A confession

by

by liberal japonicus
I’m a fast reader. Too fast sometimes, and when I drop into ObWi, it’s often more to see that people aren’t reenacting Lord of the Flies. So when the Count started to post single names, my eyes went right over them. Janie joined in. I didn’t notice until an offlist email from Janie, saying that she was grateful that he did that. I assumed it would be a long list of names and looked thru the comments for something like that. I had to write back to ask and Janie pointed me to the first one, here.

I also see that Russell had picked up on it, pointing out that one name was from just down the road from him.

I googled each name, it’s just started, so there are still more to come. I went back and using the admin powers, I added a link to each person’s name, ideally something from a local paper/news site. It’s like the opposite of a treasure hunt, you aren’t looking to find some treasure, you search around to find something you’ve lost and will never recover.

If the Count and Janie object, I’ll go back and delete the links. But if they don’t mind, I would like to keep doing it, possibly as a bit of penance, possibly as a way to support the Count and Janie, perhaps as a way of trying to do something that doesn’t involve screaming and getting in arguments.

223 thoughts on “A confession”

  1. lj, far from objecting — thank you for adding links. I hope the Count doesn’t mind that we’re weaving more into his good idea.
    I am hoping to expand beyond Las Vegas, but that hope will probably come into conflict with my nerdy wish to be orderly rather than random. And as I’ve said, I’ve got visitors for a few days so will only be dropping in for brief moments.

  4. Like wonkie, I feel very sad about these people whose lives were cut off too soon, and whose loved ones may never recover.
    But I feel hopeless too: somebody on twitter linked to some stats from the NYT a couple of days ago showing that more people have died from gun violence in the US since 1966 than the total number of American soldiers who have ever died in any and all wars (also unacceptable, of course, in a better world), I think the numbers were 1.6m to 1.3m.
    I’m with cleek: all guns in the US should be banned from private ownership, with very few and very strict exceptions indeed for hunting, and I think he came up with a good and detailed plan for how to do it and how to finance it on the other thread. The 2nd Amendment should be repealed, as a historical anachronism.
    I realise not everybody, even here, agrees, but there it is: that’s what I think.

  5. I wouldn’t go as far as cleek or GftNC.
    But I definitely agree that we need a LOT more controls over who owns guns, what kinds of guns, how many guns, and how they are required to be secured.

  10. more importantly, the second amendment requires that gunfire is a possibility in every situation; likewise it requires that being shot is also a possibility in every situation.
    the second amendment mandates this.
    and people fight to maintain these possibilities. they get very upset, very indignant when anyone tries to say “no, gunfire will not be a possibility in this situation.” they start yelling and screaming and waving their guns, when people try to create situations where gunfire is not a possibility. they are deeply committed to making sure that in every situation in the US that one can find oneself in, gunfire a possibility.
    very smart, we are not.

  11. I think the USA is unsuited to gun controls. What it likes is tort. Make gun owners carry third-party insurance in case anyone gets hurt by their gun (including if the gun has been stolen). Make gun manufacturers liable for sudden unintended discharge incidents.
    I can’t see anything in the second amendment which would stop you.

  12. they get very upset, very indignant when anyone tries to say “no, gunfire will not be a possibility in this situation.”
    Except in GOP presidential debates and nominating convention.
    Each and every attendee should have been issued with a fully auto, fully loaded AR-15 at the door. America deserves, and NEEDS no less, amirite?

  13. @ Pro Bono …
    I like the idea, but as I understand it the reach (and therefore the premiums) of insurance carried by gun owners would be limited by the intentional act exclusion.
    In other words, the carrier would only be underwriting for accidental deaths/injuries resulting from gun ownership. That’s actually a small (but tragic) percentage compared to intentional deaths/injuries.
    Then you have laws like Florida’s § 626.9541(1)(g)(4)(a):
    http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=0600-0699/0626/Sections/0626.9541.html
    which keeps insurers from charging gun owners extra beyond what is actuarily justified.

  14. more importantly, the second amendment requires that gunfire is a possibility in every situation; likewise it requires that being shot is also a possibility in every situation.
    the second amendment mandates this.
    This is probably not a widely held view and is accurate only in the sense that every moment a person is alive mandates the possibility of sexual assault or some other heinous crime.
    The number of guns in the hands of private citizens has more than doubled in my life time, even while the number of gun crimes has fallen. So, more guns, less crime, despite how others bend the stats. Does the presence of more guns reduce gun crime? I’m agnostic on that. Crime in general is falling for reasons that are hard to identify.
    Gun statistics are widely abused. There are way more children killed in swimming pools than accidentally by guns. The vast majority of non-suicide shootings are inner city minority youths, mostly African American.
    Tort liability for gun accidents bears no relationship to mass shootings. I’m a tort lawyer. I’ve done maybe 20 gun cases over the last 37 years, mostly product liability cases in search of a deep pocket with a small number being accidents or suicide. Actually, most of the product liability cases were negligent handling and in once case, suicide.
    It is not uncommon here to have someone say there is a better chance of X (some remote contingency) than being killed in a terrorist attack before going off on how we overreact to Islamic terrorism (an unpersuasive argument in my mind, but it’s still fairly common here and elsewhere on the left). If you are not a young, male African American living in a depressed inner city neighborhood, or not profoundly depressed, your odds of death or injury by firearm are quite remote, much less than operating a car in an urban environment.
    Cleek and a few others are honest enough to declare their agenda and their hostility to one part of the Constitution. At least those of us who see things different know where they stand.
    Somewhat related is the ongoing debate over what the 2d means. Pretty much every constitutional scholar who has looked at it agrees that it confers a personal right, i.e. the right of the people. Where the breakdown comes is “a well regulated militia being necessary to a free state.” Historically, in Texas anyway, the militia was drawn from the armed population. If the Comanches raided Victoria (they did), the militia (everyone who had a gun) was called out (a whole bunch of folks showed up) and when the two got together, a big battle ensued.
    The point is, back in the day, even if there was a state (there was not when the Comanches raided Victoria), it was so remote that the militia was a purely local operation, with very mixed notions of organization and whatnot. The Texans at the Alamo were militia in the sense they were armed citizens who showed up to fight under the command of three self-appointed colonels who were not entirely in agreement as to who was boss.
    So, first you have your armed citizens and then you have your militia, if needed. You can’t have a militia, as understood back in the day, if you didn’t have the underlying armed citizens.
    Is all of that business an anachronism today? Under most reasonably foreseeable conditions, yes. Might there be local, short term conditions where civil order breaks down to the point that responsible, armed citizens are deputized to act? Possible. Hopefully it never happens, but it’s not impossible.

  15. Ah, McKinney, excellent to see you – I was just thinking about you today when I saw the latest stuff exempting any employer, “regardless of whether they are religious, to refuse to include the coverage [of contraception] in their health insurance plans for moral reasons”. You told me recently, when I was loosely characterising the aims of “the left” versus “the right”, that it was not a project of the right to aid employers in avoiding having to cover contraception in their employees’ health coverage, just a view that people should not have to act (or pay for things) contrary to their conscience. Tell me, would you still say this? And if so, what would the wording/effect have to be before you agreed that this seems to be their aim?

  17. You told me recently, when I was loosely characterising the aims of “the left” versus “the right”, that it was not a project of the right to aid employers in avoiding having to cover contraception in their employees’ health coverage, just a view that people should not have to act (or pay for things) contrary to their conscience. Tell me, would you still say this?
    I recall the conversation but like a lot of other things at my age, the recollection isn’t particularly precise. I don’t speak for righties but am loosely associated with that side of the divide. I think it is clear that there is no consensus on the right to outlaw or limit access to birth control. For myself, I support an exception to employer-mandated health policies for birth control if there is a bona fide religious objection by the funding employer. The idea that any employer can opt out of BC coverage for any “moral” reason is well beyond my view. To me, it’s analogous to being a conscientious objector. US law respects CO’s but the burden is on the objector to establish his/her status.

  18. I don’t speak for righties but am loosely associated with that side of the divide.
    Hmm, I hope you will grant us all the same exemption, i.e. that we don’t speak for the left! However, interesting (and good) to hear that you think it is clear that there is no consensus on the right to outlaw or limit access to birth control., but if so it is certainly strange that attempts to limit such access seem to surface so often from your side of the divide.
    Again, apologies to everyone for going OT in this way.

  19. it is clear that there is no consensus on the right to outlaw or limit access to birth control.
    This is indeed true. But while a majority of Republicans are in favor of access to birth control (including the access that the administration has just acted to limit), somehow it is always Republican legislators who are pushing for limiting access. Which definitely gives the entirely understandable impression that the right opposes allowing birth control.
    It may be only a subset of the right, consisting of the religious fundamentalist right. But it still looks the same.

  20. “…somehow it is always Republican legislators who are pushing for limiting access. [to BC]”
    When the GOP ‘big tent’ covers theocrats, Nazis, Klansmen and Russian-suborned traitors, that tent is too damned big.
    Not my job to fix it, though. Unless by ‘fix it’, you mean ‘burn it down’.

  21. When the GOP ‘big tent’ covers theocrats, Nazis, Klansmen and Russian-suborned traitors, that tent is too damned big.
    When the chips are down, Snarki, your snark is just so … so … Yeah, that’s why I’m not you.

  23. Pretty much every constitutional scholar who has looked at it agrees that it confers a personal right, i.e. the right of the people.
    meh.
    also, too: we’re no longer back in the day.
    last but not least: when the 2nd A was drafted, TX didn’t exist.
    when the constitution was under discussion, states were leery of surrendering sovereignty to the feds. among other things, they did not want the feds to be able to impose it’s will on them through military force.
    so they insisted on retaining the institution of of the citizen militia, operating under the control of local civil government, per the direction of congress.
    what that looked like, exactly, was codified in the militia acts of 1792. able bodied men of suitable age were not only permitted, but were in fact required, to equip themselves with a firearm, ammunition, and powder, and participate in a local, organized militia.
    by ‘organized’ the statute meant under the direction and authority of local civil government.
    that institution was basically mothballed by the dick act, because as a system of national defense it was utter bollocks. to the degree that it persists, it persists as the national guard.
    if we want to go back to what the founders intended, we need to get rid of a professional standing army, replace it with citizen militia with almost universal participation, and everyone between the ages of 18 and 50 or 60 needs to roll out of bed on weekend mornings and haul their asses down to the local training ground for drills.
    we don’t do that. so what the founders intended by the 2nd A is kind of a dead letter.
    i recognize that the US has an entrenched gun culture, and that’s fine with me. not my thing, personally, but different strokes. there are many legitimate reasons to have a gun, including no particular reason other than you like to shoot and they are interesting to you. most folks that own guns use them responsibly.
    want a gun? have a gun. have ten. just don’t be an idiot, and don’t hurt yourself or anyone else.
    but what the 2nd A was talking about no longer exists.

  24. oh yeah, wait, one other thing…
    i seriously want to sign up for the thing where we can claim to be exempt from federal regulations and requirements because of religious, moral, or ethical beliefs.
    i got a list as long as your arm. i want in.
    if anyone gets to play by those rules, we all get to play. otherwise we are in establishment of religion territory.
    i want in on that one. sign me up.

  25. “i got a list as long as your arm. i want in.”
    Well there are two places this plays and I think you can play.
    From a government standpoint you can convince a majority if congresspeople that your tax dollars should not be spent on anything on your list. Or taxes period.
    As a private person or entity you can refuse to pay for pretty much anything you decide not to pay for.
    The discussion starts when government requires a private entity to pay for something that isn’t a tax or fee, in fact it is a payment from one person or company to another company or person. Not to mention when the government requires you to provide your labor to another person or company.
    Then, I guess, you get to object on moral grounds.

  26. Just get rid of the income tax on wages, jack up the rate on capital gains, and tax stock transactions (at the exchange level). Moral objectors can avoid all that stuff with ease.
    And stop pretending that the US government can’t make as many “money-bits” as they want.

  27. responsible, armed citizens
    “Responsible” motorized citizens register their automobiles, obtain driver’s licenses, and carry insurance — by guvmint mandate in most places.
    A person who refuses to do the above is not considered a “responsible” citizen.
    But “responsible” means something different when it comes to firearms. It seems to mean “any citizen with cash or credit”, to many people.
    And I’m still waiting for “responsible, armed citizens” to even brandish their weapons in defense of anyone’s rights but their own. I don’t remember “responsible, armed citizens” rising up to oppose Jim Crow, or Japanese internment, or minority voter suppression.
    “We need to keep and bear arms to defend our right to keep and bear arms” is airtight logic, though.
    As for McKinney’s “bending the stats” comment: yeah, crime has been going down since the Baby Boom aged out of its rambunctious late teens and early twenties. It has been going down in NYC, where guns are rare, and it has been going down in rural TX, where I take it they are not. For all I know, Texans would be killing each other a lot more if they had fewer guns, and New Yorkers would be killing each other more if they didn’t have so few. Statistics, bah!
    Traffic deaths have been going down, too. Safety mandates like requiring motorized citizens to pay automobile makers for seat belts, airbags, crumple zones and such may have something to do with that. But so what? Here in America, owning a gun is a Constitutional right; driving is merely a privilege. Safety mandates can’t “infringe” a mere privilege.
    One last question: if The People have the right to vote in elections, do individual persons have the individual right to vote, e.g. whether there’s an election on or not? This is a question for the Consitutional scholars here. In 18th-century American English, when literate, articulate persons like our revered Founders referred to “persons” in some cases and to “the people” in others, were they making some sort of distinction or just alternating for the sake of variety?
    –TP

  28. IIRC, Marty’s previously stated policy preferences WRT firearms are sensible and rational. So the people with which we have a big argument *aren’t here*.
    It does require some effort to move past Cleek’s Law to get to the ‘rational’ stuff, though.

  29. I don’t remember “responsible, armed citizens” rising up to oppose Jim Crow, or Japanese internment, or minority voter suppression.
    No “rising up,” but there is this:
    “I’m alive today because of the Second Amendment and the natural right to keep and bear arms,” declared John R. Salter Jr., the civil rights leader who helped to organize the famous sit-ins against segregated lunch counters in Jackson, Mississippi. “Like a martyred friend of mine, NAACP staffer Medgar W. Evers, I, too, was on many Klan death lists and I, too, traveled armed: a .38 special Smith and Wesson revolver and a 44/40 Winchester carbine,” Salter recalled. “The knowledge that I had these weapons and was willing to use them kept enemies at bay.”
    How the Second Amendment Helped Civil Rights Activists Resist Jim Crow: A response to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and his call to “repeal the Second Amendment.”

