Tag Archives: guns

Political Rants

Such a quiet boy, a bright boy

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I’m not fond of doing blog posts about mass shootings. Part of the reason for this is the fact that they happen all the time, and it’s manifestly obvious that none of our political leaders are willing to do anything substantive to prevent them. Still, this shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo is particularly heinous. Yes, this is about guns, but it’s about more than guns. It’s about assholes, too.

No, I’m not referring to the shooter, though he is clearly an asshole. The primary responsibility for this atrocity belongs to more powerful people. This kid didn’t pluck racist “great replacement” theory garbage out of thin air. This crap is being circulated by politicians, pundits, and other well-paid voices eager to draw some attention to themselves. Young people like the shooter are susceptible to the toxic logic behind these crackpot theories. Those who propagate it know this, and they have blood on their hands.

Legally obtainable

According to press reports, the shooter legally obtained his Bushmaster assault rifle. (Apparently he had his man card checked.) This in spite of the fact that he had made threats against his high school – threats serious enough for the school to report it to the NY State Police. And yet, with all that, he was able to buy the gun. Was that a grievous mistake? An unfortunate clerical error? Or the soft terrorism of flaccid gun laws?

I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter. Even in a state like New York, our gun laws are weak. Worse, the Supreme Court is closing in on a decision on NY State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which involves a challenge to the NY State law requiring gun-toters to show probable cause before getting their concealed carry permit. It seems likely that this law will be overturned, which may mean more white nationalists will be packing heat in a supermarket near you.

Twitter gate crashers

Then there’s the Swanson fortune heir. You know – the one on T.V. that occasionally cackles like Felix the Cat. Now, I’m certain that his pathetic little junior Nazi producers funnel dark web conspiracy theories up the the boss on a regular basis. That replacement theory BS, though – that’s old as fuck. That shit likely rode into Tucker’s mouth on the same silver spoon that delivered his pablum. He’s heir to more than frozen dinner money, you know. Pater and Mater left him a handsome legacy of country club racism as well.

Of course, he likes to have his audience pretend that he’s not a member of the elite – that it’s those people on the left telling you what to think and lording it over you. He’s talked about the “gatekeepeers” on Twitter who get “hysterical” when he talks about the great replacement. Not sure how anyone on Twitter can be a “gatekeeper” for a guy with the top rated show on cable news. Right wingers are super sensitive little butterflies, aren’t they?

I’m just using Carlson as an example. There’s plenty of prominent reinforcement for bad ideas like replacement theory. He could disappear tomorrow and it would still be a problem.

What now?

The answer to hate is better organizing. I don’t see any other way. We need to help people understand that their problems are not being caused by other workers who happen to look, talk, love differently.

What to do about the Court’s broad interpretation of the second amendment? Well, I believe Congress can pass legislation that’s outside the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Here’s the relevant passage, from Article III, Section 2:

…the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

“With such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make”? That’s not nothing.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Doing the wrong thing. Again.

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We live in a violent society. I think that’s as close to a truism as anything can be. Mass shootings are a fact of life in America, and they happen with a sickening regularity. Gun violence takes a very heavy toll, and violent crime has spiked since the pandemic – specifically, homicides over the course of 2020. It was, of course, a year of exceptions, though many pundits and prognosticators have claimed that the increase is largely the result of police going into a kind of defensive crouch in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising.

I’ve no doubt that police departments have pulled back. Some made a point of doing so after previous high-profile deaths of people of color in police custody. On the podcast Why Is This Happening?, Patrick Sharkey talks about the various factors behind this rise in violent crime. Less aggressive policing is one, but he makes the point that a lot of community-based services that contribute significantly to reducing crime were shut down during the pandemic.

This, in some ways, reflects the divide between right and left perspectives on how best to address crime. Not surprisingly to anyone who follows this blog, I come down on the left side of this question, and I do so with what I consider to be really good reasons.

Fighting Crime With Crime

The idea that, as a society, we should reduce crime by over-policing disadvantaged communities is cynical beyond belief. Yes, you can marginally depress crime by mass arresting people, throwing them in jail for long terms, harassing people of color, etc., but in so doing you do irreparable violence to entire communities. That in itself is criminal far beyond the level of anything you might hope to prevent.

Other approaches work better, frankly – mutual aid, community-based counseling and mentorship services, nutrition programs, housing support, direct aid to families and individuals, etc. They also build communities, not destroy them.

Dirty Harry Syndrome

The advocates for hyper-aggressive policing work to create the impression that cases like the murder of George Floyd are necessary by-products of the service police provide. Sure, goes the argument, occasionally someone gets killed who probably shouldn’t have died, but that’s the price you pay for having safe streets. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few skulls … I mean, eggs, right?

There’s a visceral appeal to this argument – a kind of cathartic, give-them-what-they-deserve attitude that makes a lot of white people feel right with the world. There’s a reason why movies like Dirty Harry were big hits – it’s a very attractive narrative for people who don’t do a lot of thinking.

The Political Economy of Policing

Of course, we know that political careers are made on hyper-aggressive anti-crime politics. That’s true of everyone from your local DA to the President of the United States. It’s a lot easier to get taxpayers to pay for MRAPs and sophisticated weapons for the cops than it is to get them to fund after-school programs and free breakfast for kids of color. And even though aggressive policing is a bad solution to the problem of crime, it’s an easier sell for politicians than the much more effective and less destructive approach that involves supportive community services.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in expanding the police/prison state, just like there was a lot of money in slavery. That’s why defund causes so much consternation – it hits them where it hurts. Very insightful on the part of BLM to work that out. We need to carry that knowledge with us as we seek real solutions to this dysfunctional system.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Fire one.

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Last Friday, I thought there had been two mass shootings in a single week. Michael Moore’s podcast Rumble set me straight on this. Based on law enforcement’s definition of a mass shooting – four or more victims – there were seven that week. As I said in my last post, this is nuts. We’ve become a nation of people waiting to be shot. For the more than 80 percent of us who do not own firearms of any sort, that’s a pretty nerve-wracking place to be. It’s not like there’s a safe place. Shootings happen in schools, movie theaters, grocery stores, outdoor concerts, restaurants, you name it. Anyplace a gunman can enter, so too can the gun, and like that Chekhovian cliche, if there’s a gun in the first act, you know that someone will be shot by the end of the play. So the operative question is, how do we get the gun out of the first act? If we’re depending on Congress to answer that question, it’s going to be a long play.

I will admit, I thought for certain that Sandy Hook would have been sufficient to put gun control over the edge. A hideous massacre of young school children – that had to be enough to shock the conscience of a nation. Perhaps …. only not this nation. Of course, Obama was president, the House was in Republican hands, and the Senate – while still run by a significant Democratic majority – was tied up in knots by its fealty to the modern version of the filibuster. Even the small-bore gun law they proposed could not make it through, and ultimately it was dropped. Now we live in a post-Heller gun-owners paradise, in which a particularly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that implies a personal right to gun ownership – rules the day. I have to think that even if we were to get meaningful gun measures through Congress and signed by the president, the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court might well knock them down.

There are some who defend this notion of the Second Amendment. People like Joe Scarborough are fond of saying that the amendment “says what it says” – a kind of shorthand textualist approach. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what the amendment says. (Scarborough in fact affected to read it from memory on his show last week, and added in a few terms not found in the original.) For one thing, they all seem to ignore the dependent clause at the beginning of the text; the part about the well-regulated militia. If you’re a strict textualist, shouldn’t that, too, be considered sacrosanct? But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that this is clearly not an unlimited right – we do, in fact, limit our interpretation of the Second Amendment, like we do with every other text. The word “gun” appears nowhere in the document. It uses the term “arms”, which we interpret narrowly as meaning “guns”. I think most people agree that there is no constitutional right to own chemical or nuclear weapons, even though those are “arms”. I suppose a bazooka could be considered a kind of “gun”, and yet we disallow ownership of those under the Second Amendment. (At least, as of now.)

I guess what I’m getting at is that we are all potential victims of semantics. If we could limit our interpretation of “arms” to our Founding Fathers’ use of the term, Americans might have a limited right to own flintlocks and other muzzle-loaders. I think I could live with that kind of originalism. How about you?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Fourteenth.

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Very nearly speechless after the heinous massacre of Jewish congregants in Pittsburgh. I am glad, at least, that reporting on this atrocity has attempted to capture the motivations of this neo-fascist killer. He was driven to attack the Tree of Life Synagogue by his outrage over the work of HIAS, a century-old Jewish organization dedicated to resettlement of refugees from around the world. The president’s, his party’s, and conservative media’s fulminations about the approach of an “invasion” of Honduran refugees, supposedly funded by “globalists” like George Soros, no doubt contributed to the shooter’s sense of urgency. And, of course, he had an AR-15 handy. Why not, right?

Two thumbs up (your ass)How did Trump meet this outrage? By doubling down on his anti-immigrant tirade. By sending hundreds of troops to the border to stop a group of poor people a thousand miles away. And by launching an attack on birthright citizenship, the principle at the core of the fourteenth amendment. It’s almost as if, while attending a memorial service in Pittsburgh, Trump is doing his best to make it up to the Synagogue shooter for falling short of his racist expectations. He seems to be under the impression, no doubt encouraged by the likes of Steven Miller, that he can, as president, undo the 14th Amendment by executive order or, in a pinch, through legislative action. As usual, Trump is skating on top of another constitutional question about which he knows less than nothing.

Regardless of its vacuity, his attack on the notion of citizenship is a toxic ploy one week in advance of the mid-term elections. As with his scare talk about the refugee “caravan” working its way north, Trump is using birthright citizenship as a tool to gin up his most hardcore supporters, including those on the extreme xenophobic right. For them, this speaks to Trump’s core brand proposition – the demonization of people of color that propelled him into the White House on a wave of white resentment. He entered the political arena railing about Obama’s birth certificate; essentially, attempting to undermine the legitimacy of his citizenship and, of course, his presidency, and fostering the notion that black people in general are not full citizens, foreign, illegitimate.

Will the ploy work? Tuesday will tell. All I can say is vote, vote, vote, and encourage others to do the same. Let’s prove him wrong. Let’s put a check on this disaster.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Recoil.

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As I mentioned briefly last week, it has happened again. Another deranged shooter with a military-style weapon and a mountain of ammunition. This time the target was a high school campus in Florida; last time it was somewhere else that didn’t expect it. The young people who emerged in one piece from that atrocity have demonstrated an emotional and intellectual maturity, an eloquence, and a remarkable facility for organizing that puts us all to shame. When I see them, I hang my head – we, the older generations, simply are not good. Let them take the reins.

Our cheese-headed president had some of them over on Wednesday, along with survivors of other mass shootings, for a “listening session”. What has Trump taken away from this heinous remake of previous atrocities? Well, he is telling Beauregard to look into banning bump stocks, again. That is something the Justice Department has been working on for months, since the Las Vegas massacre. The problem is that the administration is probably barred from doing so without action by the Congress, so Trump’s NRA patrons can rest easy. He also suggested arming teachers, janitorial staff, and, I believe, students, claiming that that Gym teacher could have ended the whole shooting rampage if he had had a gun.

Trump's notion of the ideal school resource officer.Okay, well … I may be the only American to remember this (I hope not), but back in the seventies, this latter suggestion was put forward as a joke on All In The Family – the right-wing caricature Archie Bunker was invited to do a guest editorial on television, and he advocated stopping airline hijackers by arming all the passengers. What was a joke in 1972 is now consider a serious policy proposal. That’s how far we’ve come, people. And this is how far political leaders will go to avoid dealing with an issue. The money is all on one side, and our kids are on the other. If we leave the decision to our current crop of politicians, the kids don’t stand a chance.

Sure, there are something like 10 to 15 million AR-15 style weapons in the United States. That doesn’t mean we can’t do something about this. First thing is to stop selling them. Second, in my opinion, you should be required to register military assault-style weapons and handle it in an appropriate way (i.e. lock it up at appropriate times). If you don’t register it, you can’t keep it. They are simply too destructive to treat like a 30-30 hunting rifle. Third: extensive background checks for all gun purchases (since Trump loves the concept of “extreme vetting,” this shouldn’t be a problem for him). Fourth, no more high-capacity clips and new limits on ammunition sales.

That’s where we need to go if we’re serious about protecting kids. Up to us, people. Elect a Congress and a president that will do it.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Arms control.

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Let’s have some fun with semantics, shall we? Start with the word “gun”. What is a gun and when does it stop being a gun and become, say, a bazooka or a howitzer? Though I suppose you can say that a howitzer is a kind of gun – big guns, as in “Bring out the big guns!” How about a staple gun or a glue gun? So a “gun” just a device for expelling something, right? That’s why it also serves as one of umpteen English euphemisms for penis, among other applications.

Well, fortunately for you 2nd Amendment purists out there, this very confusing word “gun” does not appear anywhere in the text of your favorite founding document of the Republic. The Constitutional scholars over at the local NRA gathering simply assume the word “arms”, which is used in the amendment, means every manner of gun from the .38 special to the Kalashnikov. Why they stop there I have no idea. Given the vague wording of the 2nd Amendment, our founders seem to leave the door open to an inalienable right to brandish a bazooka, or a howitzer, or a tactical nuclear missile for that matter. “Arms” is a far more general term than “gun”, so obviously we draw the line somewhere.

Constitutional right to ALL of them?Based on the evident facts of the massacre in Las Vegas, it’s way past time to move that line a bit south from where it’s been over the past couple of decades. I know my gun enthusiast friends bristle at the thought of restricting “assault rifles”, largely on the basis of the fact that the term is not sufficiently defined and, like all terms, highly subject to interpretation. Fair enough. But it seems to me we are in need of restrictions on the actual firepower represented by these weapons (particularly when modified, as the Las Vegas shooter’s rifles were, to operate as automatic weapons) rather than the specific design. Nine rounds a second seems kind of excessive, for instance. Is there any earthly reason why someone using a gun for self-defense, hunting, or other varieties of personal amusement would need to shoot more than a round or two per second?

I know, I know … I’m trying to spoil people’s fun. There are something like 200,00 legally registered automatic weapons out there, millions more semi-automatics, and people just love, love, love to shoot them at target ranges, etc. Great. But weight your right to do something fun against the right of others to be protected against the massive trauma and death caused by such weapons on a regular basis. If you can have your normal old .30-30 hunting rifle, your handgun, your shotgun, and your Bowie knife, but NOT the modified assault rifle, has your right to keep and bear arms been violated? You still have guns, right? Just not every kind of gun you want to have.

I guess our little semantics game should end on “rights.” Are “rights” about what we should be able to do or are they about being able to do every little thing our heart desires … like owning that modified AR-15?  I guess it’s up to us to answer that question.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Targets.

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The most recent heinous and indefensible mass shooting in America (or nearly so – there’s already been another one) was targeted on members of the House of Representatives. That is part of what makes it unusual. The other part is that it was perpetrated by someone nominally on the left. Typically we get some kind of Klan kid, like Dylan Roof, or some crazy cracker shooting up south Asians because they’re darker than him (and it’s usually a him). Whatever the motive, the shooting at the baseball diamond was a despicable act, plain an simple. And it happened in the usual way: the perpetrator purchased the guns, apparently legally, from a licensed firearms dealer (a 7.62 -caliber rifle and a 9 mm handgun), no problem. The kind of transaction that most if not all of the players on the GOP baseball team wholeheartedly support.

Lets all be nice to each other.Will this lead to a brief era of civility and bipartisanship? Maybe, but probably not. Civility, we should remember, starts at the top, and with a legion of TV pundits decrying the toxic tone of political rhetoric, I have yet to hear anyone call out President Trump for setting that tone during his campaign last year, even to the point of suggesting that “second amendment people” should act against his opponent. Then there were his entreaties from the podium to “beat the hell out of him!” at his various rallies, reminding the mob of the good old days when protesters were “carried out on a stretcher”. Oh yeah, that did happen.

And bipartisanship? I tend to agree with Chris Hayes that it doesn’t have a very positive history. I’m sure whatever this severely deranged one-time Bernie supporter intended, this act of domestic terrorism will only result in pushing forward the very agenda he professed to despise. Thanks for helping, asshole. Political fights are what democracy is all about, and acts of violence tend to take the air out of them. It’s no contradiction to sincerely wish Steve Scalise and the other victims a full and rapid recovery while at the same time holding the opinion that Scalise is a total dick on the issues. Many in Congress have trouble squaring that circle, and given the speed with which Ryan and McConnell are advancing their legislative priorities, there’s simply no time for any interval of acquiescence and deferral.

As for this moronic shooter, the only thing he accomplished was more needless bloodshed and providing additional cover for House members like Claudia Tenney not to hold public meetings.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Week to forget.

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Another one of those weeks when it’s hard to know what to focus on. So many disasters and revelations in such a short time, I’m guessing that many of the media folks who took this week off (and you all know who you are) are chomping at the bit to get back. I, for one, am disgusted by what’s happened this week, and frankly I can’t find anything positive to say about it.

It keeps on giving.It was a week that started with the obscene bombing in Baghdad, the death toll for which has exceeded 250. As has long been the case, this provoked some small response in American culture because of the magnitude of the crime, but the degree of “hair-on-fire” apoplexy about terrorism has been relatively minimal due to the cultural distance between Iraq and the United States. As these attacks move closer culturally to the U.S., our politicians get more worked up. Forget this export we call “freedom” – that bombing is our gift to the Iraqi people and it just keeps on giving.

Decisions were handed down on Hillary Clinton’s damn email and Tony Blair’s god-awful warmongering. Guess which one got more coverage in the U.S. It gives you some notion of what’s important to our great leaders. They lose their minds over some freaking private email server, but news about the enormous case against Blair and Bush over the Iraq invasion – the act that spawned the bombing I spoke of earlier – is met with a collective yawn.

What really disgusted me, beyond the sickening loss of life in Baghdad, Turkey, and Bangladesh, are the domestic shootings that made their way into the news cycle this week. The senseless killing of Philando Castile, caught on his girlfriend’s smartphone, is just sickening, as was the point-blank shooting of Alton Sterling – both incidents illustrating that there is no way for African Americans to feel safe.

Cap that off with the vicious, calculated assassination of five police officers in Dallas (six other officers wounded, as well as one civilian) during what was otherwise a very peaceful, very positive protest march, and it’s clear that we have some serious challenges before us. By all accounts, the police in Dallas behaved very well during the protest, which makes this last piece all the more painful. My hope is that the entire Dallas community can come together and show the rest of us how to overcome violence with compassion.

So yes, you can have this week, totally. I’m out.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

House rules 2.0.

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Spent some time this week watching Democrats in essence occupy the floor of the House of Representatives in what looks like an unprecedented effort to force a vote on modest gun control legislation. Pretty amazing demonstration in response to the latest gun-related atrocity in Orlando, to which the official response of the Republican majority in the House has been zero. The protesters’ chant of #NoBillNoBreak is a modest demand: bring three pieces of legislation to a vote, and let them stand or fall on their merits.

When he says "strike," I'm there.Now I’m not crazy about the legislative approach, particularly with regard to the expansion of the terror watch list – I just don’t think it’s the best way to deal with this issue – but I think it’s high time somebody occupied the freaking House. I tweeted my support to Barbara Lee and John Lewis on Wednesday night, attracting a flurry of ammo-sexual Twitter trolls. If these folks are willing to take direct action, the least I can do is give them some encouragement. (Elizabeth Warren brought donuts, after all.) That said, there’s a lot more to do, and it can’t all happen in Congress (though some of it must).

I think the core of the issue is the culture of fear and macho posturing that defines our nation’s gun obsession. The former is obvious, a pillar of American life since our earliest days, always available to be exploited by politicians, preachers, and other scoundrels. Be afraid, be afraid! You need a gun … or maybe five! Then there’s the gun as the sexual talisman, the ammo amulet that makes every little man a big one. Tough, dangerous, and hell, sexy, right? Strap on the old cannon and you’ll be fighting them off … perhaps literally. The phallic imagery finds its way into their rhetoric. I remember one gun nut decades ago telling me about people being “de-barrelled” – having their guns taken away. Not sure he got the sense that he was talking about castration with that odd term, but perhaps.

All I can say is that, with 300 million guns sold and rising, I’m not sure what good limiting the supply will do, but we should try anyway. The gun show loophole is another important issue. That guy who lived around the corner from me – the one who shot up the AT&T store because he didn’t like the service – probably got his gun from a secondary dealer or gun show (it had actually been stolen from someone’s car in South Carolina).

So, thanks, House Democrats, for at least trying to do something. A pity Eddie Munster holds the gavel, but that won’t change until we all get more involved in political life.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

The hobby lobby.

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The sickening, sickening massacre in Orlando last weekend has had a range of effects on America’s national, multi-layered electronic conversation, from some truly inspiring expressions of love, sympathy, and defiance among the survivors to the sorry spectacle my gun-nut Facebook friends setting their hair on fire over the dim possibility of some Congressional action on arm sale restrictions.

Liability issues.God, I’m sick of this grisly movie, running over and over again – innocents cut down in large numbers by some psycho bastard with an easily obtainable assault rifle. The graves are not even filled in before AR-15s start flying off the shelves, hastily purchased by paranoid hobbyists who see black helicopters everywhere. One dealer in California, I believe, claimed that while he normally sells 15 of these death machines a day (!), that rose to 15 an hour after Orlando. Bonanza, in more ways than one.

Gun enthusiasts always speak to their constitutional rights, but what is this if not a hobby, really? None of these fuckers need a machine gun for self-defense – they just like to play with the thing, fire it off at targets, tote it around like a real soldier, fantasize over it five ways from Friday. It’s the industry (manufacturing and retail) that plays up the self-defense angle, most ardently through their lobbying group, the NRA. It’s a dangerous world! they warn. You have to protect your family, tough guy. (Of course, the manufacturers also emphasize the macho war-fighter image that an automatic weapon confers onto its purchaser.) All bullshit, of course, with respect to their core market. So … why do the rest of us – the vast majority of the country – have to pay such a high price to protect their hobby?

The short answer is, they have a good lobby. Very effective advocates, the NRA, and they can hold Congress’s feet to the fire like almost no one else. The fact is, it looks like legal action may be the only way to undermine the power of this industry. The families of victims need to sue the manufacturers. We need to find a way to make the manufacture, sale, and possession of assault weapons a prohibitively costly liability. Once the profit goes out of it, however that may be achieved, the air will go out of this tire. And maybe we’ll be able to get through a whole year without another Orlando.

Here’s hoping.

luv u,

j