Thoughts on Charleston

I thought it was good but depressing, especially on how the ‘politics of safety and security’ has spread across the ideological spectrum, prempts genuine politics, and intersects with a criminal approach to social problems. Keep ’em coming!

In 2014, 425 people lost their lives to homicide in Chicago. Of those murders, only 31.6% resulted in identification of a suspect, and the conviction rate is far lower. Chicago has nearly 3 million people, but the victims of these crimes aren’t evenly distributed. A city like Camden has it even worse.

No, you aren’t safe if you live on the West Side, where the schools are rotting and the jobs are gone. You have to fear being shot, and your shooter going free. But from the leafy streets of Lincoln Park, it might as well be a thousand miles away.

Murder is a very real deprivation of rights. It’s not poverty that causes it: most poor people never pick up a gun. But the impunity with which murderers strike encourages them. This is not a problem of overpolicing, but policing incapable of enforcing the law fairly and in a way that is respected by those who live in the areas policed.

Ultimately the real conditions of life in Chicago owe less to the operations of racist jokes, then to economic forces and policies enacted to serve capitalism. And unless we understand that root, anti-racist politics will never be able to challenge them successfully. Guns are not the root of the problem here.

Depressing to be sure. I’m glad you are looking at this as an aspect of our safety and security culture, rather than just guns, and racism. Certainly our national issue with guns is wrapped up with our desire to feel secure, and how our culture media all politics all conspire to exploit well know cognitive weaknesses regarding low probability but high emotional impact risks. It isn’t easy to confront these highly distorted fears, particularly when the listener is under the spell of one or more of them. We’ve become a society where it is now borderline illegal to allow your kid to walk to school, or play in a public playground without the presence of an appropriate helicopter parent.

If you spend any time exposed to our media, and our political discourse you won’t have any trouble finding examples of the exploitation of these fears. Its almost braindead easy to figure out how to take advantage of overblown fears, and that’s what we are all exposed to almost daily. The almost total lack of discipline amongst public opinion makers would seem to be at the root of this. We always ask the question, “will this help my career or the immediate cause we are pushing?”, and almost never ask “what longterm effect on the public discourse am I having?”. The incentives run all the wrong way, those who consider the first question and ignore the second
are rewarded.

The US has never had a serious white movement to feel conviction about the evils done to blacks, acknowledge it, apologize in a heartfelt way, turn away from it, and make amends to the extent possible. White Americans have never repented. Without repentance, new laws and reforms aren’t likely to accomplish much; they must still be administered.

The US violent crime rate has halved since 1994. Black teen pregnancy has dropped 2/3rds since its peak in 1991. Yet crime rates and teen pregnancy are repeatedly used to ignore oppression of blacks, no matter how blatant, or to blame them outright for it. A number of Republican politicians had to be pressured to admit that the Charleston shooter was a vicious racist. Despite improvements, repentance seems a long way off.

Joshua Holmes: US whites should “make amends to the extent possible” to US blacks.
“Possible” is a wonderfully elastic word. To what extent do you think amends might be possible? To what extent would, say, the Rev Al Sharpton believe them to be possible?

While I’m definitely in favor of gun control, my concern is that in practice, it would just give the cops more opportunities to police and imprison black people. That’s certainly how the drug war has worked out, no?

I’m not sure about this. I agree with your overall conclusion, but I would ask: are cops waiting for gun laws, or any other law, so as to have more opportunities to push around and kill black people (and/or other poor people)? I’d say they have a pretty darned free hand as it is. Subjugators gonna subjugate.

Someone on twitter asked Ta-Nehisi Coates what would’ve happened had modern firearms been so generally available as now in the late 19th century and early 20th century. His answer was ‘genocide’. I think that’s right.

It’s completely wrong. Blacks took up arms to defend themselves and their families across much of the South. The Navy laws aimed to remove cheap firearms from the hands of freedmen so as to permit their subjugation by terrorism. Banning guns means depending on the police to protect you: they won’t.

‘As President of the U.S. it is in fact within his power to do something about it other than “acknowledge” it and go on helplessly.’

By all means, suggest what he could do. I’m struggling to see it myself. Unless you think he’s just not leadery enough.

‘If he’s helpless, how is it “in our power” to do something about it?’

I imagine, as a starter, stop electing these nuts to office. Doing something about racial oppression and gun violence requires legislation, prosecution of the law, and a bench which will not impede progress.

To what extent do you think amends might be possible?

I don’t yet know, but there are clues. For example, Chicago recently paid $5.5m in restitution to arrestees tortured by police. Most of the victims were black. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, though generally a scumbag, said, “Chicago will finally confront its past and come to terms with it and recognizing something wrong was done.” New York could do something similar for those brutalized in Rikers Island prison, many of whom are black. The federal government and banks could do something similar for those who suffered under red-lining policies, who were almost entirely black. And so on.

Really it’s absurd, it would sound utterly absurd anywhere but in the States.

I can confirm that it does sound absurd in the UK.

I think there’s a danger of making the best the enemy of the good here. The project of criminalising gun ownership, except under a narrow range of strictly regulated conditions – which is essentially what’s happened in the UK – strictly speaking has nothing to do with the project of reversing two centuries of racist injustice: you could achieve A without doing anything to bring B nearer, and I guess you could achieve B without worrying about A (although I’m really struggling to imagine an armed and just society). But, while guns certainly don’t kill people, they do make it a hell of a lot easier for people to kill people. The kind of society where – as in the UK – people get arrested for owning a single bullet may not be ipso facto a just society, but it is a society where mass shootings just don’t happen – and, by extension, where mass killings don’t happen (people do go crazy with bladed weapons every so often, but there’s only so much you can do with a knife or a sword before you get stopped).

(You guys may not want to live in a society where people get arrested for owning a single bullet; I confess I wasn’t entirely convinced myself when we went down that route. But it does seem to have worked out OK.)

Layman, Dylann Roof is the exceptional racist, as is the LAPD, etc. But Dylan Roof didn’t put a gun in the hand of the boys who shot down 25 people in Chicago this weekend. Dylann Roof didn’t contribute to welfare reform, or the demise of unions, or disparities in school funding. We can talk all we want about Dylann Roof and the confederate flag, and go vote for politicians who condemn racism, while leaving the intolerable conditions in place.

You don’t need to imagine diehard racists running the show to understand why these conditions exist. Just politicians who listen to the voices of their wealthier donors more than those who don’t organize politically, a job market that has become increasingly polarized, increasing collateral consequences of conviction leading to lifetime exclusion from work. Our search for racists undermines the political organizing that could cut against these policies and their effect.

I think it might be advantageous to further articulate how contemporary ideas about (national ) “security” intersect with race, gender, and gun culture to elevate gun violence in the warped minds of some young men and how such belief systems benefit the military industrial complex in supplying it with indoctrinated customers.

LBJ benefited from years’ worth of smart, informed people with the elites’ ear thinking about the exact same problems he set out to solve. The problem is, one, we don’t have this now. Worse, two, the backlash against LBJ’s programs began immediately and has been so successful, and pointed out so many real blind spots in the ideas behind them (without suggesting anything to take their place), that it’s not clear how many of the people who might come up with new programs think those were worth doing even at the time. The President can’t just declare a new synthesis without input from educated commoners.

