Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Editorial Roundup
Recent editorials in newspapers in the United States and abroad:
The Washington Post on gun violence in the United States (Jan. 23):
Gun violence is so regular an occurrence in the United States that no incident, however tragic, comes as a surprise. But events in recent days deserve special attention all the same, as they underscore a core truth about responding to gun violence: changing just one or two rules would not be enough.
Early this month, a 6-year-old boy shot and wounded an elementary school teacher in Newport News, Va. This, according to authorities, was no accident: The first-grader pulled out a handgun and fired a bullet through his instructor’s outstretched hand and into her chest. His family says he has an “acute disability”; The Post reports that administrators brushed off concerns about the boy after he threw furniture in class, barricaded the doors to a room and threatened to light a teacher on fire and watch her die. The day of the shooting, his backpack was searched after a tip that he may have had a weapon.
Across the country and over the weekend, a 72-year-old man killed 11 people inside a dance hall in the Los Angeles suburb Monterey Park. The attack came shortly after the Lunar New Year celebration in the majority-asian American city. The 11 killed were in their 50s, 60s and 70s. They were dancing guangchang wu, a public square dance popular among middle-aged and older patrons, when the carnage began. Only two days later, a gunman killed seven people at two plant nurseries in Half Moon Bay, near San Francisco.
The Newport News case and the California cases should be considered together not because they are so similar, but because they are so different. The 72-yearold in Monterey Park is the oldest person in U.S. history accused of perpetrating a mass killing in public. The 6-year-old in Newport News is one of the youngest believed to be responsible for intentional gun violence. None of these people fits the mold of the stereotypical alienated young man who has become the face of mass shootings in this country.
The Gun Violence Archive has counted 39 mass shootings so far in 2023. Congressional intransigence on gun reform often pushes politicians to choose individual solutions on which to place their legislative focus, usually geared to what may have helped prevent the most recent tragedy: One year, red-flag laws are on every lawmaker’s lips; the next, the “boyfriend loophole.” Yet instances of gun violence are so varied that the right approach isn’t either-or but all-of-the-above.
At least one of the guns implicated in the Monterey Park shooting, a semiautomatic pistol equipped with a large-capacity magazine, might have been illegal to purchase in California. Yet the state’s prohibitions on many semiautos and magazines that can hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition don’t apply to purchases made when the bans weren’t in effect. And while a new state law that aims to block the possession of such magazines was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, last year lower courts were instructed to reconsider it after another reckless pro-gun Supreme Court ruling.
This is worrying. The five highest-casualty mass shootings in modern American history all involved weapons that allowed shooters to let loose on crowds without having to reload. That restrictions are federal is important, too. Regardless of whether guns like the one used in Monterey Park are illegal to purchase in California, it’s easy enough for a California resident to buy one across state lines.
These interventions wouldn’t have prevented the 6-year-old in Newport News from shooting his teacher. That case involves a host of other issues, from proper supervision and security in schools, especially in response to warning signs, to safe gun storage. The public is likely to learn more about the trigger lock that the family’s lawyer says was installed on the weapon in question. But measures that require secure, tamper-resistant storage can keep kids from getting their hands on guns. And where a gun is stored (in the Newport News case, supposedly on the top shelf of a bedroom closet) matters, too.
Changes that could have stopped other headline-making shootings in recent years, from better background checks to waiting periods before purchase to redflag laws, and programs such as government gun buybacks and gun licensing are essential, as is prosecuting dealers who allow their supply to flow to illegal markets. It is not yet clear whether any of these efforts would have saved lives in Monterey Park or Half Moon Bay — but they would have saved lives elsewhere at other times.
As President Joe Biden and the rest of country try, again, to confront the gun violence epidemic, policymakers should understand that no single solution will scrub out this scourge. Doing one thing is better than doing nothing at all — but to pretend the work ends there would be irresponsible.
The New York Times on Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine (Jan. 21):
The war in Ukraine has entered a new, more deadly and fateful phase, and the one man who can stop it, Vladimir Putin, has shown no signs that he will do so.
After 11 months during which Ukraine has won repeated and decisive victories against Russian forces, clawed back some of its lands and cities and withstood lethal assaults on its infrastructure, the war is at a stalemate.
Still, the fighting rages on, including a ferocious battle for the city of Bakhmut in the eastern Donetsk region. Cruel, seemingly random Russian missile strikes at civilian targets have become a regular horror: On Jan. 14, a Russian missile struck an apartment building in Dnipro, in central Ukraine. Among the at least 40 dead were small children, a pregnant woman and a 15-year-old dancer.
Both sides are now said to be bracing for a fierce new round of offensives in the late winter or spring. Russia has mobilized 300,000 new men to throw into the fray, and some arms factories are working around the clock. Ukraine’s Western arms suppliers, at the same time, are bolstering Kyiv’s arsenal with armor and air defense systems that until recently they were reluctant to deploy against Russia for fear of escalating this conflict into an all-in East-west war.
Ukraine and its backers hope that the Western arms will be decisive, giving Ukraine a better chance to blunt a Russian offensive and drive the Russians back. How far back is another question. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine talks of chasing Russia out of Ukraine altogether, including the territory seized by Russia in 2014 in Crimea and eastern Ukraine. The United States and its allies may prefer a less ambitious outcome, although U.S. officials are reportedly considering it as a possibility. But so long as Putin shows no readiness to talk, the question is moot. The job at hand is to persuade Russia that a negotiated peace is the only option.
This is why the coming fight is critical. But as Putin digs himself ever deeper into pursuing his delusions, it is also critical that the Russian people be aware of what is being done in their name, and how it is destroying their own future.
How much of this do Russians know or question? It is difficult to ascertain what Russians are privately saying or thinking, given how dangerous any open criticism of the “limited military operation” has become. Independent media have been stifled, thousands of protesters have been arrested, and many foreign correspondents, including those of The Times, were compelled to leave when it became illegal to dispute the official line about the war.
Still, at the very least, most Russians should be asking when and how this war will end. That is why this editorial is addressed in part to the Russian people: It is in their name that their president is waging this terrible and useless war; their sons, fathers and husbands are being killed, maimed or brutalized into committing atrocities; their lives are being mortgaged for generations to come in a state distrusted and disliked in many parts of the world.
The Kremlin’s propaganda machinery has been working full time churning out false narratives about a heroic Russian struggle against forces of fascism and debauchery, in which the Western arms are but more proof that Ukraine is a proxy war by the West to strip Russia of its destiny and greatness. Putin has concocted an elaborate mythology in which Ukraine is an indelible part of a Russkiy mir, a greater Russian world.
Isolated from anyone who would dare to speak truth to his power, Putin ordered an invasion of Ukraine last year, convinced that the Ukrainians would promptly shed their “fascist” government. The start of the war stunned Russians, but Putin seemed convinced that a West wasted by decadence and decline would squawk but take no action. He and his commanders were apparently unprepared for the extraordinary resistance they met in Ukraine, or for the speed with which the United States and its allies, horrified by the crude violation of the postwar order, came together in Ukraine’s defense.
Putin’s response has been to throw ever more lives, resources and cruelty at Ukraine. And with the deplorable support of the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill, the president has elevated what he insists on calling his “limited military offensive” into an existential struggle between a spiritually ordained Great Russia and a corrupt and debauched West.
But Russians are aware that Ukraine was not widely perceived as an enemy, much less a mortal enemy, until Putin seized Crimea and stirred up a secessionist conflict in eastern Ukraine in 2014. Until then, Russians and Ukrainians traveled freely across their long border, and many of them had family, acquaintances or friends on the other side.
And after all the poverty, repression and isolation under Soviet rule, Russians need to remember that until Putin began trying to change Ukraine’s borders by force in 2014, they were finally enjoying what those in other industrialized countries had long considered normal — the opportunity to earn decent salaries, buy consumer goods and enjoy vastly expanded freedoms to travel abroad and speak their mind.
The West they visited was not the caricature of depravity presented by Putin or Patriarch Kirill. And their Russia was hardly a pure and spiritual model, with the alcoholism, corruption, drug abuse, homophobia and other sins so familiar to all Russians.
In the end, the question is whether any of Putin’s lectures on history really provide a justification for the death and destruction he has ordained. Russians know the horrors of all-out war; they must know that nothing Putin has concocted remotely validates the leveling of towns and cities, the murder, rape and pillaging, or the deliberate strikes against power and water supplies across Ukraine. Like the last great European war, this one is mostly one man’s madness.
It is possible that Putin might eventually seek a negotiated settlement, though that becomes ever more remote as the Ukrainians suffer ever greater destruction and loss, and as their determination not to cede an inch of their country deepens. For now, Putin seems to still believe he can bring Ukraine to its knees and dictate its fate, cost be damned.
In his public appearances, Putin still cultivates the image of a self-confident strongman. Where there are failures, it is the fault of underlings who do not obey his will. He played out that scene Jan. 11, in his first televised meeting with government ministers in the new year, when he tore into Denis Manturov, deputy prime minister, over aircraft production figures Putin insisted were wrong and Manturov defended. Putin finally exploded, “What are you doing, really, playing the fool?” “Yest,’ ” Manturov finally said, the Russian equivalent of “Yes, sir.”
Russians have seen this act before in the Kremlin. They might do well to ponder whether, in this version, Putin is the omniscient czar and Manturov the bumbling functionary — the intended lesson — or whether they are being played for fools by Putin’s vanity, delusions and spitefulness.
The Los Angeles Times on the GOP and George Santos (Jan. 19):
Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., quickly became a global punchline when his multiple, contradictory misrepresentations of his background were revealed after he was elected in November. But there’s nothing funny about House Speaker Kevin Mccarthy’s refusal to call on Santos to resign, as a few other Republicans have.
Santos was caught in lies about much of his biography. He didn’t graduate from — nor apparently even attended — the colleges listed on his résumé, didn’t work for Goldman Sachs or Citigroup, and does not appear to be Jewish (as he has claimed) or descended from refugees who fled the Holocaust. (Left off the résumé was a 2008 fraud charge in Brazil for allegedly using a stolen checkbook; Brazilian authorities recently said they would revive the charge now that they know Santos’ whereabouts.) There are also questions about the legality of his fundraising and spending.
Despite various investigations underway, he has been recommended by the House GOP Steering Committee for membership on the Small Business and the Science, Space and Technology committees.
It’s small consolation that Santos didn’t receive the more prestigious assignments he reportedly coveted on the Financial Services and Foreign Affairs committees. (The Small Business Committee does exercise oversight of the Paycheck Protection Program established in response to business hardships caused by the COVID19 pandemic.)
Moreover, Mccarthy has pooh-poohed complaints about Santos’ conduct. Last week the speaker said: “I try to stick by the Constitution. The voters elected him to serve. If there is a concern, and he has to go through the Ethics (Committee), we’ll let him move through that.” This week the speaker acknowledged that he “always had a few questions” about Santos’ resume.
Santos is the subject of a complaint filed with the Ethics Committee by two Democratic House members, who called for an investigation of Santos “for violations of the Ethics in Government Act by failing to file timely, accurate and complete financial disclosure reports as required by law.” He is also being investigated by local prosecutors on Long Island and, according to The New York Times, by federal prosecutors as well. Although Santos has admitted to “embellishing” his résumé, he has otherwise denied any wrongdoing, saying, “I am not a criminal.”
Santos is obviously entitled to due process and the presumption of innocence, but the baroque misrepresentations he has admitted to — so-called “embellishments” — make clear that he doesn’t belong in the House. Mccarthy, however, has refused to grasp that point, perhaps because a Santos resignation would shrink the Republicans’ already small House majority. Last week, Mccarthy mused that “a lot of people here” had fabricated part of their résumés.
It’s true that other politicians have exaggerated their credentials, including President Joe Biden years ago, which is why it’s unlikely that Congress will approve a Santos-inspired bill to require candidates for Congress to file information about their educational background, military service and employment history. A candidate who knowingly and willfully provided false information would be punished with a $100,000 fine, one year in prison, or both. (The legislation could also pose constitutional problems. For example, the Supreme Court has said that some laws that punish lying violate the First Amendment.) Still, Santos’ fabrications are so extensive and audacious as to put him in a mind-boggling class by himself.
Even so, Santos’ lies seem trivial compared with some of the outlandish and offensive statements made by other House Republicans, such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has been assigned to House Homeland Security and Oversight committees after losing her committee assignments in the previous Congress. It’s clear that fringe figures and fabulists are welcome in the new House Republican majority.