"Any law is only as good as the people that are enforcing it. Does it make sense we took away the gun because he’s too dangerous to have one, but we didn’t take the step to prevent him from going out and buying one the next day?"

Said Brad Banks, a former prosecutor in Marion County (location of Indianapolis), quoted in "In Indianapolis Shooting, a Red Flag That Never Flew/Red flag laws are supposed to keep guns away from people who should not have them. That did not happen with the gunman who killed eight people in Indianapolis." 

The headline is obfuscatory. Why can't they say it straight, in a way that challenges the people who cry out for more laws? The Indianapolis Shooter Was Legally Barred From Purchasing a Gun, But the Seller Sold One to Him Anyway. 

But is my proposed clear headline correct? I had to comb through the article trying to find the answer. It wasn't easy!

In March 2020, Mr. Hole’s mother approached officers at a Police Department roll call and told them she believed that her son was having suicidal thoughts and might even try to commit “suicide by cop,” the chief of the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police, Randal Taylor, said on Sunday....

When the police arrived at the house, Mr. Hole’s mother “asked him to come down,” the chief said. “When he does, they’d already felt they had enough information to do the needed detention.” Mr. Hole, who was 18 at the time, was taken to a hospital on a “mental health temporary hold,” according to Paul Keenan, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Indianapolis office.

Having been told about a shotgun that Mr. Hole had recently purchased, an officer at the house went upstairs to take it, the chief said, and saw on the young man’s computer “some stuff about some white supremacy ideations and those kind of things.”

Federal investigators would interview Mr. Hole about those discoveries the next month, though they would conclude that he did not harbor an ideology of “racially motivated violent extremism.”...

I'm trying to cut the text down as much as possible as I try to focus on why the gun law didn't work in this case, but I'm leaving in the white supremacy material because it's such a big topic, and it feels as thought the reader is getting detoured into the subject of controlling not guns but hateful thoughts. But I'm more than halfway into the article, and I still don't know why the existing gun law did not work.

The seizure of weapons under red flag laws is often temporary. In Indiana, once a weapon is taken by the police, prosecutors have 14 days to justify the seizure to a judge. If such a determination is not made, the firearms are immediately returned.

But the shotgun seized from Hole was never returned, so this does not yet address the lapse that led to Hole's having a gun.

But if the judge decides the person in question is so unstable that he or she should not be permitted to have guns, the police hold onto the seized weapons, and the person is barred from possessing any guns for at least six months. The permanent seizure of Mr. Hole’s shotgun would therefore suggest that prosecutors had sought and obtained a red flag determination. But this apparently did not happen....

So where was the lapse?

Ryan Mears, the Marion County prosecutor, said in an interview at a vigil on Saturday that he did not know what had happened in this case. But he suggested, posing a hypothetical, that the authorities might have taken the gun in response to pleas from concerned family members, and considered the crisis resolved. “What could have occurred,” Mr. Mears said, “is the point was: ‘Let’s get the gun out of there, make sure the gun is not returned,’ if that was the agreement that was made. And I’m not saying that it is the case. But there’s no reason to go in front of the judge at that point in time, because the point is we want to take the weapon away.”

What "point in time" is he talking about? Why isn't Mears informed about this particular case? Something obviously went wrong. The people had their important gun control law. Hole's mother did what she could, and so did the police. Why is Mears talking about "mak[ing] sure the gun is not returned" when the question here is why was this dangerous young man allowed to buy a gun when, under the red flag law, he should have been barred from purchasing a gun?

[W]ithout a red flag restriction, Mr. Hole would go on to buy two powerful firearms within the next six or seven months. For those who have studied the evolution of red flag laws, Mr. Hole may turn out to be a tragic example of their shortcomings.

The NYT never tells us that the Indiana statute has a provision not only for seizing guns but for barring the future purchase of guns! It speaks of the "evolution of red flag laws" and "their shortcomings" as if the problem is in the text of the law. But the problem was in using the provisions of the law! Here's how the article ends: 

In practice, experts say containing more chronic threats like Mr. Hole might be beyond the laws’ reaches, in their current forms. “Maybe it prevented something for a year, or six months,” [said Aaron J. Kivisto, a psychology professor at the University of Indianapolis]. “And then it wasn’t enough.”

