Legal Commentary

After every deranged shooting, opinion elites engage in a game of Derive-Ideological-Lessons-From-A-Deranged-Shooting Game. The Arizona Massacre was no exception from the DILFADS ritual, and the usual gambits -- more gun control, less political polarization -- were played. If I were inclined to play DILFADs, I'd offer two other plays for the DILFADS playbook -- namely, that the "lesson" of the shooting is that (a) it should be easier to civilly commit apparently deranged people (catering to my Red State readers) or (b) we need more spending on social services for the mentally disturbed (taking care of those Blue State lurkers out there). As I happen to believe both of these propositions, the Arizona massacre would be a great opportunity for me to press my personal agenda.

But here's a third option: Why do we not just stop playing DILFADS? Is not DILFADS an obvious example of the Fallacy of Identity -- the assumption that a salient effect must have a big cause? (See David Hackett Fisher, Historians' Fallacies at 177-78 for a nice summary). Thus, in the Arizona case, lots of commentators assumed that a well-documented contemporary condition -- widespread political polarization -- was somehow related to the shooting. But it turns out that Jared Loughner's possible schizophrenia does not seem to have been "primed" by political rhetoric as opposed to, say, Drowning Pool's music. Had he lived in Alaska, he might have gunned down Sarah Palin: There is no evidence that he had ever been exposed to Tea Party (or any other) political rhetoric, let alone Palin's now-famous cross-hairs.

The problem with DILFADS and, more generally, the Fallacy of Identity, is not so much that they lead to embarrassing op-ed pop sociology. Rather, the problem is that the Fallacy of Identity corrupts our agenda-setting process by causing us obsessively to focus on statistically unimportant problems with excessively costly solutions. The more the reform is tailored to the particulars of the tragedy, the more likely it is that the reform will misfire, because the particulars of the salient tragedy were actually not major causes of the evil that we seek to avert.

After Columbine, for instance, we got horse doctors' doses of state laws mandating Zero Tolerance for weapons in schools, even though weapons in school are not, in fact, a major cause of school injury. This host of badly drafted laws wreaked havoc as kids were thrown out of school for bringing tweezers to school, and toy soldiers were banned from classrooms. After Megan Kanka's murder, we got waves of ever-tougher >sex registration laws, even though inability to identify the address of sex offenders is not, in fact, a major cause of children's sexual abuse. These laws now impose extraordinary costs to little apparent effect in reducing the evil to which they were addressed.

Perhaps the Arizona incident will energize the movement to ban high-capacity magazines like that used by Loughner. Such a prohibition would, on the whole be a decent legal reform -- but, compared to other goals to which the Left could devote its energy, not an urgently needed one: The body count from deranged gun-wielding shooters using high-capacity magazines is pretty low, compared to, say, fires caused by carelessly used space heaters. It is irrational that our policy-making apparatus should be distorted into addressing such a statistical anomaly at the expense of more important goals. We academics pride ourselves on being able to arise above irrationality. So I suggest we academics make a special effort to fight both DILFADS and Fallacy of Identity, by embracing the sadly nihilistic reality of mass shootings: They are random events unrelated to any Big Cause that, even if preventable, might not be worth the costs of preventing them.