Knucklehead + Handgun = A Good Reason for Complete Strangers to Exercise Their God Given Right to Free Speech

Yet another knucklehead exercising his god given right to be one. I have written about guns and handguns and the death and destruction that trail more or less invariably in their wake repeatedly. If you want to hunt, fine. Go kill something (if you think you are able), then lock the gun up in the closet or someplace safe. If you want to collect something metallic and shiny, try coins; they are much less dangerous to you and your kids. If you want a cup of coffee leave the accessory to your manhood at home. Bring along your fancy Weber instead - just as useful for signalling true masculinity! All you are doing by pulling stunts like Matt Bottali (the aforementioned knucklehead) is demonstrating that you don't have anything like sufficient good judgment to be considered a responsible gun owner.

The Senate is Pathetic (2)

Yet another fine advert underscoring the idiocy of gun rights fundamentalists and their political minions in Congress. And, before critics bellow about the second amendment, let's recall all of the restrictions on first amendment rights - speech and assembly especially - that they willingly tolerate every single day. Rights are not absolute. Since it is important to leaven one's frustration and anger with humor, here is a terrific send-up of our intrepid leaders in the Senate.

The Senate is Pathetic

 

An appropriate advert given the craven behavior of these forty-five U.S. Senators this afternoon. You can find out about the banned book here.

Harry Belafonte on Guns, Artists and Radicalism

This is a remarkable statement not just about the matter of guns and their impact on the African American population, but about the role of leaders, and especially artists, in advocating radical thought and action. There is a report here at The Guardian.

Prove It! The Latest 'Birther' Angle

Why do I find this photo - actually, not the photo itself, but the political pressures to release it to the press - so thoroughly disturbing? You can read the context here at The Guardian.

I am not a shooter. I don't need to be one in order to appreciate the danger of firearms or to criticize 2nd Amendment fundamentalists. Likewise, I do not use, possess, or traffick in child pornography. I do not not need to have done so to appreciate the harm that it does or to criticize those who do use, possess or traffick in it. I am an absolutist on the second issue. But I am not an absolutist on gun control. Don't ask for a photograph of me shooting. Just take my word for it.

Newtown: What's the Big Deal?

You can find the interactive version of this graphic here at Slate. It represents deaths due to gun violence from the Newtown massacre through 28 December 2012. Note - lots and lots of dead kids since the big massacre. Only they were shot one at a time. Newtown is a heartbreak. So too are all these other dead people.

A Sane Exchange on Guns, Violence & Self-Defense

First Jeffrey Goldberg published this essay at The Atlantic entitled "The Case for More Guns (And More Gun Control)." (The piece was written post-Aurora and prior to the Newtown massacre.) Then he and Ta-Nehisi Coates engaged in this calm and sensible conversation - "More Guns, Less Crime: A Dialogue" - about guns, violence, self-defense and related matters that takes off from Goldberg's essay. I find myself agreeing with the position Coates advocates. Here are some of the good bits, in which he is replying to this query from Goldberg: "I could go on, but let me ask you a question: If you were confronted with an "active shooter," do you think, in that moment, you might wish you had a gun?"

. . . it is not clear to me that human beings, with all of their foibles, always understand where defense ends and aggression begins. George Zimmerman, by his own telling, was defending himself. And given the marks on this head, in some sense he was. But I wonder, if he had been unarmed, whether he would have ever gotten out his car. Michael Dunn, who sprayed a teenager's SUV, claims he was defending himself. But I wonder if he ever would have said anything to those kids if he had not been armed. This has particular meaning in the realm of race, where the mere fact of being black means that an uncomfortably large portion of American society is more likely to perceive your everyday actions as aggressive, and thus justify "defense." There seems to be no sense that the very presence of a gun -- like all forms of power -- alters its bearer, that the possession of a tool of lethal violence might change how we interact with the world [. . .]

If I had a gun, there is a good chance I would shoot myself, thus doing the active shooter's work for him (it's usually "him.") But the deeper question is, "If I were confronted with an active shooter, would I wish to have a gun and be trained in its use?" It's funny, but I still don't know that I would. I'm pretty clear that I am going to die one day. That moment will not be of my choosing, and it almost certainly will not be too my liking. But death happens. Life -- and living -- on the other hand are more under my control. And the fact is that I would actually rather die by shooting than live armed.