But what wasn't enough? The text of the law or the actions of those with the responsibility to enforce it? Instead of mushing up this article with the "maybe" musings of the psychology professor, the NYT should shine a harsh light on the prosecutors. Why did these killings happen? The young man was apparently quite obviously mentally ill and dangerous, and his poor mother did what she could. So did the police, it seems. The legislation was on the books. 

My proposed clear headline is wrong, I believe. I think that there was some failure, the fault of the prosecution or the court, that caused there not to be a bar on Hole's purchasing of a gun. I don't think the seller was at fault. Correct  me if I'm wrong. 

Must I answer that question I asked above: "Why can't [the NYT] say it straight, in a way that challenges the people who cry out for more laws?" The answer seems obvious: The NYT prefers to heat up the demand for more gun laws. 

FROM THE EMAIL: Ozymandias writes:

Chief Taylor is first reported to be baffled by the absence of a judicial detention order: 

The permanent seizure of Mr. Hole’s shotgun would therefore suggest that prosecutors had sought and obtained a red flag determination. But this apparently did not happen. “For whatever reason,” Chief Taylor said, “that never made it to the court.” 

But later in the piece, there’s this: 

Still, this would not explain how the authorities legally held on to the shotgun after the 14 days. But the chief said Mr. Hole called at one point and said that “he didn’t want the weapons back.” 

“It’s not uncommon,” the chief said. “People realize, you know, ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have it.’  

[Emphasis added.] 

It seems no judicial order was sought because Hole agreed to the seizure after the gun was taken, and perhaps before the 14-day deadline for a red-flag order had expired. There was no order on record, Hole was apparently free to buy more guns. 

Such flaccid, meandering writing. Looks like the Times needed another article on the shooting, so they published one before they had figured out a clear story. Quote in the fifth paragraph even lacks closing parentheses.

Yes, that is incredibly garbled. I could be more compassionate toward the NYT. My assumption was they used a template: We need more gun legislation. Your idea is: They rushed to publish a story that they didn't even understand. Either way, it's defective journalism.

AND: Amadeus 48 writes:

This problem (possession of guns by deranged persons) is perhaps one of these things in life to which there is no solution. But the bright and ambitious people who populate our various governments never want to have THAT discussion. In a country where there are already hundreds of millions of guns, we are never really going to be able to corral even a significant fraction of them. Plus, citizens do have the right to defend themselves. We may have to live with this problem, as we have done. And, as this article hints, we don’t enforce the gun laws we have.

When we were in the thrall of the last mayoral election in Chicago, the leading candidates all came serially to a forum of which I am a member. As we all know, the south and west sides of the city have become a shooting range. I asked each candidate what they proposed to do about the surging violence. Each of them said, “Pass tighter gun laws.” When I pointed out that the prosecutors and courts weren’t enforcing the gun laws we have, which are quite strict, they blamed Indiana and Wisconsin in a non-sequitur. Each of them did this, without knowing what the others said. My conclusion was that they didn’t know what to do, so they default to “pass more gun laws” and attempt to change the subject.

ALSO: Another reader emails: "Ryan Mears is a Democrat. There will be no examination of the failures of his office. Reading the article triggered my 'name that party' sense."

"On Friday, West Point officials said in a statement that the [second-chance] program had 'not met its intended purpose' of increasing the self-reporting of honor code violations and reducing cadets’ tolerance for them...."

"'The tenets of honorable living remain immutable, and the outcomes of our leader development system remain the same, to graduate Army officers that live honorably, lead honorably and demonstrate excellence,' General Williams said in a statement. 'West Point must be the gold standard for developing Army officers. We demand nothing less than impeccable character from our graduates.'... Tim Bakken, a professor of law at West Point, said the involvement of so many athletes in a cheating scandal was a recurring theme at the academy and he called for greater scrutiny of the issue and more transparency on the part of the institution’s leaders. 'We have to ask the question of whether there is something about the culture of athletics that is at odds with the academy’s mission with regard to honor,' he said... Echoing Professor Bakken, C. Richard Nelson, a 1960 West Point graduate... noted that the 1976 scandal, like last year’s and another in 1951, was concentrated among athletes at the academy, in that case the football team. Mr. Nelson said that in his day, there was 'no slack' given and that 'any violation meant separation' — the academy’s term for expulsion. He also said he could see how the second-chance program that was being discontinued, known as the Willful Admission Process, might have fallen short of its goals. 'You’re asking an awful lot of these young people to turn somebody else in,' he said."

