Buffalo

Tuesday

Casey Chalk

Laying down our arms

The recent killing of ten people in Buffalo has renewed calls for gun control legislation. Buffalo mayor Byron Brown, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation, urged “sensible gun control.” One of the victims, the Washington Post noted in morbid irony, was herself an outspoken advocate for more gun control. Sadly, there’s nothing new about any of this. Again and again we learn of senseless mass shootings by white nationalists, the mentally deranged, and substance abusers. Again and again we desperately search for answers. And again and again we are both shocked and cynically unsurprised when another mass shooting occurs. Yet as much as we declare “never again,” we seem incapable of stopping mass shootings.

Monday

Peter Van Buren

The horror in Buffalo is not an excuse to censor

If classic horror resides in the banality of evil, modern horror resides in the banality of predictability: yet another deranged man, driven by hate, kills, and the left seizes the opportunity to try and restrict speech, claiming not metal music, not violent porn, not Alex Jones, but social media spurred the shooter from basement to killing ground. This risks the loss of speech rights out of fear. As the bodies lay on the ground in Buffalo, New York governor Kathy Hochul blamed social media and called for speech restrictions in order to prevent another tragedy. Hochul claimed free speech had gone too far when it allowed someone to shout fire in a crowded theater for the shooter to hear.

Monday

Bill Kauffman

Mark Twain in Buffalo

“Irreverence is the champion of liberty and its only sure defense,” wrote Mark Twain in an age before irreverence became a hanging, or at least exiling, offense. Perhaps the more apt aphorism today belongs to Edward Abbey: “The distrust of wit is the beginning of tyranny.” (The distrust of half-wit, I suppose, is the beginning of a TV critic.) Mark Twain would be hopelessly out of favor with both wings of the modern duopoly. Militaristic Republicans would scorn Twain for his skepticism of empire and mockery of world-saving cant. (He was a supporter of the Anti-Imperialist League and proposed that the stars and stripes be replaced by the skull and crossbones.

twain

Wednesday

Bill Kauffman

A June election in Genesee County

Batavia, New YorkWhen our daughter was growing up, she and I would sit on the front porch every summer solstice and read the opening chapters of Ray Bradbury's Dandelion Wine, as fine an evocation of a childhood summer as has been written. True, dandelions are a May flower — don't you dare call them weeds! — but old Ray had earned his literary license. A stiff shot of dandelion wine would be welcome fortification for those of us voting in the special congressional election in the 27th district of New York on June 23, coincident with our state's presidential primary. That day we will choose the successor to the disgraced Republican resignee Chris Collins, who has yet to begin serving his 26-month sentence in the federal pen for insider trading.

election