Plus, a reader question about new voting laws in Georgia.
I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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Today's read: 13 minutes.
Tonight & Friday.
Tonight, for the first time ever, we are going live on YouTube for the Kamala Harris-Donald Trump debate. Our stream will start at 8:50pm ET, and I'll take a few questions and talk about what I'm looking for before the debate begins. Then you can stay on our channel to watch the debate live, and I'll chime in throughout with some real-time commentary. After the debate ends, I'll hang out for 20-30 minutes to take questions from viewers and talk about what we all watched.
You can subscribe to our channel here to get notified when we go live; or just tune in tonight on our channel. We'll send an email out around 8:50pm ET tonight with a link to the stream. Come watch the debate with us!
And, on Friday, we're going to be releasing a special edition that breaks down Kamala Harris and Donald Trump's positions on the eight biggest issues in the election. This is something a lot of readers have asked for, so keep an eye out for it.
Quick hits.
- Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump will debate each other for the first time tonight on ABC at 9:00pm ET. (The debate) Reminder: We'll be streaming the debate with live commentary on our YouTube channel.
- The U.S. accused Iran of sending short-range missiles to Russia and threatened Iran with more sanctions. (The accusation)
- Israel struck a coastal tent encampment in southern Gaza that had been designated a humanitarian zone, killing at least 19 people and injuring more than 60, according to the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry. Israel said it struck a Hamas command and control center in the area. (The strike)
- Voters in New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Delaware are voting in the final primaries of 2024 today. (The primaries)
- Ukraine targeted Moscow in its biggest drone attack yet, killing at least one person, forcing 50 flights to be diverted, and destroying dozens of homes. (The attack)
Today's topic.
The Georgia school shooting. Last week, a 14-year-old boy killed two fellow students and two teachers and wounded nine others when he opened fire inside Apalachee High School in Winder, Georgia. The suspect was taken into custody minutes after the shooting began, and he has been charged with four counts of felony murder.
Editor's note: Tangle does not name mass shooters because of the well documented contagion effect. For similar reasons, we also try to share limited information about the shooter and their alleged motives where possible.
The suspected shooter had been interviewed by FBI investigators last year after making online threats about committing a school shooting. The suspect denied making the threats, and investigators said they lacked cause to take any action. The FBI claimed it alerted local schools to “monitor” the suspect, but it is unclear if Apalachee High School was among the schools informed. About 30 minutes before the shooting began, the suspected shooter’s mother reportedly called a guidance counselor at the school to warn them about an “extreme emergency” involving her son.
The suspect was armed with a semiautomatic rifle during the shooting, according to a local sheriff, and was confronted by school resource officers after the shooting began. The officers said he immediately got on the ground and surrendered. Those killed in the shooting were 14-year-olds Mason Schermerhorn and Christian Angulo and teachers Richard Aspinwall, 39, and Christina Irimie, 53.
On Friday, the shooter's father was brought to court and charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder, and eight counts of cruelty to children. In Georgia, state law prohibits minors from possessing handguns, but there is no minimum age for possessing a rifle or shotgun. Police say they are investigating whether the gun used in the shooting was purchased by the teen's father as a gift for his son in December of 2023. The shooter reportedly had a troubled family life, and his father said he was bullied and accused of being gay by other students.
President Joe Biden said he was mourning the deaths of the students and called on Republicans to come to the table to negotiate common-sense gun-safety legislation. Former President Donald Trump said, "Our hearts are with the victims and loved ones of those affected by the tragic event in Winder, GA," and called the shooter a "sick and deranged monster."
Today, we will examine some responses to this story from the right and left, then my take.
What the right is saying.
- The right is mixed on how best to respond to the shooting, with many suggesting it is appropriate to charge the shooter’s father.
- Some disagree and argue the law is being stretched to justify flawed charges against the shooter’s father.
- Others say the failures of the school and law enforcement cannot be ignored.
The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote about “parents and school shooters.”
“Americans are understandably frustrated, angry and searching for other ways to prevent mass murder, especially against children in schools. Holding parents criminally responsible for abuses by their children may make sense when the facts of a case demonstrate negligence or aiding or abetting the child’s commission of a crime,” the board said. “The Georgia facts will be tested in court, and it’s important that laws are written in a way that requires clear parental culpability. School shootings are horrific, and the public desire to cast blame can be strong. There needs to be evidence beyond guilt by parental association.”
“A second useful focus has to be more school security, as some states and communities are doing… Security measures didn’t prevent the shooting this week, but they might next time. When the Georgia shooter returned to his algebra class with a gun, he was unable to enter because the door had locked automatically and a fellow student refused to open it,” the board wrote. “It’s a tragedy that such security steps are needed, but the deeper causes of school shootings such as community and family dissolution will require a cultural renaissance.”