From "West Point Scraps Second-Chance Program After Major Cheating Scandal/Some graduates criticized the program as too lenient after the U.S. Military Academy disclosed its biggest academic scandal in decades" (NYT). 

I'd like to see the NYT go more deeply into the question of athletics and cheating — something more than quoting 2 professors on the subject. The question that arose in my mind — and I have no idea of the race of the various accused cheaters — is whether an honor code is a manifestation of white supremacy. The NYT has been weaving Critical Race Theory throughout so many of its articles that we ought to take note of its failure to include that dimension.

FROM THE EMAIL: Robin writes: 

A cadet will not lie, steal, nor cheat, not tolerate those who do (unless they're upper class men, and then there's nothing you can do about it). 

That ending parenthetical was not in the formal code that all must regularly recite, but it was, as they say now, "my lived experience." 

Asked the "Honor Representative" a question about something our "First Sergeant" had said. He violated the confidence, told the guy about it, and soon the guy was chewing me out as our whole squad stood at attention against a hallway wall. He said he was going to make sure I got sent on the upcoming "punishment hike." Soon faced a "Captain's Board," which was in a dark room with a bright light in my face, where the voices behind the crossed swords on the table asked no questions, just pronouncing punishments. A hike up and down a ski-slope with a heavy pack on a hot Sunday afternoon in July was no fun. The kicker was the "First Sergeant" then loudly proclaiming to us all as we again stood at attention in the hall that he'd had nothing to do with it. That was the moment the decision to resign was sealed. Three weeks after asking to resign, I finally saw a real officer just before being processed out. 

When the 1976 scandal broke it was no surprise. When they let them off the hook, it was no surprise. What we have now is the fruit of that poisonous tree. 

Oh, and I eventually rose through the USAF enlisted ranks to Technical Sergeant before getting commissioned in 1987 (which was very hard to do, with a resignation from West point on the record). Retired as a Captain in 1996. Still have *huge* level of distrust of West Point graduates. These people are supposed to be the most honorable we have. God help us if they are!

AND: Jem writes: 

I presume your assertion near the end of your post was meant to be facetious; it would be profoundly racist to presume that members of designated minority groups are inherently less capable of behaving honorably. I don’t believe you are actually the racist that your comment portrays you to be, and hope your email will not be filled with the ravings of too many such people. 

You are attributing to me a statement that I did not make and you misconstrue the purpose behind my question. I am holding believers in Critical Race Theory to a responsibility to face up to it in uncomfortable situations. I see in that NYT article an avoidance of the issue. If one believes white supremacy is systemic, then one must think through how the honor system and the second-chance program contain white supremacy. I do not personally espouse Critical Race Theory. I observe how it is applied and evaded by its proponents.

My own military experience began in late August, 1984 when I enlisted in the Air Force Reserve as part of activating an ROTC scholarship. I never attended or taught at any of the military academies and retired from service at the end of 2012, shifting my employment to supporting the US Government as a contractor, full-time; over the better part of forty years, I have worked with military officers from all the services and virtually every commissioning source (academies, ROTC, direct commissioning programs and officer candidate/training schools). Academy graduates are, as a group, no better and no worse than those from other commissioning sources (just more expensive for the taxpayers). Their personal and professional qualities are distributed no differently from those from other sources and range from marginal to exceptional. 

To me, honor codes are simply a way to remind young people (I was 17 when I enlisted, with my parents’ permission—the accused West Point cadets were mostly 18 or 19 when they cheated on the exam) that managing state-directed violence and having authority over the lives of others entrusted to do so are solemn duties, not to be entered upon lightly. As my parents’ generation (I was but an infant at the time) saw in the actions of Calley and Medina, poor character from those in leadership roles can have catastrophic consequences. I am agnostic about whether these cadets can become acceptable officers—those who return and seek commissions should be closely watched for signs that their recourse to dishonorable conduct does not remain an option they’ll entertain under stress. The academies field sports teams, and sporting competition is an excellent way to train teamwork, self-management and other positive traits, but success in those endeavors can never be the primary goal (ends in themselves); they are but a means to produce high-quality officers to lead our volunteer military.

AND: Ozymandias writes: 

The article was a rewrite, so the Times’s interest in the subjects you raised may be negligible. I’d have been particularly interested to hear from cadets, both in and out of athletics, on those issues, but they would be as unlikely to want to comment as the Times would be to go out and actually . . . you know . . . report on the matter, the character of our future military leaders being strictly infra dig.  