The thing where Obama says, “You elected me and now I’m going to tell you what to do yourselves,” is admittedly one of his most annoying rhetorical tics. It probably actually is what he thinks it means to be “leadery.”

“Being a political leader seems to me to be a highly disadvantageous position from which to try to do anything”

LBJ got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed. That may or may not have “dissuaded people from racist beliefs”, but it sure did a whole lot about racist practices. It’s still the framework that we use for everything now (including Title IX etc.). Sure, political leaders have to ingratiate themselves with the state and culture as they are, and then if they are actual leaders — and if they are in any way “on the left” — they have to use the power they’ve gained to influence that culture, not to be limited by it.

Huge numbers of other people did everything they could to prepare the way for LBJ to push the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through. Some of them got shot for it. But all of that would have come to very little if, at the end, a political leader hadn’t been willing to risk their credit within the system.

“LBJ got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 passed.”

This is certainly true; but it seems extraordinarily unlikely to me that he could get it passed again today, with this Congress. I’m sure Obama could move measures to improve economic conditions, fight racism, and control guns through the Congress that LBJ faced, but such things aren’t in the cards.

“Well in fact he could pardon everybody unilaterally, however many million there are.”

I like this idea, but have two things to say about it. First, it seems quite hard to execute as a practical matter. Second, although it is undoubtedly the humanitarian thing to do, and I’m entirely in favor of it, I don’t think for one minute it will improve race relations; rather the opposite, I’d guess.

“…he nominates candidates for the upper reaches of the law bench…”

Indeed, he does, but he cannot ratify their appointment. Instead, he must suffer the Senate to do that, which takes us back to the problem if Congress.

“Racists elect people who carry out racist policies. ”

Indeed, they do. But that comes back to Obama’s point, that it is to some extent up to the people to fix this problem.

Really, I hate to be cast as his advocate here. I’d impeach him over some of his security policies, and I’m tremendously disappointed by how he’s handled things he can control (HAMP comes to mind). But it is nonsense to think he could employ leadership to end institutional racism and gun violence in the face of a legislature and judiciary who are determined to oppose him.

“LBJ *created* the Congress he had, in large part, he didn’t merely face it as a pre-existing entity”

You’ll have to say more about this. Johnson inherited a Democratic majority in both houses, and actually lost ground to Republicans in the South after the Act was passed.

I’m still waiting for a clear prescription of how any President in these particular circumstances solves the problem. I’m as frustrated as you are, but this ‘more leadership’ nonsense is punditry dreck.

Layman 06.22.15 at 2:21 am @ 34:
‘… Racism is the very reason we have economic inequity on a scale not found in any other social democracy.’

I think it’s the other way around. First you have a class-based social order; this situation naturally leads to individual and group competition for advantage and preference, which tends to result in the formation of teams: tribes, gangs, races, ethnea, genders and so forth — any distinction can be used to gain advantage, any means can be used to pursue it. Those on top will not be slow to notice the development and cultivate it. I believe the picture I draw here follows the historical development of institutional racism in the United States. (This is not to say that the success of the racial divide as a mechanism of class oppression hasn’t been tremendously successful; only that I don’t think it’s fundamental.)

bianca steele,

“The President can’t just declare a new synthesis without input from educated commoners.
The thing where Obama says, “You elected me and now I’m going to tell you what to do yourselves,” is admittedly one of his most annoying rhetorical tics. It probably actually is what he thinks it means to be “leadery.””

I have mentioned before the historic Redfern speech by Prime Minister Keating here in Australia which was about the negative impacts of European settlement on Indigenous people.
https://antar.org.au/sites/default/files/paul_keating_speech_transcript.pdf

That was an important political speech, but there is also a public reconciliation movement which is driven as much or even more by the community as by government.

There is an NGO Reconciliation Australia ( https://www.reconciliation.org.au/about/ )
which has reconciliation as its mission, and it was reconciliation week recently, and just in my shire there were a number of events and similar things would have happened throughout the country.

There is still a long way to go, but there has been progress. It there anything similar in the USA for reconciliation with African Americans and Indigenous Americans?

The annual number of homicides in Chicago is terrible – it is around about the same number as for the annual number of homicides in the whole of Australia.

But Layman, there are more non-gun murders per year in Chicago than total murders in Naples. And this is true generally in the USA. To use my favourite comparison, even if adopting British-style gun laws prevented every single homicide with a gun*, the US murder rate would still be almost double that of the UK.

The US is just an extraordinarily violent country.

*Which it wouldn’t. Some people would kill using illegal guns, and some of those murders would be displaced onto non-gun weapons.

I’m in favour of gun control in US but it seems to me making this discussion about that, as a lot of commenters here seem to want to, feeds into the kind of anti-political security agenda which the post accurately critiques.

Engels @ 41, fair enough. I don’t want to make this about gun control, if for no other reason than the practical one: There is no prospect of meaningful gun control in the immediate future anyway.

With respect to the OP, I’m also deeply alarmed that all public policy seems to revolve around protection and security. It strikes me that racism is a big component of it, and that we won’t make inroads there without a concerted effort to confront racism where it masquerades as other things, like Tradition and History and Southern Pride.

Layman: “You’ll have to say more about this. Johnson inherited a Democratic majority in both houses, and actually lost ground to Republicans in the South after the Act was passed.”

Of course he lost ground after the Civil Rights Act was passed. That’s what “we have lost the South for a generation” was about. But he didn’t simply inherit a Democratic majority: LBJ was supposed to have been the most effective Senate majority leader in history (before he became Vice President) building up the ability to convince other legislators to do his bidding. When the Civil Rights Act was being voted on, Republicans used the same obstructive tactics that they use now. He used his knowledge of the process to overcome various blocks, then finally (quoting from his wiki page):

In the Senate, since the tax bill had passed three days earlier, the anti-civil-rights senators were left with the filibuster as their only remaining tool. Overcoming the filibuster required the support of over twenty Republicans, who were growing less supportive due to the fact that their party was about to nominate for president a candidate who opposed the bill. According to Caro, it was ultimately Johnson’s ability to convince Republican leader Everett Dirksen to support the bill that amassed the necessary Republican votes to overcome the filibuster

So some pundits might have said that LBJ needed to be more “leadery”, and some might have said that passing the bill was impossible, and both were wrong. LBJ had developed, over his career, specific ways of employing his power as a politician, and in the crisis about something that he actually cared about passing (for whatever reason) he was able to use them effectively. That’s one of the things that being a successful Presidential level politician is about.

When pundits talk about how a President should get things done, they tend to rely on mechanical repetition of a few things that fit their worldview: “why doesn’t Obama just talk to the GOP leaders like LBJ talked to Dirksen”? Clearly that’s not going to work. But what if Obama, rather than tossing out his best-at-the-time ground game voting software once it was of no direct use to him, had used it to intervene in primaries all over the country in favor of less radical GOPers and further-left Democrats, piling up favors from people he’d gotten into office that he could call on (and fear of what might happen in next election)? The U.S. Presidency allows a huge range of actions and the President is generally pretty much the head of the party as well, so they’re only helpless if they want to be or if they’re incompetent.

johnnybutter @ 44, fair enough.

Look, that’s nonsense. There’s no way that we have a less polarized electorate than in 1964, and while I’ve tossed out some ideas here just to show that ideas are possible, it’s not my responsibility as an Internet commenter to come up with a workable game plan for the President. I don’t even know what you could mean by structural barriers that more-or-less ensure a Republican majority in the House, given that in his first term, Obama had a Democratic majority in the House. I think that you’re basically making excuses, and given that Obama is a lame duck, it’s not even that important any more.