  30. This is probably not a widely held view and is accurate only in the sense that every moment a person is alive mandates the possibility of sexual assault or some other heinous crime…
    That seems pretty specious too.
    You’re honestly making a comparison with the cost/benefits of being alive, and having guns – whose only function is to shoot lumps of metal at lethal speeds ?
    Cleek’s formulation seems pretty accurate to me.

  31. My thoughts on guns …
    You can have anything short of a tactical nuke to defend your home, but you need a hell of lot more training than most states require for a carry permit.
    Hyperbole aside, I think urban areas should be allowed to restrict weapons/ammo based on how close people live next to one another. When we had a crime spree in our downtown neighborhood (daylight smash and grabs), my wife wanted a gun (when she isn’t traveling for work, she’s home alone working). We restricted our choices to guns/ammo that would pose less potential harm if a stray shot went through a window.
    For several years, I have volunteered at an elementary school in an economically distressed part of town (almost exclusively black and Hispanic). I teach 5th graders the basic rights guaranteed under the Constitution. As distrust of the police increases, the desire to exercise 2nd Amendment rights increases in this population. It’s sky high these days. I volunteer at a rural, economically poor, white school with the same Constitutional rights program. Support for the second amendment is unsurprisingly high there as well.
    I feel like some of my well-off liberal white friends occasionally demonstrate a lack of empathy when it comes to firearm ownership.
    Not that I’m an NRA supporter; far from it. On a truth-in-advertising level, they are an industry lobby masquerading as a champion of individual rights. On a public policy level, Florida’s legislature is deeper in the NRA tank than any other state that I know of (even TX). The combination of “stand your ground”, “shall issue”, no duty to inform, “take your gun to work” and permissive concealed carry is toxic.
    I have no problem with registration. I have no problem with ending unregulated private sales and gun show sales. I think that the level of “proficiency” needed for a carry license should be *much* higher than a quick NRA class; periodic practical training should be required. “Stand your ground” should burn in fire … I’m a big believer in the castle doctrine, but when you step off your property, your rights vis a vis others should change considerably.
    With all rights afforded by the Constitution, my exercise of freedom is limited by its impact on others (e.g., I have freedom of speech, but can’t falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater). Somewhere along the line, this natural limiting factor has almost been erased when it comes to gun ownership. My right to own and carry a gun should not unduly impact someone else’s desire not to own a gun or not to be exposed to someone carrying a gun in public with minimal training.

  33. “I feel like some of my well-off liberal white friends occasionally demonstrate a lack of empathy when it comes to firearm ownership.
    Not that I’m an NRA supporter; far from it. On a truth-in-advertising level, they are an industry lobby masquerading as a champion of individual rights. On a public policy level, Florida’s legislature is deeper in the NRA tank than any other state that I know of (even TX). The combination of “stand your ground”, “shall issue”, no duty to inform, “take your gun to work” and permissive concealed carry is toxic.”
    Reverse the order of those two paragraphs, with the first now becoming the consequence of the second and some sense would be made of the growing lack of empathy for firearm ownership and the Second Amendment.

  34. As to Jim Crow, please.
    I might be convinced of the efficacy of widespread gun ownership by the black population if we could read in today’s history books that entire state and local governments throughout the United States, perhaps even the federal government had been violently overthrown by highly organized and armed black militias (the Klan and their local Klan police forces butchered in their beds) as Reconstruction went “south” so to speak and as Jim Crow unfolded.
    And then of course the requisite “it’s too soon to talk about it waiting period” of decades before Civil Rights legislation guaranteeing all of the other rights in the Constitution could get through the hard heads of the armed Democratic and Republican Parties.
    And now backsliding on that, even as blacks may own weapons.
    Meanwhile, three to five days, is it, has been the maximum it’s too soon to talk about it waiting period for taking possession of the guaranteed Second Amendment right to possessing a weapon, or the ones waiting might just have to shoot us.
    We could test this gun ownership secures all of the other rights thesis, I suppose, by issuing firearms to 800,000 Dreamers.
    The current killer f*cks in charge would be happy to deport corpses and confiscate their weapons.
    I suppose too the same lesson that Salter and company (and good on them) learned has gone unlearned to this day as unarmed blacks are shot in the back by law enforcement.
    I didn’t see any fewer bullets piercing the armed flesh of the Black Panthers and in the end, Malcolm X, in the 1960s, than I saw taking out Martin Luther King, little black kids in churches, and civil rights demonstrators.
    Armed or not, they were fucked.
    I’d like to see much fewer weapons in the hands of law enforcement too, including the ATF.
    I grew up around guns and have fired them after training and with supervision.
    Target only. I’ve never hunted.
    I have been known to go long periods without locking the doors to my castle let alone setting up machine gun nests to protect it.
    Nothing has happened. Yet that is proof of nothing.
    I could, at this point in my anger about this issue, learn to appreciate gun ownership again, but it wouldn’t be for personal defensive reasons.
    Happily, thus far my intense dislike for firearms, especially the weapons of war, has vetoed my political and ideological demons.
    And strangling those who need it takes too long.

  36. “Reverse the order of those two paragraphs, with the first now becoming the consequence of the second and some sense would be made of the growing lack of empathy for firearm ownership and the Second Amendment.”
    Poor urban blacks are not the target demo for the NRA.
    NRA ≠ all gun owners.

  37. The discussion starts when government requires a private entity to pay for something that isn’t a tax or fee
    that’s a good point, and noted.
    i still got a very long list.
    I feel like some of my well-off liberal white friends occasionally demonstrate a lack of empathy when it comes to firearm ownership.
    hey, i guess that’s me!
    i have no problem with people owning firearms for personal self defense.
    and, I have no problem with communities setting the bar for the conditions under which folks can and can’t carry a firearm around with them in public.
    i don’t care if people have guns per se. i care about idiots, paranoids, and violent assholes having guns.
    as should we all.

  38. Somewhere along the line, this natural limiting factor has almost been erased when it comes to gun ownership.
    this. thank you.
    NRA ≠ all gun owners.
    yes, but they are the public face of all gun owners.
    if “all gun owners” don’t want that to be so, they need to start speaking up. loudly, early and often. not just on a blog post.
    you say “advocate for gun ownership”, i think wayne lapierre and dana loesch. there is no conversation available to me to have with them. i don’t like them very much. in fact, i despise them.
    if “responsible gun owners” feel like they are being unfairly characterized as blood thirsty nutjobs, maybe they need to give the rest of us someone else to talk to.
    the problem here is not all of us non-gun-owners. we don’t care if you hunt, or shoot target, or keep a gun in the house for self-defense.
    we aren’t the problem. the people that keep shooting other people, or themselves for that matter, are the problem.
    and responding to people like lapierre and loesch as if they are freaking insane death zombies is not unreasonable.

  39. russell-
    I don’t have anything to say to Lapierre or Loesch either. You can add Marion Hammer to the list as well.
    I’m fine with acknowledging that responsible gun owners need to speak out against NRA-gun industry craziness if you’ll acknowledge that not every non-gun owner is willing to stop at not caring if we “hunt, or shoot target, or keep a gun in the house for self-defense”.
    Slippery slope arguments are generally lazy extrapolations, except when one side admits that they are trying to create a slippery slope.

  40. I feel like some of my well-off liberal white friends occasionally demonstrate a lack of empathy when it comes to firearm ownership.
    sorry. the ever-present state of fear in which i’m required to live has worn my empathy center down to a tiny .22-sized nub (and then scooped-out its center, just for maximum ka-blooey!).
    if only i wasn’t always so busy wondering if i’m going to get shot by a formerly-responsible gun owner! alas.
    i’m sure you can empathize.

  41. I’m fine with acknowledging that responsible gun owners need to speak out against NRA-gun industry craziness
    in general, all gun owners are responsible gun owners, right up until the second that they do the deed that brings their last-known grainy photo into our lives.
    until you can guarantee that a responsible gun owner will always be a responsible gun owner, the label says much less than you want it to. pointing out that that this particular responsible gun owner hasn’t murdered a dozen strangers is just a reminder of the potential; there’s always a silent “yet” at the end of the statement.
    this responsible gun owner hasn’t murdered a dozen strangers yet.
    until then, we all have to wonder if he’s going to snap at the next traffic stop, at work, in a hotel, in an elementary school, at a night club, a party, an overpass, from the truck of his car, etc..
    guarantee me that responsibility is immutable and i’ll start worrying about the feelings of gun owners.

  42. Actually I can empathize as is evident from the rest of my post above, but if the snark makes you feel better then go right ahead.

  44. “and yet you say i’m just being snarky.”
    Everybody here just keeps horning into my gig, SHEESH!

  45. True situation as yet unclear, but it seems a car has driven into pedestrians outside the Natural History Museum in London. Motor vehicles now seem the weapon of choice for terrorist attacks in Europe….

  47. “and yet you say i’m just being snarky.”
    Posted by: formerly known as cleek

    I guess I was hoping it was snark because the alternative doesn’t cast you in a favorable light.
    Yeah, let’s stick with snarky.

  48. It has become a standard ISIS advice: If in the US, use a gun; if in another Western country, use a vehicle. I wonder why (no, I actually don’t).

  49. remember, folks, the right to have guns in order to protect yourself from gun owners is the cornerstone of freedom.

  50. The discussion starts when government requires a private entity to pay for something that isn’t a tax or fee, in fact it is a payment from one person or company to another company or person. Not to mention when the government requires you to provide your labor to another person or company.
    Then, I guess, you get to object on moral grounds.
    This was the point I was alluding to with my reference to conscientious objectors. As private citizens outside the economic sphere, there are few affirmative, individual requirements: paying taxes, buying health insurance, jury duty and military service if drafted. Jehovah’s Witnesses are routinely excused from jury duty in Texas because they refuse to sit in judgment of others. If one is a pacifist or conscientious objector, one can avoid compulsory military service. The insurance/BC nexus is new and its the product of a federal mandate that all must adhere to. There is no long list of other gov’t mandated actions one can avoid on grounds of conscience.

    I have no problem with ending unregulated private sales and gun show sales. I think that the level of “proficiency” needed for a carry license should be *much* higher than a quick NRA class; periodic practical training should be required. “Stand your ground” should burn in fire … I’m a big believer in the castle doctrine, but when you step off your property, your rights vis a vis others should change considerably.
    I’m not a fan of open carry for several reasons. First, walking around visibly armed is an implied threat. Second, people who think they need to walk around visibly armed probably should not be issued a license in the first place.
    As far as concealed carry is concerned, the complaints about that from the gun control quarter are unsupported by evidence. Licensed fire arm carriers are one of the most if not the most law abiding cohort in society.
    the people that keep shooting other people, or themselves for that matter, are the problem.
    Then your problem is primarily with depressed people, secondarily with young African American inner city males and third, with young men raised in single parent households.
    in general, all gun owners are responsible gun owners, right up until the second that they do the deed that brings their last-known grainy photo into our lives.
    This is true for every human being. Everyone of us is a law abiding citizen until we are not. Take out “gun” and insert “vehicle” and read GFTNC’s quote.
    guarantee me that responsibility is immutable and i’ll start worrying about the feelings of gun owners.
    There is a lot of unintended irony packed into this sentence.

  51. yes, but they are the public face of all gun owners.
    the people who grab their guns and commit our daily mass-shootings get a lot more air time than the NRA ghouls who work to guarantee them their guns.
    when i think of gun owners, i don’t think about the NRA. the NRA are just cheerleaders. the murderers are the real stars of gun ownership.

  52. in general, all gun owners are responsible gun owners, right up until the second that they do the deed that brings their last-known grainy photo into our lives.
    This is true for every human being. Everyone of us is a law abiding citizen until we are not. Take out “gun” and insert “vehicle” and read GFTNC’s quote.
    I do see that this doesn’t change the principle, but with the exception of Nice it seems very hard to kill the same numbers with vehicles as with, for example, bump-stocked semi-automatics. However, I don’t want to tempt fate….

  53. I do see that this doesn’t change the principle, but with the exception of Nice it seems very hard to kill the same numbers with vehicles as with, for example, bump-stocked semi-automatics. However, I don’t want to tempt fate….
    Actually, car bombs do the most damage.

  54. Do they, McKinney? This is a serious question, not snark. Do you mean the sort that used to be driven into e.g. the US Embassy in Beirut? But the point about driving a vehicle into a crowd versus acquiring a load of semi-automatics is that neither of them requires any specialist knowledge, unlike making a bomb that actually goes off.

  55. Take out “gun” and insert “vehicle” and read GFTNC’s quote.
    yes, we’ve done this one before. the list of things that can kill people is a very long and sometimes humorous list (water! harhar).
    but, as always, guns are designed to kill. that’s their purpose. it’s why they’re made. and it’s what they do. people get guns and use them to kill. quite often, they kill other people.
    but most importantly – and again, as always, unlike a vehicle – i can buy a gun right now and nobody will know. i won’t have to register it, prove i know what i’m doing before i can use it, purchase insurance on it, get my name on countless government lists, etc. etc. etc.
    because gun owners refuse to let us treat the ownership of guns like the ownership vehicles, i’m going to refuse to put them in the same category when it comes to talking about casualty statistics.
    also, see Hartmut’s 12:29.

  56. when i think of gun owners, i don’t think about the NRA. the NRA are just cheerleaders. the murderers are the real stars of gun ownership.
    Given the vehemence of your views, maybe the issue here is projection.

  57. As far as concealed carry is concerned, the complaints about that from the gun control quarter are unsupported by evidence. Licensed fire arm carriers are one of the most if not the most law abiding cohort in society.
    Posted by: McKinneyTexas | October 07, 2017 at 12:42 PM

    I’m not talking about the statistics as much as a respect for the rights of non-gun owners when in public. I don’t carry a weapon but I’m OK with the concept of concealed carry *if* the demonstration of proficiency required was not a joke. I should not need to worry that person next to me is carrying a hand cannon that has not been fired since they completed their afternoon NRA training session two years ago.
    In other words, I’m not really concerned with people randomly going crazy like cleek seems to be, but if shit hits the fan, I want to know that if someone pulls a weapon with good intentions, they have a chance in hell of not making matters worse.
    My issues with cleek’s comments are the same I have with the law and order crowd: a divergence between the data and the policy response.
    The law and order types see massive crime that requires suspension or erosion of the fourth and fifth amendments. They don’t blink at ridiculous incarceration rates. They see all of this as a reasonable policy response.
    Likewise, some gun control advocates put too high of a bar on, to use cleek’s phrasing, “guaranteed” results. Like the law and order types they probably mock, they seem to be acting on irrational fear (unless you live somewhere like the projects in Chicago).

