Fish Fear Me

Why Gun Control Is Failing

It's been two weeks now since various gun control measures went down in flames in the US Senate, prompting President Obama to don his petulance pants and lecture us from the Rose Garden. In that time I've read quite a few pieces by Democrats seeking to explain, in one way or another, how gun control could fail in the wake of the Newtown mass shooting. Some blame the NRA, of course. Some blame Republicans, of course. Some even blame Obama, but not for the reasons I'm going to cite. Pretty much all are long on self-pity and short on self-examination, so here are my criticisms of the pro-gun control side, because they are every bit to blame, if not more, than the NRA and Republicans.(This is a long one, so I'll put most of it below the fold)

Obama's poor leadership

When Obama outsourced the issue to Joe Biden, the probability for meaningful action took an immediate and negative hit. At that moment Obama signalled that it was really going to be business as usual, in other words it was going to be "inside the beltway politics." In the short term that was probably smart politics for Obama personally, but it was also another missed opportunity for him to match the greatness of his office.

He could have taken the role of an honest broker between the two sides and step by step publicly guided the conversation toward what was possible. That would have meant swallowing his own personal preferences for the moment and acting as President of all of these United States to bring both sides together. I suppose many in both party establishments would consider that idea naive, but my gut tells me the less ideological on both sides and independents would have eaten it up. Besides, isn't that the Hope and Change president we've been promised twice now?(I know, I know, that was always phony, but I couldn't resist) 

Biden's Poor Leadership

Many projects fail before they even begin because the problem and/or the scope of the solution are not properly defined from the start. I've seen it countless times over the years to the point where I can smell a looming clusterf*ck from a mile away. As I noted here and here, the problems of overall gun violence and mass killing are related but also distinct, and they have related but also distinct solution sets.

A tightly focused effort on Biden's part might have had a chance, but instead we got what was basically a free for all of gun control wish list items, regardless of how effective they would be in preventing the next mass shooting or daily gun violence on the streets.

To be fair to Biden, the Washington Post back in January noted how Obama had tied his hands somewhat from the start. Still, he wasn't just Obama's puppet on this issue. He fully embraced Obama's strategy of foregone conclusions, emotion over reason, and divisiveness through demonization. That worked in the last general election with the media covering their backs, but as shown in the results two weeks ago, it's a disastrous way to try to govern.

Real Journalism, RIP

Real Journalism died yesterday after a long and heroic struggle against Political Correctness. The coup de grâce was delivered by AP Senior Vice President and Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, who said, "Fuck it, let's stop pretending. Real Journalism stopped mattering a long time ago." 

Real Journalism is survived by its estranged children, Entertainment, Tabloid, Advocacy, Pack, and the hypocritical bastard who now goes by Truth to Power. 

Real Journalism was noted for its intense desire to inform the people on the important issues of the day, so they could make sound decisions about their lives and public policy. Transparency, reason, integrity, and clarity were its most important tools. It wasn't always pretty, but for decades it flourished by giving its customers the solid information they craved.

Real Journalism was infected with Political Correctness long ago, but it managed to fight bravely on for decades before its tools began to fail. It suffered a terrible blow when integrity totally failed during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, and with the shutdown of clarity yesterday, it was gone.

Small and scattered bands of followers will hold private services this week and keep the flame alive in the hopes that someday, Real Journalism will return.  

Gun Control Theater

As you probably have heard, this week Harry Reid declared Sen. Dianne Feinstein's assault weapons ban to be dead in the U.S. Senate. Oh, it will have its "Weekend at Bernie's" moments until it is finally planted for good in April, but it's dead. More thoughtful gun control advocates welcomed the death of this worthless bill because it distracted from efforts that might actually be effective. Less thoughtful gun control advocates, think Mike Bloomberg as Larry and Joe Biden as Richard, have decided to continue to drag this corpse of a bill from one event to another. The batshit crazy gun control advocates, as exmplified by Mike Lupica, predictably let loose with unhinged rants.

We can go back and forth all we want on the details of Feinstein's bill, but the fact of the matter is that the core of the bill is a falsehood. And that falsehood is that cosmetic features like barrel shrouds and pistol grips alter the basic lethality of these rifles in any meaningful way and banning them would make our society safer. It will not, and the falsehood is easily illustrated.

This gun would be banned under Sen. Feinstein's bill, in fact it is specifically named:

 

This rifle is not classified as an assault weapon under Sen. Feinstein's bill:

In the same way that automakers put different body styles on the same engineering frame, Sturm Ruger offers different looks on the same guts of these rifles. The same holds true for the Bushmaster series that Lanza is said to have used. That's why Mike Lupica is absolutely wrong when he says something like this:

Any fool knows that Lanza couldn’t possibly have killed as many children as quickly as he did on the morning of Dec. 14 without an assault weapon in his hands. 

