March miscellany
Ionce shook hands with a murderer. It was at the ballpark, where his young son played baseball on the team I coached. We were acquaintances only in that circumstance, and my only conversations with him were small talk, chatter in passing about the weather or the next practice or game time.
He seemed normal in every way. I knew his future victim in the same capacity. I had noticed that he didn’t sit in the bleachers next to his wife at games, but that wasn’t uncommon; anxious fathers often couldn’t sit still watching their kids play.
Later, after the shocking evening when we learned that he had shot and killed his wife, and then himself, people observed in hindsight that maybe he did seem more nervous or stressed than average at times.
It’s easy to second-guess everything in the face of inexplicable events.
I remember him for those brief personal encounters. His grip, his smile, his nod. His pacing behind the backstop, patting his son on the back, walking away from the field.
But I remember his case every time I hear about a murder-suicide, which means with increasing frequency.
In late November 2018 a murder-suicide was reported in Jonesboro, in late January another in Little Rock and, just last weekend, another in Searcy.
The Violence Policy Center tracks such incidents across the nation in a biannual report, and the most recent edition produced discouraging news.
Since 2002, the center has been tracking data related to crimes in which a killer commits suicide within 72 hours of committing murder. Ten years ago, these calamitous and senseless homicide/suicides occurred at a rate of nine per week. In the 2018 report, the rate had increased by 22 percent, to 11 per week.
Most readers have known someone or several someones who committed suicide, and perhaps even a murder-suicide perpetrator or, worse, a family annihilator.
All violent crimes create pain, suffering and sadness, but these kinds of killings invoke an extra-devastating sense of despair.
It’s hard to have meaningful discussions without gun-control zealots trying to railroad the issue, but the causes of such tragedies are always upstream of the weapon.
These are never crimes of personal gain, and always beyond the purview of deterrence. That makes them unique, and if our approach in both research and prevention fails to address their singularity, we will fail to improve the statistics.
And continue to fail the victims.
Debt worse
Among the achievements of the Barack Obama era was a neardoubling of the national debt.
Back in March 2009, the figure for the first time topped $11 trillion. By the end of fiscal 2016, before the election, it had grown to $19.7 billion.
Those dollar amounts are alarming enough, but the real worry is the threat they represent as an uncomfortably growing percentage of the gross domestic product.
Using that measure, Congress and President Obama presided over a 26 percentage-point increase in just eight years. In President Trump’s first two years, the gain is only about a half-percentage point, partly due to growth in the GDP.
Economists disagree over the precise number, but all agree that debt above a certain percentage of GDP becomes unsustainable. Unfortunately, news about the national debt continually underreports the nation’s burden accumulating on posterity.
You may have noticed the national debt just crested $22 trillion in mid-February. But what’s never addressed specifically is the total debt, including what are called unfunded liabilities. Those are future financial obligations the government has to citizens through Social Security and Medicare (liabilities), which are not part of federal budgetary accounting (unfunded).
The government is not required to follow Generally Accepted Accounting Practices with regard to unfunded liabilities, and subsequently this debt figure is rarely reported.
It will soon top $123 trillion (more than $1 million per taxpayer), and is projected to exceed $157 trillion by 2023. That will be $157,000,000,000,000 on top of a projected $26,000,000,000,000 national debt, juxtaposed against a hopeful $24 trillion GDP.
So many IOU zeros should be allcaps ALARMING, especially at a time of taken-seriously discussions about Medicare-for-all.
Change will be required; it might seem drastic now, but will be draconian later.
One life too many
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an executive order on Wednesday placing a moratorium on capital punishment in the Golden State, whose death row has swollen to 737 murderers.
Among his stated reasons: He can’t countenance the odds of a single innocent person being executed.
It’s incongruously odd that the same standard isn’t applied to California’s sanctuary city infatuation. On Monday a previously deported illegal immigrant with at least six detainer orders filed against him by federal authorities was linked by DNA and other evidence to the Feb. 28 murder of a San Jose woman.
Last January, the vice mayor of San Jose vowed to protect immigrants targeted for criminal suspicion, saying, “California refuses to become part of the president’s deportation machine.”
How many lost innocent lives will it take before governors like Newsom take executive action against sanctuary city policies?