On this slide, we have the Second Amendment. The one that starts with the words “A well regulated Militia, being necessary...” Now, let us slip it under our Supreme-Court-O-Scope and peer deeply into it’s tiny 27 word structure. Hmm, yes, the amendment does allow the government to prohibit weapons not part of a “reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.” Yes, and this bit agrees, and that bit agrees, and… wait a second. A new Supreme-Court-O-Scope-2008 model has arrived, complete with a high power conservative lens. What does it see… “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia.” Wow! That is one powerful instrument. I totally didn’t see that in there. Like totally. Totally. Good thing some non-activist judges got at it with their non-activism and fixed up that two+ centuries of settled law.
The New York Times in a rare front page editorial.
… motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.
It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing...
Opponents of gun control … point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.
But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs.
There’s this theory out there—you can’t live in America without hearing someone cite it—that despite all that militia talk, the real purpose of the Second Amendment is to allow people to stock up enough weapons to hold off the gub’ment. It seems silly because the government kind of has… tanks and planes. Seal Team Six. All that stuff which makes the victory of Cliven and kin kind of unlikely.
Turns out, they don’t really need to win that kind of fight. They already won the other. They piled up enough guns that it put enough money in the hands of gun manufacturers to buy themselves a high caliber congress. They brought lawyers, guns, and money—a well-known formula for getting out of any kind of restriction at all.
The only cold dead fingers around these parts? All those people on the receiving end of Second Amendment rights.
Come on in. I promise to limit my own punditizing and see what’s up in the newsy papers…
Nicholas Kristof on real threats and percieved threats
For three weeks American politicians have been fulminating about the peril posed by Syrian refugees, even though in the last dozen years no refugee in America has killed a single person in a terror attack.
In the same three weeks as this hysteria about refugees, guns have claimed 2,000 lives in America. The terror attacks in San Bernardino, Calif., and at the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs were the most dramatic, but there’s an unrelenting average of 92 gun deaths every day in America, including suicides, murders and accidents.
So if politicians want to tackle a threat, how about developing a serious policy to reduce gun deaths — yes, including counterterrorism measures, but not simply making scapegoats of the world’s most vulnerable people.
Even if the events in San Bernardino turn out to be definitely an act of terrorism inspired by Islamic extremists, that will make the score for this year international terrorism: 1, domestic spree killings: 354. Actually, that’s probably not right. I haven’t checked the scoreboard in the last few hours.
Historically, we Americans have repeatedly misperceived outsiders as threats. In 1938 and again in 1941, one desperate Jewish family in Europe tried to gain refugee status in the United States but failed, along with countless thousands of others. That was Anne Frank’s family.
Ross Douthat and the Gun Control of Doom
Sometimes, it’s suggested that all we need are modest, “common-sense” changes to gun laws: Tighter background checks, new ways to trace firearms, bans on the deadliest weapons.
This idea was the basis for the Manchin-Toomey bill that failed in 2013 in the Senate. It was also, though, the basis for two major pieces of gun legislation that passed in the 1990s: The Brady Law requiring background checks for handguns and the assault weapons ban.
Both measures were promoted as common-sense reforms — in the case of the Brady Law, by none other than Ronald Reagan. But both failed to have an appreciable impact on homicides — even as other policies, like hiring more police officers, probably did. That double failure, some gun control supporters will tell you, has to do with the loopholes those two laws left open — particularly the fact that individuals selling guns aren’t required to run background checks when they sell within their home state.
Hmm, Douthat has his own incredibly resolving instrument that can distinguish between the effects of things that happened at the same time. He can also tell that the 1.2 million background checks in which the Brady Bill stopped someone from getting a gun were a “failure.” And of course, the assault weapons ban was only partially implemented for less than ten years and only affected a tiny number of weapons, so reasonable people might not expect it to cause a big statistical change. But “failure.” Let’s move on… Douthat cites the Australian experience, in which assault-style weapons really were reduced then goes on to state…
The clearest evidence shows that Australia’s reform mostly reduced suicides — as the Brady law may have done — while the evidence on homicides is murkier.
Murkier? Hell, let’s take a look.
Mass Shootings in Australia
Shooting |
Date |
# Dead |
Top End |
June 1987 |
5 |
Hoddle Street |
August 1987 |
7 |
Canley Vale Huynh |
October 1987 |
5 |
Queen Street |
December 1987 |
8 |
Oenpelli |
September 1988 |
6 |
Surry Hills |
August 1990 |
5 |
Strathfield |
August 1991 |
7 |
Central Coast |
October 1992 |
6 |
Hillcrest |
January 1996 |
6 |
Port Authur |
April 1996 |
35 |
Hectorville |
April 2011 |
3 |
Hunt Family |
September 2014 |
5 |
Want to guess when those new gun laws went into effect? Now, you can be a fatuous asshole, like Douthat, and contend that the overall homicide rate in Australia didn’t fall much post 1996 gun control laws, or you can accept that these laws had an almost immediate and substantial impact on the kind of spree killing America has witnessed 355 times this year (Also of note: Australia took tough action after a number of events that America calls “the first couple of weeks in January.”).