Obama isn’t going to do anything, and there are limits to how much mass movements can accomplish without politicians at the top being willing to support them. I predict that the lasting effect of this massacre is going to be, sadly, nonexistent. There will just be another massacre a few months later and people will repeat all the same rhetoric. That rhetoric includes both everything that the GOP is saying *as well as* the kinds of things that Layman above is saying: all the justifications for why nothing can be done by anyone with actual power and it’s up to us.

“14 times in his Presidency Mr. Obama has addressed the nation about a mass shooting”

Whoa.

I’m aware of that, temp, but something is lacking in the phrase “more-or-less ensure” when the situation that is supposed to be more-or-less ensured against happened in the last few years.

Back when I was a liberal, I used to think that really one of the major things that ordinary members of the electorate could do was hold their elected leaders responsible for their performance. Now it appears that everyone is an expert and that expertise consists of explaining why we can’t expect anything.

“I’m with Rich on this – the President has done a poor job of even attempting to build consensus. 14 times in his Presidency Mr. Obama has addressed the nation about a mass shooting and on none of these occassions has he proposed any legislation (Sandy Hook produced a few house and senate led proposals but that’s it).”

This is simply false.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/01/16/us/obama-gun-control-proposal.html?_r=0

Again, that’s nonsense. “Name the 17 Republican members he can effectively bribe or threaten” means that you’re taking a snapshot of politics and insisting that a solution be found with no preparation. Obama has had two terms to work towards credible bribes or threats. If he hasn’t dome that work — including the time when, once again, the Democrats had control of both the Senate and the House — then you can’t come in at the last minute and say “Turn this around.” When LBJ talked to Dirksen, he relied on levers of power he’d spent more than a decade building.

Guns are a very high priority for the 2nd Amendment crowd, and a very low priority for the Gun Control crowd. That includes the people here. Trader Joe @48 is right: if you want to get something, you have to give something up. You aren’t going to get your way on every issue across the board. The Democrats most associated with gun control – the likes of Bloomberg and Cuomo – are anathema around here, and you won’t vote for pro-gun-control Republicans. Because you prioritise other issues. Meanwhile the 2nd Amendment crowd really will vote and donate in light of a candidate’s positions on guns, so although they aren’t the majority, they get their way. It kinda looks like the system “working,” in the sense of preference-intensity.

I think Obama is right. Yes, maybe something along Rich Puchalsky’s notion is possible, but why should Obama try when the pro-gun-control voters will provide no reward for taking their side, and no punishment for not doing so? Particularly when their opponents will do so. And if he did try, why should any other politician go along with him in those circumstances? But if people who support gun control make it the #1 or #2 issue when they cast their votes, then politicians will take note, and some political entrepreneur may well come along. Now, I’m not saying that it should necessarily be the most important issue. If you care more about healthcare, and policing, and the economy, and foreign policy, and unionisation, and the TPP, and reproductive rights, and whatever else, then I’m not saying you’re wrong. But you can’t then be surprised when political leaders aren’t willing to go out on a limb for what you yourself view as the 732nd most important issue.

@55 Layman
I recant…that was the post Sandy Hook legislation (which was December 2012 – your post references January 2013 so right near start of post-Christmas session) I referred to in my comment which I attributed to House and Senate efforts, not the White House. I however stand by my comment that he did nothing to broker passage of that legislation despite having an incredibly powerful moment available with which to force a vote.

I would also note that prior to Sandy Hook, there had been 15 previous multi-death shootings in 2012 alone (Aurora theater most prominent, but 14 more as listed here:
http://www.thenation.com/blog/171774/fifteen-us-mass-shootings-happened-2012-84-dead#

He also failed to propose legislation after DEMOCRAT representative Gabby Giffords was nearly killed and 6 others were killed in 2011.

The point being, yes, I misrembered who initiated the 2013 gun control bill, but there is no way you can begin to suggest the President has been on top of this despite, unfortunately and tragically, multiple opportunities to take anything resembling strong action.

Lee A. Arnold 06.22.15 at 3:05 pm @ 58 —
The rate of firearms homicide has been going down since 1993, when it was 7.0 per 100,000. In 2013 the figure was 3.5; appears to be declining slowly. It seems unlikely to increase soon, anyway. However, you may be referring to the number of massacres, currently an exciting but loosely defined category of event. While they set off the most commentary, they are statistically a not very significant form of firearms homicide and it seems hard to predict whether they will increase or decline in the immediate future.

“which Republicans would support it?”

None.

Corey is right, I think, to frame the context for these atrocities as he has here. See also Paul Krugman’s op-ed today in the NYT. Although far too anodyne in tone for my tastes, Krugman’s analysis, like Corey’s, does help make what we’d prefer to remain silent about an unavoidable part of the conversation, namely that the Civil War never really ended.

A majority of white people in the North may have seen slavery as an abomination, but they were never comfortable with the idea that black people were people like themselves, and therefore entitled to live unmolested where and how they chose. This white ambivalence, exploited as it has been by the Republican Party in recent decades, remains the mother of all wedge issues, just it was in the 1850s.

By any means necessary was never my favorite slogan, largely because I believed that it underestimated the savagery that it invited from white people, but I’ve never doubted that it was the most succinct expression possible of what justice actually demands of us.

“The problem is not the ease of the killing, it is the willingness to kill in the first place. ”

It is at the least PART of the problem. This maniac would not have been able to kill 9 people with a knife or a club.

MPAVictoria 69
Your statement has an interesting subtext that nine lives taken through hatred one at a time through non-gun means are somehow less of a concern or are less of a tragedy than nine taken all at once with a gun. If you would care to elaborate on that?

The Lin hammer murders in 2009 (5 dead) or the Cairns stabbings in 2014 (8 dead) would be a counterpoint about crazy people with knives or clubs. It merely changed the victim selection and preparation by the murderer, not the act itself.

Both of the above paragraphs return to the “it’s acceptable if they have to break a sweat” approach some people seem to prefer for dealing with the problem. It strikes me much the same as magazine limits, which are “screw the first ten people, we just want to give the eleventh a head start.” Insert whatever arbitrary non-zero value your state or country has and it still sounds equally callous.

Layman: “Very well, name the 218 votes from any party that you believe could be had for a gun control measure in any Congress Obama has faced. Include the Congress elected in 2008, if you like.”

The 110th Congress had a Democratic majority of between 231-236 votes during the course of the Congress. Out of those, Obama could not say “OK I want a party line vote” and get 218 of them? Ridiculous. Learned helplessness is a sad thing.

‘The 110th Congress had a Democratic majority of between 231-236 votes during the course of the Congress. Out of those, Obama could not say “OK I want a party line vote” and get 218 of them? Ridiculous. Learned helplessness is a sad thing.’

Your insistence that it is so doesn’t make it so, and your reluctance to name the votes makes it seem likely to me that you don’t have any idea whether this is possible or not. The best I can make of this argument is something like this:

1) Gun violence happens
2) Obama leads, using Real Leadership
3) ?
4) Gun control!

I’m asking about (3).

Gun violence needs to be seen in total, not as the NRA would have us view it. It means roughly 33,000 deaths a year, now. Most of them preventable. It includes suicides and accidents. The NRA doesn’t want us to think of either.

They also don’t want us to know that owning guns radically increases the chance of homicide, accident or suicide in the home, and that when carried on the street, they also increase the likelihood of a violent end for the carrier.

My own preference would be to radically limit firepower, which wouldn’t go against the 2nd amendment in the slightest. Limit guns to internal chambers only, to guns that must be hand-loaded, with a max of six bullets, total. No detachable ammo containers of any kind. No automatic loading mechanisms. Six bullets max, which need your fingers to put them in the chambers.

To me, this would eliminate most mass shootings. It, of course, wouldn’t stop them all. But the idea the NRA depends upon the most as that it is supposedly useless to have any gun restrictions if they don’t solve all gun violence. The idea they push, endlessly, is if a particular law isn’t absolutely successful in stopping all killings, it shouldn’t be considered.

This is deeply pernicious as a concept, but one that our elected officials seem to have bought into as well. In reality, if even one life is saved, it’s worth it. And every American should be able to see that it is. How can anyone legitimately justify this stance, for instance:

“Well, my ability to have the widest possible consumer selection outweighs saving anyone’s life.”

It’s like saying “I refuse to give up my access to a hundred different colors for my Iphone, even though this trade off would save a life.”

Who thought that having a majority of the legislature of the same party as the President is what’s needed to get anything done? “Getting a legislative majority”: that’s an Underpants Gnome plan right there. Clearly we haven’t done the job that only we can do unless we provide a super-duper-majority. And no, I am not going to name 218 names from 2008 for you.

To get back to the thread: as CR writes, I’m skeptical that gun control is even what’s primarily needed here. If you look at the agenda of Black Lives Matter, it’s not about gun control. It’s about, among other things, “a decrease in law-enforcement spending at the local, state and federal levels and a reinvestment of that budgeted money into the black communities most devastated by poverty in order to create jobs, housing and schools.”

Perhaps the next loony killer will have a Barrett M82 0.5″ sniper rifle, which can be legally acquired in all but three US states. The bullet goes through a house at a range of a mile. Its mass presumably makes the aim much less susceptible to wind.

Against this gun in the hands of a skilled rifleman, there is essentially no defence: you cannot guard a 1,000-yard perimeter. And perhaps the targets will be politicians, or the aircraft and helicopters they travel in. They should be worried. During the retreat to Corunna in 1809, Rifleman Plunkett of the 95th killed the French General Colbert at a range of 600 yards, using an ancestor of the Barrett, the 0.6″ muzzle-loading flintlock Baker rifle. He then shot Colbert’s aide-de-camp when he came to the rescue.

There are no comprehensive US federal regulations on ammunition, so a gunman would not be greatly inhibited on that score. There is a federal ban on the sale or possession of armour-piercing ammunition like the the Norwegian Raufoss round, designed to destroy lightly armoured vehicles, equipments, and aircraft. (Terrible wimps those Norwegians.) Many gun nuts are skilled enough to make their own ammunition, so it would be imprudent to assume that a gunman would be deprived of any armour-piercing or incendiary capability.

A gun can be a weapon of terrorists. Rich terrorists: this one costs $12,000. So that’s all right then.

massacres..[are].. exciting but loosely defined category of event. While they set off the most commentary, they are statistically a not very significant form of firearms homicide and it seems hard to predict whether they will increase or decline in the immediate future.

That they set off the most ‘commentary’ is kind of the point. That they are statistically meaningless is beside that point. I don’t know if their frequency will increase or not, but it has increased recently even as overall gun related crime rates have gone down. Modern terrorism is usually not about *statistical* import.

“Your statement about mass killings not being possible with simple melee weapons was simply lazy assumption making, since I found the two results listed with a Google search on “Australia” and “mass killings”.”

Or maybe you are just being stupid?

I recognize Shamash’s type. They insert themselves into any conversation about guns and play the devils advocate until their opponents are exhausted. Wait for arguments involving backyard pools and cars next.

After a 1996 Mass Shooting, Australia Enacted Strict Gun Laws. It Hasn’t Had a Similar Massacre Since.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/2012/12/16/gun_control_after_connecticut_shooting_could_australia_s_laws_provide_a.html

No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
http://www.theonion.com/article/no-way-to-prevent-this-says-only-nation-where-this-36131

Layman: “Ok, but to be clear, you should be talking about 2009 and the 111th Congress. And, in that Congress, 34 Democrats voted against the final version of the Affordable Care Act. Apparently majorities are not what they’re cracked up to be.”

All right, I looked up the 11th Congress. The Democratic majority varied from 253-258. Even chopping ~30 Democrats off of that you still get 218. And please stop with the passive phrasing like “majorities are not what they’re cracked up to be.” One of the functions of party leaders is to make sure that party members vote along with the party on important votes. If they can’t do this, it isn’t “majorities are not what they’re cracked up to be”, it’s “we’re got a weak political leader”. Or more to the point, we’ve got a political leader who really doesn’t care about this agenda: who is currently devoting what’s left of his political power to getting a trade deal passed.

If “let’s get a 250+ majority in the House and the Presidency and the Senate” is classed as Underpants Gnome planning … then why should anyone participate in this system? It’s clearly fixed, and the outcomes that we want are unattainable within it. *Or* you could say what’s obvious: that we have a weak President who doesn’t care about anything resembling a left agenda in any case. But people don’t want to say that because …. ?

Brett,

Who’s after any amendment in this case?

See, that’s yet another part of the Big Lie conservatives cling to and propagate.

It is fully within the bounds of the 2nd amendment as it is written to severely restrict the type of weapon and its usage. It wasn’t until Heller that the Supreme Court even viewed it as an individual, versus a collective right, and even in Heller, Scalia, a rabid gun nut, said restrictions on lethality were perfectly reasonable under the law.

Gun nuts have invented and radically inflated the extent of this “right,” far beyond the written page, common sense or any connection with reality. It doesn’t pre-exist in nature and has always been subject to governmental boundaries and interventions. And, as written, it doesn’t say a thing about any protections regarding actually firing the damned things, and bullets aren’t mentioned at all.

All it says is that Americans have the right to “keep and bear.” Which, literally means you have the right to own and carry them in your person. There are no restrictions, implied or stated, on limiting the type of weapon, their numbers, their lethality or their usage. None.

Plume your next argument is terrible. Apply that reasoning to other amendments and we’d lose the first amendment entirely “it doesn’t say anything about typing or ink or voice recordings” and how about those abortion protections. Could you quote that section for me so we can analyze it?

Sebastian H @95,

Please come up with a more original objection. It’s nonsense to compare this with the First Amendment. That is an amendment regarding, among other things, free expression. It’s not a protection when it comes to possessing an external, inanimate object. The thing being protected is you, your voice, etc. etc. Not the ownership of a deadly piece of metal. Which is why it’s easily the most absurd of all the amendments, completely unnecessary and radically out of place when compared with the rest of the BOR.

Advancements in communication technologies aren’t in the same universe as advancements in the lethality of deadly pieces of metal. Unless you want to say that the purpose of the 2nd is to ensure a permanent accord with ever increasing ability to kill greater and greater numbers of people, I would think this would be obvious, even to a conservative.

I’ll take the bait, and assert sincerely that I don’t accept the moral “right” to own a gun in a modern civilized society.

Not that they shouldn’t exist period, but should IMO be highly regulated privilege and restricted to those who demonstrate both a reasonable need and maturity and level of responsibility to handle one.

Of course this isn’t going to happen soon, but I think there are massive political benefits to simply having the discussion, with forcing the gun nuts to defend their position.

A lot of the comments about Obama are just so much Green Lanternism.

The mood of fear and paranoia about crime in America is the end product of literally decades of propaganda, starting with very real rise in crime in the late 60’s and 70’s, to the cynical purveyors of fear in the media (if it bleeds it leads) to those profiting handsomely from it.

This is why I referenced the “liturgy of security” above- it was us who terrified ourselves into this state- the urban legends that circulate endlessly about the horrors lurking in every playground, the savage violence of the urban wasteland, the way TheseKidsToday are waist deep in filth and depravity.

I never let these go unchallenged- I work in downtown Los Angeles and walk the streets daily at lunchtime, and have never once felt fear. I constantly challenge people I know about open carry- who needs a gun, and why?

Its the national conversation, the surrounding meme that needs to be changed, from one rooted in the 1970’s era Scorsese vision of the urban landscape to something more resembling reality.

‘And please stop with the passive phrasing like “majorities are not what they’re cracked up to be.”’

It’s entirely to my point. You think a Democratic majority should be sufficient for any President to get whatever legislation he or she wants; while I think that’s unlikely. On my side, I can point to dissenting votes from Democrats on what are certainly less controversial measures. On your side, you can point to your magnificently gruff exterior, but not to the Democrats who would cast a vote for stricter gun laws. Pfui.

LWA,

Good points. It also makes it harder for gun nuts to make their case. On the one hand, they’re telling us gun homicides are going down. On the other, they’re telling us they need unlimited access to unlimited numbers of guns with no restrictions on lethality.

If there is less to fear from guns, why do they feel the need to buy more and more of them, and more and more powerful guns?

In America, the overall percentage of gun ownership is declining. But existing ownership buys more weaponry than ever before. It would seem their own propaganda is at odds with itself. Their own call for the rest of us to relax seems to be matched with greater levels of their own paranoia.

Republicans tend to create their own reality. They make their own Overton Window, and move it in their direction despite the faint complaints from liberals.

Democrats, OTOH, sit in fear of their own shadows, and claim that they don’t have the votes before they’ve even tried to win those votes.

This includes their liberal supporters outside DC. I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard them say that they couldn’t do Single Payer because they didn’t have the votes. But they didn’t get the votes because they didn’t even bother trying to win them from the undecided or the fearful. And, beyond that, as long as they’re stuck in the mode of needing a sure thing before they ever act, they’ll never act, because there aren’t sure things in politics. Well, except that if you don’t act, you guarantee the status quo or worse.

Movement conservatives learned long ago to take the long view. Suffer loss after loss while still passionately pushing for what they want, wrong-headed as it always is. They kept pushing and eventually they started winning. Eventually, the Dems starting seeing the Republican line as the starting point. But none of that happens if the Republicans had taken the Democrats’ view of things. We’re still in another entirely different “Washington Consensus” if the Republicans had acted like present-day Democrats back in the 1960s and 1970s.

In short, even if there was no chance to get gun control, or single payer, etc. etc. the Dems needed to push for it vigorously, ferociously, passionately and relentlessly, if for no other reason than to set the table for an eventual win.

Doing nothing guarantees endless losses.

Layman,

As far as actually passing a bill, tragically you are right. But as far as making your case, in a very loud, passionate and relentless way, majority or no majority, the Dems should do so.

That’s the only way to get progressive legislation passed at some point down the line.

The Civil Rights Act, for example, didn’t come ready made. They didn’t have the votes for that, either. They had to bust their butts to get them, and it took decades. As long as the Dems decide not to fight at all, they don’t even create the ground for the long path toward that legislation. There isn’t even a starting point for the long march, etc. etc. It never starts.

Someone suggested up thread (perhaps unintentionally) that Australia may have had similar rates of gun related violence to the USA before our gun control legislation in the 1990s. I don’t think that’s correct. Quality statistics are hard to come by but from what I’ve seen it looks as though the USA has for a long time (at least 50 years and probably longer) had higher rates of gun violence than most comparable countries.

The effect of our (Australian) legislation has been hard to measure but certainly there seems to have been a real decline in public massacres of the sort we are discussing here (as the Slate article linked above discusses). It’s hard to prove causation but there are some factors that seem to support it, particularly that perpetrators of mass killings seem to be often young disaffected men, often loners and/or with psychological problems or mental illness. It seems likely that gun control would restrict their access to guns (as compared to say criminal gangs and networks).

From an observer’s point of view I think some things to think about in the USA are:
Cultural belief in violence, especially guns, as the solution to problems
Ready access to guns
Very high rates of inequality
Belief in Americans as some sort of special people, god’s elect
Racism, history of slavery, history of white supremacy movement

I also think that patriarchy plays a large part in all this, but that’s a more general observation, rather than US specific, perhaps. I will repeat it though, it needs to be said.

Several of those issues are linked to your founding documents so I guess they require real national soul searching.

Rich’s attempts to turn this into an ‘how bad is President Obama’ discussion are unbelievable. I think even he is beginning to recognise that.

Layman,

There’s strength in numbers. Not asking for a savior. Not asking for a “leader.” I’m saying every Dem who actually thinks we should have gun safety legislation needs to stand up, stop being a coward, and speak out. Together. At the same time. From the rooftops without stopping. Shame the people who block this legislation. Shame them. All they have to do is present reality. Unlike the people opposed to this, they don’t have to make shit up.

The truth is on their side, as is a majority of this country. They just need backbone.

“Advancements in communication technologies aren’t in the same universe as advancements in the lethality of deadly pieces of metal. ”

You might want to talk to the internet overlords of China about that. But by all means, if you want Democrats to have a serious chance of losing the White House, push to try to seriously curtail gun ownership.

Thanks for the reminder of how hopelessly annoying talking about Obama on the internet is. (For what it’s worth, not much I know, I think Rich Puchalsky’s right, in the main. I don’t quite get the resistance from otherwise reasonable commenters.)

js: “I don’t quite get the resistance from otherwise reasonable commenters.”

I do. Let’s review what we apparently all agree on:

1. There will in fact be no effective political response to this massacre.
2. Since 2011, according to the link provided by Lee Arnold above, the U.S. has averaged a massacre every 64 days. So there will probably be another one in a couple of months.
3. Everyone pretty much knows the major factors underlying why these massacres occur. No one is particularly doing anything about those factors.
4. There is every reason to believe that our system is locked against doing anything, so there will be no response to the next massacre, and the one after that, etc.

Eventually something in the system will change. Who knows what? Everyone “knows” that political leadership is impossible, so we’re left with external factors. Cultural changes? Environmental changes? As with all of neoliberalism, it can’t possibly be anything under human control: if it’s not the market, then it’s just something with have to live with (or die with) until it changes by itself.

@ 123
And if you’re trying to suggest that I’m criticising your position because I’m a neo-liberal, I’d suggest you’ve lost the plot.

Part of the reason for Democratic reluctance to be seen as a leader, is fear of true political retaliation. There is always a special effort by certain national conservative organizations to select and target a small number of highly visible enemies. So funding spigots targeting a few select local races will be opened up, and the attack adds will flow. The fear of being put onto this list is what gives D politicians pause. Obviously they can’t target all Democrats in this way, just a select handful, so the response needs to be coordinated so that the odds of any individual politician being on the special enemies list is small. As long as there is no coordination, then narrow minded local political considerations will dominate.

“Eventually something in the system will change. Who knows what?”

We’ll get changes in gun laws and their legal viability when public opinion on the matter demands it. Talking about it is a way to shift opinion, though as methods go it is painfully slow. It does, however, have the virtue of working. There’s a reason the courts opened the door to gay marriage – the Constitution hasn’t changed, but attitudes have, and sufficiently so as to shame justices to abandon fear or prejudice. It seems to me that took a generation or more of effort. Every single substantial change has happened more or less the same way.

“Why should black people get special treatment and government hand-outs? If they want a better life they should by-god go out and work for it.”

There is certainly a prevailing myth about the ‘extra special welfare’ which is only given to black people. As Krugman noted in his column yesterday, citing Alesina & Co, the desire to deny any social safety benefits to minorities seems to be the driver behind the very poor US social safety net. Conservatives see this racism, which aligns with their own goals for a diminished state, and so they make common cause, as they have for some 4 decades or more now. Thus Reagan’s overtly racist language about ‘young bucks’ and ‘welfare queens’ buying t-bones with food stamps.

“So I think it’s questionable whether we know why massacres occur.”

I think that this article is pretty convincing: Clues to Mass Rampage Killers: Deep Backstage, Hidden Arsenal, Clandestine Excitement.

Actually, there is not now, and has not been since ~2008, a consistent majority for tougher gun laws.

There was such a majority in the past and, in fact, we got tougher gun laws as a result. The Brady bill comes to mind, as does the 90s era assault weapons ban.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx

Layman @135,

From your link, with its very general questions:

Skimming the part on gun sales, it looks like the “more strict” tops “less strict” by a wide margin in every instance, and usually tops the “keep the same” columns.

Further down, the “dissatisfied, more strict” column exceeds the “dissatisfied, less strict” column, consistently.

When asked about the reasons for massacres, “easy access to guns” is considered to be a “great deal” of the problem by a plurality. The only thing that tops it is the “mental health” category.

Random background checks gets 83% and 91% approval.

Reinstating the ban on assault weapons gets 56% and 60%

Limiting the number of rounds to 10 gets a majority. Another related question, worded as an actual ban, gets 62%.

Etc. etc.

The majorities are there, Layman. And given that they fluctuate, and people are generally open to persuasion with new facts on the table, those majorities can be strengthened, and pluralities turned into majorities.

Plume,

Those are interesting numbers, because it’s the background checks that will affect most people, in reality, when they or someone they know can’t get a hunting license or buy a gun as a Christmas present because of the background check and other administrative rules, and maybe a past conviction for a minor offense. Either people are seeing “background check” and thinking vaguely “keep bad guys from getting guns,” thinking no one would ever assume they’re the bad guy, or some other reason is making lots of people reject the assault weapon ban. Or hunters and recreational shooters are a smaller group than I thought.

I don’t hunt myself but I’m not quite prepared to ban it, and we do rely on it for wildlife control at present.

The wish to resist a tyrannical government, supposed to be on the horizon imminently, is certainly a thing, but I think it’s a minority. I had in mind Supreme Court decisions, to be honest, as being more likely.

bianca,

Fair enough. I agree your point is more relevant.

But the Supremes have been dominated by far right ideologues for some time now. I don’t think it’s impossible that a different court would arrive at nearly diametrically opposite rulings. And I hope that is the case. Soon.

Plume, your methodology is interesting. I’m not sure I fully understand it though. Maybe you could explain it to me by applying it to abortion. You seem to use a very aggressive textual analysis to prove that the Constitution protects the right to bear ‘arms’ but not to have bullets. Does a similar concept apply to the textual basis for abortion rights in the US such that there might be a right to ‘abortion’ (I’m not sure which Amendment that is in, so I may need help finding it) but no right to have outside doctors perform them? Or no right to have surgical instruments used?

Your polling analysis on gun control is also interesting. According to the Gallup summary of the last 20 years of abortion polling here we learn that well over 60% of people think that abortion should generally be illegal in the second three months of pregnancy. And that has been steady for 20 years. We learn that well over 80% of people think that abortion should generally be illegal in the last three months of pregnancy over the same time period.

About 70% of people approve of a law requiring a 24 waiting period for abortions–fewer than people who believe we should have a 24 hour waiting period for guns.

87% of people approve of a law requiring doctors to inform patients about possible risks of abortion before performing the procedure.

86%+ approve of a law requiring doctors to inform patients about alternatives to abortion before performing the procedure.

60%+ believe that abortions should be illegal if the reason for it is that the woman or family cannot afford to raise the child.

Nearly all of these are well above the opinions you cite on gun control. Does your methodological analysis apply to abortion as a Constitutional right?

Sebastian H @ 145

One difference with abortion is that there actually are mass-membership organizations contesting the issue, as well as creating and disseminating propaganda campaigns, alongside legislative and judicial strategies. The anti-abortion side is smaller, but arguably more organized. There’s no business lobby that I am aware of, and anti-abortion groups actively and ruthlessly campaign to prevent one from forming.

Bruce @146,

Well said, and I agree with you 100%.

When I said “so many Americans,” I was not suggesting a majority. But that’s a minor quibble, etc.

Sebastian H @145,

Not sure why you want to make abortion some kind of comparative here. But it is very common whenever conservatives discuss gun safety issues. They also tend to bring in car accidents, which is puzzling as well. But that’s another story.

You’ll note that there are clear majorities of Americans who believe abortion should be legal. The percentages you cite are for some restrictions regarding time frames. This would track well with my view that there is no absolute freedom from any restrictions whatsoever when it comes to guns, which is typically the position I run into when I discuss the issue with NRA folks and followers. That any restriction goes against the 2nd amendment, and this is clearly a terrible misreading of that amendment and not at all a sane vision for society.

My own view about abortion is that it’s a woman’s choice, but the fact there are majorities who believe some restrictions to this apply really doesn’t make your case. It makes mine.

Absolute license to do anything you want is the general position of the gun nut crowd. They state, over and over again, that it goes against their “rights” to have any restrictions imposed on them, of any kind, and more than a few of them issue death threats to politicians and media personnel who suggest even minor changes. This can cause several different reactions.

One might be to equal their absolutism with talk of total bans — which no one in DC is calling for.
Another is to embarrass them with common sense, reasonable and quite legal changes to our laws.

The second choice is my own. But I find that this too is met with more absolutism on behalf of gun nuts, who claim something that is 100% false yet again. That these common sense changes go against their “rights.” They don’t. Their complaint rests on a truly insane vision of their “rights.”

BW: “It seems to me that the explanation is that the majority — the great commons — has little or no social or political organization to sustain a commitment to reason, while narrow and sociopathic business interests are able to focus resources and bring professional propagandists and operatives into play.”

In part, yes. But in part, what I was writing above is that “realism” is how neoliberalism colonizes left-liberalism.