In Reason, Jacob Sullum asked “why is [the shooter’s] father charged with murder?”
“Although the details of Colin Gray's conduct are not yet completely clear, the gist of the case is that he negligently gave his son, a freshman at the high school, access to the rifle he used in the shooting. Since Georgia does not have a law that explicitly treats such negligence as a crime, prosecutors are stretching other laws to cover Colin Gray's alleged failures as a parent,” Sullum said. “Even if Colin Gray shares some of the moral responsibility for his son's actions, holding him criminally liable requires showing that his conduct fits the elements of a specific offense. At this point, that seems doubtful.”
“Prosecutors will have to make the case that Colin Gray's failure to predict that outcome was so egregious that it amounted to criminal negligence. In light of the Crumbley convictions, there seems to be a good chance that a jury will accept that proposition, especially if prosecutors can show that the father ignored the distress that [his son’s] aunt described. But for every lonely, depressed, and angry teenager who decides to shoot up a high school, there are millions of others who will never do such a thing. Warning signs are always clear in retrospect.”
In Bearing Arms, Ryan Petty called the shooting “another preventable tragedy.”
“The recent school shooting in Georgia is yet another stark reminder of the tragic consequences when warning signs go unheeded, and those responsible for our children’s safety fail to act. As details continue to emerge, it’s becoming increasingly clear that this was not an unforeseeable event. It was preventable, and it should never have happened,” Petty said. “Recent reports have revealed that the FBI had been aware of the Georgia school shooter, a 14-year-old boy, as early as 2023 due to online threats he made about committing a school shooting… This raises significant concerns about the effectiveness of the communication between local law enforcement, and the school district.”
“We cannot ignore the role of the school district in this tragedy. Schools are supposed to be sanctuaries of learning, not battlegrounds. The safety of students should be the highest priority, and any credible threat should be met with immediate action. Did the school district understand the gravity of the threats made online or have any first hand knowledge that this student was a potential threat?” Petty wrote. “The Georgia school shooting is a tragic reminder that our current systems and protocols are not foolproof.”
What the left is saying.
- Many on the left argue charging the shooter’s father satisfies the public’s desire for justice but doesn’t address the issues underlying the shooting.
- Some say the U.S.’s inability to pass gun control laws is a failure of democracy.
- Others question why lawmakers can act on other problems affecting children but not guns.
In The New York Times, Megan K. Stack wrote about “blaming a parent, again, for failed gun laws.”
“The United States, desperate to stop mass shootings, has been seized by an increasing zeal to prosecute parents. Jennifer and James Crumbley, convicted of involuntary manslaughter this year in Michigan after their son’s school shooting, hadn’t broken any gun laws, either,” Stack said. “These prosecutions satisfy the public desire to blame somebody. If you don’t like guns, shaming and punishing the parents feels like landing a righteous blow against gun culture. If you do like guns, it’s a bit like the predictable invocation of mental health by politicians — diverting attention from the weapons themselves and suggesting, instead, that the problem is a few bad apples among the owners.”
“Going after the parents in the absence of adequate gun laws is, in truth, a kind of scapegoating — displaying a head on a stake to satisfy the rage of a desperate crowd. We shouldn’t wait for kids and teachers to be gunned down, then punish the parents by having jurors try to read their minds and judge their parenting,” Stack wrote. “Georgia’s elected representatives have had ample opportunity to pass safe gun storage legislation. They are, presumably, aware of the scourge of school shootings. But they either deemed such laws unnecessary or didn’t bestir themselves to act.”
In The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin suggested “punishing a shooter’s parents delivers some justice. But not enough.”
“Given that prosecutors and jurors are eager to hold someone accountable for such horrific crimes, this might not be the last time a parent gets charged in a mass killing. Moreover, there is no reason to limit potential defendants to parents, although they plainly have primary responsibility for their children,” Rubin said. “There is some justice in holding peripheral figures accountable for cavalier handling of weapons. But that begs the larger societal issue of mass shootings.”
“Prosecuting people related to the shooter deflects from the grotesque public policy failure: ready access to such weapons. Treating these incidents as individual crimes, with a subsequent search for a specific person to blame, allows the real culprits — the gun lobby and the weak-kneed Second Amendment absolutists, as well as the hyper-partisan Supreme Court — off the hook,” Rubin wrote. “The gun problem is as much a democracy problem as anything else. Gun measures such as universal background checks and red-flag laws garner supermajorities… But as long as heavily gerrymandered states produced hyper-conservative state legislatures and the Senate filibuster allows sparsely populated red states to dominate, the popular will is thwarted.”
In The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Patricia Murphy said we are “failing our students, one school shooting at a time.”