  58. Do they, McKinney?
    Yes, I believe the highest body counts are the result of car bombs. The shooter in Norway may be the exception.
    but most importantly – and again, as always, unlike a vehicle – i can buy a gun right now and nobody will know. i won’t have to register it, prove i know what i’m doing before i can use it, purchase insurance on it, get my name on countless government lists, etc. etc. etc.
    because gun owners refuse to let us treat the ownership of guns like the ownership vehicles, i’m going to refuse to put them in the same category when it comes to talking about casualty statistics.
    Every gun purchased from a gun dealer is registered at the time of purchase. The one exception is gun sales by one private citizen to another. So, here you are simply mistaken. But, don’t let that stop you.

  59. In other words, I’m not really concerned with people randomly going crazy like cleek seems to be, but if shit hits the fan, I want to know that if someone pulls a weapon with good intentions, they have a chance in hell of not making matters worse.
    Well, if there is a full on gunfight, chances are good that someone will get caught in the crossfire. We aren’t seeing a lot of that AFAIK. When something like this becomes a problem, we can look at it then.
    The present issue is psychopaths getting guns and committing mass murder and what, if anything, can be done about that.
    I don’t know.
    A related issue is what can be done about the high levels of inner city gun crime.
    I read somewhere, maybe a year or two back, that most inner city weapons are acquired illegally through straw purchases but that the Feds don’t prosecute straw purchases. I suspect that if a bunch of people started going to jail for brokering straw purchases, that might make some difference, but probably not a huge difference. More likely, it would drive the cost of illegal weapons higher producing more crime to raise the money to buy the guns.

  60. It has become a standard ISIS advice: If in the US, use a gun; if in another Western country, use a vehicle. I wonder why (no, I actually don’t).
    Something like this is usually accompanied with a link.

  61. Given the vehemence of your views, maybe the issue here is projection
    maybe the issue is that i don’t want to get shot.
    Like the law and order types they probably mock, they seem to be acting on irrational fear
    my wife’s employer is doing “active shooter training” next week. shall i tell her to skip it because it’s irrational?
    it’s telling that never, ever, has anyone made a positive case as to why i should have to live in fear of being randomly shot. all that’s on offer are attempts at distraction, hand-waving, vigilante fantasies and, of course, insults.

  62. it’s telling that never, ever, has anyone made a positive case as to why i should have to live in fear of being randomly shot. all that’s on offer are attempts at distraction, hand-waving, vigilante fantasies and, of course, insults.
    If you feel that strongly about it–and I have reservations on that point–you probably should move to the UK or someplace like that. Your best/worst chance of being shot is to shoot yourself. That is by far and away the leading cause of gunshot deaths. If you are worried about being the victim of gun crime, stay out of the inner city and do not consort with criminals. If you do those things, you are much more at risk from driving than gunfire, which at that point raises the issue of whether your fears are rational. Here’s a link that I hope helps with perspective: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortality-risk

  63. The latest (good) news is the London incident is not being treated as terrorist-related, but as a traffic accident.

  64. McTX: The present issue is psychopaths getting guns and committing mass murder and what, if anything, can be done about that.
    Ban psychopaths or ban guns. Take your pick. Or keep doing nothing, of course.
    If you are worried about being the victim of gun crime, stay out of the inner city and do not consort with criminals.
    Is the Las Vegas Strip “inner city”? Was whatshisname a “criminal”?
    I read somewhere, maybe a year or two back, that most inner city weapons are acquired illegally through straw purchases but that the Feds don’t prosecute straw purchases.
    “The Feds” are all Republicans now. Think they’ll start?
    BTW, McKinney, YOU could move to some country that’s more congenial to your attitude on guns just as easily as cleek could move to the UK.
    –TP

  65. It seems to me that the US is already pretty congenial to McKinney’s attitude to guns, no?
    As for cleek moving to the UK, as Hunter Thompson said about John Belushi after he died “He’s the real thing. He’s welcome here anytime, alive or dead.” (Preferably alive).But honestly, why should he have to? The US is, increasingly, in a mass-psychosis about guns, and surely, surely it will have to come to its senses sometime. At least, that’s how it seems as the rest of the developed world looks on aghast.

  66. I don’t know, GftNC — it depends on what “the US” means. “The US” includes city-dwellers as well as honest yeoman sons of the soil, FDR liberals as well as Trump troglodytes, men who are disgusted by guns as well as women who are disgusted by abortion, atheists as well as god-botherers, golfers who don’t drink as well as drinkers who don’t golf. This nation’s laws are surely more congenial to McKinney’s POV than to cleek’s, but laws can change. The nation’s “culture” may be a different story.
    I think, myself, that McKinney is more justified in worrying that “the culture” will eventually turn against guns than cleek is that he will be shot by one. Statistically speaking.
    –TP

  67. and i need to stay away from concerts, workplaces, night clubs, elementary schools, overpasses, sidewalks, libraries, baseball practice, malls, etc, etc, etc.
    and “meh, that’s just the way it is” is a cowardly cop-out.
    and still, there’s not even the slightest hint of a positive case for guns. you might think on why that is and what makes you defend the situation despite not being able to say why it should persist.

  68. McKinneyTX @ 1:25: Every gun purchased from a gun dealer is registered at the time of purchase. The one exception is gun sales by one private citizen to another. So, here you are simply mistaken. But, don’t let that stop you.
    I believe that the set that cleek references contains ALL gun purchases, while your set ONLY contains that subset of gun purchases made at registered dealers (who are by law required by law to report the transaction). Eliding this loophole with the phraseology “the one exception” seems, um..disengenuous to me. Venn-speaking, your circle is completely overlapped by cleek’s, but the opposite is not true.
    A more accurate version of your sentence might read:
    “For every gun purchase in which the buyer opts to make the purchase through a gun dealer, the gun is registered at the time of purchase.”
    And so the certainty with which you declare him wrong is rather humorous in light of the fact that he is not. But, don’t let that stop you.

  69. Every gun purchased from a gun dealer is registered at the time of purchase
    LOL.
    everyone is encouraged to read this link that Count dropped off at my place:
    https://www.gq.com/story/inside-federal-bureau-of-way-too-many-guns
    what ‘dealer registration’ amounts to is this: when a sale is made, the dealer fills out a form. the dealer holds that form. if the dealer goes out of business, the form is sent to a place in WV where it is photographed into microfilm. they get millions of records per month. there are no computers to help them locate any particular registration.
    and that only accounts for the first sale from the dealer. it doesn’t track the gun after that. and they don’t even have records from dealers that haven’t turned over the forms.
    and even this was fought tooth and nail by the perpetual fear lobby.
    it’s not even close to being comparable to the car registration system.

  70. True situation as yet unclear, but it seems a car has driven into pedestrians outside the Natural History Museum in London
    on a brighter note, this is now being called a “road traffic collision”, not terror-related. and, everybody who was injured is expected to live.
    http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-41538762

  71. There is no long list of other gov’t mandated actions one can avoid on grounds of conscience.
    marty wants to confine the discussion to things that aren’t taxes or fees. you want to confine the discussion to individual affirmative requirements outside the economic sphere.
    fortunately for me, i’m not obliged to tailor my point of view to fit the turf you’d prefer to play on. i’m free to simply object to things that i’m required to pay for, participate in, or not pay for or participate in, that various levels of government require of me, and which i find morally objectionable.
    whether they fit into your requirements or not.
    at the moment the feds require employers above a certain size to provide health insurance that includes birth control as part of empoye compensation. some folks object to that because they feel thatit makes them complicit if some employee uses that coverage to obtain an abortion, or use birth control methods that are, in their view, equivalent to abortion.
    all good. suffice it to say that lots and lots and lots of people find themselves in positions that involve at least that level of association with things they find objectionable.
    i’ll start with: i’m obliged to pay for a hell of a lot of stuff that makes me puke. stuff that i think is profoundly evil.
    you want an exemption for the stuff you don’t like. i want the same consideration. i probably won’t get it.
    feel free to dismiss my point of view. i’ll bear it in mind when you call for consideration of yours.

  72. I didn’t dismiss your point of view, I pointed out that there were mechanisms to protect or lobby for your point of view in most cases. Same as me.
    In one set of cases I can simply object to making x payment to y entity on moral grounds because it is a discreet identifiable private transaction. It isn’t federal budget dollars, it isn’t a fee for use, it’s an imposed private transaction. Which I think you have a right to object to purely on moral grounds.

  73. I agree with Marty: it doesn’t make sense to pay for contraception, or medical advice about it, through employer-provided ‘insurance’ (quote marks because insurance is a strange word to use for payment for a routine expense). It’s generally desirable that women should be protected from unwanted pregnancy, so contraception should be paid for through general taxation.

  74. Which I think you have a right to object to purely on moral grounds.
    first, i don’t really see how having to provide a certain level of health insurance as part of compensation is an “imposed private transaction” any different in kind than having to, for instance, pay a minimum wage, or time and a half for overtime.
    an employee could use their health insurance to obtain an IUD. an employee could take their pay and buy an IUD. it’s their compensation to use as they wish. they earned it, it’s theirs. not your money, not your business.
    as far as i can see.
    second, i don’t see how an “imposed private transaction” is fair game for moral objection, but other requirements are not.
    it’s hair-splitting, IMO.
    lastly, i didn’t think you were dismissing my point of view, that was directed to mck.

  75. I’ve been abstaining from commenting lately, for the most part. We’ve been through guns, insurance, blah blah blah, so many times before. Contraception, oh no! But Viagra and penile implants, definitely necessary!
    Please. Let’s just allow people to go to the doctor, get their medical services, and have it insured.

  76. Likewise, some gun control advocates put too high of a bar on, to use cleek’s phrasing, “guaranteed” results.
    Except polities and/or cultures that ban or heavily restrict the private ownership of firearms do get results as revealed by the data.

  78. Except polities and/or cultures that ban or heavily restrict the private ownership of firearms do get results as revealed by the data.
    Yeah, forgot to mention that, of course, this has been pointed out over and over, Thanks, bobbyp for doing the necessary stuff all over again.
    I went canvassing today for “Ralph Northam for Governor”. Most people “weren’t home”. One person (with dogs!) shut the door in my face without comment, Out of 40 people, 2 copped to hoping the D would win.
    Thanks, all you anti-establishment folks! Why are we even worrying about this?

  79. …it doesn’t make sense to pay for contraception, or medical advice about it, through employer-provided ‘insurance’ (quote marks because insurance is a strange word to use for payment for a routine expense).
    As policy, it makes sense to have widespread access to relatively easily obtained and somewhat low cost health care. Feel free to put quote marks around those terms.
    As a society, we have (for a variety of reasons-some not so wise) used employer provided health insurance as the vehicle to provide this widespread access.
    Contraception is a women’s health issue. It is an important aspect of women’s health. If you are not sure on this point, you might ask a couple of them what they think.
    Thus access to this ‘routine expense’ should be covered as part of a public health policy.

  80. I think I said exactly that, except that since it’s a matter of public health policy, it should be funded by government.
    That way, Marty will have no objection to paying for it through taxation.

  81. Contraception is a women’s health issue. It is an important aspect of women’s health. If you are not sure on this point, you might ask a couple of them what they think.
    Yes. Also abortion.

  82. Contraception is a women’s health issue. It is an important aspect of women’s health. If you are not sure on this point, you might ask a couple of them what they think.
    Yes. Also abortion.
    Seconded (thirded, even, as Snagglepuss used to say).

  83. That way, Marty will have no objection to paying for it through taxation.
    Insofar as Marty shares the view that taxes “pay” for federal government spending, I feel he would object, but that is for Marty to say.
    Federal spending is not “paid for” by federal taxes, but that is another discussion.
    🙂

  85. I will point you to a bunch of countries who have created way too much “new” money and paid the price. Each of these ridiculous articles is worse than the last.
    These are like reading the justifications of climate change deniers.

  87. Marty is clearly stuck in the 19th century worldview, that ‘money’ consists of a pile of shiny metal, while those of us who inhabit the 21st century know that it’s just bits on a computer.
    There really are only a couple of reasons for taxation, in these modern times: social engineering (pull money from A, give it to B), and macroeconomic stability.
    Leaving aside the social engineering, that is why I have been saying HEAVY TAXATION ON CAPITAL GAINS AND A TAX ON SUPER-FAST STOCK TRANSACTIONS: two of the biggest causes of ‘bubbles’ and ‘crashes’.
    If one re-prioritizes tax policy toward macroeconomic stability (without the ‘shiny metal’ delusions), I think you get something that looks rather different from the current (and proposed) schemes.

  89. The latin american debt crisis does nothing to support your contention. The loans were denominated in dollars, not the currency of the borrowers.
    They basically mortgaged their economies to the big banks.

  90. “The loans were denominated in dollars, not the currency of the borrowers.”
    That’s the problem, right there. They were tied to a “shiny metal” standard, and if they couldn’t cough up the right stuff, they had problems.
    The USA does NOT have that problem, and hasn’t for a long time.

  91. Yeah, that was the problem. It wasn’t all the things it said here,too much debt, recession, rising interest rates, nope they were dollar denominated. Make more money and buy dollars. Oh, yeah, thats what they did until they couldnt.
    There is no more frightening thing than people who believe that money literally grows on trees.
    However, I knew better than to start down this road so my last word is, you are wrong, Money is not infinite.
    And I know you disagree, although I sometimes think you look for someone to have this argument with because you just like the abstract idea of defining the process of adding zeroes to the balance as actually creating something. Those zeroes go on the balance sheet as an obligation, they aren’t free.

  92. LOL. suckers.

    With the House passing a critical budget resolution this past week, GOP lawmakers are charging forward next week with plans to cut taxes in a way that could add more than $1.5 trillion to the government’s debt over 10 years, with the goal of legislation by early next month. That is on top of an effort to significantly increase military spending. White House officials say their focus is on growing the economy now and dealing with the debt later.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/in-a-switch-gop-deserts-its-budget-cutting-mantra/2017/10/07/5a62b8be-a943-11e7-850e-2bdd1236be5d_story.html

  94. Marty, I really don’t care about the number of zeros in the budget numbers.
    My point is simply that the usual arguments about taxes and spending put the cart (deficit) before the horse (macroeconomic stability). If macroeconomic stability requires strictly balanced federal budgets, so that each dollar added to the economy by government spending has to be extracted via taxes, okay. The evidence of the past century shows that is *not* the main driver of instability.
    So START with the “need for stability” and work from there, without being a slave to antique ideas that are founded on “a fixed pile of shiny metal” that is complete fiction for the US government.
    “Rampant inflation” is “macroeconomic instability”, in case it wasn’t obvious. Don’t want that. Or bubbles and panics either.
    So if you have to extract cash from the economy for stability reasons, extract it from things that tend to cause instability themselves: super-fast stock trading, and capital gains. Is that enough? Probably not, but start there. So the usual GOP policy of ‘super-low capital gains tax rates’ seems completely wrongheaded to me, and not even as a matter of ‘soak the rich’. If the rich (who have flexibility, dammit) had to deal with higher capital gains taxes than taxes on income, they would shift to having income. And that’s okay!
    But realize, Federal spending is what it needs to be to do what needs to be done; the taxes are what is done to keep the economy on an even keel. Those two things are only loosely related to one another.

