President Trump is grasping at straws trying to find a solution to mass shootings. The president has flirted with largely irrelevant universal background checks (before eventually walking back his support), touted potentially problematic “red flag” gun confiscation proposals, and now, he wants to give mass shooters the death penalty.
News broke Monday that the Department of Justice, alongside Attorney General William Barr and Vice President Pence, is working on a large gun control legislative package meant to address gun violence in the wake of several high-profile mass shootings. This plan will speed up the federal process for giving mass shooters, defined as those who kill four or more, the death penalty.
Unfortunately, tough-on-crime virtue-signaling is highly unlikely to help.
Of course, the emotional urge to push this policy and put mass shooters to death is completely understandable. The men (and it’s almost always men) who carry out these depraved acts of violence are monsters through and through, and deserve to burn in hell. Seeing them put to death would no doubt provide a sense of satisfaction and justice for some.
Yet the idea that it will do anything to discourage future shootings is, frankly, ridiculous. The sick men who carry out these attacks know full well they are unlikely to survive their efforts, given the high likelihood that police will shoot and kill them in the act. Plus, many are borderline or fully suicidal anyway, and some shooters kill themselves after or during their attacks.
Regardless, anyone dead-set on killing as many people as possible in a random act of violence certainly won’t be stopped or discouraged by the idea that years down the line they might get the electric chair. And most research shows that the death penalty in general has little to no deterrent effect. Why would mass shootings be any different?
Let’s call Trump’s plan what it is: A virtue signal. It’s a feel-good proposal that would make some people feel better, but accomplish none of the Trump administration’s stated goals of violence prevention. On the other side of the coin, it arguably undermines key conservative principles such as valuing human life and limiting government.
Per Zuri Davis of Reason, the state of Texas just literally executed an innocent man who could not, according to experts, possibly have committed the crime he was accused of committing. To give government even more power over life and death as the emotional reaction to a tragedy is a terrible idea. It will inevitably lead to similar abuses of this authority in the future.
Choosing principle isn’t always easy. But the Trump administration should realize that it’s ill-advised to abandon conservative values in the heat of the moment, just to jump on a tragedy train and send a meaningless death-penalty virtue signal.
