Why We Shouldn't Treat Survivors and Victims as Authorities on Policy Issues

Over the last few days, controversy has raged over whether Harvard University was right to rescind the admission conservative activist Kyle Kashuv after the discovery of racist comments he made in an online Google Doc last year. Unlike almost everyone else who has commented on the issue, I am divided in my own mind on the question of whether Harvard made the right decision. But, whatever we think of the rescission, it is worth noting that Kashuv became famous in the first place because he was a survivor of the horrific Parkland school shooting, and became an activist on gun rights issues as a result. If not for that history, there probably would be far less controversy over Harvard’s decision. The origin of Kashuv’s fame highlights a troubling aspect of modern political discourse.

In a post written last year,  I explained why it’s a mistake to give special credence to the policy views of victims of horrible tragedies. Surviving a school shooting, or some other awful event, doesn’t give you any special insight into the moral and policy questions at stake. Survivors deserve empathy and respect—but not deference to their policy views, except in rare instances where they have genuine expertise on the subject:

[R]ecent gun control protests draw moral authority not only from the age of the protesters, but from the fact that some of their leaders are survivors of school shootings, such as the one in Parkland, Florida that precipitated the current round of protest activity. Even school-age protesters who have not personally experienced gun violence may be seen as having special moral authority, because they are perceived as facing a heightened risk of suffering such horrible events in the future. In reality, school shootings are extraordinarily rare, and schools are among the safest places in American society. Schoolchildren are far more likely to be killed in accidents while walking or riding their bikes to school than in a shooting at school.

But even if students really were disproportionately likely to be victims of gun violence, that would not be a good reason to give special credence to their policy views. Personally experiencing a horrific event or being at disproportionate risk of suffering one, doesn’t necessarily give you special insight into how to prevent such tragedies from occurring. A person who survives an awful plane crash does not thereby gain special insight into aviation safety. Similarly, a person who survives a mass shooting does not thereby get much in the way of useful knowledge of gun policy….

Often, the real reason for focusing attention on victims and survivors is not the value of their insights, but the way in which they tug at our emotional heart-strings. Opposition to policies promoted by survivors of a recent horrific event is easy to denounce as callous and unfeeling. Here, we would do well to remember that our immediate emotional reactions to tragedy are rarely a useful guide to policy. All too often, giving in to such feelings results in policies that create more harm and injustice than they prevent. Liberals are quick to point out this out when it comes to terrorist attacks. Conservatives routinely do so in the aftermath of mass shootings. Both are right, and both would do well to heed each other’s warnings. As with emotional reactions to terrorist attacks, overreactions to the extremely rare phenomenon of school shootings can easily result in dangerous and unjust policies, as with the “zero tolerance” policies enacted in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine shootings.