This president’s day weekend I was off at the Southern California Writers Conference in San Diego, so I have been busy and light in posting. (The Conference was good, though I have gotten sick and missed the last day as I stayed home without appetite and with a light head.) I was at the conference when I saw the news appear on my phone that Scalia had died.

First I will not take in joy nor will I celebrate in any fashion his passing. His family, his friends, and those close him are in grief and to them I offer my sincere condolences.

I am relieved that he will no longer be influencing the Court, though it would have been better for all if this result had come from retirement and tragedy.

Yes, he was a brilliant man and he was a complex man. (Through back channels advocating for Kagan to be elevated to the court alone shows that he was not a simple caricature of a right wing extremist.) However, his clearly displayed intellect made his failing as a justice even more plain.

He was not a champion of human rights and liberty, he was a champion of states right when the states acted in a manner of which he approved.  If a state moved in a direction that he did not approve of, such as legalizing marijuana or legalizing assisted suicide then his used his considerable intelligence to craft logical arguments designed to arrive at his predetermined and desired outcome even if that flew in the face of his stated beliefs about states’ rights and such. To my eyes, he was not a principled justice, but one who consistently applied the power of government to compel his views on morality. I will not miss his voice denying individuals their liberty.

You are certainly welcome to feel differently.

So yesterday morning as my sweetie-wife and I were en route to my day I caught a very interesting piece on NPR’s Morning Edition. They were interviewing writer Malcolm Gladwell and he proposed a radical take on the growing phenomenon of mass school shootings. The interview was prompted by a piece Gladwell had written for the current issue of the New Yorker Magazine and can be found here. It’s worth the time to read.

What he says and the sociological theory of riots he applied to school shooters all make sense to me and maps fairly well with what I know about these events. To be clear, these are a very different from workplace shootings and also very different from politically motivated mass killings. Gladwell avoids the simplistic approach of mental illness and looks at a much more frightening mechanism. The mob effect and in my opinion the status seeking motivation.

Particularly upsetting it the idea that traditional mass media is no longer a relevant factor as a status conferring mechanism. The internet drives a lot more of this now. This matches with what I do know about these schools shooters. They often, if not always, obsessed on-line over previous events, often analyze the shooters methods and outcomes, and seek to — for lack of a more apt word — improve on the results.

I have confided privately to a friend that my personal belief is that this wave is going to continue to a generation, perhaps two while our culture deals with the shock waves induced by massive change. (It is not a coincidence that the shooters are nearly always young men. The only except I know is the Brenda Spencer case and that’s more than 40 years old.) My friend if a gun collector and I predicted that it was likely the US would see more and more restrictive gun laws passed and that these would likely have little to minimal effect on the wave. (The laws that are possible, assault weapon bans, background checks, magazine capacity limits, are unlikely to make any serious change to these sorts of killings and a total gun ban is simply unrealistic for this country.)

However, this article sparked an idea. The problem is identifying these gunmen and killers before they act. More and more they have no history of serious mental illness that could be used in a reliably predictive manner. A position I hear repeatedly from psychiatric professionals on this matter. there simply is now way to screen to the vast population of angry young men and sort out the shooters from the non-shooters.

But they may be sending up flags we can use. On-line. If they are obsessing on-line about previous events, sharing information in forums and chatrooms, and leaving a digital trail of their intentions then it should be possible too use that information to identify, isolate, and prevent them from acting on their murderous fixations.

In order words, treat them like the terrorists they are and utilize the full power of the intelligence agencies to deal with this problem.

There is a famous saying that ‘politics is the art of the possible.’ As far as it goes that is true, but there are additional P’s to couple with politics, Principle and Priorities and it is these secondary P’s that are often in conflict and often denied for their importance.

Principle is not dogma. Dogma is inflexible. Dogma does not admit the half-loaf and demand only total victory. Dogma demands total fealty. Principle is a guidepost, a map, not a straight jacket.

Priority is about what matters more. If we are being mature about our politics and realistic about our expectations, then priority becomes important and presents us with the most difficult decisions.

For example I support gun rights and I support marriage equality, it is quite rare to find an acceptable candidate that holds both of those positions. Therefore when looking at candidates I end up, via my vote, prioritizing one over the other. In practice it tends to be marriage equality, while I support gun rights I must be honest that it is a secondary cause and that the fight there has to wait while a more important battle is waged.

In my experience most people have the conflicting priorities, but they rarely are honest with themselves in their hierarchy. In my positions they would proclaim themselves both for gun right and marriage equality, claiming the honorable mantle of both camps while ignoring the ground facts of their actual support.