Conservative: To Actually Stop Mass Shootings
To stop school massacres, argues Jim Geraghty at National Review, America needs “reforms that would have prevented the Uvalde shooter” from getting guns. One would be prosecuting serious threats, which the Uvalde shooter made prior to his killings. He was also “a prime candidate for being involuntarily committed” given his erratic, violent behavior (peers called him a “school shooter” even before the killings). Red-flag laws on gun ownership need to improve, too: Most now demand that “the court system and police seize the firearms of the troubled individual and then . . . that’s it” — “no requirement for subsequent . . . mental-health treatment.” Such laws need to take “the mentally ill and [treat] them so that they [are] no longer a threat to others.”
Health wonk: Albany’s Boosting Insurance Costs
“The closing days of the legislative session could prove costly for New York health insurance consumers,” warns the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond, “as lawmakers push a raft of proposals that would make coverage more expensive, harder to find or both. One bill already sent to Gov. Hochul helps consumers who use some expensive pharmaceuticals (and the drug companies who make them) but “means higher costs overall for consumers, employers and taxpayers.” And a proposed “out-of-state transfer tax” pushed “by health-care workers union 1199 SEIU and the Greater New York Hospital Association, two of New York’s most influential lobbying forces,” would also add new insurance costs. New Yorkers already pay the second-highest premiums in the country, yet lawmakers’ aims mean “that situation is likely to get worse.”
Energy beat: The Coming Dark Ages
“The Dark Ages were accompanied by darkness (obviously), cold, poverty, starvation, plague and depredation. . . . Infrastructure collapsed. Everyone suffered, but especially the poor. It’s pretty much what the Democrats are doing to America today,” snarks Grady Means at The Hill. The feds now say “Americans should prepare for unprecedented electric power failures and blackouts this year.” An “ ‘advanced’ country that cannot support the predictable energy needs of its nation? Now that is primitive.” It’s a “Dark New Deal”: Plans “to shut down nuclear and fossil fuel plants” and “rush toward unreliable, unsupported” green sources will “never get America to a ‘net-zero emissions economy’ — unless progressives really intend a ‘net-zero economy,’ i.e., complete economic collapse.”
From the right: Musk’s Green and Pro-Family
“Elon Musk wants you to have more kids,” notes The Federalist’s David Harsanyi. Musk, with eight, “is doing his part,” but “the affluent tend to have fewer kids.” Blame “the decades-long effort to stigmatize large families and normalize abortion.” The “Malthusian case for treating human beings as if they were a disease was popularized in the 1970s.” Some even saw Roe v. Wade as “about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.” So “it’s refreshing to see someone as famous as Musk, a techno-optimist and environmentalist, argue that humans are the ones propelling a decent world rather than the ones holding it back.”
Culture critic: ‘Blood Sacrifice’ Wins the Wars
“The culture war is suddenly going well for conservatives,” observes Daniel McCarthy at Spectator World, with victories on Disney, Twitter and critical race theory. But battles “are not the war.” The left gains via “the blood of sacrifice” like the death of George Floyd, a “modern martyr.” The right “has comparatively few martyrs”, with “religious liberties . . . violated by progressives” but no resultant deaths. Note that “the Roman Empire lost its culture war against Christianity because the Christians welcomed martyrdom . . . and the more people talked, the more they heard Christ’s name, learned of his sacrifice and converted.” “Conservative Christians remember these sacrifices. But memory is not as powerful as a fresh image. George Floyd is on CNN, while Christ is not.”
— Compiled by The Post Editorial Board