Shootings and August links

In less than 24 hours, there were two major mass shootings, following up a mass shooting at a festival in California (so three in fairly short span). The shooting in El Paso, TX targeted Mexicans. The shooting in Dayton, OH was by a young man with a long history of violent fantasies, including having a kill list and a rape list while he was in high school. (Google these shootings for details. I won't choose one link as representative). This article about the background of the El Paso shooter is chilling: mostly 'normal' but with all too familiar undercurrents including bullying at school along racial lines, hopelessness about job prospects while automation continues, and open racist sentiments expressed after Trump was elected.

Ignore the headline of this article (Washington Post again - a good source). It's not so much that there's pushback from the NRA on gun legislation, as there is deep worry from GOP legislators. Can they stay in office if they sign on to gun legislation? Probably not if they depend on votes from GOPers, which they do. According to polls, the wide majority of Republicans are still against even partial gun control measures. So it's less the NRA standing in the way, but instead the very popular Guns R Us ethos among Republicans.

Faltering Dem candidates. A Politico author contrasts the Republicans, who understand the importance of legacy and a winning historical narrative, with the Democrats, who are sniping at each other over the party's recent past. Part of this is due to a leadership vacuum since Obama is gone and the Clintons are gone, and both failed in some major ways.

Stealth reform measures for Social Security. Why hasn't this been big news? With funding issues looming, the Dems in the House are working on a big change to SS. This should be drawing a lot of attention, debate, number-crunching, and fact-checking, but the press barely utters a peep. Sure, it's not likely to get through the Senate, but it's a real proposal with seemingly real numbers, and these numbers are likely to be the basis for future work on SS.

Zero interest on bonds. A big difference from when I was young is that now the return on bonds is almost nothing. I find this fascinating. The world is awash in money chasing after profits. We've created so much wealth, and so much paper or digital money that there isn't enough ways to spend it or invest it. This doesn't worry me, however. We won't turn dirt poor even if there's a crash. There will just be another inflation via QE (quantitative easing) as there was last time.

Update on Gaza. Tensions rise and fall, but nobody wants a repeat of the last useless, destructive war. Progress!

Image: wikipedia.org

Extras. Gun control (now called gun safety) advocacy group shows how common private sales are without a background check.

July links

Tangled mess. A knitting site has banned political discussions due to animosity between Trump supporters and opponents. I sympathize. Maybe it was the right move if people were arguing too much and not sharing enough knitting tips.

Election disinformation starting. Example #1 is about Kamala Harris.

NRA meltdown. This is something to watch. The NRA is embroiled in scandal. But it's also a big player in elections. Will we see any effects? Possibly not because it works mostly locally, not from the top down.

2020 forecast. The prediction by a forecaster who did well in the 2018 election.

Russia laughs at Trump display.  Russian media jokes about the lame military display for the Fourth of July. Oh really? Well, who lost the Cold War? That's right, suckers.

Police misbehaving. This isn't really a surprise. Police in a major city are caught making biased remarks on social media, including white supremacist remarks. However, I thought the comment section was worth reading.

Legal analysis on regulation. From a conservative source this time. An analysis of a recent Supreme Court decision. His prediction is a rolling back of government by regulation. I can't comprehend that, and wonder about chaos ensuing until the Supreme Court finds a good balance.

Historical footnote on rich people getting away with crime. Jeffrey Epstein was a known pedophile, and how did he stay out of jail? Good question. It's harder to charge him than you might think, until someone does it and then the other prosecutors look like wimps or worse. One of them being Trump's secretary of labor, now having resigned.

Trump's master stroke. After the grab-them-by-the-pussy video, Trump barely survived. However, he saved himself by going into attack mode during the next debate, and that was admired by much of the GOP.

Image: newstimes.com

Our American gun culture

I've thought about guns all my adult intellectual life, which actually started at age 12-13. I've observed the American cultural traits and myths about guns. First, I have to say that guns are pervasive in American culture. Not as pervasive as food or cars or television, which are practically universal. But about as common as: voting, home ownership, and exercising regularly.

Our latest example of toxic American gun culture was a school shooting with 17 people killed. This is no surprise in the US. We have so many mass shootings, though the death toll isn't usually that high.

