Tag: hit&run

In the aftermath of the Las Vegas shooting, both Republicans and Democrats have said they’d support a ban on bump stocks, which allows a semi-automatic rifle to fire more rapidly. Even the National Rifle Association has semi-endorsed “additional regulations” on the devices.

Now YouTube is getting in on the action.

The video hosting website has been taking down videos depicting the installation or even the mere use of bump stocks. These removals appear to have started on October 6, when a number of prominent firearms channels received notifications from YouTube that their videos featuring bump stocks were a violation of community guidelines on harmful or dangerous content.

The channels were also awarded a community standards “strike,” which comes with the suspension of features like live streaming.

“Three strikes and you’re done on YouTube and that’s my livelihood,” says Tim Harmsen, owner of the YouTube channel Military Arms. For the past three years, Harmsen’s main source of income has come from his channel, where he posts demonstrations and reviews of firearms and accessories.

Harmsen received a strike for his four-year-old video SSAK-47 Bump Fire Stock for the AK by Slide Fire Solution, which depicts the use of a bump stock. The penalty, he tells Reason, came as a shock.

“No warning. Nothing. I logged into YouTube on the 7th after traveling and I’m greeted with a big orange page telling me I’m in violation of community standards and offending videos have been removed.”

Harmsen learned of the penalty at a gathering of other firearms enthusiasts in Atlanta. Many of the other attendees also maintain YouTube channels, and were likewise penalized for depicting bump stock videos.

The gun website TwangNBang reports that the popular firearms channels 22Plinkster and BigShooterist also received strikes for violating community standards. Instragram has also deleted pictures of bump stocks from Harmsen’s account.

In a statement provided to Reason, a YouTube spokesperson said: “We have long had a policy against harmful and dangerous content. In the wake of the recent tragedy in Las Vegas, we took a closer look at videos that demonstrate how to convert firearms to make them fire more quickly and we expanded our existing policy to prohibit these videos.”

YouTube is, of course, a private service, and it can moderate its content in whichever way it chooses. That said, it is sad to see the company react this way. As has been pointed out countless times, adding a bump stock to a weapon does not make it inherently more deadly, thanks to the device’s sacrifice of accuracy for speed. A few YouTube videos remain that demonstrate this trade-off quite effectively. Removing such clips only inhibits people’s ability to learn about the device, something that is particularly important given the nationwide debate about banning them.

Meanwhile, YouTube still features plenty of videos of people using actual automatic weapons. Removing videos of bump stocks, much like the calls to ban the device, is clearly more about pandering to a sudden political moment than about actually advancing safety.

It has come to this: The latest reporting on Russia’s attempts to “interfere” with the U.S. presidential election focuses on Facebook groups that posted content created by Americans.

This, The New York Times breathlessly reports, represented an effort to “Reshape U.S. Politics.”

What are the Russians accused of this time?

“The Russian pages—with names like ‘Being Patriotic,’ ‘Secured Borders’ and ‘Blacktivist’—cribbed complaints about federal agents from one conservative website, and a gauzy article about a veteran who became an entrepreneur from People magazine,” the Times informs us. “They took descriptions and videos of police beatings from genuine YouTube and Facebook accounts and reposted them, sometimes lightly edited for maximum effect.”

So in essence, they did what a lot of Facebook pages do: Repost content that fits the theme of the page.

The Times describes this as “harvesting American rage,” but that seems grossly overstated. These pages—which the site has removed—were not unlike countless other politically oriented pages on Facebook. Since virtually anyone can start a Facebook page, and since the Russian pages reportedly suffered from broken English, it’s hard to imagine them having any real influence rather than being merely another interchangeable part of the online echo chamber.

The wide range of ideological opinion represented by the Facebook pages (which included material that highlighted police brutality and discrimination against Muslims, in addition to standard right-wing fare) also undercuts the idea that Russian efforts (or these efforts, at least) were directed toward a particular outcome.

“This is cultural hacking,” Jonathan Albright, research director of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, told the Times. “They are using systems that were already set up by these platforms to increase engagement. They’re feeding outrage—and it’s easy to do, because outrage and emotion is how people share.”

Maybe that’s the aim. But that’s also their right. The right to free speech, perhaps contrary to popular belief, is not limited to U.S. citizens. Anyone can (or should be) able to participate in America’s marketplace of ideas.

Are Russians trying to breed chaos by stoking certain segments of America’s political debates? Guess what: Free speech means our debates are always chaotic. That makes them stronger. Suppressing speech because Russians may have amplified it, on the other hand, undermines our culture of free speech and has the potential to be a lot more harmful than any Facebook page could possibly be.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation yesterday that would require pharmaceutical companies to justify and give a 60-day notice for price increases. The regulations will apply to any increases of more than 16 percent in any two-year period for a drug whose wholesale price is more than $40 for a 30-day supply. Insurers also must file annual reports explaining how drug costs affect their health-care premiums.

