Monday, May 20, 2013
Some Preliminary Thoughts on Gun Control
GUN CONTROL HAS BEEN MUCH IN THE NEWS LATELY, and I thought I’d share some thoughts about it. If this post seems a bit muddled or indecisive, it’s not an accident — it reflects some real ambivalence I have about this.
Some of that ambivalence comes from the makeup of my extended family. Mom’s side of the family is primarily rural. Mom grew up in a small agricultural town, Arroyo Grande, on California’s Central Coast, in the 1930s. On Mom’s side of the family, a significant fraction of my aunts, uncles and cousins are farmers, dairymen, ranchers and so on; thus, on Mom’s side of the family, gunfire has benign associations — my Aunt Virginia and Uncle Leonard raised seven children; their three boys went deer hunting with their father at an early age, and they all remember fondly when they got their first buck. For people in their community (and in similar rural communities all across the United States) the opening day of deer season is a de facto holiday, with local shops closed and school out, since practically everyone in town heads into the hills with a rifle early that morning.
In short, when people in Mom’s and Aunt Virginia’s and Uncle Leonard’s community hear gunfire, it might provoke a smile and perhaps curiosity about whether the neighbor kid finally managed to bag a deer after a couple of luckless seasons.
My Dad’s side of the family is much more urban. Dad grew up in Chicago; his father was an immigrant from Ireland who worked his way up from a welder in the Chicago shipyards to being chief welding estimator by the time he retired in the 1960s. Gunfire was nowhere near as common as people think in Chicago in the 1930s (contra the impression created by a million gangster movies like “The Untouchables”), but if you did hear gunfire, it usually meant Something Had Gone Terribly Wrong. It meant murder — either attempted or accomplished.
I know that feeling. I’ve mentioned before that I spent my formative years in Richmond, so I feel a deep connection to that city. In the last 10 years, Richmond has suffered anywhere from 18 to almost 50 murders a year, the vast majority of which involved firearms of one sort or another. (By comparison, in the last 10 years, London, England in its worst year had 200 murders — four times Richmond’s worst year in the same time period. But London has approximately 80 times the population.) I never personally witnessed a murder when I lived in Richmond, but dear friends I had there have been claimed by that horrible crime, and I have comforted the survivors of those and other murders. So, in urban areas, guns and gunfire have very different associations and meanings than they do in more rural places.
And I think the urban/rural divide explains the bitter divisions that characterize the gun control debate in the United States. And what has become abundantly clear in recent weeks — if it wasn’t already — is that there is no easy solution.
The urban/rural divide goes back a long way in this country — all the way back to our founding, in fact. It was a factor in how the founders structured the government. The House of Representatives was heavily tilted in favor of the more populous states, since the number of representatives each state has is determined by that state’s population; California, for example, has more votes in Congress than all the other states from the Rockies to the Pacific combined. The Senate, however, is where rural states even the playing field: Every state gets two senators, whether its population numbers in the millions or it is small enough that its two senators played against each other in a high school championship game. My family background has members on both sides of the urban/rural divide, and that background has shown me that both sides in this debate are often talking past each other, with no attempt by either side to truly understand the position of the other.
All that said, let me say this: I think, on balance, this is one battle in which justice favors the urban states, but what I’m going to propose needs to take account of the needs and (reasonable) fears of both sides.
Speaking of fears, allow me a quick aside to address something I keep hearing from a certain small but significant subset of the pro-gun folks: that an armed citizenry is our best defense in the event our government becomes tyrannical. Let me to put this as succinctly and clearly as I can — and I say this as someone who served four years in the United States Army in a combat arms role and got a good, close look at the glittering array of death-dealing machinery that our tax dollars have bought huge piles of: If the people I see on TV talking about the “Tree of Liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” were to (yes, this is ridiculous, but stay with me...) actually succeed in beginning the Great Birther and Anti-Kenyan Rebellion of 2013, and the U.S. military were given free rein to use all that previously mentioned hardware to suppress the uprising, the result is beyond doubt. The rebels would be absolutely annihilated. I mean, seriously, guys. Your duck guns and deer rifles — heck, even .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles and home-made pipe bombs — would be up against the 82nd Airborne Division, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Air Force, armored divisions, cluster bombs, artillery, predator drones, B-52 raids, and so on. Capisce?
