Stories from three, at first glance unrelated sources – the mass killing of children in Louisiana, Washington’s hard line on Iran in a Gordon Sondland column on Fox News, and Toyota’s win in the WEC race at Imola – unexpectedly converge around one theme: how people and institutions understand and use power and control. In one case power takes the form of monstrous domestic violence, in the second — strategic pressure in international politics, and in the third — regulated, managed combat on a racetrack. This contrast makes especially clear what happens when violence gets out of control and how “legitimate” force fundamentally differs from destructive force.
NBC’s report on the tragedy in Shreveport, Louisiana, describes one of the most horrifying forms of loss of control — a destructive surge of domestic violence that culminated in mass murder. Eight children aged 3 to 11 — Jayla Elkins, 3; Sheila Elkins, 5; Kyla Pugh, 6; Layla Pugh, 7; Marqaiden Pugh, 10; Saria Snow, 11; Hedarion Snow, 6; Breylon Snow, 5 — were shot dead, and according to police spokesman Christopher Bordelon, many appear to have been shot in the head while asleep. The shooter was Shamar Elkins; seven of the eight children were his own, the eighth a cousin. His wife and an alleged girlfriend were seriously wounded. Elkins was killed by police after a chase and the car he had stolen.
Here power is intensely personal. This is not abstract “gun violence” but the destruction of one’s own family by a person who held maximum everyday authority over it. Police say it was strictly a “domestic incident” tied to a family conflict. Domestic violence — when the harm-doer is not an external enemy but a close person — makes the situation especially monstrous: where there should be protection, there is a direct threat to life. Police chief Wayne Smith admits: “I just cannot imagine how something like this can even happen.” This is not the rhetoric of politics or ideology, but the bewilderment of a person accustomed to severe cases who faces something that shatters basic moral anchors.
It is important that the Shreveport events fit a known, though rarely voiced, pattern: domestic violence, guns, and prior incidents involving force. According to police, Elkins was convicted in 2019 of unlawful use of a firearm, which likely barred him from legally owning guns. Nevertheless, he had both a small-caliber pistol and a “pistol-style rifle” — essentially a shortened rifle in pistol format (a firearm that uses rifle ammunition but in a “compact” form factor). Such designs often become loopholes in gun regulation: formally a pistol, but in power essentially a rifle.
The Louisiana tragedy shows the consequences of the combination of personal crisis, access to weapons, and the absence of effective checks at the family, medical, and law enforcement levels. Council chair Tabatha Taylor, speaking through tears at the crime scene, unequivocally linked the incident to the shooter’s mental state: “This is the result when someone snaps.” She immediately appealed to mental health professionals for help for the family and the community. In modern discourse “someone snapped” often sounds like a colloquial explanation, but in essence it refers to unrecognized or undertreated mental destabilization against which power turns into uncontrollable violence.
On another level, but using the same words — force, pressure, control — writes former U.S. ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland in a Fox News column. In his piece on Donald Trump’s strategy toward Iran he says that extracting concessions from Tehran is “like breaking a horse.” That image runs like a thread through the text. It is not accidental: horse-breaking is a tight mix of force and control, pressure and calibrated easing. Sondland describes a model of “pressure, pause, pressure again” as the only correct line with an “unreal” partner whose power is split among the clergy, politicians, intelligence services, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he calls a “state within a state.”
Sondland insists Trump intuitively understands that you cannot negotiate with such a regime “by Western rules”: sequence, transparency, predictability — he believes — become weaknesses that give the other side space for “stalling, deception, and division.” In a sense he proposes “managed violence” as a method: overwhelming military power is concentrated around Iran, and the readiness to use it is itself a lever. It is important to understand: in modern international politics “violence” often exists not as the immediate use of force, but as a constant reminder of the possibility of strikes against “leadership targets, command structures and critical infrastructure” if the “horse requires harsh correction.”
This logic differs sharply from the domestic violence outbreak in Louisiana, but structurally they are similar in one way: in both, a breakdown or refusal of self-control is perceived as the point at which application of force becomes permissible and sometimes necessary. The difference is that in the Iran case it is institutionalized, embedded in international-law logic (or at least in the logic of realpolitik), while in Shreveport it is a criminal act and moral catastrophe. International negotiations, as Sondland describes them, embed violence within strategic frames: “This is not chaos. This is leverage.” It’s important to clarify “leverage” here: not in a mechanical sense, but as the collection of pressure tools that give one negotiating party an advantage.
Sondland emphasizes that success, in his view, is measured not by elegant agreements but by changing calculations in Tehran: “This is a test of will and strength taken to its logical end.” He opposes the “long game” to the “minute-by-minute panic cycle” in the media, urging to “not back down” and to “stay in the saddle” — continuing the horse-breaking metaphor. At the same time, he effectively dismisses the value of process and diplomatic ritual, elevating constant pressure as the means to “denuclearize” Iran and thereby “remove the last major barrier” to a “more stable and prosperous Middle East.”
Juxtaposed with the Shreveport events, an important ethical question arises: where is the line between legitimate use of force to prevent a greater evil and a destructive loss of control? In Shreveport, police force is a forced response to extreme violence, not a behavior-shaping instrument. In the U.S.–Iran case, force is built into the negotiating position from the outset. The “pressure, pause, pressure again” strategy assumes that the threat of force is not a meltdown but a deliberate, rational component of the game. But the problem is that, as with breaking a real horse, there is always a risk of “over-tightening”: Sondland speaks of the need to “stay in the saddle long enough for the dynamics to change” but says little about scenarios in which that dynamic leads to unintended escalation or essentially to war.