  95. There is no more frightening thing than people who believe that money literally grows on trees.
    Reagan tax cuts-check.
    Bush tax cuts-check.
    Bush Iraq War-check.
    Recent $700 billion DOD appropriation-check.
    Trump tax “plan”-check.
    Basically nobody is against deficits. It’s all about whose side gets to buy their toys. If the GOP House or Senate had killed the recent Defense Bill and kicked it back to committee to die, I would believe the GOP fraudsters and their endless caterwauling about deficits.
    They are either fools or liars.

  96. Some thoughts on national debt (after substantial Sunday-Funday-Mimosa consumption) …
    Japan remains the canary in the coal mine. Japanese national debt is roughly 2.5 times GDP. The US has debt equal to GDP. The difference is that that Japan is starting to reduce their debt (-1.5% per year) while we are still piling it on (10% per year).
    The US benefits substantially from being the reserve currency of choice. There is an argument that Yellen should hold off on shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet:
    https://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2017/09/unwinding-qe
    It is difficult to overestimate the value of the dollar being a reserve currency. All the more reason for voters to immediately disqualify any Congress critter who even suggests default when the debt ceiling comes up.
    We are still dealing with the effects of the housing bubble (10 years is about right for this type of shock). Keynesian and neo-Keynesian types seem to have a short memory when it comes to the inflationary effects fo monetary expansion because no one has been concerned about inflation since 2007. The laws of eco-dyanmics have not been suspended. Snarki’s “loose relationship” between spending and revenue does not hold across all debt levels.
    Bottom line: we have a fair amount of leeway in terms of adding to the national debt, but it isn’t infinite and we need to do a *much* better job of choosing how we spend it (e.g., money spent on foreign military bases doesn’t contribute much of anything in terms of a multiplier effect).
    My glass is empty, so I’ll stop now.

  100. Everybody talks about the federal government’s debt as the “national” debt. That’s sloppy. The Government is not The Nation.
    You can easily imagine a nation whose government has no debt at all but whose citizens are carrying $100T in private debt. Maybe they had to borrow that much in order to buy services the government doesn’t provide; maybe they had to borrow that much in order to pay the taxes needed to keep the government debt-free. Would you celebrate that nation as a paragon of fiscal probity?
    Many more people worry about the federal government’s deficit than about the nation’s trade deficit. That’s silly.
    Imagine a nation A that produces soybeans and trades them for cellphones produced in nation C. Imagine that after you do the currency conversions the exchange rate boils down to: one bushel of soybeans buys one cellphone. Then imagine that the cellphone makers in nation C are willing to extend credit to the soybean growers in nation A: “We will send you 2M cellphones this year in exchange for 1M bushels, this year, and an IOU for another 1M bushels, next year. Repeat year after year. Eventually, the IOUs come due: the soybean growers have to cough up millions of bushels WITHOUT getting new cellphones in return. They have to work just as hard, but live less well. That’s only fair, of course: the cellphone makers were living less well than they could have while pumping out all those cellphones.
    Any pretense that the above is literally about “soybeans” or “cellphones” will be treated as deliberate stupidity. The point of it is that whether The Government (of either country) “prints money” or runs deficits or cuts taxes is (to first order) irrelevant to the underlying, and fundamental, process of barter.
    Finally, and to return to a long-running gag of mine: I invite anyone who is seriously concerned about the “national” debt to support my call to Privatize the National Debt.
    –TP

  101. TonyP —
    The beauty of QE is that it artfully transferred private debt to public debt and managed a fair amount of aggregate deleveraging along the way.
    Translation: I don’t mind the increase in public debt due to the government response to the RE bubble.
    I disagree that national debt is decoupled from trade deficits. Nation debt (whether defined by public debt or public debt + private debt) impact exchange rates and therefore impacts trade deficits.

  102. A trade deficit, specifically a trade deficit with a particular country, is nothing to get worked up about either. You can have, for example, a three corner trade flow, where goods go around in one direction and cash goes in the other. Zero net cash in or out for all involved. But definitely “trade deficits” for everybody with one of their trading partners.
    An overall trade deficit can be another story. But not necessarily. If the rest of the world decides that American dollars are the reserve of choice, then we are trading them something of value (dollars for their reserves) in exchange for something of equal value (goods). It’s a “trade deficit”, but it’s not a problem.
    Well, until and unless some morons decide to decide to default on our debts. At that point, our status as the reserve currency of choice disappears. And all those reserve dollars abroad will get spent buying assets here — including property, companies, etc. THEN, we will have a problem. And not a small one.

  103. Decided to delurk from time to time on issues that won’t result in pissing matches between sapient and me, which will limit the delurking. Anyway, Stephanie Kelton, linked by bobbyp, is a proponent of modern monetary theory, which is strongly pushed by some on the left including the Nakedcapitalism bloggers. I would like to understand economic theories of all sorts better if only, as Joan Robinson once said, for self defense purposes. Unfortunately I can only take it in small doses before falling asleep.
    Here is a primer on MMT. I have only read bits of it. ( See previous paragraph.). As I understand it, part of the theory is that countries with a sovereign currency are in a very different position from those like Greece which use a currency they don’t control. There are still limits on how much you could print, but if I understand correctly they kick in when there is full employment, the real economy is producing as much as it can and then extra spending created by the over utilized printing press will just cause inflation.
    http://neweconomicperspectives.org/modern-monetary-theory-primer.html

  104. McKinney said, “If you are worried about being the victim of gun crime, stay out of the inner city and do not consort with criminals.”
    It turns out that is not true. For those of us who are white (including most commenters here),

    Rates of homicides, gun killings and illicit-drug fatalities are highest in counties where nine in 10 residents are white and where President Trump won.

    For white women like me, the greatest risk IIRC is being in a relationship with a man when there is a gun in the household.

  105. Suicide and domestic violence are a significant danger (percentage wise) for white middle (and above) class Americans. McTX’s comments were in response to claims of random violence which are not a problem statistically speaking for that cohort.

  106. For anyone interested in English views of the whole gun rights issue, I posted in the Adult Daycare thread by mistake something from yesterday’s Guardian. And, taking a very different tack, here is something from today’s Observer, headlined “After Vegas, why do we still treat the US as a civilised state?” (but mainly about apologists for gun rights, in all fairness):
    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/07/after-vegas-why-do-we-still-treat-the-us-as-a-civilised-country

  107. americans have a lot of guns. americans shoot themselves and each other a hell of a lot. way, way, way more than any country that we’d actually want to compare ourselves to. way, way, way more than similar countires that also have a high rate of gun ownership.
    to me, the idea that removing the guns would reduce the violence puts the cart before he horse.
    we’re not violent because we have a lot of guns. we have a lot of guns because we’re violent.
    i don’t know why we’re so violent. all i know is hat, self-evidently, are.
    mass killings are a small – microscopic – part of the picture statistically, but they loom larger because of how freaking horribl they are. every couple of months, or even couple of weeks, somebody goes nuts and kills a bunch of people. everybody is horrified, and it’s all over the news and social media, then nothing happens to change it.
    we’re aparently helpless to do anything about it.
    so, in a couple of weeks or maybe a month or two, some other dude – it will be a dude – is going to show up somewhere with a car full of something approaching military firepower, and kill a bunch of people.
    and we’ll all talk about it, like it’s some inexplicable anomaly.
    it’s not an anomaly. it’s a pattern. it’s not inexplicable. the explanation is that americans are violent MF’ers.
    whatever it is that keeps swiss people, and german people, and french people, and swedish people, and icelandic people, and norwegians, and finns – all countries with high levels of gun ownership – from dealing with their personal issues by either shooting themselves or shooting a dozen or three other folks, is lacking in the american social character.
    when we figure that out, we’ll stop shooting each other. when we finally get sick and tired of seeing our family, friends, and neighbors gunned down like fucking shooting gallery pigeons, we’ll make some attempt to figure it out.
    i don’t know what it’s going to take to cross that line, and i’m afraid to find out.
    but the guns aren’t going away until we decide that shooting each other is not an option we want to, or need to, keep in our back pocket.
    we accept extreme violence as a regrettable but unavoidable part of life. we can’t be bothered to try to figure out why the f*** we shoot ourselves and each other at rates that would make any other similar country call for a day of national mourning, complete with sackcloth and ashes.
    we just don’t give enough of a shit to look at ourselves and ask WTF is wrong with us.
    until that happens, the guns are not going away.
    save this post and re-read it the next 25 times somebody has a bad day and guns down half a dozen, or a dozen, or five dozen people, and tell me i’m wrong.
    you will not have to wait very long.

  109. “you will not have to wait very long.”
    I’m concerned that the next mass shooting will
    happen before we get through the list of the dead from this most recent one.
    Maybe I should list two names per comment, so I can be ready to start the next list. But it seems unseemly to hurry things.
    It’s too soon to talk about the next batch of sacrificial victims before we start talking about the last batch.
    Even morgues and cemeteries are first come, first serve, or so I’m told. That’s why they have cooler drawers.
    I haven’t been keeping up with this weekend’s other gun victims across the country and I feel remiss.
    I am relieved that they decided to be individual victims instead one among a large crowd, in keeping with American normalcy.
    Bump stocks shouldn’t be banned, said the NRA today. They should be regulated, but without use of computers. In fact, The NRA wants government bureaucrats at all levels to hand over their filing cabinets and pencils too.
    They may operate abacuses, but with only one bead.
    And no finger counting.
    Not to be outdone, the American Swimming Pool and Wading Pool Council this afternoon said they will challenge all swimming pool safety and sanitation across the land regs in court, having found reference to a natural absolute right to the operation and ownership of swimming pools without exception in a scrawled note in a pocket of James Monroe’s swimming togs, now displayed at the Smithsonian.
    The note and the togs were transferred to the Shrine of Holy Objects and placed alongside Ted Cruz’s hymen for inspection by the mentally deranged.
    Spokesman Mark Spitz, who replaced Johnny Weismuller in that position after it was learned the latter was in the habit of purposefully holding a succession of chimps named Cheeta under water between takes until they passed out and had to be given mouth to mouth by assistant directors, said it was too soon to talk about rumors that the Council would recommend yesterday that carrying concealed swimming pools in public be codified into law.
    Technological advances over the centuries since “ye ole swimming hole” was originated now permit, by patented hydraulic and pneumatic methods, the water in swimming pools to form itself into, huge, powerful water spouts that can cross property lines and travel long distances and engulf and drown, say 50 little leaguers, their little sisters, their coaches, their parents, and one suspicious male lurker in a park across town in a matter of moments.
    The technology was developed by the Reagan Defense Department as a standby for invading Grenada, the island, but was never used for those purposes of war, but for readiness only. The government shared this boon to mankind with swimming pool manufacturers and builders, who were ready, at no cost, so what’s to complain?
    More this week, and a segue into how American gun culture is like Shirley Jackson’s story “The Lottery” (this a riff off of the New Yorker’s and Marty’s idea to tag bullets with names), and the rise and fall of cannibalism, the religious tradition by people of conscience, as laid down by mysterious tribal founders.
    Unless I grow bored by the gunfire.

  110. mass shootings (4 or more people shot) happen, on average, literally every day. (see my link on the last page of this thread)
    we’re so inured to them that they don’t even register. it takes double-digits before we pay attention. and even the slaughter of double-digits of children isn’t enough to hold our interest.
    if we can’t ban guns, we’re going to live with them. most of us will live in fear of them. but some of us will be polishing them in the bathroom while panting heavily, dreaming of joining the Murder-suicide Hall Of Fame.
    and nothing can be done.
    if Mandalay Bay had burned down, killing 60 and wounding 400+, we’d have a talk about building fire systems. if 60 people died and 400+ spent weeks shitting blood from food poisoning at Great Adventure, we’d have a talk about food safety. if 60 died and 400 were permanently scarred from fires caused by overheating iPhones, Apple would fix the problem before the govt could get around to forcing them to do it.
    guns? meh. nothing can be done. maybe if we think and pray harder.

  111. Count: “Not to be outdone, the American Swimming Pool and Wading Pool Council this afternoon said they will challenge all swimming pool safety and sanitation across the land regs in court, having found reference to a natural absolute right to the operation and ownership of swimming pools without exception in a scrawled note in a pocket of James Monroe’s swimming togs, now displayed at the Smithsonian.”
    Plus religious FREEDUM by Baptists also, too. Not sure how you could have missed that one, Count.

  112. [open snark tag]
    Count, glad you highlighted (highlit?) the stunning hypocrisy of liberals concentrating on gun control when people are dying because of swimming pools. If someone wants to post names of people whose life was tragically cut short because a swimming pool suddenly killed them when they were minding their own business, I’ll make sure I add links.
    [close snark tag]

  113. I certainly hope armed ICE agents are surrounding Rocio Guillen’s family’s house tonight to check their papers, now that you-know-who has been reading the internet and is a little concerned about how they pronounce their names.

  114. Just when I’m led to believe the republican party cares nothing about experience when they hire someone to blow up the world:
    Tillerson wondered aloud whether the entire effort to improve relations with Iran wasn’t doomed by history. “We have more pounds, and our hair is gray,” he said. “Maybe we don’t have it in our capacity to change the nature of this relationship, because we are bound by it—maybe we leave it to the next generation to try.” He thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I’M NOT A DIPLOMAT.”
    They go out of their way to hire the best for the job:
    ‘Harlon Carter, “Mr. NRA,” the man who turned America’s national rifle club into its formidable gun lobby, knew guns could kill people—including the 15-year-old Mexican kid HE BLEW AWAY with a shotgun when he was 17.’

  115. I disagree that national debt is decoupled from trade deficits. Nation debt (whether defined by public debt or public debt + private debt) impact exchange rates and therefore impacts trade deficits.
    1. Assuming a sovereign fiat currency and a freely floating exchange rate, how does this relationship you put forth work?
    2. Japan.
    3. You are in favor of our currency being the world’s reserve currency. How many domestic manufacturing jobs are you willing to sacrifice on this altar (same question to wj)? Because when you plump for a ‘strong’ currency, this is what it comes down to.
    See also here.

  117. If the rest of the world decides that American dollars are the reserve of choice, then we are trading them something of value (dollars for their reserves) in exchange for something of equal value (goods). It’s a “trade deficit”, but it’s not a problem.
    Not so.