The new law was a response to recent double-digit price increases for many medicines. For example, branded drugs prices rose an average of 15 percent in 2015; specialty drugs were up almost 10 percent; and even generics increased their average price by nearly 5 percent. And then there was the public outrage over Martin Shkreli’s 4,000 percent increase in the price of the 62-year-old anti-fungal Daraprim and Mylan’s 400 percent increase in the price of a two-pack of EpiPens.

The pharmaceutical industry is not happy about the new law. Gary Andres of the Biotechnology Innovation Organization issued a statement declaring, “Despite its intent, this law will neither provide meaningful information to patients nor lower prescription drug costs.” Andres added, “By ignoring the realities of biopharmaceutical development, [the new law] will delay or prevent future biopharmaceutical innovation by driving investment toward other industry sectors that are not burdened with this type of misguided government intrusion.”

So why are drug prices going up so steeply? The main reasons are rising research and regulatory costs, according to the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. The Tufts group estimated in 2016 that the out-of-pocket costs for each new approved drug is now $1.4 billion. Taking the costs of the regulatory process into account raises the average cost for a new drug to $2.9 billion. Obviously, drug companies have to earn back enough to cover their costs for both unsuccessful and approved drugs. (Naturally, not everyone agrees with the Tufts calculations.)

Now California is demanding that drug companies provide just the sort of information about their research, manufacturing, and marketing costs that the Tufts researchers report. But here’s the problem: Prices are not set on the basis of costs. As I have explained before, “Drug companies are in the business of making money by selling medicines to sick people and they, just like any other businesses, set their prices based on what the market will bear.” Perhaps California’s new cost information requirements will somehow shame drug companies into keeping their prices lower, but I wouldn’t count on it.

What will really keep drug (and other) prices lower? Competition. Fortunately, the Food and Drug Administration, under new leader Scott Gottlieb, appears to moving in the direction of faster approvals of generics. While we’re at it, speeding up the regulatory process for approving new drugs will help. In addition, since 20-year patent monopolies are enough time for pharmaceutical companies to profit from their discoveries, policy makers should figure out how to stop them from playing games with the patent system as a way to forestall competition from generic drugmakers.

A gay coffee shop owner in Seattle is getting viral attention for loudly ejecting a group of aggressive anti-abortion Christian activists from his business.

Members of Abolish Human Abortion had been handing out rather vivid posters outside the shop that seem to link gay acceptance to the prevalence of abortion. They then came inside Bedlam Coffee and received service—until shop owner Ben Borgman angrily threw them out, declaring their views and their posters offensive. Watch his profanity-laced tirade below:

It’s very easy to watch Borgman’s rant and decide that, no, his shop shouldn’t have to play host to a group of people who were just outside handing out fliers that he found offensive and that he felt attacked him personally.

It’s also easy to watch it and immediately think about the upcoming Supreme Court case about whether the government can force a baker to prepare wedding cakes for gay couples. And some, like the legal scholar Jonathan Turley, are doing exactly that. If a coffee shop owner doesn’t want to serve a group whose positions he finds disagreeable and offensive, is that subtantially different from a baker refusing to do work for a same-sex marriage he finds offensive?

Washington State’s public accommodation laws prohibit discrimination on the basis of “creed,” so Borgman cannot simply boot people out of his coffee shop for having Christian religious beliefs. But over at The Stranger, a Seattle alt-weekly, Katie Herzog argues that this case isn’t religious discrimination but a disagreement about political positions:

Not believing that woman should have autonomy over their own bodies is not actually a protected class in America, much like…gays. Looks like these folks have more in common than they thought.

She’s saying that Borgman isn’t kicking them out because they’re Christians, which would violate the state’s laws; he’s kicking them out because he finds their extreme anti-abortion positions offensive. The fact that these positions are informed by their religious beliefs is not relevant.

What’s fascinating about that argument is how it so closely tracks the response from bakers and florists who don’t want to offer their services for gay weddings. They say that they’re not discriminating against gay people: Gay people are more than welcome to come into their shops and buy cakes and flowers. Rather, they object to the concept of gay marriage and to the position that it should be treated similarly to heterosexual marriage, and they do not want to be forced to produce goods that suggest that they support it.

By trying to come up with a justification as to why Borgman should allowed to boot these guys from his coffee shop without running afoul of state antidiscrimination laws, Herzog is essentially making the same argument: that this isn’t discrimination against people for their identities, but discrimination against certain views.

That’s the sort of weird semantic contortions that come when you try to police the circumstances in which people can decline to do business with someone else. People want to preserve their own right to refuse to associate with others while limiting the others’ ability to shun them. Using government authority to do this gives people an incentive to look for ways to punish people with whom you have disagreements.