I do have to thank Douthat. His article is exactly the kind of double-speak and purposeful clouding of the facts that have marked the right’s position. Later in the article he ties gun control to police states and suspension of religious liberty because… of course he does. Maybe he’ll use that NRA check to buy a Thesaurus of Even More Ponderous Terms.
Hey, let’s look at another example. Scotland also implemented tougher gun laws following a mass shooting in 1996. Since then… none. But of course gun ownership in Scotland is low. So low that no police officer has been shot on duty since 1994, and a civilian hasn’t been even wounded by a cop in six years. Yeah. Horrors.Scotland’s homicide rate? The lowest since records started being kept. But I’m sure it has nothing to do with fewer guns. (And… sorry. I didn’t do very well at leaving my own puntificating out of this)
Linda J. provides a personal account of what it means to be a refugee
The best days of my life were in Syria. I was born and raised there. I married and reared my family in my country. My kids went to school, and my husband worked as a carpenter. I was a 29-year-old stay-at-home mom, and we owned furniture stores in Damascus. We shared everything with our neighbors and felt the love around our home. But in 2011, everything for my family and every family in Syria changed.
Peaceful protesters began asking for improvements from the government — basic things, fundamental rights. Among other things, they were calling for the release of political prisoners and for an end to the government’s corruption. My husband and I were not revolutionaries. We respected the role of the government in our lives, but we agreed that changes were needed and believed those changes could happen peacefully. Our family did not participate in the protests. We watched from our house.
The demonstrators were not terrorists. They didn’t carry weapons; they carried signs calling for a better life. I remember seeing people with olive branches and flowers, symbols of peace. So the government’s reaction came as a terrible surprise. Soldiers began using violence to silence the voice of the people, shooting them in the streets. A war between the people and the government had begun.
Want to understand what’s happening in Syria? Go read this. To understand what it means to be a refugee and to be accepted into a safe place? Go read this.
My biggest dream is for my daughters to have a good education and good careers, and for us to be part of this society: to learn the language, to do something productive, to integrate. The same thing that saw me through my journey is what guides all mothers — a future for their children. I understand that there is a necessary process for Syrian families to come here, but please don’t close the door.
When politicians rail against allowing in Syrian refugees, that’s what they’re stopping, not terrorism.
Mandy Patinkin visits refugees in route from Syria
“I saw death behind me, and life in front of me,” said Safae, a Syrian mother of two young sons, as she told me the story of her family’s escape from the Islamic State. They had fled in the night across the Syrian-Turkish border and had arrived, finally, in Greece. …
“I saw death behind me and life in front of me.” My family might have spoken the same words in Yiddish or Russian or Polish as they made their perilous journeys away from their homes. As I listened to the stories of these new generations of refugee families and thought of past generations of my own, the fear-mongering news cycles faded away, and I saw clearly that we cannot fight fear and hatred with more fear and hatred. We must not allow the horrific actions of madmen to cut us off from our humanity.
How much would it take to get every cowardly governor in America onto a plane and fly them to a refugee camp to see the people they are destroying?
You can call your representatives and ask them to continue the long-held American tradition of refugee resettlement — with a specific focus right now on Syrian refugees. If you live close to an International Rescue Committee office in the United States, find out how you can assist a refugee family as they transition to American life. Invite a newly arrived family to your home for a welcoming meal. Listen to their hopes and dreams, and share your own. Only through loving and supporting one another, even in the face of unbearable pain and suffering, will this cycle of violence end.
Jessica Stern on our hardening hearts
...the experimental psychologists Tom Pyszczynski, Sheldon Solomon and Jeff Greenberg are known for having developed what’s called terror management theory, which suggests that much of human behavior is motivated by an unconscious terror of death. What saves us from this terror is culture. Cultures provide ways to view the world that “solve” the existential crisis engendered by the awareness of death.
The theory says that when people are reminded of their mortality — especially if the reminder doesn’t register consciously, as happens after a brutal act of terror — they will more readily enforce their cultural worldviews. If our cultural worldview is xenophobic, nationalistic or moralistic, we are prone to become more so. Hundreds of experiments, all over the world, have confirmed these findings.
If we believe guns will protect us from harm, a terrorist strike will further strengthen our views. If we blame Muslims or white supremacists or the government for whatever is wrong in our world, we will become more fearful and more certain about who is to blame. For example, psychological experiments found that being reminded both of one’s own mortality and the attacks of Sept. 11 increased support for military interventions in the Middle East among people who identified as politically conservative. It had no effect on people who identified as liberal.