  122. BobbyP-
    1. Are you asking about the relation between national debt and exchange rates? All else constant, national debt can impact inflation and interest rates which clearly impact exchange rates.
    2. Japan!
    3. Favoring doing the basic stuff to meet our obligations and maintain reserve currency status ≠ favoring a strong dollar policy.

  123. Pdm: … national debt can impact inflation and interest rates …
    “Can impact” does not equal “will raise”.
    If the debt doomsayers were right, what would long-term interest rates be right now?
    What’s certainly true is the reverse: higher interest rates do raise the “national” debt, because (all else equal) higher interest payments increase the “national” deficit.
    What’s also true is that inflation causes lenders to demand higher interest rates. At least, higher nominal interest rates. Real interest rates of course depend on what the lenders’ next best alternative is.
    –TP

  124. I’ll try to keep this short:
    1. While I was unaware that the the forms I fill out and the call that is made to the FBI to find out if I’m fit to buy a shotgun doesn’t leave a permanent record somewhere, several things come to mind.
    A. How would a record of what I bought stop what happened in Vegas?
    B. Cleek says we don’t keep a national, computerized registry because of implicitly groundless fears that guns will be confiscated if the Feds know who the owners are. Isn’t that exactly what Cleek wants to do, confiscate all guns, in some form or fashion.
    2. Swimming pools vs accidental firearms deaths–maybe this is just too much nuance, but the number of accidental firearms deaths is minuscule. All of this talk of safes and insurance misses the point: suicide by gun is the leading cause of gun deaths, followed by murder. Getting exercised about accidental gun deaths is theater, unless we are going to get exercised about all forms of accidental deaths: swimming pools, ladders, poisons, on the job injuries, etc. And cars, motorcycles and bicycles.
    3. Doc, your piece is the precise kind of statistic bending that resonates only in this very small quarter. To tease those numbers out of nearly 3000 counties and then speak in terms of rates of homicide co-related with Trump voters is the kind of ideological silliness that never gets taken seriously beyond the intended audience, for plenty of good reasons. Nonetheless, have at it. This is, after all, the science/reality based community. Look at homicide rates on a state by state basis and you’ll see how uninformed your cite is.
    Which is not to say your final point about domestic violence could not use a lot more discussion (and sorry for the double negative). Guns are a small part of that discussion. A domestic abuser should be on the ‘no buy/possession is a felony list’ and then have that enforced, but he’s still an abuser with plenty of other options.
    4. Russell, I don’t agree that “we” are all that violent. There are 330,000,000 or so of us, so it’s hard to generalize. There are identifiable demographics which stand out has higher on the violence spectrum than others, young, males born and raised by single mothers being the single largest indicator IIRC. Another complicated issue about which there is no consensus across ideological lines.
    5. Nor did I intend to dismiss you. I inferred that your list of objectionables consisted of how your tax dollars were spent rather than individual acts required of you as a citizen. My point is that there are very, very few acts that gov’t requires individuals to perform. Most of those have exceptions for conscientious objectors. That was my point. Whether compelled insurance purchases with BC coverage is too attenuated and therefore like taxpayers objecting to how their tax dollars are spent, is part of the discussion, but the difference is that buying insurance is a specific government injunction, as opposed to paying taxes, which is generally seen as more attenuated.
    6. BP, the link to the Truscott article was interesting. He is wrong that “gas operated” would fix the problem. You can achieve the same effect with a recoil operated rifle or shotgun. The identifying characteristics of rifles with high rates of fire, whether full auto (a machine gun, in effect, and therefore highly inaccurate) or semi auto are two things: (1) a center fire cartridge firing a solid round at 2000 plus feet per second (2) that reloads and is ready to fire again automatically. This would leave pistols and shotguns out of the picture and the highest body count, so far, on record was the Norway shooter who used pistols. Addressing the problem in this fashion would put us back to the days of Charles Whitman shooting from the tower at UT-Austin. Whitman used over the counter, low cost surplus military and hunting rifles.
    The problem(s) are (1) depressed people (mostly men IIRC), (2) poorly raised, poorly socialized young males, (3) males born into violent homes who learn violence as the norm and (4) mentally ill males who are mostly but not exclusively young. These categories + guns produce tragedies.
    7. Because our history is quite different from the European model, many of us see things differently. Expecting/demanding large swathes of America to be more like Europeans is no different, or more productive, than expecting large swathes of Mexico to be more like the US or large swathes of the Middle East to be more like Europe. Different history = different outlook.
    So much for keeping it short.

  125. “Rates of homicides, gun killings and illicit-drug fatalities are highest in counties where nine in 10 residents are white and where President Trump won”
    Yes white people are most likely to be killed by white people, because a majority of all homicides are committed by someone you know. Family, friend. Over half in your home. I see no causal effect between this and the diversity of where you live, well except you live there.
    http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/domestic-violence-murder-stats/
    Even slightly more true if you are black,
    https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-homicide-in-america-by-the-numbers

  126. I inferred that your list of objectionables consisted of how your tax dollars were spent rather than individual acts required of you as a citizen.
    First, thanks for the clarification, it is appreciated.
    In general, your inference is correct. But also in general, employer-provided health insurance is not paid for, personally, by an employer.
    To provide an example closer to yours, were I, personally, a direct employer, I would object to having to collect immigration status on people via an I-9. Because I have moral and ethical objections to US immigration policy, rooted in religious conviction.
    That scruple would not be likely to surface in public discourse, let alone receive careful and considerate attention from the feds.
    The range of moral, ethical, and religious objections to public laws and policies is actually pretty broad. The religious objectors whose concerns seem to merit public attention tend to be conservative evangelical Christians and Catholics.
    Which seems, to me, unbalanced, and edging into establishment of religion turf.

  127. Also:
    There are 330,000,000 or so of us, so it’s hard to generalize.
    And we experience about 100,000 deaths or injuries by firearm, per annum.
    For a country that is otherwise basically orderly, that is a hell of a lot. It just is.
    When I say we’re violent, I don’t mean every one of us, or even a statistical majority of us, are running around shooting people or beating them up.
    I mean that extraordinary violence is an acceptable and normal part of our cultural and social life. Movies, games, language. The persistent fantasy of achieving political and social goals via assassination or insurrection.
    And, the acceptance of extraordinary violence as a normal part of routine public life.
    We think it’s sad, but we do nothing about it. That’s unusual.

  129. TP-
    “Can impact” does mean “will exert upper pressure”. In the end, interest rates may rise or fall based on other factors overwhelming increases in national debt, but when the Feds scoop up a slice of the credit market, there is less of it for other users of credit. Ceteris paribus, increases in national debt increase interest rates. Post hosing bubble, consumption took a nose dive and there was no real concern that federal deficit spending would lead to higher interest rates or inflation. Of course it’s silly to extrapolate from period after a massive asset bubble has been popped to “normal” economic times.
    Inflation, which also has a positive relationship to interest rates, goes up or down with the national debt based on how the Feds spend their money. On the one hand, if the feds are spending money domestically or transferring it to citizens who are spending it domestically, then inflation will go up (ceteris paribus). If the money is going to foreign wars or into reserves for troubled banks, then there’s less inflationary pressure (and less of a multiplier effect).
    I have not been a “debt doomsayer” post-2008 and would have been very happy to use significant national debt on a massive infrastructure bill to help soak up housing construction workers who had been idled.
    If we say that the safe upper limit of national debt is 2.5 times GDP (I’m not saying it is, but one could make the argument), then we have significant reserves of credit for a debt financed infrastructure bill today (better late than never).
    It does not follow that national debt is something to be ignored and the US should just print as much money as it wants for government programs as a permanent strategy.

  130. A. How would a record of what I bought stop what happened in Vegas?
    B. Cleek says we don’t keep a national, computerized registry because of implicitly groundless fears that guns will be confiscated if the Feds know who the owners are. Isn’t that exactly what Cleek wants to do, confiscate all guns, in some form or fashion.

    i don’t care about recordkeeping. i don’t care about the existing registry. i want all guns taken apart, smashed, melted and used to make frying pans and guitar strings.
    my proposed way to get that done is a combination of immense taxes on ammo and new gun sales, an insurance requirement that makes ownership a financial burden (tie it to homeowners insurance or health insurance for household members – let insurance companies deal with record keeping), crushing financial penalties for illegal gun use, and a buy-back program to absorb all guns that will then become too expensive to own. it would take time, but it should work.
    or, fuck it, let the bodies pile up.

  131. Because our history is quite different from the European model, many of us see things differently. Expecting/demanding large swathes of America to be more like Europeans is no different, or more productive, than expecting large swathes of Mexico to be more like the US or large swathes of the Middle East to be more like Europe. Different history = different outlook.
    I suppose this really is true. I watched a (lighthearted, despite the subject matter) discussion on TV the other night when one guest, a female comedian, writer and professional poker player who spends a lot of time in LV (not that that’s relevant) said words to the effect that “We think we’re the same because we speak the same language, but they’re very different to us. We have nostalgia for a time when you sat picnicking on the grass listening to the sound of leather on willow [a cricket reference] and they have nostalgia for the time when the they were frontiersmen shooting it out with the Indians”. The other guest replied “Yes, we’re very different, they’re a bunch of violent lunatics”.
    Leaving aside that her reference was to a particularly middle- and upper-class kind of idyll (although she was right, it is general shorthand here for a kind of lost golden age), there is something to this, and to the reply (which is similar to what russell has been saying, absent the lunatics part). I suppose because of the way your country began, the foundational myths and consequent self-image are very, very different to Europe. Australia, though? It must have been pretty bloody violent to begin with, and the extermination of the aborigines surely bears some resemblance to the American destruction of the Native Americans? I don’t have a settled thesis here, I’m just speculating.

  132. or, fuck it, let the bodies pile up.
    We’re all going to die anyway.
    It seemed, for the first portion of my life, that “the long arc of history was bending toward justice.” Justice wasn’t quite attained, the arc missed it, and is now on a decline.

  134. We have nostalgia for a time when you sat picnicking on the grass listening to the sound of leather on willow [a cricket reference] and they have nostalgia for the time when the they were frontiersmen shooting it out with the Indians”. The other guest replied “Yes, we’re very different, they’re a bunch of violent lunatics”.
    The Indian wars were pretty much over with by the mid 1870’s. Geronimo and his Apaches came in in 1882 IIRC. The frontier, populated as was the rest of the country by veterans of the Civil War, was armed and lawless. Without armed citizens on the good guy side, even as rough as things were, they would have been a lot worse. Personal responsibility for responding to criminals has a long history in many parts of the US.
    The American gun tradition goes back centuries, but what hammered it home and made it stick through modern times is a bit more complex. First, unlike Europe, America was pretty much a classless society, and what classes there were arose out of effort and good luck, not birthright (for the most part). Everyone was armed, and if you were a white male, you were more or less equal in the eyes of the law. The European model, being the end result of feudalism, presents a population whose only familiarity with firearms is as draftees in horribly costly wars. The American Revolution is and was a big part of our national consciousness, the Indian Wars produced mixed reactions–not everyone was on board with the atrocities and broken treaties–but they ended. What really stamped us as a gun owning society (IMO) was the Civil War. Not many 5th and 6th generation Americans today have a family history of having fought in the Indian Wars. Just the opposite is true for the Civil War. The turnout was quite impressive and it lingers with multi-generational families. This is true for my family. My Dad knew his grandfather who was in the Civil War. A lot of my family going back fought on both sides. Like most other semi rural males, my dad grew up hunting and fishing and so did I. We had guns at the house along with very strict rules about how to handle them. Our children grew up hunting and fishing and both have at least one firearm in their home. Russell’s point about violence has a number of facets. One of these is that many Americans are a lot more afraid being a defenseless victim of crime than they are of shooting themselves accidentally. My sister is single and lives alone. She is licensed and keeps a pistol and shotgun in her bedroom. One fellow worker of hers–a woman–was raped in her building’s parking lot. She is not alone in preferring to have a defense of some kind if she is attacked. So, what seems irrational based on the European model is entirely rational base on the American, or at least parts of it. One of my earlier points is that there are 330,000 of us. It should be no surprise that we have large sub-cohorts with significantly different backgrounds and outlooks.
    As I sit here writing this, I can think of more women within one degree of separation I have known who were violently raped than I can think of people who were shot whether accidentally or on purpose. This does not count suicides. In the broader context of people whose homes were broken into or where someone tried to break in, I know a lot of people including me and my wife (two actual break in’s and one attempted). So, while some are afraid of guns in a general sense, others are afraid of criminals and want to prevent the crime not be the victim.

  135. GftNC-
    Origin myths are important, but I think WW I and II have more to do with European attitudes toward violence and weapons than the calming influence of cricket.
    Outside of the Civil War, Americans have not had to suffer the reality of massive armed combat in our hemisphere let alone on our own soil.
    Also, the percentage of Americans that particularly identify with “frontier” myths in terms of “shooting it out with the Indians” is really not that significant. Our popular culture has had an apologetic stance towards native Americans for quite some time.
    To be fair to the comedian, the concentration of “shooting it out with the Indians” types is higher in southwest, so she may just have slightly skewed perception.
    The enduring mythology in America is that of self sufficiency. As compared to a European, the average American feels that he/she has “earned” everything that they have and discount the notion that government does much to make lives better and help them attain whatever status they have. When you have such an investment in the notion that you are responsible for all that you have, it is not a stretch to want to defend it.

  136. As I sit here writing this, I can think of more women within one degree of separation I have known who were violently raped than I can think of people who were shot whether accidentally or on purpose.
    FWIW, I have the opposite experience. It’s not a contest, of course. My house has been broken into numerous times, and I was once assaulted on the street by a stranger. I can recount other experiences which might have moved someone else to buy a gun. Somehow, though, I just can’t imagine myself in a shootout. The only thing that’s made me consider it seriously is worrying about civil war. I guess I’m still taking my chances for peace.

  137. My house has been broken into numerous times, and I was once assaulted on the street by a stranger. I can recount other experiences which might have moved someone else to buy a gun. Somehow, though, I just can’t imagine myself in a shootout.
    Where Cleek and I disagree is that, in my world, you would have the choice of arming yourself for self defense. Choice.

  138. many Americans are a lot more afraid being a defenseless victim of crime than they are of shooting themselves accidentally.
    I really wonder how much of this is the result of relentless propaganda about the crime rate. After all, it’s been dropping for a couple of decades now, but much of the population is convinced that it is at all0time highs.
    As I sit here writing this, I can think of more women within one degree of separation I have known who were violently raped than I can think of people who were shot whether accidentally or on purpose.
    You definitely have my sympathy. Of course, my view of what is normal may be due to the fact that I know zero women who have been raped. Perhaps I simply live in a very different world….

  139. I just can’t imagine myself in a shootout. The only thing that’s made me consider it seriously is worrying about civil war. I guess I’m still taking my chances for peace.
    I suspect that is true for a lot of us. We don’t see the need for a gun for protection against criminals. But we can imagine needing one for defense against those current gun-owners who keep ranting about the evils of government and the need to fight back. (Who admittedly, if they did so, would be criminals, too. But a rather different sort.)

  140. Where Cleek and I disagree is that, in my world, you would have the choice of arming yourself for self defense. Choice.
    Guns are the only arms available now?

  141. Actually, I’d be quite fine* with a rule that said only women could carry/possess/own guns.
    *ignoring all other considerations

  142. Where Cleek and I disagree is that, in my world, you would have the choice of arming yourself for self defense.
    we live in that world right now. it is failing us.

  143. “Getting exercised about accidental gun deaths is theater, unless we are going to get exercised about all forms of accidental deaths: swimming pools, ladders, poisons, on the job injuries, etc. And cars, motorcycles and bicycles.”
    You forgot trans fats.
    Or what, we’re hypocrites?
    So, after, a 58-human-being murder fest it’s really too soon to talk about what to do, if anything, because two kids locked themselves in an abandoned refrigerator on a vacant lot in April and where is the outrage?
    May I pick only three issues to be exercised about at any one time? Do I need to hand in a schedule to someone or other showing that I have devoted equal amounts of time each week to every issue under the sun? This makes no more sense than stipulating a dress code that must be adhered to while being exercised about an issue. Do I have to stand on one foot as well while being exercised equally about every issue?
    I have to say, though, that I feel guilty and remiss for not spending enough time this week on the US-sponsored cholera epidemic in Yemen.
    Events got away from me.
    There are plenty of exercised citizens suitably exercised about all of the issues on this list. We have heard of division of labor when it comes to exercising one’s outrage, haven’t we?
    As we speak, however the ones with any authority and expertise to do something but kvetch on a blog, like I do, are being ignored, sidelined, de-funded, and purged from governments at all levels, as well as gerrymandered out of influence and their very ability to effing vote challenged, because conservatives running the show possess an absolutely equal amount of outrage about swimming pool deaths, ladder injuries, poisons in the air and water, on-the-job injuries, crib deaths, guys using confederate flag bandannas instead of safety-certified motorcycle helmets while coming through my regulated windshield, and automobile and truck and accidents, which is to say, none.

  144. C’mon Pollo, she wasn’t suggesting that we were more pacific because of cricket, just that our national fantasies revealed something about our character based on what appeals to us.
    McKinney, FWIW, I have to admit that the only woman I know personally (as far as I’m aware) who was raped is an American, in LA. And she is now very pro-gun. May I ask, did your guns help in your break-ins?

  145. wj, My best guess, just something to thibk about, is that based on statistics alone you do know more than one woman who has been raped. While I gather what McK meant, i suggest rape us violent so the term is redundant.
    Some of my very early experiences were knowing women who had been raped and beaten, one thrown out of a car naked onto her parents upfront lawn. Her parents kicked her out when she refused to have an abortion and for all the years I kept up with her she was never unarmed. I knew an older woman who was attacked and raped by home invaders. She became a recluse, living in the dark so no one knew she was home, her weapon her only companion.
    Perhaps the science in our culture stokes our desire for a gun, not the other way around. Perhaps these things just don’t happen in other countries.

  146. “Getting exercised about accidental gun deaths is theater, unless we are going to get exercised about all forms of accidental deaths: swimming pools, ladders, poisons, on the job injuries, etc. And cars, motorcycles and bicycles.”

    FFS. we do get exercised about those things!
    most municipalities have rules and regulations covering swimming pools (depth, signage, access, fencing, etc.). insurance companies can charge more for homeowner’s insurance if you have a pool. pools don’t accidentally kill your neighbors while you clean them. you can’t sneak your pool into a company party and drown 15 of your coworkers.
    please, regulate guns as much as we regulate pools!
    on the job injuries? how can a lawyer never have heard of OSHA?
    cars, motorcycles: heavily regulated, heavily tracked, heavily monitored, heavily policed, heavily taxed, utterly not designed for the sole purpose of killing things. the car companies and the govt work like crazy to make vehicles safer. the biggest promise of ‘driverless’ cars is that they’ll be safer because people won’t be involved at all. please, make a gun that will know not to shoot innocent people and then ban all the rest!
    please, at least regulate guns the way we regulate cars now!
    and when was the last time someone went on a murder spree with a fucking ladder?
    by the frequency with which they make this argument, i know people think it’s some kind of winner. but what it really does is point out how un-regulated guns are and how utterly unconcerned these people are with the violence they cause.

  147. The European model, being the end result of feudalism, presents a population whose only familiarity with firearms is as draftees in horribly costly wars
    To push back on this a bit:
    European political history includes a much broader range of forms of organization than feudalism. And feudalism as a form of political and social organization has been gone a really, really long time. I’m not sure how relevant it is to patterns of firearm ownership in modern Europe.
    Gun ownership is also fairly common in many parts of Europe. Especially in rural areas, where hunting is still a common practice.
    There are lots of differences between the US and Europe, but I don’t think the presence or absence of a history of feudalism, or the presence or absence of firearms, is the issue.
    Most Americans don’t own guns. As a percent of population, the number is actually declining. If you exclude the really small number of Americans that own personal arsenals, the pattern of gun ownership in the US as compared to a pretty wide range of European countries is not that different.
    Germany, France, all of the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, Austria. Lots of guns.
    We just shoot ourselves and each other more often than they do.

  149. “Cleek says we don’t keep a national, computerized registry because of implicitly groundless fears that guns will be confiscated if the Feds know who the owners are. Isn’t that exactly what Cleek wants to do, confiscate all guns, in some form or fashion.”
    When cleek gets lots of people elected to positions of authority, as conservatives have elected no-compromise absolutists like Steve Scalise, and cleek’s reps take a bullet that nearly kills them and, despite that, stick to their total-confiscation-of-guns-pledge, I’ll be real ascared of cleek and start fearing for my swimming pool, the imaginary one, too.
    Same rule applies to global warming science and taxes.

  151. So, after, a 58-human-being murder fest it’s really too soon to talk about what to do, if anything, because two kids locked themselves in an abandoned refrigerator on a vacant lot in April and where is the outrage?
    No, we always discuss what to do about guns after something like this. My separate point about accidental shootings is addressed at those who, in response to something like Vegas, start talking about safety courses and insurance as if accidental shootings have anything to do with mass murder. Accidental shootings are quite rare in context.
    May I ask, did your guns help in your break-ins?
    On the actual break-in’s, my wife came home while the intruder was ransacking our bedroom. He jumped out of the window (ground floor apartment). This was 38 years ago. Four years later, we came home and found our home burglarized. These were the actual break-in’s.
    When I was thirteen, I was watching my younger brother and sister at night while my parents were out with their bridge club when someone starting pounding and kicking on our back door in a really aggressive, violent way. We had two normally very chill dogs and they went absolutely crazy. I had a single shot 20 gauge shotgun that I’d gotten for Christmas. I put my sibs in a bedroom away from our back door, ran for and loaded up my shotgun and waited behind the door while also calling my parents (they were several blocks over playing cards). Then, whoever it was went away. I don’t know why. If he had gotten in, I would have shot him. Or shot at him. I’m pretty sure I would have hit him. I’d been hunting and shooting for some years by then and usually hit whatever I shot at. It scared the bejesus out of me. I was in major adrenaline overdrive. So, yes, I think having a gun would have made a difference, particularly if we hadn’t had dogs and assuming it was a violent criminal and not someone pulling some kind of stupid stunt. I recall thinking the latter was a possibility and deciding I wouldn’t shoot unless the door actually got kicked in. That night has stayed with me a long, long time.

  152. “When cleek gets lots of people elected to positions of authority, ”
    Like 8 years ago when they passed the ACA with a 60 vote super majority in the Senate?

  153. Like 8 years ago when they passed the ACA with a 60 vote super majority in the Senate?
    Refresh my memory. Did they also enact legislation to drastically curtail gun ownership? Or did they limit themselves to the ACA?

  154. While I gather what McK meant, i suggest rape us violent so the term is redundant.
    You are correct, and what I meant was “attacked by a stranger” as opposed to “assaulted while drugged or intoxicated” and as opposed to date rape, where the perp obtains voluntary access. So, I should have said “violent, stranger rape” or something of that nature. My sense is that I am more likely to know about stranger rape than I am about date rape, the latter being–I surmise–harder to discuss for the victim for fear of being disbelieved.
    by the frequency with which they make this argument, i know people think it’s some kind of winner. but what it really does is point out how un-regulated guns are and how utterly unconcerned these people are with the violence they cause.
    Since accidental death is ubiquitous and since accidental death by firearm is rare–as opposed to murder, manslaughter and suicide–the argument for regulation due to accidental gun deaths is not very compelling. It just isn’t. But, you have your view, I have mine and I’m not going to argue with you anymore.
    “When cleek gets lots of people elected to positions of authority, as conservatives have elected no-compromise absolutists like Steve Scalise, and cleek’s reps take a bullet that nearly kills them and, despite that, stick to their total-confiscation-of-guns-pledge, I’ll be real ascared of cleek and start fearing for my swimming pool, the imaginary one, too.
    Same rule applies to global warming science and taxes.
    Some days, I’m just not very clear. When someone who expressly advocates the abolition of private gun ownership chastises people who fear registration as the first step toward that end for being paranoid, that someone isn’t paying attention to his own message.
    o push back on this a bit:
    I’m pretty sure there is no widespread tradition of private gun ownership among the European hoi polloi going back centuries. I think the aristocracy did a pretty good job on keeping weapons in the hands of those they deemed best suited to using them. But, that’s just my take on things: different historical experiences produce different contemporary viewpoints.
    I agree that gun ownership is declining in the US even while the number of guns grows. Three or four generations from now, who knows what things will look like.

  155. So you think Pelosi and Reid didn’t have it on the agenda?, They were distracted by another shiny object but the limitation was Scott Brown and then midterms. It was close enough to worry about, since Pelosi certainly hopes that any agreement on the subject turns into a slippery slope.
    So, several days ago I’m firmly for limiting magazine sizes, and outlawing bump stocks. Today? f#$% Nancy Pelosi. She’s as stupid and dangerous as Trump. But she is authentic.

  156. I’m pretty sure there is no widespread tradition of private gun ownership among the European hoi polloi going back centuries. I think the aristocracy did a pretty good job on keeping weapons in the hands of those they deemed best suited to using them
    I think it sort of depends on which place and period you’re talking about.
    In any case, there are many countries in Europe with strong histories, and modern practices, of private firearm ownership. Especially outside the cities.
    If you spend any time in the country in the fall, you’ll hear lots of shooting.

  157. the argument for regulation due to accidental gun deaths is not very compelling
    LV was not an accident.

  158. I’ve had several women over a lifetime confide in me that they were raped, far in the past.
    None reported the crime. None, that I knew of, owned a weapon.
    It occurs to me that had the justice system (and society, with its disgust with and doubt about rape victims’ accusations) for time immemorial not placed such a high burden of proof on women who bring accusations of rape to authorities and perhaps successful trial, it might be (I can’t prove it) that vindicated women might be more prone to getting on with their lives instead of huddling with a weapon in the dark with their secrets, though I certainly understand that course of action under the circumstances.
    Let me get this right. Women should carry a weapon to defend themselves against sexual assault. Therefore, it could be that Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Hugh Hefner, Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein and numerous other male celebrities would have been gunned down and dead and buried by now, and despite that, ALL of the women who have brought the accusations have had to wait years to even have their complaints heard.
    I wanna see the America that would countenance all of those women being apprehended standing over the dead bodies of these famous, wealthy men holding a weapon.
    That America doesn’t exist.
    I say bullshit.
    We now have this rape thing going on on college campuses. Doubts about these young womens’ accusations are legion among the usual suspects, and maybe in some cases, those questions should be asked.
    But we’re saying these women should carry weapons on campus and shoot their “dates” when the word “no” is ignored by the men.
    OK, have at it. I’m all for it.
    On the other hand, it’s bullshit to think America, let alone the fucking NRA, would put up with that.
    I’m reading this article at the moment:
    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/10/02/gloria-allreds-crusade
    Eight percent of female Marines report being raped/sexually assaulted by their “fellow” male Marines. I’m sure the number of actual rapes/sexual assaults is quite a bit higher, given how things are.
    Thirty thousand male, active duty and former-enlisted Marines are anonymous members of Marine-only internet rape sites (it varies according to when older sites are shut down and new ones crop up immediately) that post photographs of female Marines and rate the women according to their rape-ability.
    Allred is bringing cases, for which she is subject, as are her female clients. The Marine Corps is very slow to react.
    Semper snowflakes, the fuckers.
    Marines have access to weapons, do they not? If not them, who then? I mean, these women could stick a grenade up the buttholes of these “men”, these “warriors”, these cocksuckers, as they are being assaulted.
    Would America put up with men, exalted Marines, being gunned down by female rape victims, perhaps one every couple of weeks.
    Would Sean Hannity?
    Would rump?
    Bullshit!
    In that case, they would keep women on their knees and unarmed as the flag flew.

  159. Marty:
    “Like 8 years ago when they passed the ACA with a 60 vote super majority in the Senate?”
    Even though the ACA guns down 100,000 Americans annually. I see your point.
    They did omit the provision, at conservative insistence, that doctors should ask their patients about their household gun habits. When Steve Scalise was treated for gunshot wounds, the physicians referred to them as moop wounds for fear that he would censor them, even in his condition.
    “So, several days ago I’m firmly for limiting magazine sizes, and outlawing bump stocks. Today? f#$% Nancy Pelosi. She’s as stupid and dangerous as Trump. But she is authentic.”
    What did she say in the intervening period that would stop the NRA and much of the republican congress from referring to YOU as Nancy because of your views on magazine sizes and outlawing bump stocks?

  160. Was it the slippery slope comment?
    The government agency that regulates the slipperiness of slopes (not Slants; that’s a different one) has recently been de-funded in the republican budget, so I’d say that Pelosi is home free and without restraint.
    Happy sledding.
    I’m confident that many more years of mass murders by gun, and all of the other gun-related depredations, will pass before any legislation proposing the total confiscation of guns from citizens is ever put to paper.
    I’m also confident that several or more of the 25 Amendments to the Constitution will be rescinded by republicans before the second half of the Second Amendment ever comes up for debate again.
    Because those other Amendments don’t actually kill people, but rather their rescission make it possible to restrict access to the democratic process with its checks and balances for those who don’t want to kill with guns.

  161. Above, in the Allred article:
    “Allred is bringing cases, for which she is subject, as are her female clients.”
    should read: “subject to anonymous violent threats”
    Also 27 Amendments, 26 too many according to the NRA.

  162. Let me get this right. Women should carry a weapon to defend themselves against sexual assault. Therefore, it could be that Bill Cosby, Roger Ailes, Hugh Hefner, Bill O’Reilly, Harvey Weinstein and numerous other male celebrities would have been gunned down and dead and buried by now, and despite that, ALL of the women who have brought the accusations have had to wait years to even have their complaints heard.
    I wanna see the America that would countenance all of those women being apprehended standing over the dead bodies of these famous, wealthy men holding a weapon.
    That America doesn’t exist.
    Short answer: yes, if they want to arm themselves as one defense against stranger assault, I’m fine with that. No, a gun won’t do any good against sexual harassment or being drugged. Yes, America is perfectly fine with a women shooting an assailant in the act of attempting to rape or assault her.
    Would America put up with men, exalted Marines, being gunned down by female rape victims, perhaps one every couple of weeks.
    Would Sean Hannity?
    Would rump?
    Bullshit!
    Count, the New Yorker article you link to recites that the Marine abomination broke in March this year. Then, per the article:
    “In May, the Protecting the Rights of Individuals Against Technological Exploitation (private) Act passed unanimously in the House. The bill awaits a Senate vote. It would make nonconsensual sharing of intimate photographs a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
    Two things: unanimous and 2 months. Its a statute that’s too late (and should apply to all nonconsensual postings) and that’s not all that will happen hopefully, but it’s not nothing.
    Do I think Hannity and the Donald would “contextualize” this kind of monstrosity? Certainly they lean in that direction. It would turn on how they gamed it in private to see where the best advantage to them would lay.
    My viewpoint on what people think about things like self-defense and personal responsibility stems from lots of jury verdicts and lots more jury selections. Over time, you get a pretty good sense of what people think about discrete things as opposed to broad, policy or ideological issues. Left, right, center, very few have an issue with self defense. Most people have more sense and give more thought than a lot of people give them credit for when it comes to sexual assault. One of the grimmer subsets of cases I’ve dealt with over the past is defending civil matters arising from sexual assault at schools, churches and public venues. My assumptions, born out by plenty of jury selections and trials are: (1) the victim is telling the truth, (2) the jury is predisposed to believe the victim, any (3) effort to minimize the harm suffered by the victim will produce immediate and profound blow back. The one thing the jury is usually willing to hear is whether someone who did not commit the act and had no idea the act was going to be committed can be held responsible. None of my cases were date-rape situations (except Jamie Leigh Jones, which I’ve discussed before), which is important. The dynamic changes when there are indicia of consent. But, to your larger point, I disagree that the country is so benighted as to victimize women who defend themselves with lethal force from a assailant.

  163. “But, to your larger point, I disagree that the country is so benighted as to victimize women who defend themselves with lethal force from a assailant.”
    Thank you for your balance.
    The writer of the article also emphasizes that even journalists and other observers of the Cosby trial express reluctance to apply recent standards regarding what constitutes rape to something Cosby did not that many years ago, one noting “He definitely did it, but, back then, everybody else did too.”
    It’s taken raving liberal feminists, feminazis as the benighted among us would call them, for the most part, to bring America along to its current state of enlightenment.
    Also, I don’t minimize the head of steam that a Hannity or rump could get going under a plurality of voters who would mount an offensive against female Marines gunning down their assailants or even prohibit female enlistment in the Marines because boys will be boys.
    I don’t think either of them knows what “contextualize” means.
    In separate news, Europeans, as they witnessed in their diaries, were a bad influence on Americans, as they morphed from one into another (quotes lifted from LGM):
    Columbus:
    “They … brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things… They willingly traded everything they owned… They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane… . They would make fine servants…. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
    Michele be Cuneo, after being “presented” a native girl by Columbus:
    “While I was in the boat I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me, and with whom, having taken her into my cabin, she being naked according to their custom, I conceived desire to take pleasure. I wanted to put my desire into execution but she did not want it and treated me with her finger nails in such a manner that I wished I had never begun. But seeing that (to tell you the end of it all), I took a rope and thrashed her well, for which she raised such unheard of screams that you would not have believed your ears. Finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you that she seemed to have been brought up in a school of harlots.”
    Harvey Weinstein just got the message.
    rump knows what immigrants are like, the rapists, especially those ones with the hot Latin blood.
    Maybe he does know what “contextualize” means.
    Yes, I know, the Comanche and their swimming pools. 😉

  164. “Mr. Trump considered [Bob] Corker as a candidate for secretary of state after last year’s election but was said to have told associates that the 5-foot-7 senator was too short.”
    In my years playing competitive ball with and against tough guys of all sizes, you never want to start a fight with the littlest tough guy.
    Low centers of gravity. And usually fast. They get inside real quick.

  166. It’s taken raving liberal feminists, feminazis as the benighted among us would call them, for the most part, to bring America along to its current state of enlightenment.
    True. Also true that it took a bunch of lefties screaming their asses off to communicate that passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Title VII didn’t fix everything overnight. But now we are in Social Justice Land with CRT and Intersectionality and a bunch of other stuff that has the flavor of oppression, just from a different angle.
    Yes, I know, the Comanche and their swimming pools. 😉
    Yes, being right about one thing doesn’t make someone right about everything.
    Charles Sykes is not a liberal.
    We are doing some stupid stuff here in TX thanks to a radical, purist 2d A movement that believes, apparently, that children should have Glocks in their lunch kit. I’m not a big fan of radical purists of any stripe because all they see are enemies, everywhere. Fundamentalism is a malignant fever no matter what the underlying “good” is.

  167. But, to your larger point, I disagree that the country is so benighted as to victimize women who defend themselves with lethal force from a assailant.
    But the women would first have to pass the test of being believed that the injured (or deceased) was or was about to be an assailant. I’m glad that in your 3 points you say that the jury is predisposed to believe the victim, but, even if this were true, in this type of case there would be competing victims. Who is to say that juries would necessarily believe the woman in such a case, let alone if for example the woman was black and the assailant was white?

  168. Marty quoting Doc: “Rates of homicides, gun killings and illicit-drug fatalities are highest in counties where nine in 10 residents are white and where President Trump won”
    Marty responding to doc: Yes white people are most likely to be killed by white people,
    Um, the quote was about rates. The response is non-responsive.
    Maybe someone else has already pointed that out; I have been out all day and am about to disappear again, so sorry if this is ancient history by now.

  170. One more thing, before I waste the entire week and everyone else’s.
    I’ve hatched a new marketing scheme for weapons and ammo producers and their sponsors, based on the New Yorker cover placing the name of the LV victims on bullets and Marty’s idea of linking a name to a bullet here, which might help bring gunshot victims and their survivors around just a little to reconsider the downside of being shot.
    You’ve heard of your own personal Jesus. And you’ve heard of those cute pink weapons for girls, amirite?
    Well, kids, I would engrave the name of one living American, all of em’, one per bullet, (we could extend this to the world at large, even though their names have too many letters in them) on every bullet at the manufacturing source in the country.
    Ammo for the semi- and automatic markets could repeat the names on many bullets as a special honor to the recipients.
    That way, it could serve as a heads-up to potential victims, each and all of us, that there is a bullet somewhere with our names on it, and to keep it in mind as we go about our days.
    The catch is that you couldn’t shoot someone with a bullet with someone else’s name on it. So you’d have to collect them, like baseball cards, to find the bullet with name of the person who deserves it, thus cutting out some of the randomness of these incidents.
    This practice would also honor some of the great gunfighters in American history, like Yul Brynner, John Wayne, Lee Van Cleef, and Clint Eastwood, who often would say: “I’ve got a bullet with yer name on it, pilgrim.”
    I realize Americans don’t like TOO much planning ahead of time, seeing as what happened in Russia and China and Germany, and we like to retain an element of surprise in our mass shootings.
    But, think, if you survive a shooting, you could regale your friends with the fact that the bullet that shot you had YOUR NAME on it, just like Lou Gehrig would marvel to Babe Ruth that he, Lou Gehrig, was dying of Lou Gehrig’s disease.
    Can you believe it? My own personalized disease. It kind of takes the edge off.
    We wouldn’t place your Social Security numbers on the bullets in case the wrong kind got a hold of them and REALLY wanted to do you damage.
    Next up in the suggestion box:
    The shooterless gun … to take with you in the driverless car.
    That way, we could remove all individual human agency in shootings. When the cops arrive, you could just shrug and say, “Progress”.
    For those who want to enjoy the frisson of excitement in holding a gun without firing it, I propose the triggerless gun.
    You CAN’T fire it.
    I know it’s fun to have human agency and personal responsibility for your actions with these contraptions that have triggers so you can walk around bragging that hey, look, I have the absolute freedom to either fire this weapon at someone or not, and I chose not to. How bout that?
    Plus, with the triggerless weapon, the word “Whoops!” would grow into disuse AND you’d meet fewer guys missing a testicle because they had to adjust their waistbands after climbing out of the car at the local Kum and Go, with all that armor they got stuck down in there.

  171. “Maybe someone else has already pointed that out; I have been out all day and am about to disappear again, so sorry if this is ancient history by now”
    Not really, the article was about the dates that white people were killed. They get killed at a higher rate in some counties, really? Counties? 10 out of every county in the country? That’s a meaningful Statistical?
    Which isn’t the point. White prove are killed 84 percent of the time by someone white, black people just at 90% of the time by someone black and black people are significantly more likely to be killed. The diversity of the area where these crimes take place is not essential, or seemingly statistically meaningful.
    That’s what I got from the article.

  172. The artificially intelligent gun sounds doable to me too.
    For those conservative in nature, who want to stick with the old ways, I propose artificial stupidity.
    The latter is a burgeoning field of endeavor.
    You can’t have everyone and everything being equally artificially intelligent.
    Then everyone would be elite.
    The world would be less variable and therefore less interesting.
    Best to keep some artificially ignorant.

  174. But the women would first have to pass the test of being believed that the injured (or deceased) was or was about to be an assailant. I’m glad that in your 3 points you say that the jury is predisposed to believe the victim, but, even if this were true, in this type of case there would be competing victims. Who is to say that juries would necessarily believe the woman in such a case, let alone if for example the woman was black and the assailant was white?
    Well, actually, step one is to be faced with an intended rapist with the wherewithal to shoot him (I presume a male). In that context, the potential victim can decide not to shoot for the reasons you identify or she can shoot and hope for the best. I’m speaking somewhat tongue in cheek here: if a stranger came in my house uninvited, even if I wasn’t worried about being raped, I’d still shoot him (still on the male perpetrator). A woman doing so will have no more credibility problems than a man. You might have an issue with that–I don’t. We have diverse juries and the skin game or the plumbing game just aren’t options.
    That said, witness credibility is an inherent part of the jury system and no one has a better system that I know of. Still, it is fundamentally a human enterprise and therefore subject to error. That said, if a woman is attacked in a parking lot or someone breaks into her home, the surrounding circumstances are compelling in favor of self defense. Killing someone who entered a home seemingly as an invited guest is more problematic and fact specific. If there is a dead guy on the floor who was allowed in the home and the female shooter is fully clothed, in no apparent distress, uninjured and there are no other signs of violence, she’s got some explaining to do. Sure, it could be self defense, but then again, who knows? If, as is more within my experience, the perpetrator holds a gun or a knife on the woman, forces her to act or submit, and if in the process she gets a gun or a knife and cancels his ticket, I’m satisfied a Texas jury would exonerate if the DA was dumb enough to bring charges. Further, when a rape victime describes her–and sometimes his–experience, the authenticity comes through. As for the racial angle in your last sentence, I tried to find some stats on victim and ethnicity and couldn’t. I’m not sure how often that particular dynamic plays out currently.

  175. Married couples would not be permitted to own a bullet with their spouse’s name in it.
    As with all good ideas, the small print is going to have to be extensive.

  176. Breitbart Buzzwords for $200, Alex.
    Social Justice Land with CRT and Intersectionality
    what are three things 99% of Americans could not define accurately without Googling?

  177. Most Americans don’t own guns. As a percent of population, the number is actually declining.
    Perhaps this is what drives the NRA, which is essentially a lobbying group for the gun mfrs., to such extremes. They are relying increasingly on a small and somewhat psychotic marketing base.
    If you exclude the really small number of Americans that own personal arsenals, the pattern of gun ownership in the US as compared to a pretty wide range of European countries is not that different.
    But the regulations are really different.
    Note: Wikki entry looks to need spiffing up.

  178. what are three things 99% of Americans could not define accurately without Googling?
    Why would anyone try?

  179. what are three things 99% of Americans could not define accurately without Googling?
    You, however, are in the know, so that’s good.
    If you exclude the really small number of Americans that own personal arsenals, the pattern of gun ownership in the US as compared to a pretty wide range of European countries is not that different.
    Do you have a cite for this? I’m pretty sure this is not correct. I’ve traveled fairly extensively in France, Spain and Italy and have a fair sense of what you can find in Portugal, what you can’t find–anywhere–is a gun store. I’ve looked. Actually, that’s not completely true: Beretta has a shop in Paris–high end shotguns and hunting rifles starting at well over 2K a copy–not your everyday guy’s first choice for occasional skeet shooting. I found a couple of shops in London where the starting price for most shotguns was 5K and up–not exactly something Joe Sixpack is going to buy for a once a year dove hunt.
    I know there is some boar and deer hunting in Europe along with some bird shooting, both upland and water fowl. Back when I did that kind of thing, a two day hunt started at around 3K (not counting getting there) and went up fast from there. From talking to folks locally and what research I did back when I cared about that kind of thing, hunting is not all that common in Spain, France, Italy and Portugal. It’s not forbidden and owning a shotgun is fairly easy. But it’s nothing comparable to the US, even with today’s reduced number of hunters.
    The Balkans, Scandinavia and Eastern Europe might be different–I don’t know. Switzerland has widespread possession of fully automatic firearms and virtually no crime. Anyone know why the Swiss are different?

  180. You, however, are in the know, so that’s good.
    give it a whirl, define them for us. no Googling. and then tell us exactly how each of them is oppressing us.

  181. Anyone know why the Swiss are different?
    Sure. Because all men are required to undergo military training. And reserve service continues for 10 years. So it’s not like the (frequently) untrained gun owners we have running around with arsenals here.

  182. Switzerland has widespread possession of fully automatic firearms
    fully automatic guns are illegal in Switzerland.
    you need a permit to buy anything that isn’t a single-shot bolt-action or muzzle-loaded long gun.
    there’s a limit to the number of guns a person can buy.
    non-citizens from several countries are forbidden to own guns at all.
    detailed sales records are required, even for private sales. those records are sent to the govt..
    buying ammo is strictly regulated.
    etc. etc. etc.

  183. in rapes, the US is higher than most, but pretty far from the top…but since it so often goes unreported, maybe those stats can’t be trusted.
    I’ve spent some hours trying to find something(GDP per capita, guns per capita, freedom index, economic freedom index, quality of education, level of education, gender equality) that would correlate with the figures provided in the link. No luck so far. Some kind of correlation would give the figures a bit more weight and meaning.
    Any suggestions?

  184. I’ve told this before:
    I hail from Crete. The island of Crete is to Greece what Texas is to the USA: it’s large, it’s southern, it was briefly an independent republic, and its people talk funny.
    They also have a reputation when it comes to guns: once, when the Greek Parliament was debating a proposal to count up the Greek households with guns in them, an MP from Crete famously declared that it would be easier to count the households on Crete without guns.
    It was my cousin’s husband who told me that story while showing off his recently-acquired and formally-illegal pistol to a group of us having dinner at a restaurant. So the story may be apocryphal. In any case, the fellow in question had specifically bought the pistol because he was due to be best man at on old buddy’s wedding and shooting into the air is how (aside from smashing plates) Greeks traditionally express enthusiasm. In small villages on Crete, anyway.
    I mention all this for the benefit of our friend McKinney.
    I should also mention that I was once at a village festival on Crete where a small traditional band was playing. At one point the band leader put down his lyra (a sort of gourd-shaped viola da gamba, the Cretan equivalent of the fiddle) and walked over to his house. He emerged a few minutes later carrying a shotgun, walked across the brightly-lit plaza, and headed off into the darkness toward the hills behind the village. Knowledgeable sources told me that he had been informed somebody up in the hills was trying to steal his sheep.
    As far as I know, murders of any sort — by gun or otherwise — are so rare on Crete that it’s big news when one happens. I don’t know the current statistics on single-parent households there.
    –TP

  185. Do you have a cite for this?
    I refer to this.
    The US reports 112 guns per 100 residents. Which is head and shoulders above anyone else.
    Factor out the 3% that own 50% of the firearms here, and you’ve got 56 guns per 100 residents. Sort of in Yemen and Serbia territory, which is unfortunate.
    The Euro countries I referred to run about 30-35 guns per 100 residents.
    So, we have more, but not stupid more. Except for that 3%.
    This Swiss survey has somewhat different numbers, but it comes out about the same.
    This one looks like it comes from the Swiss survey cited by the CBC, just above.
    Include the 3% that have half the guns here, and we have a ridiculously high rate of ownership.
    Factor them out, and we have something like one-and-a-half the rate of ownership of about half of Europe.
    So, not that different.
    I’d really like to see numbers on the percentage of population that owns firearms, rather than having the numbers be about number of firearms per capita. Everyone I know in the US that has firearms has a couple. My guess (sorry no cite) is that the percent of the population in the US that owns firearms is even closer to that of the Euro countries where gun ownership is quite normal.
    Which includes all of the countries I’ve mentioned in this thread.
    There are several notable differences in the gun culture here as compared to Europe, but the presence of guns per se is not a particularly significant one. As far as I can see.
    Some countries yes, many no.
    The biggest difference here is that in many if not most places, if you have a freaking pulse you can get a gun and carry it around any place you like. You don’t even have to demonstrate that you know how to load and shoot it.
    And, we shoot ourselves and each other a lot more than they do.
    I know there is some boar and deer hunting in Europe
    Just spent a week in Umbria near Montone, and a week in Chianti just outside of Castellina.
    In Umbria we woke up every morning to the sound of gunfire and barking dogs. Local dudes getting a head start on boar season. Got lost and got directions down off the mountain from Farmer Bob (or I guess Farmer Guido) who was running his dogs after some deer. Saw the deer, too.
    Not as much in Chianti, they have more of a tourist vibe. You had to get out of town a little more to hear the hunters.
    My wife and I have a good friend with a very interesting life history that includes a period as a runway model based in Paris. These days she lives with her farmer boyfriend up in the Ardennes. They hunt a lot. I’ve seen the pictures.
    Lots of Europeans like boar meat. If you want to eat boar, somebody has to kill the boar. Guns are involved.
    So, your experience and mine differ.

  187. I’m enjoying the colorful travelogue part of this. I need to get to Europe soon.
    Words are funny things.
    The vast difference between Cretans and cretins occurs to me, especially in the context of comparative murder rates.
    As a general rule, in Europe the people hunt boars, which I can’t have a problem with, given my lust for boar bolognese.
    And I know wild pigs are a problem in some parts of America.
    But in America, for some reason, perhaps linked to a sort of endemic national cretinism, the bores hunt us. So far, again as a general rule, they are credited with not eating their prey.
    So there is that.
    When the National Rifle Association executes a buyout of Tyson Foods, we’ll know the pollo de muertos will have come home to roost.

  190. Might hurt Moore some, too. “Hunting over bait” doesn’t tend to resonate with folks who are real hunters. They have to be asking why he didn’t raise his son right.

  191. As a general rule, in Europe the people hunt boars
    The deeply sentimental-about-animals English say that if you walk in the woods in Italy, you no longer hear birdsong, because the Italians shoot anything that moves, including (gasp) songbirds. This is something quite different from the Cypriots and Maltese (and as far as I know others) who hunt songbirds by liming the tree branches so that when they alight to rest during their migration, they cannot get away again. The English consider this unsporting in the extreme, not to mention cruel (as indeed it is). But what is interesting is the absolute distinction made here between “birds it is OK to shoot” (e.g. pheasant, grouse, partridge, woodpigeon) and birds that you only kill if you are a barbarian (songbirds). That’s cultural differences for you.

  192. “real hunters”
    I have a feeling they are as irrelevant as “real republicans” and “real conservatives” in the madness engulfing Bannon America.
    Moore’s people want to put a salt-lick out to lure Nancy Pelosi and whatever remains of the near extinct “real” to the right of center into the open and blow her away with armor-piercing ammo.
    They fish with dynamite.

  193. songbird slaughter
    Jonathan Franzen has written eloquently and incisively about this subject.
    Yes, from culture to culture, human beings are choosy about what we rationalize and then sticking to it and calling it conservatism.
    Not that liberal forward-thinkers aren’t capable of thinking up something newly nuts to replace it.
    I’m still cogitating on the happy similarities between the near extinction of human cannibalism in some parts of the world and the coming confiscation of weapons of war in the hands of some segments of the American public.
    Probably more missionaries need to be boiled or roasted alive before we reach that second marker of progress.
    I dig a pony.

  194. The name, soon-to-be-released, of the Texas Tech campus police officer shot in the head by an armed student

  195. It turns out that a high IQ may be a marker for predicting that countries named Nambia are soon to be nuked by your government:
    http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2017/10/brought-white-supremacy
    If you are tracking the advent of World War III, as predicted by a conservative republican politician to be triggered by the leader of HIS political movement and voted for by that same diminutive republican politician, you’ll want to watch for this:
    Mike Allen, via Hullabaloo:
    “There are 28,500 U.S. troops in South Korea right now, and 230,000 additional U.S. citizens (including families of those service members).
    Keep an eye on flights to Japan: Evacuation drills are conducted every year. If the U.S. ever had to evacuate its citizens, that’s where they’d go first.
    “Just something to keep an eye on if this is anything more than mind games.”
    Then run for your fucking worthless lives, as worthless as Las Vegas country music fans’ and songbird and large game bird lives, entirely dependent on your cultural norms.

  196. GftNC-
    I don’t know about Europe, but the modern American sportsman is a force of conservation on balance. It isn’t perfect and sometimes a species of over hunted/fished, but regulated hunting and fishing for sport does a pretty decent job for the most part.
    Consider: Last I checked over half of the Department of Fish and Wildlife’s budget came from sportsmen paying taxes, fees and tags. That funds, inter alia, research on wildlife conservation and purchases of land for conservation.
    Consider: With reduced predation, hunting is needed to keep populations fo prey animals in check. Whitetail deer from my home state of SC would be completely out of control without hunting. In addition to the deer starving to death, overpopulation of deer contributes to deforestation and spread of disease.
    Again, it isn’t a perfect system, trophy hunting especially is anti-natural selection, but it’s better than nothing.

  198. Pollo, FWIW I have no objections to hunting game for food (apart from a personal horror of killing hares, which I think must be my spirit animals), and to cull populations to keep them healthy etc. If I said anything that seemed to imply the contrary, that was a mistake.

  200. The name, soon-to-be-released, of the Texas Tech campus police officer shot in the head by an armed student
    Floyd East, Jr.
    All the links I’ve found so far are more about the shooter than the officer, and I’m not going to glorify the killer by linking to his picture.
    I’ll watch for more about the officer and post a link when I can.
    [ed note from lj: added link, comment below]

  202. Swimming pools?
    if you have one handy.
    i prefer a 12′ aluminum step ladder with an integrated laser sight.

  204. The entire huckabee family are dangerous fascists infesting America:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/sarah-huckabee-sanders-unlv-look-into-professor
    I’m sure their towels are beautiful and soft.
    As are my cookies when I toss them all over Puerto Ricans.
    If republicans, with the vast legal tools they have at their disposal, are not going to do anything about our national emergency, then maybe it’s time to start hoping for a military coup in this country.

  208. added a link to Janie’s mention of the name of Floyd East, Jr. While it shouldn’t have been a surprise, articles and obituaries about police officers are different than the ones for the LV victims.
    btw, the Count and Janie have listed 12 people in the comments, just a shade over 20% of the victims. No word on deaths by swimming pools.

  209. I really hate it when a swimming pool massacres scores of people from the 32nd floor of a Vegas hotel.
    It’s clear that the problem in Vegas was that the concert was a ‘pool-free’ zone, also, too.

  210. I’ve been in Vegas thrice. Swimming pools all over the place, even on rooftops.
    If there was anyone who drowned in a swimming pool in Vegas at the same time the 58 were being gunned down and the other 500 scragged, I think it’s only fair to include their names.
    Rumor has it that a guy in Reno fell of a step ladder and fell neck first on to his Sawzall, which he left running near his three children under the age of seven.
    The National Sawzall Association and the Step Ladder Ladies Council of the Confederacy held a joint press conference and pointed out that at the very least their implements were NOT used for what they were invented and designed to accomplish in this incident, to climb, and cut through anything but human flesh, respectively, unlike the weapons employed in the Vegas shootings, even though in the latter case wildlife and humans since circa 1364 everywhere would testify differently.
    The NRA pointed out that an enterprising member once leaned his Kalashnikov against a tree and climbed it to escape two liberals dressed as a grizzly and another guy in a dumb hat said he once threw his Sawzall at his wife while his girlfriend cowered behind the divan, so whatta bout that, hunh?
    Then everyone went down to the Holiday Inn and did cannonballs into the pool off the diving board without incident ‘cept fer tequila poisoning.

  211. Not sure where exactly to put this, but
    https://globalnews.ca/news/3787534/las-vegas-survivors-face-expensive-medical-bills-total-shooting-costs-could-top-600m/
    Ted Miller, a researcher with the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation based in Maryland, is estimating the Las Vegas incident will cost at least $600 million, when accounting for medical care, mental health, loss of earnings, emergency transport, work by police and first-responders, employer costs and lost quality of life for victims and their loved ones.
    and
    Miller says the average cost of per gun death for Las Vegas will be in the neighbourhood of $7.6 million.
    and not least of all
    A study from John Hopkins School of Medicine published in the journal Health Affairs found the total cost in hospital charges for the more 100,000 people shot every year in the U.S. was$2.8-billion. On average, those treated in emergency departments for gunshot wounds received $5,254 in charges, but if they stayed in hospital overnight, charges rose to $95,887 on average.
    I hope someone can calculate the cost of swimming pool injuries so we can have a comparison…

  212. https://www.edgarsnyder.com/swimming-pool/swimming-pool-statistics.html
    not quite the same stats, but…

    The Centers for Disease Control report that here in the United States, on average, 3,536 people died from drowning annually from 2005 to 2014, which equates to 10 deaths each day. Then there are the thousands of others who suffer swimming pool-related injuries each year.
    In fact, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission reports that an average of 4,900 people received emergency care for injuries suffered in a swimming pools or spas each year in 2011, 2012 and 2013.
    …

    • More than 50 percent of drowning victims treated at an emergency room required to be either hospitalized or transferred to another facility for further care.
    • Non-fatal drowning injuries can cause severe brain damage that could result in long-term health issues including memory and learning problems.
    • Medical costs for near-drowning victims 14 and younger can cost more than $8,000 for initial hospital treatment, and those costs could soar to more than $250,000 each year if long-term care is needed.
    • If the drowning-related injury results in brain damage, the overall cost of medical treatment, and work and quality of life losses could cost as much as $5.5 million.

  214. I probably shouldn’t mention this, because it’s highly classified, but covert operations are underway to build swimming pools in remaining ISIS strongholds in Syria and Iraq. This will probably be the end for them.

  218. No one, anywhere in the world, died in a thermonuclear bomb explosion last year.
    They are safer than bed sheets.
    More Russians expired from vodka poisoning while handling nuclear weapons than dropping the things while shitfaced caused harm to anyone else.
    Given that record, clearly, we need ten times more nuclear warheads.
    Nancy Pelosi, to regain the white working vote, should counter propose a fifty-fold increase in American nuclear warheads.
    Some of those bombs, arranged on mobile platforms, could be targeted at swimming pools across the country as a drowning deterrent, perhaps concealed in cabanas and operated by highly trained, untrained pool boys, selected from among the current useless foreign diplomatic corps, who are now twiddling their thumbs at the State Department engaging in that diplomacy malarkey.
    To prevent the expense from widening the fucking budget deficit, Pelosi should propose tax cuts at the federal level so deep that rump enterprises, rather than paying ANY taxes, would be cut a billion dollar check by the IRS, now renamed rump ATM, at 2:00 pm every day of the year, to be deposited in offshore bank accounts.
    Make my day, swimmers.

  220. Flash mobs now:
    http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/white-nationalists-resort-to-flash-mobs-rallies
    I believe these gatherings were called Grossaktion Warschau in the Warsaw Ghetto near the end.
    I do think it’s so nice of our American republican Nazis to dress as they do, slacks, v-necked sweaters, loafers, though they seem a little heavy in them.
    And they smile like realtors. So polite and helpful. Good people on that side.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayJrgaVz-Xs
    Just kind of blending into the general background pig shit that is America in 2017.
    We’ll get use to them.
    I love the sounds of trains in the distance.

  221. “I love the sounds of trains in the distance.”
    The wailing of the train horn…that is a horn, isn’t it?

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