Unfortunately, from a policy perspective, the relevant question isn't "how many mass shooters displayed red flags" but "what percentage of the people who display red flags become mass shooters". I suspect the answer to the latter is "very, very low".
This is a very common mistake when talking about policy--you note that a lot of people who do X or Y have some characteristic, and then say "We should address that characteristic with our policy!"
To offer an extreme example, say we discover that 98% of bank robbers have driver's licenses. Who cares? We will not get very far looking for bank robbers, or potential bank robbers, by scrutinizing licensed drivers
Of course, "red flags" are less extreme, but lots of people nurture violent fantasies, a bitter hatred of the opposite sex or some other group they imagine wronged them, without doing so much as spitting on the sidewalk in their direction.
I'm not saying that's great and fine, but if most of them don't do anything, what's your policy response?
BTW, this is also why the Finkelstein et al study of medical bankruptcy is superior to Elizabeth Warren's work on the subject. It's much more useful to know how much a medical event raises your probability of declaring bankruptcy than what % of bankrupts had some medical bills.
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As I wrote in 2022, about why affirmative action eventually became untenable: “One of my favorite statistics for shocking Washingtonians is to reveal that in 1960, more than five out of every six accounted for in the census were White”.
This shouldn’t be shocking but it is; people tend to unconsciously assume that there must have been a lot of non-white people around, because that’s what they’re used to. They understand the numbers used to be lower, but not how much lower.
I've talked about this with lawyers because I've been repeatedly surprised when folks I didn't know very well would openly say to me that they were looking to hire a woman of color for X position. I understood that this was illegal even before SFFA; they very clearly did not.
How did this happen? Well, because effectively in liberal institutions there were three safe harbors that made this behavior seem safe.
First, members of a majority group had a higher bar to sue than members of a minority. The Supreme Court now looks set to overturn this: washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/…
This 1000%. I too used to think male strength was mostly about size until my super-skinny college boyfriend, who actually weighed less than me, effortlessly pinned me in a (playful) wrestling match, then held me down with one arm while he ostentatiously took a bite of his sandwich
Even now people will sometimes name check me in the trans sports debate, along the lines of "sure, most men are bigger than most women, but women like Megan McArdle exist" and yes, I do exist, but no I am not as strong even as men a foot shorter than me.
In grip strength, for example, the male and female distributions only barely overlap; the very strongest women can outdo only the very weakest men. The difference is so great that a super-strong prime-age woman would struggle when arm-wrestling an average 80-year old man.
The problem is that these extra payments are used to provide extra benefits, in the form of lower copays and add-ons like dental and vision. Cutting the payments wouldn't necessarily make the retirees less healthy, but it would make them mad as hell.
There is no magic pot of money that can be cut without pissing off voters. If there were, it would have been cut in previous hunts for revenue to spend on tax cuts or new benefits.
Oh, and fun fact: in many states, you can't get Medigap insurance if you've been in Medicaid advantage. So you would be cutting the primary reason people choose MA, and those people would then find that they can't really transition back to traditional. The politics of that would be fun.
It's not that I'm against making these cuts, mind. It's that no one should convince themselves any of this is easy. If it were easy, it would already have been done.
This is, btw, why the fantasies of getting US costs down to European levels through the power of single payer will never work. Governments are more vulnerable to this sort of pressure than private companies are, not less. "Call your congresscritter and ask them why they want patients to die!" is a super effective ad.
(Then how did European countries do it? By holding costs down, not by getting providers to take a pay cut).
Our legislators try to avoid this by enacting all these complicated, opaque reforms in hopes that providers won't notice we're cutting their pay but the thing is the providers care more about paying their mortgage than legislators do about saving money.
I think this is bad, but also think it's a sign of something I thought a lot about after 1/6: it's really important for elites to uphold election norms precisely because normies won't. They'll be happy to indulge in election denial if the political elite goes along.
Democratic norms aren't a bedrock fact of democracy. They're a truce between opposing groups of political elites. Which is why it is in fact extremely important to have elites who are committed to those norms, and will swiftly crush even minor violations.
The biggest example is obviously Donald Trump. But Democratic elites dabbled too, with their little games about election certification, and their humoring of Stacy Abrams, and their looking the other way when Clinton said he wasn't a legitimate president.