But it’s more responsible, ethical, and most of all mature to suggest that both the coffee shop owner and the baker should be able to decide for themselves when they’ll extend their hospitality. With neither the coffee shop nor the baker does a refusal to do business with these customers cause real, recognizable harms that justify government intervention.

Windfern High School, near Houston, suspended senior India Landry last week because she refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, KHOU reports. Landry had reportedly refrained from standing for months, but the school did not treat it as a problem before now.

According to Landry’s mother, the principal told her that her daughter would not be allowed to return to school until she agreed to stand for the pledge.

Landry’s mother has now filed a lawsuit against the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District. The suit says the principal relented and allowed Landry to return to class after a segment aired about her suspension on the local news. But the Landrys had already decided to file a lawsuit seeking unspecificed damages for a violation of her constitutional rights, according to The Washington Post.

The lawsuit alleges that school administrators were “whipped into a frenzy by the publicity of African-American National Football League players kneeling for the national anthem.” It also says that Landry was told her school wasn’t the NFL and that she would stand for the pledge like the “other African-American students.”

A spokesperson for the district declined to confirm or deny the details surrounding the incident, telling Reason the district had not been served with the suit yet but that they would “continue to review the situation internally.” According to the spokesperson, Landry is attending classes again.

The district’s official policy is that a student may choose not to stand if they have their parent’s permission—which Landry had. But even asking for parental permission is a silly policy. Forcing anyone to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance runs contrary to the values the American flag is supposed to represent. Schools should be places for learning, not for mandatory displays of patriotism.

60 years ago today, Atlas Shrugged was published. The novel still sells 100,000 copies a year.

But not everyone will celebrate the book’s anniversary. Ayn Rand is someone people love to hate. Years after her death, people still feel compelled to attack her ideas.

Produced by Naomi Brockwell. Edited by Joshua Swain.

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The Supreme Court of Missouri has agreed to hear an interesting religious and reproductive liberty case. Brought by “Mary Doe,” a member of the Satanic Temple, the case challenges an “informed consent” law requiring a 72-hour waiting period, an ultrasound, and support for statements like “life…begins at conception” before a woman can get an abortion.

“The case would be the first of its kind to be heard by either the Missouri Supreme Court or U.S. Supreme Court,” notes the Kansas City Star.

Doe claims the requirements violate her right to religious freedom, as Satanists do not believe that life begins at conception. The first court to hear the case rejected Doe’s constitutional claims, but an appeals court last week decided Doe’s claims might have merit.

It presents “a contested matter of right that involves fair doubt and reasonable room for disagreement,” the Western District Court of Appeals ruled unanimously, ordering the case be transferred to the jurisdiction of the Missouri Supreme Court.

Missouri regulations require that any woman seeking an abortion must first view an active ultrasound, wait 72 hours after an initial doctor’s visit, and sign papers declaring that they have read and understand state-mandated statements that personhood begins at conception and that abortion at any stage terminates “the life of a separate, unique, living human being.”

“The sole purpose of the law is to indoctrinate pregnant women into the belief held by some, but not all, Christians that a separate and unique human being begins at conception,” wrote the appeals court. “Because the law does not recognize or include other beliefs, [Doe] contends that it establishes an official religion and makes clear that the state disapproves of her beliefs.”

Despite its provocative name, the Satanic Temple doesn’t actually worship Satan. There’s no ritual sacrifice or other trappings of Satanic lore. It’s more of a mischievous and high-concept anti-religion, opposed to the tenets of organized Christianity and their infiltration of American laws. Its description of its mission actually sounds mighty libertarian, as well as steeped in traditional morality: to “encourage benevolence and empathy among all people, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense and justice, and be directed by the human conscience to undertake noble pursuits guided by the individual will.”

“The first conception was in response to George W. Bush’s creation of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives,” one of the Satanic Temple’s founders told The New York Times in 2015:

“I thought, ‘There should be some kind of counter.'” He hit on the idea of starting a faith-based organization that met all the Bush administration’s criteria for receiving funds, but was repugnant to them. “Imagine if a Satanic organization applied for funds,” he remembered thinking. “It would sink the whole program.”

Both founders consider themselves “atheistic Satanists,” with no more literal belief in Satan than they do in a literal God. To them, Satanism represents “the solidarity of outsiders, those judged and excluded by the mainstream,” explains the Times.

In addition to challenging religiously motivated abortion regulations, the Satanic Temple has also been active in fighting things like prayer in public schools, prayer at City Council meetings, a biblical statute on Oklahoma statehouse grounds, courthouse Nativity Scenes, and public schools distributing the Bible to their students.

If you strip away legal protections for rights valued by millions of Americans, you’re just going to make them angry.

