The quote of the day is presented by Guns.com
If, after decades of speechmaking about hunting and tradition and rights, Republicans roll over because they happen to have someone in the White House who doesn’t actually care much about those things, it’ll be the most perfect encapsulation of the party’s ideological hollowness since George W. Bush pushed through a massive health care entitlement, Medicare Part D.
The notion that the correct response to comparatively rare mass shootings is to rescind the constitutional rights of tens of millions of people who have sought mental health treatment has a particularly strong allure for the bipartisan “do something” crowd, perhaps because it perfectly fits the “do something to someone else” mold.
The proposed restrictions on online speech are in many ways the most worrisome. The desire to hold big tech accountable for mass shootings is politically potent: Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Twitter have already made plenty of enemies, and doing this particular something would be a great way to satisfy quite a few constituencies that are baying for their blood.
The rise of the free internet has coincided with the greatest sustained arc of increasing peace and prosperity in human history. But the forces for doingsomething are strong, so in the days after the shootings, everyone from Fox’s Tucker Carlson to The New York Times called for restrictions on online speech and other regulations of the internet.
Katherine Mangu-Ward in Don’t Just Do Something