Consider how, traditionally, the representative bargain was supposed to work in the U.S. People who you elected weren’t supposed to simply “represent”. They were supposed to be political entrepreneurs of sorts — prominent legislators and executives were supposed to actively work out solutions in their party’s interest, not merely vote Yes or No or mechanically carry out policy that someone else set. When you only voted for someone rather than taking action on your own behalf, you were supposed to be passing on the ability for action, your negligible individual power multiplied by all of those votes. The prominent politician’s responsibility was to do something, or if they couldn’t, to admit that to the people and step aside.

Now consider that active, involved members of the public with a wide interest in the public good are reduced to retailing explanations of why no action is possible. There should immediately be a similarity detectable here between this and economics, shouldn’t there? No action is possible. The market has settled on some kind of solution, and there are *structural* limits that explain why we can’t really do anything else. It would be a bad idea to even try, because the market solution is at least a solution — it is the Lesser Evil — and who knows what we’d get if we demanded something more and tried to interfere.

Isn’t there something in all this about a society based – to a much greater extent than other advanced nations – on the precepts of liberalism and the defence of property? It was, after all, Adam Smith who saw the fundamental role of the state as being to enable a property owner “to sleep a single night in security” surrounded by “unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease”. The natural longer-term consequence of this is a political system which views the whole of life in terms of possessions, including rights, privileges, status, history and culture; and politics itself as a struggle between groups to maximize their holdings of such possessions at the expense of others. It logically follows, in this zero-sum world, that you must always be on guard against those trying to take your “possessions” away, and be ready to respond with violence. Societies with a more collectivist ethic are thus in general less violent.

Sebastian H @156,

The 91% support was for background checks. They still failed to get that passed.

There is no case of 60% to 70% support for GOP-led restrictions and impositions, such as forced ___ probes, forcing women to see ultra-sound images of the fetus prior to decision-making, radically increasing the governmental rules and regulations on clinics to make them all but impossible to remain open, etc. There is no majority support for any of that, nor is there majority support for GOP-led attempts at “personhood” laws (a la Mississippi) . . . or seeking to ban abortions even in cases of incest and rape.

I’ll try to find a link to a summary of all of this insanity from the right, and will post it later. Suffice it to say, you’re confusing support for some restrictions on when an abortion can happen with the draconian laws the GOP has either successfully imposed, or is trying to impose. And, ironically, they’re all Big Gubmint interventions.

David 06.23.15 at 7:29 pm @ 155 —
Some Latin American and African countries have a much higher rate of firearms homicide than the US. I don’t know where to find objective measures of their degree of collectivism. My informal impression is that Latin Americans at least are more community- and group-minded, more ‘collectivistic’ in that sense, than (US) Americans, but that’s just casual observation.
(http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list)

Plume @154 and elsewhere

I don’t disagree with your proposal about restricting gun magazines and the various other details you’ve suggested. That said, a significant operational challenge is collecting the couple-hundred million or so weapons that would fail your requirements (wherever they were exactly set).

No doubt a government buyback program would collect some portion of these, likely at great cost – but probably worth it. The balance of them would become black market and actually increase in value and also likely increasing the chance they would wind up in the hands of people who want them for criminal purposes rather than simply to collect them or for some perverse definition of safety.

Certainly making the effort is better than not and I wouldn’t rate it as a reason not to try to achieve some of the reform you suggest, that said, I think has at least a bit of merit in the genre of “if having a gun is criminal only criminals will have guns” and is a view likely to be harbored by a fence sitter who legitimately might want a hunting rifle or a simple personal protection weapon.

Rich Puchalsky @ 153: “realism” is how neoliberalism colonizes left-liberalism
. . . active, involved members of the public with a wide interest in the public good are reduced to retailing explanations of why no action is possible. There should immediately be a similarity detectable here between this and economics, shouldn’t there? No action is possible. The market has settled on some kind of solution, and there are *structural* limits that explain why we can’t really do anything else. It would be a bad idea to even try, because the market solution is at least a solution — it is the Lesser Evil — and who knows what we’d get if we demanded something more and tried to interfere.

You know the safety label: objects in the mirror are closer than they appear?

Many of the pundits we encounter in salient media — on op-ed pages and on teevee — function as mirrors. They provide opinion in the form of a political pose, which consumers are encouraged to mimic, without themselves building up a relevant epistemic foundation, in philosophy or political science or economics or sociology. The pundit himself probably does not know much about that upon which he opinionates — it’s more of a creative writing and acting task, to create an attractive (to some target audience) persona and craft arguments that prevail in soundbite form as a manner of a drama performed for an audience.

My point, regarding the absence of mass-membership organization, is that these “mirrors” (provided courtesy of networks of corporate media financed by corporate advertising) are not predominantly engaged as political entrepreneurs forming a mass-movement in a bid for accomplishment or power. Such entrepreneurial leaders have appeared in history, and they struggle to get right with their membership in a reflexive political process of engagement and learning. They can produce fairly sophisticated arguments and understandings, even when they are wrong, as Temperance did in its critique of alcohol’s role in society, or the Populists did in fighting contractionary monetary policy. Mono-maniacs, like Henry George, and difficult philosophers like Marx, can have profound impacts, when their ideas are mediated and propounded within well-organized social movements, where followers are led to think them through a bit. An Emma Goldman can be an effective conscience, freeing the minds of many otherwise complacent people.

Our mirrors, our retailers of opinion, are engaged in opinion as sleight of hand, in which, like a convex mirror, they present their audience of mimics with what seems to be the gain of a wider field of view, but at the cost of a pervasive, subliminal distortion.

No sophisticated argument is likely to emerge, if sophistication in measured, say, by standards of social science efficacy. If the argument is sophisticated, it might be psychologically sophisticated in the manner of Freudian hypnosis — a focus-group tested bumpersticker meant to sway the masses in 30 seconds or less. Nor is there a mass-movement with the discipline to punish a politician for deviation. The tightly run business lobby groups can do that. The public interest groups cannot.

Those neoliberal mirrors are often far more conservative than they appear. This is my perennial complaint about Paul Krugman, Brad DeLong or Scott Lemieux — they present themselves as relatively liberal, but after the cards are shuffled a few times, they pull out reactionary cards legitimating the establishment and its latest conservative horror show. There’s lots of concern trolling in their repertory, to keep the pretence, but the conclusions are rarely consistent with their purported concerns or coherent, and there’s lots anger and condescension when their hypocrisies are challenged from leftish conviction. Pundits with a different target audience, like the conservative Robert Samuelson or the soi disant moderate David Brooks provide a similar service in a similar intellectual sleight of hand, but with different cards in their deck.

You can see the difference between legitimating sentiment and poor reasoning as consistent with expert assessment (Krugman’s modus operandi) and the genuine thinking presented by a monomaniac like Bill Black, an expert on control fraud. The latter’s recent retrospective critique of Tony Blair’s rhetoric and political policy on financial regulation was genuinely informative. Krugman’s endorsements of Bernanke and Yellen have obscured far more than they reveal.

I don’t follow the politics and rhetoric of race or crime the way I follow economics. Ta-Nehisi Coates is the only writer on racial politics that I read semi-regularly, who makes much sense to me, and I could not place him in any kind of spectrum or say what his role is, in any larger context. I have no contact with what is going on with the under-30s on college campuses. So, it’s hard for me to keep this comment subtopic from going rogue, relative to the topic of the OP. So, I will just stop.

Collin Street 06.23.15 at 9:16 pm @ 163:
‘…Not to diminish people’s genuine fear, but mental-health treatment presents less problems for others.’

Surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment would have to be total and compulsory to fully suppress gun violence, especially of the sort Mr. Roof carried out — the Panopticon. You don’t see any problems with that?

“The balance of them would become black market and actually increase in value and also likely increasing the chance they would wind up in the hands of people who want them for criminal purposes rather than simply to collect them or for some perverse definition of safety.”

One hears this sort of thing all the time, and it certainly seems right. On the other hand, these mass murders are invariably carried out using weapons bought legally, and it is not entirely clear to me that these same people would commit these same acts in the absence of legal and easy access to weapons. Will teenage white suburban boys find illegal guns? I don’t know.

“My own suspicion is that even if it were possible to magically create a US without guns, the sorts of people who are now doing mass shootings would make bombs instead. ”

Perhaps. Bomb-making may seem easy, but it is infinitely harder than ponying up a few hundred dollars for a legal handgun; or than loading that gun, pointing, and squeezing the trigger.

Surveillance, diagnosis, and treatment would have to be total and compulsory to fully suppress gun violence, especially of the sort Mr. Roof carried out — the Panopticon. You don’t see any problems with that?

Where do you see me advocating that this would fully suppress gun violence? In general reasonable measures fail from time to time, because pushing stuff to the limit to prevent problem X entirely usually exacerbates problem Y.

Two points:
+ people don’t state the entirety of their position, only the parts where it differs from what other people are saying: one of the consequences of this is that there’s an implicit “within reasonable limits” hedge hanging over everything people say, that’s never stated because it’s never a point of disagreement.
+ people usually intend to say reasonably reasonable things; if there’s a variety of possible interpretations some of which would mean that the statement is stupid and others would mean that it isn’t, it’s very likely that the intended interpretation is one of the latter.

Anarcisse:

I wrote, quoted in its entirety.

It’s my hypothesis and position that poor risk-assessment in your desire to own a firearm is also likely to be reflected in poor risk-assessment in your use of said firearm: for the vast majority of people, not all of them but the vast majority, the desire to own a firearm for “personal protection” is indicative of their unsuitability for same.

Not to diminish people’s genuine fear, but mental-health treatment presents less problems for others.

Can you set out what in what I wrote lead you to conclude that I was talking about mass killers rather than gun-owners generally? The italicised passage I thought made my meaning reasonably clear.

Aren’t the continuously manufactured hundreds of millions of guns in the US somewhat like a growing non-replicating epidemic deadly virus that must be dealt with once it is recognized as the potential threat it is?

Problem one: the NRA and most conservative politicians refuse to recognize the existence of the virus and actively campaign against the perception there is an epidemic even if the virus does exist and occasionally kills here and there. If there is no disease or a significant public threat even if there are sporadic outbreaks in the case that it does exist, then no cure is needed. Indeed, the virus may be seen as itself a vaccine against a larger threat: totalitarianism. This is our major problem in the US.

Problem two: what if a public awareness of the virus and the epidemic becomes a troubling policy concern after a Sandy Hook or Charleston? What cures at the epidemiological level are available? Destruction of the non-replicating viruses individually? Nope, too many. Preventing transmission of the virus from non-threat (store sales to target shooters) to threat vectors (gifts, sales to Roof, Holmes, et al) by lawful inoculation? (Universal background checks including gun shows perhaps.) Well, see problem one for political justification of that, especially given the overwrought perception of the virus itself as freedom-vaccine. And even if there is public outcry for some lawful inoculation, the various transmission vector-paths are far too rich for any one or several such inoculations to have real effect–the treatment will be too weak to prevent the sheer number of individual viruses from passing through paths untreated by the inoculations (private gifts, stolen guns, inherited weapons, drug trades, etc.) . And of course, such inoculations are perceived to defeat the patriotic role of the virus as itself a freedom-vaccine.

I own a S&W bull-barrel target pistol, though I refuse to join the NRA or even shoot at an NRA-affiliated range (and I am a very good shot BTW, though I will not hunt with any weapon).

I have a virus that no one can take from me, and though I can destroy or surrender it to render its potential deadliness moot, I won’t because I think it won’t become deadly.

I have millions of companions in the US who think likewise, and I’ll be damned if I know how they will be convinced otherwise.

We gun-owners are complacent about the viruses we individually have. They haven’t killed us (unless they have–in which case we are silent unless stats speak for those-us). Why should we worry?

But there’s one thing we forget–we are mortal. This virus outlives us whether it kills us or something else does. It does not die with us–but someone else can certainly be killed by it long after we are dead.

Some interesting data on FiveThirtyEight today about Southern racial attitudes and how they have evolved over the last 30-ish years. The data tracks a clear path of improvement, but obviously one which is much slower than many would wish for. The article also at least suggests that a lot of the improvement in attitude has come from a shift in views among the middle – the followers if you will, and that the racism that remains may be rather more entrenched.

Report is here:
http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/attitudes-toward-racism-and-inequality-are-shifting/

Best charts are about half way down the page.

Hey, I agree with Corey on something! Stop-and-frisk is about guns. One of the frustrating things about Alice Goffman’s On the Run was the lack of discussion that guns are available, but rare in a lot of these communities. The stop-and-frisk hits 10-20x the number of law abiding citizens. Even most people who carry illegally do so rarely.

Good community policing is a topic that comes around every 20 years, and since Mayor Giuliani isn’t running for President, that discussion may be ready again. Good police-community relationships are a necessary prequisite for racial justice and it is up to the police to change that, with support from politicians, schools, infrastructure, etc.

@177, 178:

Yes,

and

(without the spaces, obviously). And it works across paragraphs, tho for a long time it didn’t.

Look:

See?

I look at the Charleston shootings through another prism: the Charlie Hebdo massacre. Many differences obviously, but in any case I think illuminating. In the Charlie Hebdo instance, the French basically rose up en masse and associated themselves with the victims. This hasn’t happened in the U.S. It’s as if the white-black gulf is so wide in the U.S., white people can’t even think of saying something like, “We are Charleston”. (I have seen that slogan a bit, but a really small bit. If you Google in English, there are 10000 hits for “We are Chareston” compared to 100000 for the “We are Charlie,” and that’s in *English*.) I find that mildly depressing. The argument has devolved into, “It’s the racists” or “It’s the guns”. The attack on blacks is not being seen (except again in a few instances) as an attack on everyone. Again, I find this mildly depressing, and indeed part of the problem itself.

Dax @183,

That’s a very good point. Didn’t think of it that way before. In America, it’s still the case that “black lives don’t matter,” and I think that’s one of the huge reasons why we haven’t put the confederate issue to bed already. I don’t think it’s a stretch to compare the confederate past with the Nazis in Germany. They’ve certainly, as a nation, done a great deal to openly confront Nazism and denounce, en masse, anyone who defends it. America, especially in the South, still celebrates the confederacy.

In another sense, however, our confederate past is even worse. To be on the same footing, Germany would have had a civil war in which the Nazis lost, but Germany kept holding endless rallies in parts of that nation, celebrating key figures from the Nazi past, keeping Nazi symbols flying in certain provinces and townships, etc. etc. If you think about it, it’s absolutely despicable that America hasn’t done a Germany and shouted down any confederate celebrations long ago.

This Georgetown law professor, IMO, has the right idea, and the image is spot on:

From Business Insider