I’m not sure that study shows what they think it shows. However the article is to be commended for remembering the best way to fight terrorists: stop being terrified.
Ruth Marcus and growing up with terrorism
The columnist’s instinct is to examine an issue and propose solutions — if not perfect fixes, at least half-measures. And so, in response to mass shootings, I have written about tightening background checks and limiting magazine sizes; about cracking down on domestic abusers and requiring trigger locks.
Today, I find myself suggestion-free, just sad. … I don’t think we are desensitized by this killing. We are depressed — by its omnipresence, its persistence, its multiplicity of sources, whether right-wing extremists, disaffected high school students, or, yes, Islamist terrorists, home-grown and overseas.
And by the seeming insistence of our political system on repelling even the slightest changes in the direction of sanity. “We should never think that this is something that just happens in the ordinary course of events, because it doesn’t happen with the same frequency in other countries,” President Obama cautioned, once again. True, yet I despair of dislodging the legislative gridlock.
I hate the term “gridlock,” mostly because it implies that everyone is involved in causing the snarl. It’s not gridlock. It’s a roadblock. Same result, but understanding at least that much is mandatory if we’re going to make things move.
Kathleen Parker sniffs at the idea of women in combat
As the Islamic State amped up attacks around the world, the Pentagon responded by bravely announcing that American women will now be put in direct ground combat.
Whereupon “military intelligence” secured a permanent place in the Encyclopedia of Oxymorons.
Big tough ISIS vs. a bunch of little girls. Why, you just know how that’s going to turn out. I could go through more of Parker’s column, but this should be enough to remind everyone that, while Parker occasionally says something that makes sense, it doesn’t stop her from being an idiot.
Blaine Roberts and Ethan Kytle want to put one more monument on the National Mall
One hundred and fifty years ago today, America ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery throughout the country. It was a momentous victory. But it also prompted a protracted campaign to whitewash how slavery would be remembered, one waged in Southern parks and squares, on the region’s university campuses and statehouse grounds. By the 1930s, Confederate monuments stood watch all over the South, buttressing a white supremacist interpretation of the past.
Finally this year, after the Confederate sympathizer Dylann Roof murdered nine black worshipers in Charleston, S.C., protesters began to demand the removal of proslavery memorials and flags from the commemorative landscape. …
Hundreds of similar monuments convinced generations of white Southerners, and others, that the Confederacy had gone to war to defend states’ rights, liberty and the Southern way of life. Anything but slavery. …
Rather than relegating slavery to the margins of memory, we must place it front and center. ...
Our nation’s capital is replete with memorials to presidents and veterans. Why not raise a slave monument alongside them?
Read the full article to get a sense of the astounding pro-slavery monuments that dot the country, and some of the even more staggeringly awful that were planned, including a monument to slaves who “desired no change in their condition of life.”
Dana Milbank on a celebration that I’ll bet you didn’t attend
The elder Bush ultimately blamed his son for letting Cheney prevail. This week, Bush the younger set out to mitigate the damage of his father’s confession. He showed up at the dedication ceremony for Cheney’s marble bust, and he joined a procession of Republican luminaries in praising Cheney.
It was a bold test of the premise that time heals all wounds. And as Republican officials, former and current, set about rehabilitating the image of a singularly divisive figure in modern politics, they had the assistance of a most valuable collaborator: Vice President Joe Biden. …
“I can say without fear of contradiction there’s not one single time there’s been a harsh word in our relationship,” Biden said. “And that’s what I think is most desperately missing today in Washington, D.C. I don’t remember, Dick, you questioning anybody’s motive.”
No?
Just three months ago, Cheney opined that “the only way to interpret” President Obama’s Middle East policy, “and what his motives were was he really wanted to boost Iran’s position in that part of the world and make them the dominant force at the expense of our allies.”
I like Joe Biden, but there are a lot of days I’m glad he’s not running.
Leonard Pitts does a movie review, but makes something more out of it
In the new movie Creed, Rocky Balboa once again mounts the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
In the original Rocky, the climb up those stairs was the climax of a training montage that has since become iconic. With the gladiatorial horns and sweeping strings of Bill Conti’s soundtrack pumping full out behind him, Rocky takes those stairs at a celebratory run, dancing and shadow boxing when he reaches the top.
In Creed, Rocky walks. He needs help. He has to take a breather. It is a soulful juxtaposition to his run up those same stairs when he was young, a moment of almost unbearable tenderness that reminds you just how long — and how short — is 39 years. …
So much of what time steals, we have no choice about. Your legs are going to go, your loves are going to go, whether you acquiesce to it or not. But to watch Rocky struggle up those steps he once conquered by leaps and bounds is to know that the thing inside that makes you get up from every knockdown is different. Its loss is not predetermined by age. Rather, it’s a choice. You decide to let time take that thing away from you.
Or not.