“Without more being done to prevent school shootings in Georgia and beyond, it feels like we’re just waiting for the next one to happen and praying it’s not where we live,” Murphy wrote. “We don’t truly know whether this terrible new normal for our kids is a result of the increasingly lax gun laws that our leaders keep passing or a lack of security in schools. Is it because of the rising levels of anxiety in teens or a failure to keep guns away from people having a serious mental health crisis? Is it all of those things together? Maybe. But lawmakers in the state are not looking deeper to find out.”
“Since I have been covering the Legislature, there has never been a study committee to look at how to comprehensively address school shootings… That’s because a study committee would surely tell GOP leaders something they don’t want to hear — that along with the millions of dollars they already spent to upgrade security at schools and the requirements they put in place for active shooter drills for all students (including kindergartners), the only way to prevent school shootings is to also consider gun restrictions in some form or fashion,” Murphy said. “I know we would not need so many thoughts and prayers if lawmakers would take action and do more to save our students’ lives, no matter the politics.”
My take.
Reminder: "My take" is a section where I give myself space to share my own personal opinion. If you have feedback, criticism or compliments, don't unsubscribe. Write in by replying to this email, or leave a comment.
- I’m so deflated by how much I’ve already said all the things I have to say.
- Charging parents is a new avenue to address this, and I was initially encouraged by a new idea — but seeing it in action has given me cold feet.
- No one thing will solve mass shootings; we need a host of holistic legal, societal, and cultural changes.
We have covered so many of these shootings that it is just becoming harder and harder to think of something new to say.
This story is familiar: A young man or a teenager is troubled. He has a semiautomatic rifle. There were warning signs. Young, innocent people were killed. Family and friends could have done more. Law enforcement could have done more. Ineffective laws have left loopholes open that made it easier for this to happen. An unhealthy gun culture promotes guns like they are toys. Repeated headline news coverage gives these twisted plots a reality to copy. And then there were the usual media failures (this time, the Associated Press misleadingly quoting JD Vance).
Our country is a great big beautiful place that is better than most other places in the world at everything from economic growth to press freedom to track and field. But, when it comes to gun violence, we are very, very broken. And with each event like this that goes by, we seem to be losing the will to do anything — besides add more guns and “security” to the equation.
All the normal caveats apply: Gun deaths are the leading cause of adolescent death, but suicide is the #1 gun violence killer in our country. Mass shootings usually involve semiautomatic rifles, but handguns are involved in more violence than any other kind of weapon. School shootings represent a small sliver of the number of gun deaths, but they comprise a huge share of the psychological toll gun violence takes on us, especially younger Americans. We now have a society where kids have to learn what to do in "active shooter" drills and many of their schools are looking more and more like prisons, with armed security guards, metal detectors, and doors that lock automatically.
Apalachee High was one such school. Armed police were on the premises to stop shootings like this and a system was in place inside the school to lock classroom doors. Those safety measures may have saved lives, but they didn’t prevent a 14-year-old from being able to easily access a gun, walk into his school, and kill two of his teachers and two of his classmates before surrendering. They may have mitigated the damage, if you measure that damage only in lives lost, but they didn't prevent this from happening in the only country where it happens regularly.
I've written before about the lack of friction to buy guns and the failure of our gun culture. This story touches on both of those points: In Georgia, there is no friction for a teenager to own a rifle or shotgun. It is perfectly legal, without age restrictions or background checks. It should not be easier for a 14-year-old to carry a rifle than it is for him to get his driver's permit. Period.
We don't just have a failure of law — of course, most people would agree that a 14-year-old who threatens a school shooting when he's 13 shouldn't legally be able to access a gun — but we have a failure of culture. The latitude provided to a teenager to own a rifle in Georgia is a holdover from an era with a more responsible gun culture — one built on guns being tools for sport or self-protection — one that is no longer modeled by our most visible gun owners.
The gun culture promoted by our political and cultural leaders today undervalues the seriousness of owning firearms, promotes the notion that guns make you tough or patriotic, and plants seeds in the minds of our youth that solving your issues with a gun is always an option. When I was a teenager and learned to shoot a gun I was taught to fear it and recognize its seriousness; I was made to feel the weight of the responsibility of what I had in my hands, and made to understand that this wasn't an activity I was ever allowed to participate in without specific adults present. I am immeasurably grateful that this is how I was introduced to firearms. I know that many law-abiding gun owners across America still approach guns in this fashion.
Unfortunately, we also have legislators posing with semiautomatic rifles in front of Christmas trees, blowing stuff up in campaign ads, or saying it's "embarrassing" if their state is no longer the #1 gun state in the country. We have celebrities who throw temper tantrums by shooting things. These things matter on the margins, and they are insidious markers of a corrupted and failed culture.
