No magic bullet: a Congressional agreement on guns

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Yes, thesamemonday.com. Hello and welcome to The Intelligence from The Economist. In New York, I'm Jon Fassman. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It's one of the oldest human questions: is there life beyond Earth? So far, the answer has been no. Scientists have used ever more powerful tools to search ever further. But recently, they've begun to expand what they're looking for, not just where they look. And video games can let the average desk jockey become a soldier, ninja, starship commander, or, of course, a hard-headed Italian plumber. But they can also simulate mundane tasks Anyone up for a game of digital cubicle sitting or power washing? First up, though. The mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas last month was the latest in a long line of American school massacres. 19 children and 2 teachers lost their lives at the hands of an 18-year-old gunman armed with a powerful assault rifle. Is this carnage finally galvanizing political action? Matthew McConaughey, an actor who grew up in Uvalde, expressed hope for change at a White House briefing following the shooting, at which he told stories of the children killed. This moment is different. We are in a window of opportunity right now that we have not been in before. A window where it seems like real change real change can't happen. But American politics has been here before, and meaningful federal legislation on guns has proven maddeningly elusive. But Mr. McConaughey may be right. This moment just might be different. A bipartisan group of senators says they've reached a compromise that has the support of enough Republicans that it could pass.

The deal seems to include measures applauded by advocates of gun control while also appealing to those worried about preserving Second Amendment rights, that constitutional right to bear arms.

Rosemary Ward covers Northeast America for The Economist.

It seems senators could not ignore several mass shootings within days of each other, from Buffalo, where white supremacists murdered elderly African Americans shopping, to Uvalde, where two classrooms of children were brutally mowed down along with their teachers. It just seemed that politicians were finally getting that the mood in the country had changed, that something had to be done to curb the violence.

Rosemary, how big a deal is this, do you think? How significant is it that they reached this compromise?

It all depends on the wording of the legislation, but it could be significant. It's so difficult to get any kind of gun rules or laws changed in America on the state level, never mind the federal level. And it's certainly the first major agreement among senators on both sides of the aisle in 3 decades. Chris Murphy, a Democratic senator from Connecticut, has been trying to change gun laws since the death of 20 schoolchildren and 6 adults by a gunman in a primary school in Sandy Hook in 2012. But even the murders at a primary school could not persuade some politicians to vote in 2013 for a bill expanding background checks. So it's taken nearly a decade to get this far.

So what do we know about this deal so far? What measures does it contain?

Well, we don't have the text of the framework yet, but from what we know of the agreement, it envisions funding for mental health and school safety. But it also includes something called red flag laws, which will help states pass and implement crisis intervention orders. And these laws already exist in 19 states. and they let a judge order the seizure of guns from people who are deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, and it can also prevent them from buying guns in the first place. Florida is probably the most high-profile state which has passed this red flag law, and interestingly, it passed it with a Republican governor and a Republican legislature. It was passed after a mass shooting in Parkland where 17 people were killed at a high school in 2018, and since Since then, judges have issued more than 8,000 gun seizure orders. So it's really effective.

What about beyond these red flag laws? One concern a lot of people have had is about the young age at which guns can be bought. Does the deal address that at all?

Some Republicans were hesitant to change the legal age to buy certain weapons from 18 to 21, as many Democrats, including President Biden, had wanted. Yet it seems they wanted to do something to make it harder for young people to acquire guns. So they've agreed on enhanced background checks, including the sharing of juvenile records for gun buyers under the age of 21. This was probably prompted by the fact that the gunmen in both Buffalo and in Uvalde were just 18 years old. The deal also includes what would be the first federal law against gun trafficking and straw purchasing, which is buying a gun on behalf of someone prohibited from possessing a gun. But it's not just mass shootings that are the problem. There's also the issue of gun use in domestic violence cases.

And does the deal address that at all?

It does. And a lot of gun advocates are really happy about that. Domestic abuse cases do not get the media attention that mass shootings do, but they are deadly. According to Everytown, a gun reform group, the share of homicides committed by partners has been increasing for 3 decades, and women now are as likely to be killed by a dating partner as by a spouse. So the framework would close the boyfriend loophole so that no domestic abuser, be it a spouse or a serious dating partner, can buy a gun if they're convicted of abuse against their partner.

