1st and 2nd Amendments meet again, in the Attention Economy

Yesterday's shooting in Manhattan, in which the shooter saught to draw attention to football and the traumatic brain injuries its players sustain, echoes perfectly last year's shooting of the CEO of United Healthcare. In both cases, the shooters, troubled young men, saught to bring attention to what they saw as major societal issues: football's role in brain injuries and runaway healthcare costs.

Since we all know how much hard work and luck is involved in courting, commanding and retaining attention in today's economy of infinitely proliferating distribution channels, they chose the only sensible and sure fired way of getting the world's attention, if only for a few days: kill some people in broad daylight in Manhattan with some big-assed guns. 

And so the practical realities of meaningful speech and the hypertrophied, nonsensically legalistic preservation of the right to carry a firearm have converged into a media strategy for our age. May we find a way back from the edge.