And now we are fighting against gun violence on a whole new front: Prosecuting parents. Jennifer and James Crumbley were the first parents in the U.S. to ever be found criminally responsible for their child carrying out a mass killing. Now the shooter's father in this case is being charged. As I said after Jennifer Crumbley was convicted, I was initially supportive of this pursuit — I think holding parents responsible for their role in securing firearms could increase gun safety and increase the urgency with which parents react to warning signs. But I also got cold feet once I saw the prosecution go down.
Crumbley's guilt seemed obvious at first, but the more I learned about the case, the more I understood how we were all benefitting from hindsight. I became far more skeptical of this approach, and especially if it means throwing parents in prison for decades.
We cannot solve gun violence with a single change. This will require a holistic societal fix. We need to better enforce the laws we have on the books. We need to support new laws that allow family and friends to easily flag warning signs to law enforcement. We need more robust mental health treatment (for teenagers, especially young men). We need gun ownership and training to be more like using a car and less like shopping at Wal-Mart. We need our politicians and celebrities and cultural leaders to treat gun ownership as a grave, monumental responsibility, not one to be flaunted or flexed.
We need all of this together in the long run and each of these as individual victories as soon as possible, and we need to work together to get there. Unfortunately, this means we need a world we don’t currently seem to have — unless we are willing to make it happen as a collective.
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Your questions, answered.
Q: I keep seeing posts that the Georgia election officials are playing fast and loose with the voting rights of Georgia citizens and are making plans that don't sound constitutional. Is this on your radar?
— Pete from Oakmont, Pennsylvania
Tangle: We’ve been following the story, and it’s troubling. For background, the Georgia State Election Board appointed three new members to the five-person board earlier this year; all three are supporters of former President Trump (he recently praised them by name at a rally, calling them "pitbulls fighting for honesty, transparency, and victory"). Two weeks ago, the board passed new rules requiring county election officials to make "reasonable inquiries" before certifying results, allowing them "to examine all election related documentation created during the conduct of elections,” and requiring counties to investigate voting discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of voters in a precinct before certifying results.
Prominent Republicans and Democrats in Georgia immediately voiced their opposition to these rules, arguing they were passed too close to the election and were likely to impede the vote counting process.
In short, I agree. These maneuvers by the election board are clearly designed to appeal to President Trump and his supporters by implying there were major problems in Georgia’s 2020 election results to fix, and they create an additional pathway for Trump to challenge the 2024 results.
In a press release about the new rules, Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger noted that the state has already implemented a number of election reforms in recent years, including requiring photo ID for absentee ballots, expediting the reporting and certification of election results, and introducing citizenship verification measures. The conservative Heritage Foundation already ranked Georgia #2 on its “Election Integrity Scorecard.” All the new rules for the election board seem to do is increase the likelihood of a weeks-long delay to Georgia certifying its results.
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Under the radar.
On Monday, Republicans and Democrats released competing documents on the botched August 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan. Republicans accused President Biden of placing optics above personnel security. Democrats claimed the GOP was distorting the facts, blaming a deal former President Trump struck with the Taliban that set the terms of the withdrawal. The reports offer few new details, but laid out in plain terms how the deadly withdrawal is being framed by Democrats and Republicans. CNN summarized the reports here.
Numbers.
- $115 million. The amount allocated in Georgia’s 2023 budget to make school safety grants available to every K-12 school in the state.
- 180. The number of years in prison that the father of the suspected shooter in the Apalachee High School shooting could be sentenced to if convicted on all charges.
- 417. The number of shootings at schools in the U.S. since 1999, according to The Washington Post.
- 213. The total number of children, educators, and other individuals killed in those shootings.
- 16. The median age of school shooters since 1999.
- 26. The number of states with laws aimed to prevent children from accessing firearms.
- 42%. The percentage of U.S. adults who live in a home with a gun, according to a 2023 Pew Research survey.
- 49%. The approximate percentage of adults in Georgia who lived in homes with guns in 2021, according to a study from the RAND Corporation.
The extras.
- One year ago today we had just published a Friday edition on how not to protest climate change.
- The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the ad in our free newsletter for Brad’s Deals.
- Nothing to do with politics: In honor of James Earl Jones’s passing, here’s the Empire State Building lit up to celebrate Darth Vader.
- Yesterday’s survey: 991 readers responded to our survey on the latest economic news with 37% saying Donald Trump’s tax policies will help the economy. “If there is one thing I have learned over the years of reading about responses to economic plans, it's that a lot of people pretend to know what the economy will do, and everyone is surprised,” one respondent said.
Have a nice day.
In Kirkby Stephen, England, flower bouquets left in public have caused a groundswell of good cheer. Members of the Nateby and Wharton Women’s Institute seeded the idea, creating about 30 flower bouquets with flowers and herbs from the gardens of those involved, supplemented by flowers from local vendor Gregsons Spar. The project aimed to cheer up individuals feeling lonely, and it caused a bloom of optimism among locals. BBC has the story.
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