Last October, Robert Card killed 18 people and injured 18 others in a shooting spree across several locations in Maine. Card was later found dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Now, the New York Times reports, an analysis of Card’s brain reveals significant damage, probably related to his eight years of exposure to explosions as a US Army grenade instructor, and quite possibly explaining his paranoia and “increasingly erratic and violent” behavior in the months leading up to the shootings and his suicide.

While some people tend to unduly write off avoidable atrocity as unavoidable tragedy, it’s difficult to deny that brain trauma — natural or artificial — can play a role in turning otherwise reasonable people into killers.

For example,  former US Marine Charles Whitman, who killed 17 people in a rampage at the University of Texas at Austin in 1966, presented with a behavioral history not dissimilar to Card’s, and an autopsy found a pecan-sized brain tumor that may have caused his mental collapse by pressing on the part of his brain responsible for anxiety and “fight or flight” response.

I find the whole topic at least a little bit scary on a personal level, as I stood right next to thousands of bone-rattling explosions in the Marine Corps myself as an 81mm mortarman.

No, I don’t hear imaginary voices. No, I’m not paranoid (at least I don’t THINK I’m paranoid). No, I don’t plan to pick up a gun and go kill anyone. And fortunately I’m surrounded by family and friends who would notice and take action if I started showing symptoms of any such kind of breakdown.

But Card’s family and co-workers noticed and took action too. His son and ex-wife talked to the local sheriff’s office about his seeming mental decline. His army reserve unit also reported problematic behavior and he was detained for psychological evaluation and treatment. Even when “the system” seemed to “work” as advertised, it didn’t work for Card or for his eventual victims.

When writing on issues of public concern (I hope we can agree that mass murder is such an issue), I often try to offer practical and ethical solutions. Here, I have few to offer. But I do want to offer a cautionary note:

If we allow government to “medicalize” murder and simply attribute mass shootings to mental illness, traumatic brain injury, etc., the flip side of that coin won’t be pretty when it comes to personal privacy.

We’ll start seeing mandated examinations — first for persons actually displaying symptoms, then later for anyone working in jobs deemed “unsafe for the human brain” — at risk of involuntary commitment if we “flunk” our CTs or MRIs.

If you think that can’t happen, you’ve probably never been ordered to urinate in a cup or blow into a breathalyzer to prove you don’t use drugs or haven’t been using alcohol.

Unless we, and our healthcare providers, get better at going the extra mile to help those who might otherwise become Robert Cards, that’s the dystopia we’re heading for.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Does the exit path from William Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills lead through Trump Tower?

The Wall Street Journal‘s Alex Castellanos doesn’t quite think so, and not just because “Mr. Trump can’t be imitated” (“The Republicans Are a Party in Search of a Future,” March 1). Still, Castellanos asserts that “only the next generation of Republicans” can move past Biden-era Democrats’ vision of “goverment as a factory where they crank out laws, rules and regulations on an assembly line.”

Jared Polis, who maintains that “the government policy should be completely agnostic about what unit of exchange is used,” is conspicuously absent from Castellanos’s list of Democratic governors who “can’t imagine a world in which they wouldn’t assert top-down, mechanical control.” And while Polis may be an outlier in the current red-versus-blue map, he wouldn’t always have been.

While Biden perpetuates Donald Trump’s protectionism, it was Democrats who read Henry George’s book-length case against tariffs into the Congressional Record in 1892, the same year George challenged the notion that “there devolves on the State the necessity of intelligently organising … a great machine whose complicated parts shall properly work together under the direction of human intelligence.”

Speaking of continuations of Trump policies, Castellanos chides “Mr. Biden’s shameful retreat from Afghanistan” without noticing that the decades-long Sisyphean effort to remake that country epitomized what he calls “arrogant, old top-down government that can’t keep up with our instantly adaptive world” (when the government in question was the USSR rather than the USA, this was an obvious enough point to be made in popcorn action flicks from The Living Daylights to Rambo III).

A century after George noted that “social and industrial relations” were “not a machine which required construction, but an organism which needs only to be suffered to grow,” the March-April 1995 issue of Utne Reader contained an observation that “natural systems, such as human communities, are simply too complex to design by the engineering principles which we insist on applying to them” from John Perry Barlow, who was a Republican but one who would do such atypical activities as writing for Utne Reader.

Barlow’s Electronic Frontier Foundation helped ensure that what was still called “the information superhighway” would have the leeway to develop more horizontally than hierarchically.  The road ahead isn’t one that can be smoothed by either administration or annexation.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wilson, North Carolina Times, March 5, 2024
2. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Enterprise [Williamston, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
3. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Johnstonian News [Smithfield, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
4. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Butner-Creedmoor News [Creedmoor, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
5. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Wake Weekly [Wake Forest, North Carolina], March 5, 2024
6. “The Roads Must Grow” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, March 7, 2024
7. “Libertarian Leanings: The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, The Kingman, Arizona Daily Miner, March 8, 2024
8. “The roads must grow” by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska], March 11, 2024

Wendy’s ran into a wall of popular resistance with the mid-February release of its “earnings call” transcript for the fourth quarter of 2023. The transcript mentioned an intention to test “dynamic pricing” starting next year.

The knee-jerk panic reaction was understandable. Nobody looks forward to the prospect of sitting in a drive-thru line for 20 minutes before reaching the menu, only to learn that a Baconator combo is going for $50. Wendy’s quickly backed down on the plan and tried to explain that its focus is on “dynamic pricing” ideas other than mere “surge pricing” (i.e. higher prices at times of highest demand).

But “dynamic pricing,” including “surge pricing,” is a great idea — for Wendy’s, and for its customers.

Dynamic pricing goes in both directions, and it’s good all around. To see why, let’s look at that Baconator combo. I just priced one for pickup at my local Wendy’s: $12.29.

Now, suppose a nearby factory’s daytime shift is getting off work, or a local sporting event has just ended, and a bunch of hungry people are heading for Wendy’s. The drive-thru line extends  into the street. The workers are running around like chickens with their heads cut off. People are waiting ten minutes instead of two minutes for their food.

Of course, most of those customers are ordering via phone app these days. They know the cost before they even join that drive-thru line. And if the cost is $15.29 instead of $12.29, many of them will decide to eat at home. The people who are willing and able to pay the extra three bucks will get their food more quickly; those who can’t or won’t will eat elsewhere; and the staff will not be overworked and exhausted.

That’s “surge pricing.” But let’s look at the other side. Think of it as “slow business” pricing. There’s one person in the dining area and two cars in the drive-thru. The workers are standing around and one could safely be sent home. The basket of fries that just came out of the oil will end up in the trash if not sold ASAP.

The manager presses a button and everyone with the Wendy’s app gets a promo message — Baconator combo for $9.99 if you order in the next 30 minutes! People who happen to feel a little peckish get a deal. Food doesn’t go in the garbage. A worker keeps getting paid instead of going home. Instead of losing money during that hour due to wasted food and wasted time, Wendy’s makes money.

Everything else being equal, nobody wants to pay more for food than necessary. But everything else is never equal. For some people, saving time is worth a little extra money; for others, saving money is worth a little extra time. For businesses, keeping demand more steady is profitable.

“Dynamic pricing” — prices rising and falling — has always been the rule, not the exception. It’s just getting compressed into shorter time frames. That’s a feature, not a bug, and the sooner we see it at the drive-thru the better.

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.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY