On November 5, 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley parked his SUV outside First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, got out, and opened fire. Kelley murdered 25 people outside and inside the church, wounding 20 others before he turned his gun on himself (after two good guys with guns opened fire on HIM) and saved Texas’s taxpayers the expenses of a trial and imprisonment or execution.

On July 7, US District Judge Xavier Rodriguez ruled, in a trial seeking damages to the victims and their families, that the US Air Force is “60% Responsible” for Kelley’s actions.

Why? Because after Kelley’s guilty plea in a 2012 court-martial, for assaulting his wife and stepson, the Air Force failed to enter his criminal history into an FBI database so that he could be legally forbidden to buy firearms in the future.

Let’s get one thing straight here: Devin Kelley, and no one else, was responsible for Devin Kelley’s actions. Period.

The US Air Force didn’t beat Kelley’s wife or fracture Kelley’s stepson’s skull. Kelley did. The Air Force tried him for it, imprisoned and demoted him for it, and kicked him out for it.

The US Air Force didn’t rape Kelley’s girlfriend in 2013. If that happened (no charges were brought), Kelley did that.

The US Air Force didn’t beat Kelley’s malnourished husky in 2014. Kelley did (and was tried and received a deferred sentence of probation).

The US Air Force didn’t develop a grudge against First Baptist Church and its congregants, which Kelley attended before apparently becoming a militant atheist. Kelley did.

All the US Air Force did was mess up some administrative paperwork (well, computer work, I guess) which, had it been properly filed, might have conceivably made it slightly more difficult for Kelley to obtain a firearm. Probably not. But maybe, just a little.

Kelley was clearly a violent and dangerous man, and a man who had no respect whatsoever for any law that forbade him to do whatever he decided he wanted to do.

It’s absurd to think that a man who made the decision to kill 25 people, and followed through on that decision, would have quailed from stealing the gun he did it with, or from buying that informally and without a background check (supposedly “illegally,” but the Second Amendment says otherwise).

The reason Rodriguez found the Air Force “60% responsible” is that he wanted to give the victims some of your money, and, well, the Air Force has a lot of your money. But in getting where he wanted to go, Rodriguez damaged the very concept of responsibility.

On the bright side, perhaps the judgment will leave the Air Force short money for another bomb to drop on a hospital, wedding, or funeral in the Middle East.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Facebook, USA Today reports, “is asking some U.S. users whether they may have been exposed to extremist content, or if they are worried that someone they know might be becoming an extremist.”

The pop-ups are part of something called The Redirect Initiative, which attempts to “combat violent extremism and dangerous organizations by redirecting hate and violence-related search terms towards resources, education, and outreach groups that can help.”

The Redirect Initiative sounds like something that could be a valuable public service if Facebook was serious about fighting extremism. But that’s obviously not the case.

Only the least popular and least powerful extremists need worry that they’ll be targeted by Facebook. The company actively coddles and cuddles up to the most powerful, violent, and deadly extremist groups on the planet: Governments.

Facebook’s Community Standards on “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations” divides extremist groups into three tiers. The top tier includes “entities that engage in serious offline harms — including organizing or advocating for violence against civilians, repeatedly dehumanizing or advocating for harm against people based on protected characteristics, or engaging in systematic criminal operations.”

And yet the US Drug Enforcement Administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement — two groups explicitly organized for violence against civilians — maintain active Facebook pages on which they publicly advocate for, and openly celebrate, their depredations with nary an objection from the company.

The US Internal Revenue Service — a protection racket no different in principle from any other “nice income you got there, be a shame if anything happened to it” criminal scheme — also uses Facebook without negative consequence.

Oh, Facebook will come down hard on a government or government-affiliated actor now and then, but only if that government or individual has managed to get on the wrong side of the political establishments Facebook itself supports and caters to.

Domestically, Donald Trump is the obvious example, and not a terribly sympathetic one.

Abroad,  regimes and state actors who find themselves at odds with the regimes controlling Facebook’s most profitable markets may face bans or “Facebook jail” for activities the company considers “legitimate” when the US or EU (for example) engages in them.

Facebook’s claimed opposition to extremism isn’t a principled stand against violence, hate, or criminal activity. It’s performance art, virtue signaling, and propaganda in service to the extremist groups Facebook endorses and willingly works with — with opposition to those extremist groups itself often falsely labeled “extremism,” or at least “misinformation.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Confusion reigns. More than a week after Democratic voters from New York City’s five boroughs cast their primary ballots, we still don’t know who those voters chose as their party’s nominee for mayor. Seven days after the polls closed, the city’s Board of Elections issued preliminary results, then quickly withdrew them, citing a discrepancy in which test ballots were counted along with real votes.

Opponents of Ranked Choice Voting  are having a public field day, declaring that the results — or, rather, lack of results — prove the method is defective. It’s just too complicated, they claim, for the average voter to figure out.

They’re wrong. The New York City Board of Elections’s apparent inability to quickly, competently, and accurately count votes isn’t an indictment of Ranked Choice Voting. It’s an indictment of the New York City Board of Elections.

What’s going on here? What’s the problem?

One possible explanation is incompetence. Mike Ryan, the board’s director, went on extended medical leave after his relationship with a voting machine vendor led to calls for a conflict of interest investigation. His absence left the board’s operations in the hands of deputy executive director Dawn Sandow, who may be a token Republican appointee rather than a skilled administrator. An anonymous fellow GOP official tells the New York Post that Sandow “isn’t very qualified to run a large agency.”

Another possibility is that this Ranked Choice Voting exercise isn’t going very well because the powers that be in New York City politics don’t WANT it to go very well.  In a system where two parties continually dominate, and in a city where one of those parties enjoys a pretty firm stranglehold on power, RCV threatens to upset the (big) apple cart. It produces winners based on the broadest level of popular support rather than leaving voters with a binary choice between lesser evils. Party bosses hate that idea. It’s possible that New York City’s version of RCV was built to fail

A non-possibility is that Ranked Choice Voting itself is to blame for the fiasco. There’s simply nothing complex or confusing about it.

The voter simply ranks the available candidates from first place to last, something he or she probably already did when considering which candidate to vote for in “vote for one” elections.

At the election administration level, RCV MORE work, but it’s not COMPLICATED work. If no candidate receives a majority of “first place” votes, the candidate with the fewest such votes is eliminated. His or her votes are transferred to those voters’ second choices. This process repeats until one candidate holds a majority. Even in hand-counted elections it would be a simple and tedious chore, not rocket science. In the computer age, it’s a simple coding problem.

Among the explanations for the New York City debacle, I lean toward administrative incompetence rather than political conspiracy. But either way, New Yorkers shouldn’t let the opponents of Ranked Choice Voting defeat its future use. Where democratic processes are important, RCV is a needed improvement.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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