GOOD APPROACH: After Shooting, Trump Focuses on Mental Health, Not Guns: President says safety at schools will be priority, not limiting access to firearms.

BRET STEPHENS: On Venezuela, Where Are Liberals?

Scour the Web and you’ll find a handful of reports of anti-Maduro protests or teach-ins at universities in recent years, usually organized by Venezuelans living in the U.S. And most politically informed people are more-or-less aware of Venezuela’s political and economic disorders. No doubt they don’t like what they see, and no doubt they wish it were otherwise.

They just don’t seem to care that much.

Every generation of campus activists embraces a worthy foreign-policy cause: Ending apartheid in South Africa; stopping ethnic cleansing in the Balkans; rescuing Darfur from starvation and genocide. And then there’s the perennial — and perennially unworthy — cause of “freeing” Palestine, for which there never is a shortage of credulous campus zealots.

Then there are the humanitarian causes young activists generally don’t embrace, at least not in a big way. Cuba’s political prisoners. Islamist violence against Christians in the Middle East. The vast and terrifying concentration camp that is North Korea. Where are the campus protests over any of that?

Simple: Venezuela is socialist, and the Left remains enamored with socialism.

It’s like that because they each picture themselves becoming one of the big shots with the nice dacha, but none of them imagines they’ll end up a corpse in a mass grave.

BILL GERTZ: Mercenaries Killed in Syria Were Part of Russian-Backed Hybrid Force.

The dead fighters worked for the Wagner company, part of Moscow’s use of hybrid warfare—covert military and influence operations that include use of so-called “little green men”—unconventional forces operating without official insignia. The forces were first seen in 2014 during the military takeover of Ukraine’s Crimea by Russia.

“They are a private army,” said Vasyl Hrytsak, head of Security Service of Ukraine, known as SBU, in a recent interview.

Ukraine believes the Wagner company was formed, equipped, and financed by Russian intelligence services for military, terrorist, and other criminal activities in support of Russian geopolitical interests.

The two big advantages of using sub-state actors are plausible deniability and giving state actors pause before — or if — they take any action against them. On the flip side, when a state actor gives the go-ahead and dozens of your mercenaries get blown up, you can’t exactly get in a big diplomatic (or military) huff about it.

Uniforms, ranks, controlling legal authority and all the rest separate soldiers from mercenaries and terrorists. Treat enemy mercenaries more like terrorists and less like soldiers, and I suspect we’ll see less of this kind of subterfuge.

JULIO GONZALEZ: Susan Rice Email Means It’s Time To Question Obama’s Involvement In Russiagate.

SOMEONE DIDN’T GET THE MEMO: NYT’s Eric Lipton tweets an astonishingly insensitive — maybe stupid is a better word — observation. And of course, the apology after he deleted it isn’t much of an apology.

“Sorry it was read that way” is not an apology: it’s an insult.

DAN MCCLAUGHLIN: Every solution to mass shootings inevitably involves a serious trade-off.

Even if the mainstream media goes dark, there’s social media. Our exhibitionist culture may encourage disturbed people to perform acts of retribution that guarantee them maximum publicity; think of the mass shooter as taking a kind of mass selfie of rage. But that genie can’t be put back in the bottle, either, at least not without a massive campaign against freedom of expression.

As always, human beings are the real weapons of mass destruction, and the tools they choose are not the causes of violence. If we want to weed out people who might commit violent acts in the future, we need to scale back due process protections and incarcerate more people on less evidence. Although that too is a trade-off many of us would find it hard to make, we could plausibly target privacy laws that make it difficult to compile records on people with a history of threatening behavior.

Social media has evolved into an enabler of antisocial behaviors, and our attempts at dealing with the mentally ill more humanely hasn’t worked out to be very humane for the rest of society.

BRUCE BAWER: Rebekah Mercer Fights Back. “She won’t put up with the witch hunters now targeting her.”

Good. She seems to have taken someone’s advice about punching back twice as hard.

MEH, LAST YEAR THEY WERE CALLING TRUMP A NAZI: MSNBC’s Nicolle Wallace: When will GOP ‘wake up and realize it has blood on its hands?’

Weird how the press never says that about Dem policies.

SAY, DID I MENTION my latest, The Judiciary’s Class War, from Encounter Books? Buy it today!

