It has often been argued that social-media sites funnel us down the toilets of content choices that at first appeal to us, but then, click by click, take us down dark, rank pipes to the septic tank. That can be true, but such metaphors make it sound like these are choiceless descents from YouTube recommendations, Instagram feeds, and so on, into extremes, when, in actuality, we don’t have to take the bait.
We can instead, and many of us do, follow interesting people and ideas and pull back for context when anything seems too much—as an aside, I would say that, if anything, AI is and should be making us even more skeptical of what we see and hear.
One person I follow is Amy Swearer, a legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies. She has written features for America’s 1st Freedom and is often insightful on Second Amendment-related issues.
In an X post on the gun laws in the District of Columbia, Swearer told this story:
Last summer, I took some of my interns shooting as a “thank you” for their work on a project. Obviously, it was in NoVa [northern Virginia], because D.C. has no public ranges and doesn’t recognize my right to possess many of the guns I do, in fact, peaceably own in Virginia. A couple of them were really stoked by the whole thing and wanted to take some spent shotgun shells back with them as "commemorative" trophies. Thank God [for their sake] that one of them told me this, thinking I'd think it was awesome. I had to tell them to empty all of their pockets immediately. They were FLOORED when I explained that if they were to take those completely inert pieces of plastic with them to D.C., they'd be committing a serious felony. Why? Because D.C. considers any part or component of ammunition to constituent the whole, and because none of them had the requisite D.C. gun registration, it would be felony possession of unregistered ammo. They were even more floored when I explained that D.C. actually enforces this provision and prosecutes ordinary, well-intentioned, and otherwise law-abiding people for unknowingly violating it. If someone had seen them playing with a single empty shell casing on their Metro ride back across the river, it quite literally would have ruined their lives.
Soon, Emily Miller—you might remember her fine book Emily Gets Her Gun—weighed in by saying, “I still talk to Mark Witaschek, whose successful career was destroyed when DC convicted him of possession of one unregistered (dud) shotgun shell and muzzle loaded ‘bullets.’ He didn’t have any guns in DC.”
Miller then posted a link to a story she wrote on Witaschek’s D.C. horror story.
This is the sort of truth bombing X can now give us—thanks to Elon Musk’s purchase of the social-media site—if we are discerning about who we follow and take the time to be cautious about what we believe.
Actually, the warning about the validation of bad ideas is all-too convenient for the mainstream media, as they resent losing large segments of their audience to other voices and opinions. Without voices such as Swearer and Miller and, it must be said, this association, majorities might believe lies such as, in this case, the narrative that D.C.’s gun laws have been reasonable or constitutional.