Conceptually, however, CRT and honor codes don’t seem to mix. As I understand it, CRT posits that all relationships in society are defined by racial power differentials between the parties to the relationship. Presumably, military officers, like police, are regarded by proponents of CRT as manifestations of the hierarchical relationships at the heart of so-called white supremacy, and part of the means by which it is maintained. 

Theoretically, an honor code would initially seem to be desirable from the standpoint of CRT proponents, insofar as it required agents of the “white-supremacist power structure” to disclose their own misconduct, thereby revealing—in the words of the Monty-Python medieval peasant woman—"the violence inherent in the system.” (“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”). 

CRT proponents however, would never acknowledge the concept of “honor” in any relationship. On the contrary, “honor” and an “honor code” would be condemned as further manifestations of the misdirection by which the subjugation of the oppressed is maintained. 

The oppression would be particularly acute for so-called “BIPOC” cadet athletes at West Point, especially those forced to take time from their studies for uncompensated participation in athletics to keep athletic scholarships, subjecting them to even greater pressure to cheat in order to maintain their academic standing. 

Or something like that.

"Mr. Jacobs’s parody of the Great American Songbook prompted Irving Berlin and a group of song publishers representing the work of Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and others to sue..."

"... Mad’s parent company, E.C. Publications, for copyright infringement. At issue was 'Sing Along With Mad,' a pullout section published in 1961 that consisted entirely of song parodies by Mr. Jacobs and Larry Siegel. Among them were 'Louella Schwartz Describes Her Malady' (a lampoon of Berlin’s 'A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody') and 'The First Time I Saw Maris' (a spoof of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s 'The Last Time I Saw Paris'), about the commercialization of the Yankee slugger Roger Maris during the season he hit a record-breaking 61 home runs.... In his opinion, [2d Circuit] Judge Irving R. Kaufman (most famous for presiding over Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s espionage trial) wrote, 'The fact that defendants’ parodies were written in the same meter as plaintiffs’ compositions would seem inevitable if the original was to be recognized, but such a justification is not even necessary; we doubt that even so eminent a composer as plaintiff Irving Berlin should be permitted to claim a property interest in iambic pentameter.'"

From "Frank Jacobs, Mad Magazine Writer With a Lyrical Touch, Dies at 91/He deftly mocked pop culture, politics and more for 57 years/He also wrote new lyrics for familiar songs, which led to a lawsuit from Irving Berlin and others" (NYT).

1961 — I think that's about when I discovered Mad. I was 10! It was the first thing I ever subscribed to. The writings of Frank Jacobs played such an important role in the development of my young mind.

(To comment, you need to email me — here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Retail Lawyer:

I started reading Mad around 1961 as well! I was 10 years old. I think I may have been a bit “culturally deprived” because I think I often heard the Mad parody of songs before I heard the actual songs.

Ha ha. Me too.

And the parodies made a greater impression. “He tousled his hair so carefully, that now he the leader of the whole country.” From Pirates of Penzance. About JFK. I believe it came out while the country was mourning his assassination. Now I believe that Gavin Newsom is my governor because he tousled his hair so carefully.

AND: Craig wrote: 

I have a 10-year-old son who could benefit from a subscription to Mad Magazine, the way it used to be. I want my kids to grow up questioning everything. He does read the newspaper comics every day, which I think is great for him, but in general there are too many sacred cows these days. As you say, it's the era of "That's Not Funny". I wonder how the erasure of subversive comedy from mainstream culture will affect the developing minds of the next generation.

Kay writes: 

I believe The Simpsons may have played the same role for kids of my generation that Mad Magazine did for kids of yours. But my dad introduced me to the magazine when I was pretty young, and I loved it immediately. In the 80’s a lot of Mad (in magazine and also paperback form) had reprints of the classic Mads from the 60’s and 70’s. It taught me a lot about American pop culture and history in general. Love Sergio Argones, Antonio Prohías, Duck Edwing, Al Jaffee. The parodies, the illustrations, the fold-outs. Yes!

The fold-out era is after my time.

Or is it fold-in? Yeah, Wikipedia says "fold-in."

Mad publisher Bill Gaines joked that he was a fan of the Fold-In because he knew that serious collectors valued pristine, unfolded copies, and would therefore be inspired to purchase two copies of each issue: one to fold and another to preserve intact.