BECAUSE THEY DIDN’T WANT TO COMMIT POLITICAL SUICIDE: Why Didn’t Democrats Pass Gun Control When They Controlled Congress In Obama’s First Term?

TOXIC MASCULINITY: Dave Kirkham emails: “Did you see all three of the adults that were killed were men trying to save the kids that were under their care?”

I HAVE ONE OF THESE: Shop Amazon Devices – All New Kindle Oasis now waterpoof. It’s the wrong time of year to use it in the pool, but I use it in the hot tub, and it’s better than my old solution of putting my Kindle Voyager in a Ziplock bag.

OPEN THREAD: Thread away!

A CHANCE FOR Bipartisan Banking Deregulation.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Forget role play – these 4 pelvic floor exercises will transform your sexual prowess, experts say.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Random, Meaningless Sex Is a Bad Idea for Women.

As Glenn likes to say, “bourgeois is the new transgressive.”

DEVELOPING: Two Bronx Men Arrested in Terror Scheme.

A former Harlem high school teacher and his twin brother were arrested on Thursday in a federal investigation and charged with building an explosive device, according to court papers.

The two men kept boxes full of what the government said were bomb-making materials in a closet in an apartment they shared in the Bronx, according to a criminal complaint filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan.

The teacher, Christian Toro, was arrested on Jan. 31 on charges of raping a minor. The other man was identified as Tyler Toro. The complaint said that a diary found in the apartment contained writing that referred to the brothers as “Twin Toros.” “Strike us now,” they wrote, “we will return with nano-thermite.”

Related: Christian & Tyler Toro: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know.

MEDIA SWALLOWS MILITIA LEADER’S CLAIM SCHOOL SHOOTER WAS CONNECTED TO WHITE SUPREMACISTS.

As one wag tweeted this afternoon when the story was originally circulating, “‘We’re letting dudes with the name ‘Cruz’ in now??’ – Other members of this white nationalist organization.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: What Happened When I Made Tinder Dates Call Me Instead Of Texting. “I’m being rejected for who I actually am, not who I’m pretending to be.”

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Plus, deals in Grocery and Gourmet Food.

HEALTH: FDA approves first blood test that can help diagnose a concussion.

THE CALIFORNIA LEFT: TRUMP IS LIKE A CHARACTER OUT OF DR. STRANGELOVE. Also the California left: We can no longer sit back and allow corporate infiltration, corporate indoctrination, corporate subversion, and the international corporate conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!

A ballot initiative that would ban fluoride, chlorine, genetically modified organisms and some vaccine ingredients was approved to begin collecting signatures last week, the California Secretary of State’s office announced.

Dubbed the “California Clean Environment Initiative” by its creator Cheriel Jensen, the initiative would also eliminate vaccination requirements at schools and daycares, ban more than 300 chemicals it claims are linked to cancer, autism and Parkinson’s disease, and prohibit the use of smart meters to monitor energy consumption.

“These companies that make the chemicals have taken our right to refuse those chemicals away,” Jensen told Patch.

“Fear of fluoridation takes a left turn,” Reason’s Ronald Bailey reported way back in a 2001 article appropriately headlined, “Impurifying our precious bodily fluids.”

But then, the left have become modern-day Birchers on a host of issues.

(Via Virginia Postrel.)

SPRING TRAINING IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER: So check out Sports Illustrated’s 10 best players in major league baseball.

Mike Trout of the Angels is number 1, Jose Altuve of the Astros is number 2. Even though I’m an Astros fan, I’m good with that. The Diamondbacks’ Paul Goldschmidt is number 10 — good choice. The article includes a look a numbers 11 to 100 as well. 11 through 20 are darn good, too. But is Mariner great Nelson Cruz really number 46? Looks low to me, though he is 37. (SI admits its rating system is squishy. But this article is worth the read.)

GOOD: Scientists find key proteins control risk of osteoarthritis during aging. “The researchers noticed a striking difference in the mice with ‘knockout’ FoxO deficiency. Their cartilage degenerated at much younger age than in control mice. The FoxO-deficient mice also had more severe forms of post-traumatic osteoarthritis induced by meniscus damage (an injury to the knee), and these mice were more vulnerable to cartilage damage during treadmill running.”

MOTHER OF THE YEAR: Mom accused of feeding daughter bleach to cure her autism.