Retired Fed Tied to Buffalo Shooting, The NRA is Dying, 18-Year-Olds: No Guns, Yes Semi Truck Driving? (The Five for 05/31/22)
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[one]
Well, this is uncomfortable.
The Buffalo News has confirmed a tie between the mass shooter and a former federal agent:
Law enforcement officers are investigating whether a retired federal agent had about 30 minutes advance notice of a white supremacist's plans to murder Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, two law enforcement officials told The Buffalo News.
Authorities believe the former agent – believed to be from Texas – was one of at least six individuals who regularly communicated with accused gunman Payton Gendron in an online chat room where racist hatred was discussed, the two officials said.
The two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the investigation stated these individuals were invited by Gendron to read about his mass shooting plans and the target location about 30 minutes before Gendron killed 10 people at Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue on May 14.
The News could not determine if the retired agent accepted the invitation.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories…but if the government wants to have less of them circulating, perhaps the place to start is not with the ill-fated Disinformation Board, but by keeping the Feds from having close ties to mass shooters and terrorists.
[two]
The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the (likely preventable) mass shooting in Texas.
Axios reports:
Why it matters: Local and state law enforcement officials have faced intense criticism for their response to the shooting as details and a fuller timeline of events have emerged.
At least eight 911 calls were made between 12:03pm — half an hour after the gunman entered the school — and around 12:50pm, when Border Patrol agents and police finally stormed in and shot him dead.
Questions remain as to why officials didn't come clean sooner.
What they're saying: "The goal of the review is to provide an independent account of law enforcement actions and responses that day, and to identify lessons learned and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events," department spokesperson Anthony Coley said in a press release.
“This assessment will be fair, transparent and independent," Coley said, adding that a report will be published upon the review's conclusion.
In a very divided political nation…rage at the police department’s handing of the situation is one thing that seems to unite all Americans at the moment.
But I’m not sure what bonding over rage gets us.
[three]
Just 4% of this year’s graduating class from the nation’s most prestigious university, Harvard, hold politically conservative viewpoints.
The survey, conducted by The Crimson, was emailed to all 1,269 graduating seniors and drew a nearly 40% response rate. It found that 4% of graduates from the class of 2022 lean conservative, and 2.4% lean "very conservative." It also surveyed the students about what their politics were before attending Harvard and found that 7.1% of the graduating class identified as conservative before attending the college. Among the results:
*40.7% of the students identified as progressive after attending Harvard, compared to 44.7% prior to attending the college. 27.9% of graduating students identify as "very progressive," which is an increase from the 20.9% who said they were "very progressive" prior to attending the college.
The lazy conclusion here is that having a high IQ (the average at Harvard is rumored to be 136) makes you more liberal. However, Psychology Today reveals that there isn’t a hard line between IQ and politics, outside of higher IQ people avoiding extreme opinions and policies.
A more likely causality is Harvard’s 36% legacy admissions rate, spots that go to the children of alums. There isn’t a ton of data here, but it certainly looks like the Ivy League attracts students from Liberal families, rather than turning Conservative students liberal.
Given the extreme minority of Conservative viewpoints…it’s worth asking whether or not Harvard’s admissions selection process is biased against right-of-center students.
[four]
As supply chains continue to stagnate, one of the biggest issues that continues to wreck havoc on the community is the lack of truck drivers to move imported goods from the coasts throughout the country.
From the American Trucking Association:
For decades, truckers have quit at alarming rates, leading to a chronic shortage. The turnover rate was at a staggering 91 percent in 2019, which means that for every 100 people who signed up to drive, 91 walked out the door. Plenty of people have the commercial driver’s licenses needed to operate trucks, said Michael Belzer, a Wayne State University economist who has studied the industry for 30 years. “None of them will work for these wages,” he added.
Could the answer to this massive shortage be to recruit teenagers to drive semis, offering up to $110,000 per year right out of high school?
The New Yorker reports:
For the past couple of years, groups like the American Trucking Associations have been making the argument that a national shortage of drivers has amplified supply-chain problems. In January, Congress announced the start of an apprenticeship program that will allow some eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds to drive trucks across state lines. (Currently, you have to be twenty-one to do so.) Critics have objected that teens driving eighteen-wheelers will make roads more dangerous. Chris Rotondo, of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, disagrees. “For a hundred years, we’ve left this whole generation of kids out there who can fight our wars but can’t drive a truck when they come back,” he said.
In addition to the practicalities here, like whether or not younger drivers will lead to more highway fatalities…this debate is playing out against a much bigger one in the wake of the Texas shooting after the mass murderer purchased two rifles legally at the age of 18…
…when is adulthood?
Right now, the answer is…
…18 to vote and buy long guns.
…21 to buy alcohol, handguns.
…25 to rent a car.
…26 to stay on your parents health insurance.
It’s a terrible mess of a system that draws dozens of lines where there should be only one:
adolescent | adult
Of course, Millennials don’t think adulthood starts until age 30.
A bunch of 29-year-old children running around out here…well, actually that explains a lot.
[five]
Per as usual after a mass shooting, there’s a lot of digital ink spilled about the NRA by the corporate press.
There’s just one problem with the reporting…no one is mentioning the organization is dying.
But the NRA isn’t the primary reason that Congress is unlikely to enact the laws that Biden, Obama and other national Democrats seek. The grim drumbeat of mass shootings in America and the political stalemate over guns have obscured the fact that the NRA’s power is in steep decline, sapped by ongoing lawsuits, leadership scandals, and even a bankruptcy filing.
Start with its political spending. The NRA shelled out just over $29 million on the 2020 elections—a big number, but down from more than $54 million in 2016. So far in the 2022 cycle the group has spent less than $10,000, according to Sheila Krumholz, executive director of OpenSecrets, a nonprofit organization that tracks money in politics. The gun-rights group’s spending has been in “precipitous decline,” Krumholz says, although she cautions that the NRA will likely ramp up spending just before the November election.
The group’s clout is fading in other ways. NRA membership stagnated around 5 million for several years after 2013, and has steadily declined every year since 2018, according to internal documents obtained by The Reload, a publication focused on the firearms industry. By August 2021, revenue from membership dues fell more than $16 million short of what the organization had projected, according to the documents obtained by The Reload. There are also signs that the NRA’s supporters are aging. In 2019, 56% of donors to the NRA Political Victory Fund identified themselves as retired, compared to 40% in 2003, the first year this was recorded.
Personally, I canceled my membership after the NRA refused to support Philandro Castile, who was shot and killed by police while legally carrying a concealed pistol.
I’m guessing that the five million people who bought guns for the first time in the last two years, including record numbers of Democrats, minorities and women, have more to do with Congress not wanting to pass gun bans…as opposed to the boogeyman of the NRA, that’s dying as quickly as it’s geriatric membership.
Until the next one,
-sth