Rosemary, these are all laudable enough as far as they go, but a lot of people, including Joe Biden, hoped for a lot more. Do you think this really is the best Americans can hope for?

No one truly expected this reform to be sweeping. Gun control advocates at best hope for incremental change. And so many I spoke with said, if this can save one life, then it's worth it. And it's worth remembering that it's a deeply polarizing issue, with Republicans much less in favor of tighter controls than Democrats. In fact, Republicans were more likely to say gun laws should be less strict, 27%, according to the Pew Research Center, whereas a large majority of Democrats, 81%, said gun laws should be stricter. But overall, Americans have been lowering their support for stricter gun laws. Pew conducted research into this in 2021, and the results are surprising. 48% of Americans saw gun violence as a very big problem in America, with another 24% of adults saying gun violence is a moderately big problem. But despite this, the share of Americans who said gun laws should be stricter decreased from 60% in September 2019 to 53% in April 2021. I found another interesting number. 56% of gun owners, according to a Marist poll, said it is more important to curb gun violence than protect gun rights. That's remarkable.

That is striking. And it sounds as though this deal probably has some popular support. But what we have now is a framework, not actual legislation. What do you think the chances are, Ro, that this deal or something like it will actually pass the Senate? And if it does, what happens then?

The deal has the support of at least 10 Republican senators who are part of the negotiations. Which bodes really well for its passage in the Senate, where 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster. But it remains to be seen how many of them will stay the course when the specific details of the legislation emerge. So senators could peel off as the wording of the law gets hammered out, and the House will almost certainly pass anything that the Senate passes. But there are powerful people who are very against this, like the NRA. A hugely wealthy and influential gun lobby that will be working extremely hard behind the scenes to put a stop to it. But on the other side, a crop of new gun reform groups are stronger and getting powerful too. Many, like Everytown, which was founded after the Sandy Hook massacre, and Giffords, which was founded by Gabby Giffords, a former member of Congress from Arizona who was shot in the head in 2011. They didn't exist a decade ago. They're going to be powerful players during this. So there's a long way to go before we can say this deal provides a significant set of measures. But I truly think that this is the most consequential agreement we've seen in decades.

All right, Rosemary, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you, John.

Our sister podcast, The Economist Ask, will be talking to Senator Chris Murphy about precisely this topic on Thursday this week. Make sure to listen.

21 pictures were transmitted by Mariner 4, and they raised much of the veil.

When the Mariner 4 satellite sent Earth the first images of Mars during a flyby in 1965, humanity's dreams of a rich civilization of intelligent aliens on the red planet were dashed.

The pictures show that Mars is pocked by craters caused by crashing asteroids and space debris. They conclude from this that there has been no water erosion on the planet.

And with no water, there is, of course, no support for even plant life. The photographs showed no evidence of life at all. And even though rovers have since scoured the surface of the planet, Touchdown confirmed.

Perseverance safely on the surface of Mars.

They found no signs of life, either living today or deep in the planet's past. Astronomers have since widened their search to other planets and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, even using powerful telescopes to peer beyond our solar system for exoplanets, those orbiting other stars. The total of these distant planets now stands at well over 3,000. They found nothing. So perhaps it's time to change what we're looking for.

Life on Earth, even though it's very multifaceted and looks different all over the planet, is actually fundamentally at the molecular level all pretty much the same.

Alok Jha is a science correspondent at The Economist.

It's made of chains of carbon atoms with other elements like oxygen and nitrogen attached. All of life on Earth uses water to move nutrients around. And our search for life beyond Earth, this grand quest, has basically looked for life like Earth life. But it's of course possible that life elsewhere won't be anything like that on Earth. So we need to start thinking beyond normal Earth life if we want to truly find something outside this planet.

And before we delve into what life might look like, let's sort of set the stage and the boundaries. Where have scientists looked for alien life so far?

So ever since the dawn of the space age, people have been scanning the heavens for radio signals, essentially. But the true science of astrobiology, looking for microbes and other forms of life that may not be broadcasting any form of life at all, that's only really happened in the last couple of decades. And it started with the discovery of the first exoplanet, the first planet beyond our solar system. And what scientists tend to look for is a planet that's in the Goldilocks zone around its star. It means it's not so far away from the star that any water on its surface would freeze, but it's also not too close to the star that all of the water on its surface would essentially evaporate. So just right. And there've been dozens of planets discovered that are in the Goldilocks zones, which means that they have liquid water on them. That's where you might start looking if you're looking for life that looks like us. Life on Earth.