This is not mere cant. It is not enough to have a gun, anymore than it's enough to have a baby. It's a responsibility. I would have to orient myself to that fact. I'd have to be trained and I would have to, with some regularity, keep up my shooting skills. I would have to think about the weight I carried on my hip and think about how people might respond to me should they happen to notice. I would have to think about the cops and how I would interact with them, should we come into contact. I'd have to think about my own anger issues and remember that I can never be an position where I have a rage black-out. What I am saying is, if I were gun-owner, I would feel it to be really important that I be a responsible gun-owner, just like, when our kids were born, we both felt the need to be responsible parents. The difference is I like "living" as a parent. I accept the responsibility and rewards of parenting. I don't really want the responsibilities and rewards of gun-ownership. I guess I'd rather work on my swimming. And I think, given the concentration of guns in a smaller and smaller number of hands, there's some evidence that society agrees.

Which is not to say those of us who don't own guns don't want to live. We do. But it's not clear that this particular way of living [ a world in which gun owning/carrying has proliferated] will even be effective. [. . .]

In other words, if I have "have a gun" in that situation, other things are then also true of my life. In other words, there is no "me" as I am right now that would have a gun. That "me" would spend a good amount time being responsible for his weapon. It's not so much a situation that, if I were with you and we were facing down a crazy dude, I wouldn't want to have a gun. It's that I've already made choices that guarantee that I couldn't have one. It just isn't possible, given my life choices. I'd much rather work toward a world where the psychotic shooter is actually a psychotic knifer, or a psychotic clubber. [. . .]

I guess my point is, I have a hard time with a construction of violence that begins and ends in the moment of violent confrontation. My belief is that an intelligent self-defense begins long before that dude with the AR-15 in hand appears. If we're down to me licking off shots, then we are truly lost. And I say that as a dude with a huge poster of Malcolm X on his wall."

In a sense, Coates is advocating a sort of pre-figurative stance. Act as though the world were the way you hope it can be. And work to bring the world into line with those hopes. This risks being self-deceiving or naive. But it is no less so, I suspect, than the Rambo-esque fantasies of gun fundamentalists in which the gun-toting hero shoots up the bad guys - whether those be rogue law enforcement officials or just plain old criminals.

That said, I think Goldberg advances a pretty nuanced and quite sincere argument.  Several things nevertheless struck me about the position he ties to stake out.

First, Goldberg says this more or less at the outset: "I'm dispositionally centrist, in that I believe, as a pretty steadfast rule, that most issues are ambiguous and contradictory, and that no one ideology provides all the answers. Hence, my belief that people (qualified people) have the right to armed self-defense, and that the government has the right (and responsibility) to regulate the sale and carrying of guns." And while that makes him the sort of person with whom one might indeed hold a conversation, it also, as he admits, sets him considerably outside the mainstream of those advocating more or less unfettered access to firearms. Witness Wayne LaPierre's self-caricaturing press conference last Friday.

Second, my view is that there should be no presumption that you (anyone) should be licensed to own/carry a firearm. One should have to demonstrate a reason and the demonstration process should be onerous. Why? because for a reasonable fellow like Goldberg everything, and I mean everything, rides on the  notion that only "qualified people" - responsible, well-trained, psychologically stable - should have access to firearms.  (He calls these folks "vetted, screened, and trained civilian gun owners" and "a law-abiding, sane, and trained person[s].") There is only one way to meet that burden - namely though an onerous vetting process such as those established in the U.K.. And, if this means drastically revising or repealing the 2nd amendment, so be it.

Third,  at one point as part of an exchange about the placement of guns into schools, Goldberg says: "Again, there's no sure thing, but when I hear people say that an armed presence in the school would definitively not have helped, I think they're being fatuous and ideological, as fatuous and ideological as I would sound if I argued that a counter-shooter definitely would have neutralized the threat. My mind keeps returning to the example of Joel Myrick, the assistant principal of a high school in Pearl, Mississippi, who captured a shooter at his school by pointing his legally-owned weapon at him." The problem here is that Goldberg is overly credulous. Actually the case he mentions, and others like it trotted out by the gun fetishists are, like most anecdotes, fairly unpersuasive once one pushes beyond the headlines and look at actual events. In the Pearl case, the "active shooter" had already stopped and wandered into the school parking lot before the assistant principle collected a hand gun and detained him.

More importantly, Goldberg appears fatalistic about all the guns already in circulation: "Canada seems like an attractively gun-free place, but the whole point of the article is to acknowledge that we can't create Canada-like conditions in the U.S. It's just too late. Even if all gun sales were banned tomorrow, there would still be 300 million guns in circulation." But there is some reasonable evidence (from Australia, for instance) that it is possible to implement gun regulations coupled with buy back provisions that take guns out of circulation. And the consequences is a decline in numbers of gun violence against others and against one's self. One can debate any case. And the fetishists will rightly point out that the Australian law has not totally eliminated gun violence or other violent crime. So what? Who would claim that total elimination is even possible. We should aspire to the rates of gun violence that Australia and the UK for instance have. Zero is unattainable. But we can do substantially better than we now do at preventing gun homicides and suicides. Fatalism, talk about this or that "half measure" (as thought half as many gun deaths in a year would not be an immense accomplishment in the US), are I suspect reflections of the libertarianism to which Goldberg subsequently admits. That said, even libertarians should not be complacent or fatalistic on this matter - look at this proposal. Doing nothing is unacceptable.

Mock the NRA and its Ilk

Both of these popped up in my FB news feed. (Jef is no relation.) The top one underscores the irony of the NRA, great defender of gun ownership as a bulwark against tyrannical government, proposing that we create even more armed government officials. I guess they've not stopped to think that one through.

The NRA on Newtown

A demonstrator held up a banner as Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the
National Rifle Association, delivered a statement in Washington on Friday.
Photograph © Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

It is stunning (but predictable) that Mr. LaPierre, spokesman for "responsible" gun ownership, blames everyone but gun owners for recurrent massacres - video games, the media, mentally ill people, liberal NRA haters, policies that seek to keep schools gun free ... Of course, he takes zero responsibility for the NRA pushing an agenda of censorship and intimidation aimed at making unfettered access to guns our default policy. By the way, the picture above, accompanying this story in The New York Times, illustrates just what should happen in the face of NRA nonsense. Talk back, protest, ridicule the idiotic proposals that the NRA and its ilk advocate. You will note that after reading his talking points LaPierre refused to take questions. If his views are so well founded and defensible, why not actually discuss them?

Erik Loomis and Free Speech on Campus

I generally do not write here much about happenings at the University of Rochester where I work. On occasion I complain about labor relations on campus. More often, I've offered my views on this or that episode of "controversial" speech. I tend to be libertarian about the right of people to speak on campus, figuring that the best response to remarks that are wrongheaded, silly, offensive or whatever is to talk back.

Having said that, I want to call your attention to a brewing controversy at the University of Rhode Island. Erik Loomis, an historian and blogger, has generated a fracas over intemperate remarks he made about Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, following the Newtown massacre last week. I do not know Loomis personally. I do know that even though LaPierre is a despicable excuse for a human being neither Erik Loomis nor I literally wish him dead. That said, the pathetic right wing attacks on Loomis - including calls that URI fire him - seem to be growing.  Anything to divert attention from the fact that a kid took guns and shot 27 innocent people to death last week. Over at Crooked Timber a move has emerged to speak in Loomis's defense. I urge you to sign on in support.

Guns at the Beach?

This story from Ha'aretz popped up in my news feed. All I can say is not only in Israel. And, of course, just because men do something does not make it a good idea. You can find my views about this sort of nonsense by following the handguns label below. Carrying guns in this sort of situation disqualifies one from the presumptive judgment needed to carry a gun in the first place.

Guns and the Tyranny of the Minority

"One in three Americans knows someone who has been shot. As long as a candid discussion of guns is impossible, unfettered debate about the causes of violence is unimaginable. Gun-control advocates say the answer to gun violence is fewer guns. Gun-rights advocates say that the answer is more guns: things would have gone better, they suggest, if the faculty at Columbine, Virginia Tech, and Chardon High School had been armed. That is the logic of the concealed-carry movement; that is how armed citizens have come to be patrolling the streets. That is not how civilians live. When carrying a concealed weapon for self-defense is understood not as a failure of civil society, to be mourned, but as an act of citizenship, to be vaunted, there is little civilian life left. [. . .]

Kids in Chardon High are back in school. Nickolas Walczak is in a wheelchair. There are Trayvon Martin T-shirts. Oikos University is closed. The N.R.A. has no comment. [. . .]

In an average year, roughly a hundred thousand Americans are killed or wounded with guns. On April 6th, the police found One Goh’s .45. Five days later, George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder. In May, T. J. Lane will appear at a hearing. Trials are to come. In each, introduced as evidence, will be an unloaded gun."

These are some of the concluding comments from this smart essay by Jill LePore at The New Yorker.  I have posted here numerous times about gun ownership and its absurdities. If you want to hunt, fine. I don't but nothing about hunting implies opposition to gun laws. If you think having a gun makes you safer, you are wrong. I hope you never mistake your teenage son, coming in late at night, for a dreaded "intruder." If you want to carry a concealed weapon, get therapy - quickly.

 It is interesting that gun ownership in the U.S. has declined over time. A minority group is imposing idiotic policies on the rest of us. Tyranny of the minority.

Chicks With Guns ~ Still Dim

Alison, Marlee, Lee & Morgan with Boss 20-gauge side-by-sides.
Photograph © Lindsay McCrum.

I came across this review in The Los Angeles Times of a new book by Lindsay McCrum. I have written here numerous times about guns - and about how, generally, I don't get the attraction or the point and how, specifically, I think those who insist on toting guns in inappropriate places (e.g., political meetings, church, Starbucks, etc.) are defective socially, cognitively, morally, or maybe all three.

Here is my view. I don't hunt but don't object to those who do or who do so with guns. Beyond that, it is pretty clear that having a gun in the house does not make one safer. I won't go on again about the knuckleheads who insist on bearing arms at town meetings and other public events. All those claims apply when the gun owner is a "chick" too. In this instance, though, I'd add that a practice or tradition does not necessarily get any less dim simply because "chicks" are engaging in it.

Tucson Billboard

Gee, what is it like to live in Tuscon? Is all interaction, all communication about shooting? (This comes from HuffPost.) Are right wingers incapable of thinking without reference to this sort of metaphor or analogy?

Kelly-Giffords Campaign Messages

In my post yesterday I speculated, without evidence, that the electoral campaign last fall in the 8th Arizona Congressional District was likely to have involved themes of weapons and violence and that Jared Loughner would not have had to try hard to encounter such language or imagery. Well, here are a couple of examples from the the fellow who ran against Gabrielle Giffords. He is tea party darling Jesse Kelly. The top image is an announcement that reportedly appeared on Kelly's web page - I am not sure whether the event actually ever took place. The bottom image is of the candidate himself going to war, presumably against the dastardly liberals. (Thanks to Stan Banos for the links.. And no, I do not support the buffoon Matt Drudge!)

If you visit Kelly's defunct campaign web page now you find a standard comment deploring senseless violence. No mention there about this sort of campaign tactic.

Graphic Politics, The Full Monty

Since apparently, many of the right wing agitators like Palin are scrambling to take down the incriminating evidence regarding how they promote violence, I figure it is important to provide an archive. Here, I've lifted the full graphic created by those lost in Sarah-land. As expected, Sarah sends condolences but takes no responsibility. Indeed, according to her minions she is totally not responsible for the acts of an insane person. Here is the post from The Caucus blog at The Times:

One of Sarah Palin's top aides responded Sunday to mounting criticism that she had helped to incite the kind of violence that exploded in Arizona at a meet-and-greet by Ms. Giffords, wounding 20 and killing six.

In the wake of the shooting, many people drew attention to a map of the United States that had been part of one of Ms. Palin's Web sites that showed targets on the districts of lawmakers who supported President Obama's health care legislation.

Ms. Giffords was one of the targeted lawmakers, as she noted in an interview on MSNBC last year.

In a radio interview Saturday night, one of Ms. Palin's top aides, Rebecca Mansour, said of the map of lawmakers: "We never, ever, ever intended it to be gun sights." Ms Mansour said attemps to tie Ms. Palin to the violence were "obscene" and "appalling."

"I don't understand how anyone can be held responsible for someone who is completely mentally unstable like this," Ms. Mansour said. "Where I come from the person who is actually shooting is culpable. We had nothing whatsoever to do with this."

She added: "People who knew him said that he is left wing and very liberal. But that is not to say that I am blaming the left for him either."

Ms. Mansour, who helps run SarahPAC, Ms. Palin's political action committee, made the remarks to Tammy Bruce, a radio talk show host, on a podcast made public on the internet. Ms. Bruce is introduced at the beginning of her show as "a chick with a gun and a microphone."

Ms. Bruce complained on her show that liberals were incorrectly politicizing the shooting by blaming conservatives.

"We all know that the liberals, there's something wrong with them," Ms. Bruce said. "The reaction on the left was to start blaming somebody."

Ms. Bruce added that: "Saying that a mass murdering crazy guy is representative somehow of the political dialogue going on, especially with the non violent Tea Party movement....and yet there are attach this to the tea party and other politicians."

I'd characterize this as the obtuse making excuses for the obtuse. The shooter in Tuscon clearly had a screw (or two) loose. But he didn't dream this scenario up on his own. And, the Palin crowd are hardly alone; think of all the nutters wearing their guns to political meetings last year. But here is the question to Palin and others: if there is no connection between the assassination of the federal judge and the attempted assassination of the Congresswoman and the murder of the nine year old girl, then why remove the graphic? If it was OK to run that graphic last fall, why not keep it available now?

Graphic Politics

Well, how should we interpret this sort of graphic? I suppose that it is an innocent picture and that anyone who takes it seriously is an insane madman? Guns don't kill people, and pictures don't either. Right. And, of course, firearms belong in church and coffee shops and public meetings. Right, again. I've commented on such nuttiness here before. So where is the responsibility? That is a term that conservatives love to toss around - as though they are committed to values. Is it time yet for conservatives to stand up and not just decry 'senseless violence,' but say 'our rhetoric and our politics inform and contribute to the violence'? I'm guessing that will not happen.

Best Shots (129) ~ Zed Nelson

(156) Zed Nelson ~ ... portrait of a gun owner ... (1 September 2010).

For my views on guns, Americans, and their 'constitutional right' to endanger themselves and their families or to try to intimidate others in public spaces ... see these posts.

Conservatives with Guns and their Fantasies of Revolution

"When American men talk like this, they are usually giving voice to fantasy. Only in fantasy, after all, are governments overthrown by men trained to do nothing more than shoot long-distance targets in a controlled environment. Some of these men seek out unlikely battlefields, where they can be warriors of the future, warriors of the imagination or reluctant warriors in waiting who are passing their time on the Internet. The power of a gun to take a life is not so much a threat as a talisman connecting these fantasies to the real world."

In The New York Times you can find this article on the 'Appleseed Project' which is (despite the preposterous disavowals) a right wing project meant to prepare 'regular Americans' to take up guns in defense of liberty. I find the impulse to own guns pretty inscrutable, sort of like liking Lima Beans. As I've said here several times, I just don't get it. I also have said before that I find the conservative mind pretty much misguided. These folks are not just gun owners, they're paid up subscribers to the rigid, paranoid conservative style [1] [2] [3]. Combine that style with guns and things start to get worrying - even though the reporter from The Times has done his best to persuade us that it's all just magical thinking. Fantasies can be dangerous too.

Speak Out Against Political Violence

Read this report in The New York Times. Ask yourself why the Republican political establishment - elected and otherwise - is not falling over themselves to condemn threats of violence. I find it especially disgusting that my own Congressional Representative "Louise M. Slaughter, a senior Democrat from New York, received a phone message threatening sniper attacks against lawmakers and their families."