It’s time for all of us to learn: The best defense against tyranny is not an armed citizenry. It is an educated citizenry.
Anyway, back to my position on gun control: I think this is one where the rural states need to agree to some reasonable controls, for the benefit of their fellow citizens who suffer not just more or less regular massacres like Sandy Hook and Columbine, but also the less-talked-about but in its way more heartbreaking violence in places like Richmond and South-Central Los Angeles. I’ll have more on this in the second part of this series.
Some of that ambivalence comes from the makeup of my extended family. Mom’s side of the family is primarily rural. Mom grew up in a small agricultural town, Arroyo Grande, on California’s Central Coast, in the 1930s. On Mom’s side of the family, a significant fraction of my aunts, uncles and cousins are farmers, dairymen, ranchers and so on; thus, on Mom’s side of the family, gunfire has benign associations — my Aunt Virginia and Uncle Leonard raised seven children; their three boys went deer hunting with their father at an early age, and they all remember fondly when they got their first buck. For people in their community (and in similar rural communities all across the United States) the opening day of deer season is a de facto holiday, with local shops closed and school out, since practically everyone in town heads into the hills with a rifle early that morning.
In short, when people in Mom’s and Aunt Virginia’s and Uncle Leonard’s community hear gunfire, it might provoke a smile and perhaps curiosity about whether the neighbor kid finally managed to bag a deer after a couple of luckless seasons.
My Dad’s side of the family is much more urban. Dad grew up in Chicago; his father was an immigrant from Ireland who worked his way up from a welder in the Chicago shipyards to being chief welding estimator by the time he retired in the 1960s. Gunfire was nowhere near as common as people think in Chicago in the 1930s (contra the impression created by a million gangster movies like “The Untouchables”), but if you did hear gunfire, it usually meant Something Had Gone Terribly Wrong. It meant murder — either attempted or accomplished.
I know that feeling. I’ve mentioned before that I spent my formative years in Richmond, so I feel a deep connection to that city. In the last 10 years, Richmond has suffered anywhere from 18 to almost 50 murders a year, the vast majority of which involved firearms of one sort or another. (By comparison, in the last 10 years, London, England in its worst year had 200 murders — four times Richmond’s worst year in the same time period. But London has approximately 80 times the population.) I never personally witnessed a murder when I lived in Richmond, but dear friends I had there have been claimed by that horrible crime, and I have comforted the survivors of those and other murders. So, in urban areas, guns and gunfire have very different associations and meanings than they do in more rural places.
And I think the urban/rural divide explains the bitter divisions that characterize the gun control debate in the United States. And what has become abundantly clear in recent weeks — if it wasn’t already — is that there is no easy solution.
The urban/rural divide goes back a long way in this country — all the way back to our founding, in fact. It was a factor in how the founders structured the government. The House of Representatives was heavily tilted in favor of the more populous states, since the number of representatives each state has is determined by that state’s population; California, for example, has more votes in Congress than all the other states from the Rockies to the Pacific combined. The Senate, however, is where rural states even the playing field: Every state gets two senators, whether its population numbers in the millions or it is small enough that its two senators played against each other in a high school championship game. My family background has members on both sides of the urban/rural divide, and that background has shown me that both sides in this debate are often talking past each other, with no attempt by either side to truly understand the position of the other.
All that said, let me say this: I think, on balance, this is one battle in which justice favors the urban states, but what I’m going to propose needs to take account of the needs and (reasonable) fears of both sides.
Speaking of fears, allow me a quick aside to address something I keep hearing from a certain small but significant subset of the pro-gun folks: that an armed citizenry is our best defense in the event our government becomes tyrannical. Let me to put this as succinctly and clearly as I can — and I say this as someone who served four years in the United States Army in a combat arms role and got a good, close look at the glittering array of death-dealing machinery that our tax dollars have bought huge piles of: If the people I see on TV talking about the “Tree of Liberty being watered with the blood of tyrants” were to (yes, this is ridiculous, but stay with me...) actually succeed in beginning the Great Birther and Anti-Kenyan Rebellion of 2013, and the U.S. military were given free rein to use all that previously mentioned hardware to suppress the uprising, the result is beyond doubt. The rebels would be absolutely annihilated. I mean, seriously, guys. Your duck guns and deer rifles — heck, even .50 caliber Barrett sniper rifles and home-made pipe bombs — would be up against the 82nd Airborne Division, the U.S. Marine Corps, the Air Force, armored divisions, cluster bombs, artillery, predator drones, B-52 raids, and so on. Capisce?
It’s time for all of us to learn: The best defense against tyranny is not an armed citizenry. It is an educated citizenry.
Anyway, back to my position on gun control: I think this is one where the rural states need to agree to some reasonable controls, for the benefit of their fellow citizens who suffer not just more or less regular massacres like Sandy Hook and Columbine, but also the less-talked-about but in its way more heartbreaking violence in places like Richmond and South-Central Los Angeles. I’ll have more on this in the second part of this series.
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Last Thoughts on Sandy Hook
It is hard to be objective about such a crime, such a violation of the innocence of children.
My first reaction was that moral depravity on this scale is impossible to make sense of, because it is truly senseless. But, what if it is true that I just don’t want to attempt to make sense of it, because of where such an attempt might lead?
Don’t you and I owe it to those children to at least try?
What do these children’s deaths say to us?
Maybe it is the case that we are immersed in evil, and by failing to speak and act against it, we failed to protect these children.
Perhaps we all share in some way in the culpability for this event. Our civilization is saturated with propaganda blaring that Violence Solves Problems. Movies, television shows, popular novels and video games affirm this principle again and again and again, to the point that this glorification of violence is, in an odd way, invisible.
Maybe events like this, and the many other massacres that happen regularly in the United States, are trying to tell us to repent of empire, and the attendant violence by which it and all other empires throughout history have survived. I believe that a line – a fairly direct one – can be drawn from a civilization that glorifies and affirms the use of violence, and a disturbed individual that makes use of that glorification in a way not affirmed by that civilization.
“But how can you blame me for this horrible crime? I didn’t do anything,” you and I might object. That is precisely the problem. You and I didn’t do anything.
My first reaction was that moral depravity on this scale is impossible to make sense of, because it is truly senseless. But, what if it is true that I just don’t want to attempt to make sense of it, because of where such an attempt might lead?
Don’t you and I owe it to those children to at least try?
What do these children’s deaths say to us?
Maybe it is the case that we are immersed in evil, and by failing to speak and act against it, we failed to protect these children.
Perhaps we all share in some way in the culpability for this event. Our civilization is saturated with propaganda blaring that Violence Solves Problems. Movies, television shows, popular novels and video games affirm this principle again and again and again, to the point that this glorification of violence is, in an odd way, invisible.
Maybe events like this, and the many other massacres that happen regularly in the United States, are trying to tell us to repent of empire, and the attendant violence by which it and all other empires throughout history have survived. I believe that a line – a fairly direct one – can be drawn from a civilization that glorifies and affirms the use of violence, and a disturbed individual that makes use of that glorification in a way not affirmed by that civilization.
“But how can you blame me for this horrible crime? I didn’t do anything,” you and I might object. That is precisely the problem. You and I didn’t do anything.
Wednesday, April 18, 2012
Hump Day Video
This has always reminded me of San Francisco, somehow. The bustling yet light pace, Desmond's cool, nimble dexterity -- the casual sophistication.
Saturday, April 07, 2012
Commenter at Krugman's Blog Is Onto Something
Politicians do not grow underneath rocks; they emanate from communities, and if those communities behave in a general mediocre way, so do their politics.
Our broken politics, at heart, is not broken because of some venal and alien "Them" that is messing up our nice little society; it is an expression of a venal, selfish "us" that refuses to do our duty as citizens and insist that our government act in ways that reflect "the better angels of our nature," in Lincoln's immortal phrase.
Thursday, October 06, 2011
Sunday, October 02, 2011
Thursday, September 08, 2011
Idiot Elites
New England Brahmins: People who rape the world, and whose children think of themselves as Luminous and Enlightened Beings. Money is poison.
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
My All-Time Favorite "Scamming the scammers" story
Guy gets a typical 419 scammer email from an "exiled dictator" - "We need you to hide our millions, in exchange for a cut of the proceeds. [etc.]"
Guy responds, and after a few emails and calls (during which he keeps "forgetting" to give them his account and routing numbers), "discloses" to scammers that he wants to sell some stolen laptops in their country - they can keep 20% of the proceeds (they're like, "Oh Sure. We'll send you your 80% share, honest...") -- the only wrinkle is he doesn't have enough funds to pay for the shipping, so he will need them to pay shipping charges collect.
After hemming and hawing and guy threatening to walk, the scammers agree.
Guy then buys two used washing machines on craigslist for 20 or 30 bucks, removes the motors and guts, and then fills them to the very top with cement. Then he crates them up and ships them, air freight, to their country.
Hilarity and death threats ensue.
Guy responds, and after a few emails and calls (during which he keeps "forgetting" to give them his account and routing numbers), "discloses" to scammers that he wants to sell some stolen laptops in their country - they can keep 20% of the proceeds (they're like, "Oh Sure. We'll send you your 80% share, honest...") -- the only wrinkle is he doesn't have enough funds to pay for the shipping, so he will need them to pay shipping charges collect.
After hemming and hawing and guy threatening to walk, the scammers agree.
Guy then buys two used washing machines on craigslist for 20 or 30 bucks, removes the motors and guts, and then fills them to the very top with cement. Then he crates them up and ships them, air freight, to their country.
Hilarity and death threats ensue.
Monday, September 05, 2011
Krugman Gets It
Krugman (a hero of mine) on the "affinities" of the WSJ:
Maybe subscribers buy the paper for the reporting (although if you ask me, that’s been going downhill since the Murdoch takeover). But as far as I can tell, lots of people still take the editorial page’s pronouncements seriously, even though it seems likely that you could have made a lot of money by betting against whatever that page predicts.
[...]
I guess it’s an affinity thing. The WSJ editorial page comes across as the work of people who love the rich (unless they support liberal causes), hate liberals and the poor, and feel personally affronted by lucky duckies too poor to pay income taxes; and a significant number of well-heeled readers see this and say, “those are my kind of people!”
Sunday, September 04, 2011
Proposed Slogan for Obama's 2012 Re-election campaign:
"Vote for us: we'll make sure things will get worse more slowly than under a Republican President."
Saturday, September 03, 2011
Good Question
"Which Side Area You On?" by Florence Reese
Come all you poor workers, good news to you I’ll tell,
How the good old union has come in here to dwell.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
We’re starting our good battle, we know we’re sure to win.
Because we got the gun thugs lookin’ pretty thin.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
You go to Harlan County, there is no neutral there.
You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
They say they have to guard us to educate their child.
Their children live in luxury, our children almost wild.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
Gentlemen can you stand it, oh tell me how you can?
Will you be a gun thug or will you be a man?
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
My daddy was a miner, he’s now in the air and sun.
he'll be with you, fellow workers, till every battle’s won.
Which side are you on, which side are you on?
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