And beyond just water, what else are they looking for in a Goldilocks planet?

So if you're looking for life like Earth, you want to look for what are called biomarkers or biosignatures. And so water is one of them. Another one is oxygen. Oxygen only exists on Earth because of photosynthesis. Similarly, methane is another biosignature. And astrobiologists have calculated that there's probably something like 3,500 other signatures of life that are sort of small molecules. These things are not dead certs for life, but they would start to build the evidence that you're seeing chemistry that is lifelike on the planet that you're looking at.

So tell me about how we might broaden that search. What might scientists look for instead?

If you're a scientist and you want to look for life somewhere, then I suppose the first thing is to define it. And this is this elephant in the room. No one has actually ever defined what life is. No one's agreed on it. And so what most astrobiologists often default to is NASA's operational definition of life, which is a self-sustaining chemical reaction that's capable of Darwinian evolution. What that basically means is that living things self-replicate and they make lots and lots of specific complex molecules. You could imagine a chemistry that is different to ours that is living For example, I said that life on Earth is basically made of chains of carbon atoms with other elements attached. Well, a related element to carbon is silicon, which is also very common in the universe, and it can form chains. It can also form compounds that are quite complicated, and, you know, it could be the basis for a different form of life. And there are even more exotic bases for life. In the lab on Earth, scientists have shown that certain oxides of metals called polyoxymetalates, and that's a word if you've ever heard one. These compounds can actually show very lifelike capabilities. Like, they can form things like cells, and they can essentially divide and replicate, you know, and they can even form complicated structures that look a bit like DNA. So chemistry has all sorts of tricks up its sleeve. Now, scientists have been trying to imagine essentially what these different metabolic processes might be looking like so that you can build essentially a database, then you would essentially put these different biomarkers onto your list of things to look for.

So if scientists have been searching for Earth-like life on other planets, I assume that means they've been searching for water in some form. But if we're talking about broadening the search, what kind of alternatives to water could sustain life?

Well, this is a great question because for decades NASA's mission statement has been follow the water. The reason water is so important on Earth is even though it's a very simple molecule, it has all sorts of interesting behaviors that life uses so that it can dissolve a lot of things, for example, it can move energy and so on. Now, other solvents can do the same thing. Ammonia, which is made of nitrogen and hydrogen, can dissolve things, but it's not quite as good as water, to be honest. And the other problem with ammonia is that it only stays liquid between -78°C and -33°C. So you are talking about only on planets planets or moons that are incredibly frigid. Having said that, if you go to the moons of Jupiter, Europa, for example, or Titan and Enceladus, the moons of Saturn, on these places, those sorts of temperatures do exist in our solar system. And another option, which is probably my favorite one, is a chemical called formamide. This is colorless organic liquid. It's made of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. And it can do pretty much all the same things as water in terms of dissolving almost everything, DNA, proteins, all that stuff. And it stays liquid up to about 200°C. So if you had a particularly warm planet, it'd be very useful on that.

How would we look for these chemicals that you just mentioned?

The best way, of course, to find any chemical anywhere is to go to that place, take a scoop of a sample, and stick it through some scientific instruments, in this case, mass spectrometers, which basically can analyse the chemical composition of everything. And there are— missions on planets right now, like Mars. There are missions planned to Venus, to Titan, to Enceladus, all these places that will take very sophisticated miniature mass spectrometers and do exactly that. Obviously, for exoplanets, which are possibly hundreds or thousands of light-years away, you can't do that. So the alternative method is called spectroscopy, which is to look at light coming through the atmosphere of a planet to Earth. And split it up into different wavelengths, and you can tell which compounds are in the atmosphere. And especially in the next decade or so, there's gonna be some quite enormous telescopes on Earth, 40 meters wide, that will be able to do that spectroscopy really, really well. And also the James Webb Space Telescope, which is up in space now, is gonna be doing that sort of stuff. So we're gonna have enormous amounts of data to look at exoplanets as well.

So once we have this data up, once we have the telescopes trained on the immensity of the universe and we're crunching this data, What do you think we'll find? Would you expect that we will find life somewhere?