The oldest fold-ins were from 1964. I was 13 and had moved on to fashion magazines and music magazines.)

ALSO: Ozymandias writes: 

Mad’s humor—which in 1961 ran from the utterly silly to razor-sharp satire to something nearly absurdist—provided us pre-adolescents with much laughter and delight, but its broader and subtler effect was to lift kids out of the daily slog of home, school, TV, etc., and introduce them to possibilities of more critical perspectives of the culture in which they lived.

Mad’s pages were packed with a sophisticated range of contrasting references, familiar and the foreign, drawn from high and low culture. (I remember one piece that had Maria Callas appearing on Dick Clark’s American Bandstand with the in-studio teen audience obliviously boogying to Callas’s aria).

Mad seldom played down to its readers. One had to expand one’s field of learning and information to “get” the humor. One parody of the Cold War, “East Side Story,” portrayed numerous early ’60’s world leaders as members of opposing “gangs” in “rumbles” at the UN (Krushchev in leather jacket and jeans!). One of the parody songs included a reference to Krishna Menon, even then a somewhat obscure Indian Communist leader.

Mad’s nonchalant sardonicism was thus something of a model and incubator for kid’s nascent critical thinking skills. The humor was never mean, but an implicit aspect of Mad’s “takes” on mid-century life in America was that, by sabotaging sacred cows and shibboleths, humor could also serve to clear the field of much of nonsense in favor of whatever better things might remain.

"If a government agent has knowledge that a minor under its care or supervision has exhibited symptoms of gender dysphoria, gender nonconformity, or otherwise demonstrates a desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex..."

"... the government agent or entity with knowledge of that circumstance shall immediately notify, in writing, each of the minor’s parents, guardians, or custodians. The notice shall describe all of the relevant circumstances with reasonable specificity."

That's a proposed law in North Carolina (S.B. 514). It's quoted and mocked in "I am trying to report gender infractions in my kindergarten but don’t know what counts!" by Alexandra Petri (in WaPo).

What does it mean for a school kid to "desire to be treated in a manner incongruent with the minor’s sex." The school shouldn't be treating their children differently based on their sex in the first place. The child's desire should be meaningless. There should be only one kind of treatment. Unless you're talking about the bathrooms....

Petri writes: 

Who is the person in this state who understands gender well enough to feel that this was something worth enshrining in law and not just arbitrary and hurtful and a sledgehammer looking for a nail?... 

ADDED: Here's the whole text of the bill. The quoted subsection — truly puzzling taken out of context — fits under the heading "Protection of parental rights." The idea is that parents have a right to make decisions about their child's mental health care and about any gender treatments that might be offered to a child with gender dysphoria. 

A reader named Robert emails:

Take just the first notice-required circumstance: observed gender dysphoria.

Can anyone make the case that a school should NOT notify the parents? This is a mental 'condition' (I'm avoiding "illness" or "disorder" as labels) that appears to have a high correlation to suicidal ideation, so it would appear obvious to me that a school would be obliged, statute or no statute, to make the parents aware of that.

'Gender nonconfomity' or gender incongruent behavior may or may not have roots in gender dysphoria, but it would also very likely be linked with being bullied, social rejection and other childhood travails. Shouldn't the parents be aware of that, too?

What the law is attempting to address, I believe, is the perception that some teachers might be aligning themselves with their gender-troubled students as 'us-against-them,' meaning we enlightened trans-supporters versus parents with more traditional attitudes. Whatever you think about the whole transgender thing, there is no place for a school keeping secrets from parents, about their kids. They are the parents' kids, after all.

And Ozymandias emails: 

Except that the bill is written in the standard form of mandatory-reporting-of-child abuse/neglect statutes, one might almost mistake SB 514 for legislation designed to identify “nonconforming” children for purposes of referral to sex/gender transition clinics—an impression supported, if only superficially, by the detail that the bill’s requirements are initially imposed upon “a government agent . . . having knowledge” who is then referenced using the non-gender-conforming, anti-patriarchal, third-person impersonal possessive pronoun “its.”

Who says the NC legislature isn’t semi-woke?

AND: Jeff writes:

The folks who are telling us "gender is just a social construct" and is 100% NOT connected with biology exhibit remarkable confidence about just what it means to be of a particular gender, don't they? If gender is purely subjective, how can being what us oldies would call "feminine" be incongruent with a male gender identity? Gender has nothing to do with sex!