New York wants to check your social media before letting you buy a gun. And that includes a year of your internet search history.

No mystery writer or fiction author with ever again by able to buy a gun under those rules, which I suspect New York is just fine with.

In a coordinated assault on free speech, Gab is being shut down by basically everyone. Gab is basically a less mature twitter without the censorship by political viewpoint; the anti-semite murderer in Pittsburgh had an account there, and this has caused Paypal, stripe, Godaddy, and joyent to shut down their services. All because a bad person had an account on their service. The bad person did not use their service to commit murder; he used their service to say things people don't like (with, in this case, good reason not to like). Because of that, millions of people will now be deplatformed and have their own free speech rights curtailed in a frenzy of collective punishment.

I'm one of them; I have an account on Gab, because Twitter has already proven it can't be trusted. That doesn't associate me with a murderous anti-semite any more than it associates people who use gmail with each other. It's a service. The service is a platform to speech. Bad people get to speak too; no one has to listen to them, but they get to speak, even if the only things they say are bad ideas and hate.

At least, that's how it is supposed to work in a society that believes in free speech. I'm not so sure about ours.

Borepatch

The Media is all in for curtailing the our Second Amendment rights. OK, then - maybe we should look at curtailing their First Amendment rights.

After all, this has a better chance of reducing school shootings than any of the gun control proposals that we've heard. And their publications are commercial in nature - they make money on talking up the school shootings, which likely encourages more school shootings - which leads to higher ratings and more money for them. Which is more important: Media profits or children's lives?

After all, we're constantly told that if it saves one kid's life than we should do it, amirite?

Go sign the petition.

I'm not sure if I want to go that far. Any serious attempt at regulating the media would invite regulatory capture immediately, and backfire upon the small, indepedent bloggers and commentators. But to be honest... yes, I do think the media attention given to mass murders that happen at school contributes to them happening again and again and again.

Here's a partial explanation of why.