Gun rights advocates come up with so many excuses. It's never the goddamn huge availability of guns. It's never the worship of guns to blame. It's always mental illness, or a tenuous connection to the Democratic party, or bad parenting, or liberalism to blame.

I'm not having any of it. The gun rights advocates own these shootings. They are the ones who fight EVERY SINGLE REFORM.  They fight any improvement to background checking (NICS), until there's another mass shooting. They don't try to improve reporting. They don't want the system checked, its flaws revealed. They need the background check as a scapegoat. Many of them don't even support the background check, but feel it was imposed on them. That leads me to wonder if they want totally open sales with no limits on who can buy guns.

Maybe some do. Maybe they think it's a constitutional right, like free speech and freedom of religion. However, my freedom of religion doesn't give me the capability of killing even one person, much less riddling scores of people with bullets. Possibly that's a defect in our Bill of Rights--that gun ownership can't be restricted. Or perhaps I should say that 5 Supreme Court justices decided that's what the 2nd amendment meant.

But the interpretation of the 2nd amendment is only part of the problem. There is a whole cultural issue. In some quarters, you aren't a man if you don't own a gun. You aren't a man if you can't legally own a gun. You aren't an adult if you don't own a gun. Ownership is a right, not a privilege. It's a right, with no attendant responsibility to have training, or good handling. They belief anyone who speaks about good handling is infringing on sacred rights. That anyone who questions the gun culture is unpatriotic and infringing on sacred rights.

My god, more people may worship guns than attend church. That's how pervasive the gun culture is in the US.

Please note, though, that I don't think every gun advocate is part of the toxic gun culture. Many support reasonable reforms. Even more would support reforms if enough Democrats made clearly that they respect the right of sensible, responsible citizens to own guns. However, they aren't loud enough in their support of reasonable reform. Too often, their primary concern is not losing their gun rights, not safety.

Then there are the full-fledged nutcases. They resist all restrictions. They don't even trust restrictions due to mental issues. They would rather mentally ill people have full access than risk being labelled as unable to purchase due to mental impairment.

Frankly, my opinion is that our standards for mental impairment are seriously too tight. Many more people need to be disqualified due to mental impairment. We need to have a procedure for health professionals to report dangerous people, have their gun rights curtailed, and have procedures to follow up. We need the same for family members to report someone who is dangerous, and have their rights curtailed. Most of all, we need to encourage families and all parts of society to support this--to agree that safety is more important. To say "yes, we are committed to preventing dangerous people from having and using guns." I want that to be a whole-society commitment. That is the only rational basis for a healthy gun culture instead of the current toxic culture.

Again...

Image: abc15.com

Extras. An example of a gun advocate who blames anything and anyone but except the proximate cause. A conservative supports the kind of measure I talk about. It even has a name - Gun Violence Restraining Order, or GVRO. However, he writes as though these orders are common, but they aren't.

The FBI is accused of mishandling warnings about the shooter. I wonder how deluged the FBI with warnings, and whether the number far outweighed their ability to check. The right wing and alt-right have so many liars who keep them well-supplied with fake stories.

Update 4/7/18. Here's one of the fake stories. The most visible, talkative survivors are actually actors, according to lying stories floating around on the right. And many who repeat those stories don't give a damn that they're spouting lies.

Short: Conservative knife fight

I'm catching up on the combo-blog Political Animal. This one is worth a look. Glenn Beck and Grover Norquist are fighting over who will have more influence on the NRA. Norquist is suspect because he's a closet Mooslim married to a middle eastern woman.

Glenn Beck was able to mobilize hundreds of people to call the NRA. That's a scary thought, though not exactly surprising considering the demonstrations that the Tea Party mounted in its first year. Glenn Beck followers are nothing if not sheep-like. He's even had to ask conservative PACs to please stop fundraising because his mother won't stop giving. Multiply that by enough brainless, comfortably retired, conservative couch potatoes, and it's easy to imagine the NRA swamped with phone calls.

It is scary how many people Beck can mobilize, but then I remembered that Election Day is a whole different ballgame. It doesn't matter if Beck can mobilize hundreds or thousands if we're expecting over 100 million to vote. When it comes to Election Day, Beck doesn't have a disproportionate say.

Some of the sheep have time for Photoshop too. More scary or less scary?

Image: fitzinfo.wordpress.com

Short: Massacre averted

One component of gun reform that I'd like to see (based on my experience in mental health) is hotlines for reporting violently obsessed people and mandates for mental health professionals to report their concerns. Get the names into the databases so guns and ammo can't be sold to these worrisome people. Currently, our restrictions due to mental instability are not nearly tight enough. Yes, there is potential for abuse, but there can be an appeals process where a person can demonstrate their sanity and stability.

Here's a story of a family in Florida that reported a family member for having a dangerous arsenal and dangerous delusions. Thank God for the family's actions and for the police SWAT response. But it doesn't take a genius to guess this kicker:

"...the vet may walk out of the crisis stabilization unit after his mandatory seven days and demand that police return his weapons. The judge is not even sure that the state officials... can pull his concealed weapons permit."

There isn't a litmus strip that gun dealers or gun license processors can use to determine that a gun owner will cross the line and become a criminal. We need to use less certain criteria that will sometime deprive non-criminals of access to guns. Why can't we, and the NRA, live with that?

 A different Miami arsenal

Image: es2usa.blogspot.com

Rant: Justified resentment in the gun debate

I like to launch into my rants, but just note this is a two-parter.

I hate that we have a flood of guns in this country. This country is so inundated with guns that we have shootings in elementary schools, for God's s sake. This is absolutely crazy that you can't trust that your children will be safe despite the amazing safety conscientiousness of the schools.

It's no surprise that a smart guy like neuroscience graduate student James Holmes is able to put together a deadly arsenal. But people without a lot of skills like Jared Loughner and Adam Lanza, or the shooter in my hometown, Jiverly Wong, have had the examples, guns, and ammo available so they could execute mass shootings too. There's something incredibly wrong in society that so many people have the same dream--to shoot as many people as possible, and they also have the means to fulfill the dream. If the NRA and gun owners don't think that is a huge problem that they have hugely contributed to, they are in denial and many innocent lives are lost due to that denial. Stop it already!

Now for the liberals' turn. I hate that liberals try to impose a gun-free utopia despite all the evidence that crime and criminals have no intention of disappearing or disarming! They deny the existence of the responsible gun owner, and the legitimate right to own guns for hunting, self-protection, and sport. Their dreams that there will be no guns has spawned the fear and hyperbolic rhetoric among NRA-types that the government would confiscate guns, and therefore you had better arm yourself to the teeth. This would have been a time to take a "live-and-let-live" approach, but liberals didn't. Their advocacy backfired in a huge way because they wanted to impose values rather that let the world be what is truly is--diverse.

But now I have a third target--the NRA and the gun manufacturers who preyed on gun owner worries to ramp up sales. Enjoy your blood-stained profits.

Image: nj1015.com

Update 5/6/13. A very long personal explanation of why gun owners don't and shouldn't trust gun control advocates. 

Rant: Equal hypocrisy in the gun debate

I AM SICK OF the one-size-fits-all solutions from different factions in the gun debate.

Some people are so pro-gun and so angry about the tiniest regulations that they have one solution--MORE GUNS. No gun-free zones. Many more people carrying guns all the time.

Excuse me, but I know too many people with short fuses. The expectation that more people should be carrying guns all the time is dangerous because some people aren't fit to handle guns. I don't want people like Adam Lanza or Jared Loughner thinking that they should be carrying guns all the time. These are people we want to keep away from guns.

Some people are so anti-gun that they think all private ownership of guns should be outlawed. They ignore certain facts about this country: some people hunt with guns, many criminals won't give up their guns, but would love for potential victims to be unarmed, and culturally many Americans consider it their right to own guns for self-protection.

On both sides, idealistic visions for this country cloud realistic thinking.

• Removing all guns and all violence isn't possible, so banning guns from responsible people also removes their ability to protect themselves.
• There is very little chance that a competent armed citizen is going to be on the scene and able to stop a mass shooter, even if all willing competent citizens are armed at all times. I'm guessing 1-in-10 chance at most.

To everyone, when you think you have a solution to the problem of mass shootings, please subject it to a reality test. Gather some relevant data, such a polling on gun ownership or accounts of armed citizens at  shootings, and ask yourself whether your idea has a snowball's chance in hell of working.

By the way, I've read only a few comments from people who want to ban all private gun ownership. However, I've seen too many people, including the leaders of the NRA, who think more guns everywhere are a solution to the problem of mass shootings. The pro-gun dreamers are definitely more numerous than the anti-gun dreamers, so there isn't exactly equal hypocrisy on both sides.

 Mutually assured disrespect

Image: forums.anandtech.com

Sadly true headlines: The GOP

From HuffPo:

"The Absolutist Politics of Norquist and LaPierre Will Destroy the Republican Party"

I haven't even read the article because I have a load of Christmas shopping to do. For the record, I don't think the GOP will die. They have the will to stay whole, if not completely united. They also benefit from being the only alternative to the Dems, who seriously couldn't handle hegemony if it was handed to them. I mean, when it was handed to them. The GOP will continue as a viable party because the Dems aren't cut out for single-party rule.

That is all. Must go shopping. Must make reservations. Must STOP BLOGGING.

Image: moreismoremom.wordpress.com

Sheepish confession: I'm back editing this post and adding the picture. Someone stage an intervention. But later, I've got more shopping to do.

Gun follies

We have had so many horrific mass shootings in this country, I'm not sure why the shooting of 20 first-graders would make a difference. After all, 12 were killed in a theater in Aurora, CO, 6 were killed in Tucson, thirteen at Columbine, 37 at Virginia Tech, etc.

So I don't understand the change, but there does seem to be a change. Sen. Joe Manchin,  a blue-dog Democrat from gun-toting West Virginia, wants to sit down with Sen. Dianne Feinstein and figure out some workable gun controls that will prevent this from happening again. He is shocked by this killing spree. I'm not, but I've been watching the trends, and this seems of the same piece.

Bob McDonnell, governor of Virginia, plugs the most common gun supporter solution, which is that we need to protect ourselves by having more guns, such as guns in schools. I totally agree with this. We need guns in our high schools, middle schools, grade schools, nursery schools, maternity wards, and Lamaze classes.

The NRA has kept quiet, but finally announced that they will have a press conference where they'll present "meaningful contributions." Great news, except that they've scheduled the conference for Friday, December 21. Maybe it'll be in the afternoon, right before the long Christmas holiday weekend.

I can think of two reasons that the NRA would schedule for that time:

1. They are going to say something that will anger their usual supporters.
2. They aren't going to say anything to anger their usual supporters. 

I don't have much (or any?) respect for the NRA, so my bet is on #2. They'll just retread the usual talking points such as more concealed-carry, more enforcement of current laws, blah, blah, blah.

I've been for a less violent society and reasonable restraint in the sale and use of guns, but I've never seen a way to get there. Mandatory safety procedures (that is, laws) have consistently lost to gun rights forces. Compare this to the effective curbs on drunk-driving, both legal and social.

My response has been largely to give up the fight. I choose not to mount vain attempts to convince my fellow citizens to adopt values they clearly reject. I just quietly disagree and bear it, taking the bad along with the good in my country.

Maybe I shouldn't have given up, and there will be real change now. That's what happened after Timothy McVeigh (from my region of New York) blew up the federal building in Oklahoma. Perhaps it was because of the children killed there too.

Maybe in this country, you can kill any number of adults, college students, and high schoolers, and we won't change. But we will start to think about it when our tykes die. I'm sorry, but that is just dumb. I can't wrap my head around the idiocy of it. In future posts, I might comment again, but I might not. I had truly given up, and it's hard for me to change on a dime.

McDonnell's plan for Va kindergartens

Image: shellgunning.com

Update 12/19/12. I hope that readers don't find this post too callous. I'm not uncaring about the lives lost that can't be replaced, the lost children/brothers/sisters/mothers and everything they would have done with their lives. But I also always see the bigger picture and value honest, uncensored discussions of our human condition and ways to improve it.

Second update 12/18/12. Per the Wall Street Journal:

"Many gun-control advocates, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, have charged that the group has contributed to a regulatory climate of easy gun access that makes such shootings more likely."

I agree that the NRA has contributed to the atmosphere that makes these mass shootings more likely. Pro-gun groups protest that's unfair to them. I may post evidence for my belief.

Here is the NRA's statement. It is short and worth a look so that you have it straight from the source.