J.D. Tuccille writes:

It’s always been true, as gun restrictionists have repeatedly promised, that “nobody’s going to take your guns away.” But few gun owners have ever believed that was from lack of intent; it was always from the absence of any practical way of implementing such a taking. That’s become increasingly clear in the wake of the truly horrific Mandalay Bay massacre as open calls for repealing the Second Amendment’s protection for self-defense, and even for banning privately owned guns, get louder.

And still, the increasingly open prohibitionists haven’t come up with a proposal to make their plans stick.

Perhaps most prominent is Bret Stephens, a conservative columnist at the New York Times. He pointed to Stephen Paddock’s rampage in Las Vegas, as well as some alleged correlations between firearms ownership and homicide (contradicted by other research), dismissed most gun control efforts as “feckless,” and called on America to “Repeal the Second Amendment” or else “Expansive interpretations of the right to bear arms will be the law of the land—until the ‘right’ itself ceases to be.”

• “Since Congress can’t get its act together on HealthCare,” President Donald Trump wrote today on Twitter, “I will be using the power of the pen to give great HealthCare to many people – FAST.”
• President Trump also had this to say on Twitter today: “The problem with agreeing to a policy on immigration is that the Democrats don’t want secure borders, they don’t care about safety for U.S.A.”
• California Gov. Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency after deadly fires began sweeping through Napa, Sonoma, and Yuba counties.
• Las Vegas police have released new information about last week’s mass shooting.
• Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont may declare independence from Spain today.
• Watch the new trailer for Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

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It’s not just coddled college kids and political “progressives” who espouse worrisome views about when it’s OK to shut down speech and expression they don’t like. Many conservatives admit to favoring policies that would proscribe the rights of Muslims, journalists, and those who “disrespect” the United States.

A new poll from the Cato Institute throws some discouraging light on the overall state of public opinion regarding the First Amendment.

According to the topline poll results (to which I received advance access), 72 percent of Republicans would support making it illegal for an American to burn or desecrate the flag. A little more than half of Republicans would punish the desecrators by stripping them of their U.S. citizenship, something Donald Trump suggested (to great and deserved indignation) a few weeks after he won the election last November.

Most GOPers recognize, at least in theory, that disfavored speech should still be protected: Around seven in 10 agree with the statement that “people should be allowed to express unpopular opinions in public, even those that are deeply offensive to other people,” compared to less than five in 10 Democrats. Nonetheless, 36 percent of Republicans would support prohibiting offensive public statements aimed at the police, and the same number would ban such comments aimed at the military. By comparison, just 24 percent would outlaw offensive speech aimed at gays, lesbians, and transgender people.

Despite constant declamations from the right on the importance of religious freedom, 67 percent of Republicans favor a law to “prohibit face coverings in public spaces.” Nearly half would ban the construction of mosques in their community. That is much higher than among all Americans (28 percent) and among Democrats only (14 percent).

It’s also directly contrary to constitutional protections agaainst laws that discriminate against certain faith groups.

Asked how colleges should handle students who disrupt invited speakers in the manner of last week’s rightly maligned protest at the College of William and Mary, 65 percent of poll respondents thought that hecklers should be disciplined in some way. But about one-third (32 percent) of GOPers thought schools should actually have the police arrest disorderly students. Among all participants in the survey, that number was closer to one-fifth (19 percent).

Perhaps most troublingly, 50 percent of Republicans say the press in America has too much freedom to do what it wants. Just 31 percent of all respondents felt the same way. Republicans also appear to be following the president’s lead on a related question: By 63–35 percent, they say journalists are “an enemy of the American people.” Among everyone who took the survey, those numbers were flipped.

Lefties, too, hold many lamentable views regarding the legal and cultural importance of free expression in America. Fully half of Democrats think that “government should prevent people from engaging in hate speech against certain groups in public.” Some 53 percent say that defending someone else’s right “to say racist things” is just as condemnable as “holding racist views yourself.” Two in three believe offensive speech constitutes an act of violence, and the same number feel that college administrators “have an obligation to protect students from speech and ideas that could create a difficult learning environment.”

These answers represent a frightening departure on the American left from a longstanding consensus reflected in the famous aphorism that you need not agree with what somebody says in order to support her right to say it.

Yet the departures on the right may be even more noteworthy, particularly given how much pleasure conservatives take in decrying the behavior of their political adversaries. In fact, 72 percent of Republicans in the poll said that colleges and universities are not doing enough “to teach young Americans about the value of free speech,” and 90 percent think political correctness is “a big problem this country has.”

But it’s hard to claim a position of moral authority on the First Amendment when, at the same time, you approve of government force to punish those who speak, dress, protest, or worship in a manner you don’t like.

A brief methodological aside: The Cato study I’m dissecting here was conducted in partnership with YouGov, a highly respected British web-based polling firm. For more on the war of opinions over online-only surveys, click here.