Against this background, the sports example — Toyota’s victory in the WEC race at Imola — is particularly instructive. The official World Endurance Championship statement reports that Sébastien Buemi crossed the finish line and, together with Brendon Hartley and Ryo Hirakawa, delivered Toyota its first win since the 8-hour race in Bahrain 2024, which also marked the Japanese manufacturer’s 100th WEC entry. Second came the reigning champions Ferrari in the 499P No. 51 prototype, and third was the other Toyota crew with Nyck de Vries, Mike Conway and Kamui Kobayashi.
From the standpoint of power and control, motorsport is an almost perfect illustration of how a process that is dangerous by nature — movement at extreme speeds — is converted into a framework of regulated, predictable competition. In endurance racing, in the LMGT3 class (the category of grand touring cars adapted for racing under strict technical rules), the final hour at Imola was dramatic: the leading Garage 59 McLaren No. 10 suffered technical issues, opening the way for BMW’s Team WRT No. 69 to win. The crew of Anthony McIntosh, Daniel Harper and Parker Thompson secured BMW’s second victory in three races at Imola, leaving behind Corvette TF Sport No. 33 and the Porsche 911 R LMGT3 of The Bend Manthey, which managed to return to the podium after an early spin.
Racing shows another way of dealing with force. Here it is distributed between human and machine but subordinated to strict regulations: technical requirements, sporting rules, safety procedures. The “controlled risk” system implies not only physical protection for drivers (safety cages, HANS devices, runoff areas, etc.) but also regulated behavior: flags, penalties, speed restrictions in incident zones. It’s important to explain this concept: force (speed, persistence, aggressive driving) is consciously limited and redirected into competition so that the risk of unacceptable escalation is minimized.
Comparing this with Sondland’s approach to Iran, one can see both a parallel and a difference. The parallel is the recognition that any struggle is messy and unpredictable: at Imola, the LMGT3 outcome was decided by unexpected problems for the leader in the final hour, just as unexpected events (protests, internal crises, external attacks) can change the political balance. But the key difference is the presence or absence of agreed rules. Motorsport exists only because all participants accept a single set of norms and an organizer (the FIA, WEC organizers) enforces compliance and intervenes for violations. In international politics, especially when states with military and nuclear capabilities are involved, there is no such “race director” in strict form. There is international law and institutions, but they are much weaker and depend on the will of the most powerful actors.
The tragedy in Louisiana, by contrast, represents a complete breakdown of rules at the micro-community level — the family. Where preventive mechanisms should have worked (recording prior firearms offenses, domestic violence services, access to psychiatric care), they clearly failed or were insufficient. That neighbors saw Elkins the night before as “a normal man who waved back,” and the next day encountered eight dead children, underscores how few external indicators a pending breakdown sometimes gives. Unlike a regulated race, there are no pre-known “risk zones,” no standby marshals with flags, no medical teams monitoring and ready for intervention; police and medics are reduced to responding to an already committed horror.
The common motif in all three stories is attempts to cope with violence and risk through different forms of control. In Louisiana, police control arrives too late and is purely punitive-defensive: officers, police say, were “forced to use their service weapons to neutralize the suspect.” Where social and medical controls failed, only force remains. In Sondland’s column, force is elevated to a principle: “You will not get a deal with such regimes through process. You need power.” He explicitly states that without “sustained American pressure — economic and military — there will be no decent agreement.” This is a view of violence as a legitimate tool for shaping another party’s behavior.
In the WEC race at Imola, force and risk are integrated into a system that is the antonym of both the Shreveport tragedy and the logic of “breaking a horse” without an external arbiter. Where there are agreed rules and an independent referee, physical power — whether high speeds or powerful cars — becomes not a source of destruction but a means to a competitive but controlled end. Toyota’s victory in its 100th WEC entry, its “first win since the 8-hour race in Bahrain 2024,” shows how “pressure” can become a sporting strategy: pace management, resource control, teamwork. In LMGT3, the lead change with an hour to go demonstrates that even in a strict system uncertainty remains, but its consequences are bounded by the rules of the game, not human casualties.
The key conclusion from comparing these narratives is that power in itself is neither “good” nor “bad.” The question is the framework of control, the values and institutions that shape it. Domestic violence in Louisiana is an example of how, absent effective early intervention systems, personal authority turns into absolute evil. The “pressure, pause, pressure again” strategy Sondland attributes to Trump regarding Iran illustrates how states, aware of the risks, still bet on the threat of force as the main instrument of changing an opponent’s behavior, often ignoring the potential cost of error. Motorsport shows how the riskiest elements of human activity — speed, competition, the desire to dominate — can be placed into clearly defined boundaries where every participant understands the rules, sanctions and limits of the permissible.
From this follow several important trends and consequences. First, at the domestic policy level in developed countries it is increasingly clear that combating domestic violence cannot be limited to a police response. Tabatha Taylor’s remark that “every mental health specialist” is needed for the family and community reflects a shift toward understanding violence as a symptom of deeper problems requiring preventive work. Second, in the international sphere the role of strategies relying on the demonstration of force is growing, where the key notion becomes “trust in the threat”: as Sondland stresses, “trust is built not on statements but on demonstrated readiness to act.” This increases the importance of military and economic levers but also raises the risk of miscalculation and escalation. Third, where we succeed in creating functioning rules and institutions — as in motorsport — force ceases to be synonymous with violence and becomes a resource for development and competition.
The events in Shreveport, the rhetoric about Iran and the result of the Imola race, described respectively in materials from NBC News, Fox News and the official WEC statement, together provide a comprehensive snapshot of how modern society deals with power at different levels — from private life to global geopolitics and sport. And the sharper we feel the consequences of its uncontrolled use at home, the more important the question becomes: what “race rules” do we set where the stakes are human lives, not just championship points?
