Thread by @daniellevalore

I’m going to make the mistake of trying to have a complicated thought on Twitter, so first let me be clear that I don’t think anyone at all should be able to order a 100 round magazine off the internet, and also
that I absolutely think the Dayton shooter’s history

of threatening violence, and threatening girls and women, is relevant to understanding the pattern of mass violence. (I also think it’s telling that even as classmates were coming forward to say how long they’d been scared of him, a few news sources ran with

“seemed nice no one saw it coming” puff pieces. The benefit of the doubt and an erasure of his longer record of harm, even for a guy who died in a murderous rampage!) But I’m seeing a lot of “a background check could have caught this” and I think it’s worth asking how that works—

especially if “background checks” are going to be the fake concession Republicans claim they’d make in exchange for a racist wall. A background check would have caught— an expulsion from high school? A history of making threats and hit lists as a teenager? A history of misogyny?

None of this led to prior arrests, so who would be keeping these records, and for how long and to whom would they be provided and who would decide who qualifies for what firepower or what else a gun ban bans you from?

Again, I don’t think this guy should have had a gun! I don’t think anyone should legally have the kind of weapon he used. But I don’t know that a background check as such would have caught the scariest things about him,

and a background check process that did include things like high school would have to involve a database with a lot of uses having nothing to do with gun violence.

There isn’t a database that’s going to come and save us from our own violent racist misogynistic culture, or all the people we’ve allowed to be unaccountable for their pasts, or given a pass on toxicity, or decided weren’t really dangerous because they were only bothering girls.