must give complete strangers working for the government a brief look at a blurry naked picture of themselves. In addition, the complete strangers working for the government must select 1 million of the citizens — men, women, and children of all ages — for “special treatment.” That “special treatment” involves the one million lucky citizens submitting to the strangers from the government briefly running their hands over the citizens’ clothed breasts and genitals, in public, in front of a crowd of annoyed strangers. The whole experience takes about an hour of the citizens’ time every time they have to put up with it.

The question Ken asks, is whether we'd do it.

Of course, we wouldn't do it in response to the demand. That would be letting the terrorists win.

Instead, we'd do it because we want to.

Hmmm.

Because Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose.