David Brooks: Is There A Way To Use AI To Find Likely Mass Shooters?
PBS NEWSHOUR: New York Times columnist David Brooks and Boston Globe columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr join Amna Nawaz to discuss the week in politics, including the tragic school shooting in Minnesota.
AMNA NAWAZ, PBS NEWSHOUR: David, from Sandy Hook to Parkland to Uvalde, nothing has dramatically changed to keep this sort of thing from happening again. Is it too cynical to say that there’s a numbness that has set in to kids being shot in school here? DAVID BROOKS, NEW YORK TIMES: I think people still have the capacity to be appalled by somebody who shoots their children through stainless windows. And so I do think that. Will there be action? J.D. Vance just said prayers and actions. Well, what are the actions he’s proposing? The shooter in this case got her guns legally. She passed through the red flag law, which they have in Minnesota, the permitting. And so clearly more needs to be done. Blue states should be experimenting with more stuff. One of the things that comes up in this case is, she left a pretty big online trail. Like, is there a way to use A.I. to sort of find these people a little better than apparently we are, when no red flags are set off and this young person was writing all this stuff online? And I think the thing that’s most chilling to me about this particular case is not only the need for guns. It’s not only the need for mental health alertness. But she wrote in one of her comments, this is about nothing. Some people kill because they have some crazy ideology like the Unabomber. She has no ideology. The FBI now has a category of terrorists which are nihilists, people who just believe in nothing. And we’re seeing a rise – the anarchists 100 years ago were killing people, but now we’re seeing this tide of nihilism. So I look at it as a gun problem, as a mental health problem, and really as an intellectual problem about our culture, that you have people who believe in nothing and just want to destroy.