Are you asking me to predict if we're gonna find aliens in the future?

I am, I am.

This is one of those questions that I would love to give you an answer to. Do you know what? People have wondered for so long, are we alone in the universe? And this is the first decade we'll have a decent shot at actually answering that question. And one of the most important things, of course, is to know what to look for. And for the past few decades, we've been looking beyond Earth for life just like Earth's. And that made sense until now, but if we truly want to maximize our chances of discovering life, we need to think beyond stuff that we're familiar with. And by trying to imagine all sorts of life that looks nothing like Earth's, we give ourselves the best possible chance of finding something if it's there. One of two things are going to happen by the end of this decade. Either we'll discover something, which will be profound, or in the next 10 years, we're going to discover nothing. Which means that life is probably more rare than we perhaps thought. That tells you something too. So it's going to be one of those two things the next 10 years. So let's have another conversation in a decade.

I'll be here. Alec, always great to talk to you. Thanks for joining us today.

It's a pleasure, John.

The year is 2281. You're roaming the post-apocalyptic wastelands while listening to the music of the old world, desperately fighting off irradiated ghouls. Actually, it's the 1960s. You're trapped in a time loop on a subarctic island with a crazed gaggle of hedonistic visionaries, and you're being constantly Only Hunted. Video games can immerse players in intricate fictional worlds, allowing them to live out grand fantasies as a Viking, space captain, or prospector in the Old West. But a recent trend has seen games move away from the fantastical to the mundane.

Power Wash Simulator is exactly what the title suggests. You stand there with a power washer and you're presented with a variety of filthy locations such as a subway station or a skate park, and it's your job to point the power washer at those objects and to make them sparkly and clean so there's not a speck of dirt left behind.

Colin Campbell writes about video games for The Economist.

There's a lot of games that are directly based on what you would normally think of as being pretty boring jobs. There's a Best Forklift Operator, there's a Gas Station Simulator, and there's a game called Job Simulator which has a variety of jobs including literally sitting in a cubicle in an office.

So there are a number of these games, Colin. How popular are they?

Well, looking at the numbers, I would say that PowerWash Simulator has probably sold between half a million and a million copies. We know that Job Simulator sold more than a million copies on virtual reality, which is an extraordinary achievement. So there's no doubts that these games are popular. And if you go onto YouTube—

I never in a million years did I think that the first game that would take me to the surface of Mars would be Power Wash Simulator.

Popular YouTube streamers are getting millions and millions of viewers all the time.

I love this game.

It is amazing.

It might be the greatest game ever made. Why do you think so many people are attracted to these sorts of games?

I think firstly, it's a curiosity. You know, there's a certain kind of irony based on playing a game in which you're doing something literally that's boring, especially in a world of video games where traditionally the sort of marketing tag is, hey, you can be a spaceman or, you can be a cowboy. So that's something. But secondly, I think that they genuinely deliver satisfaction. That in Power Simulator, there is a really great feeling of just standing there and cleaning all this stuff. It's a bit like a cross between a shooting game and a jigsaw puzzle because you start off with chaos and you end up with order. And that's just something that most human beings enjoy.

Now, Colin, for the past couple of years, we've been able to go into work much less often than we're used to. Do you think that has something to do with why these games have become popular?

I think the pandemic made people want to feel a sense of achievement, and that's what these games do, and they do it in very small packages. And that was something that was definitely missing in the early days of the pandemic. These games help you cope with stress and anxiety. They make you feel good. And in fact, there is a mental health study taking place between Oxford University and the makers of Power Simulator to better understand how games ease anxiety among players.

So Colin, these work-based games seem to be telling us something new about games. Do they tell us anything new about work?

I think the gaming companies have tapped into the psychology of all that's best about work, which is creating something and enjoying a job well done, while taking away all the things that are bad about work, like having horrible bosses or having to get a paycheck at the end of every month. Having firm goals and the personal autonomy to achieve them is just rewarding. I mean, few of us would want to do these jobs in real life. But it turns out that doing them in a kind of fantasy, silly environment is a lot of fun.

Colin, always a pleasure to talk to you. Thanks so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

That's all for this episode. Of The Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts, and you can subscribe to The Economist at economist.com/intelligenceoffer. We'll see you back here tomorrow.