And this:

Again: Ask any gun owner if Lanza could have killed as many children as he did in as short a time as he did — before he was a sure shot putting a bullet from one of his handguns through his snake-filled brain — if he didn’t have an AR-15 in his hands. Then go ask the gun lovers to explain all over again how a ban on weapons like this wouldn’t have saved three young lives that morning, or five, or maybe even more than that.

Lupica can deny the truth all he wants, but the reality is that those kids were killed with a semi-automatic .223 caliber rifle and they would be just as dead whether Lanza used one with a flash suppressor(or any other cosmetic feature) or not. To say otherwise is not true, and to insist on holding that position in the face of that overwhelming truth is frankly stupid, intentionally deceitful, or some form of madness. So is claiming that stopping future production, but not the possession of the millions of such existing weapons, will have any real effect at all.

I guess some gun control advocates see value in the symbolism, but symbolism would not have shielded those kids nor will it save anybody in the future. There are lots of things around firearms that we can do, big and small, to make society safer, including what would have been most effective in the Newtown shooting, a better way to identify people who have become dangerous and know if they have access to firearms or anything else that can be used for mass killings. It's too bad that the work that has gone into Feinstein's futile effort wasn't used on something that would actually be effective.

One final note. I've pretty much had it with people like Lupica. It's one thing to be well-meaning but wrong. It's another to be aggressively, militantly, rudely stupid. I wish I could peer into his mind to know if he is just cynically callous to the truth, intellectually incapable of grasping it, or actually suffering from some sort of mental illness. My default position is to always give the benefit of the doubt to people I disagree with, but Lupica, with his grossly false and churlish attacks on gun owners doesn't deserve that anymore. There's something seriously wrong with the man, and Mort Zuckerman should be ashamed to publish his "work."

More Climate Change Hypocrisy

Awww, isn't it special that Derk Jeter, presumably in Davos, Switzerland as celebrity meat for Pepsi at the World Economic Forum, is worried about climate change?

DAVOS, Switzerland -- As global political and business leaders gather here for the World Economic Forum this week, New York Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter hopes climate change is addressed.

"I was in New York for Hurricane Sandy," Jeter told The Dispatch this morning, following a private function in Davos, Switzerland. Jeter is here for the Forum this week with Pepsi.

"It's just something that's gotten so much attention," Jeter said of climate change. "Regardless of how you feel about it, it's something that needs to be addressed because we're seeing more and more natural disasters each year, it seems like. Something has to be causing it."*

I'm guessing "something" means the day-to-day activities of us peons and not the Pepsi corporate jet or charter he probably flew on to Switzerland, nor the lavish accommodations you know he's enjoying in Davos with all of the bigwigs.

Nor the private jet he took to get his ankle checked last fall.

Nor the extravagant 30,000 square foot house he had built in Tampa Bay a few years ago.

I've said it before: I do not begrudge Jeter or any other rich person their lavish carbon-spewing lifestyle, or house, or toys. But they are going to have to do some major downsizing in those areas before I'll listen to one reeking-of-hypocrisy word about climate change from them. 

*This is all besides him being wrong on the facts.

Focus, Part 1

Another day, another example of how we as a nation fail to properly define a problem and therefore flail about instead of finding real solutions:

Gun violence is just one of many factors contributing to lower U.S. life expectancy, but the finding took on urgency because the report comes less than a month after the shooting deaths of 26 people at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn.

The United States has about six violent deaths per 100,000 residents. None of the 16 other countries included in the review came anywhere close to that ratio. Finland was closest to the U.S. ranking with slightly more than two violent deaths per 100,000 residents.

The study puts the US murder rate at 6.5/100,000 while the actual rate of homicide and non-negligent manslaughter in this country is really 4.8/100,000 according to the FBI. That study uses some sort of age adjustment mumbo-jumbo that I'm somewhat skeptical about, but the real problem is how it, and so much of the discussion about violence in general and gun violence in particular, looks at the problem from such a high level.

America is not a violent nation. America is a mostly peaceful nation with pockets of primarily urban violence. And even in most of those urban areas, much of the violence is concentrated even further into smaller pockets. By looking at the issue so broadly, we not only fail to address the real problem, we also risk damaging otherwise healthy parts of our society.

Let's take a look at Minnesota first, because it's the state I am most familiar with. 

According to the FBI, in 2010 the national murder rate was 4.8/100,000 and the violent crime rate was 403.6. For Minnesota that year, the numbers were 1.8 and 236.0. If you isolate for just Minneapolis and St. Paul(668,039 people total), they jump to 7.9 and 924.6 while the rest of the state(4,635,886 people) falls to .9 and 136.7. And knowing Minneapolis and St. Paul like I do, I can tell you that we can further isolate most of the murder and violent crime to just certain neighborhoods. 

For the overwhelming majority of Minnesotans, the murder and violent crime rates are no different from the Western Europe rates that people love to cite so much.

Minnesota might be an outlier to some extent, but not by all that much. Illinois had a murder rate of 5.5 in 2010, but if you isolate just Chicago's(city proper, not metro) rate of 16.0 the rest of the state drops to 2.7. California led the nation with 1809 murders in 2010, but the top 20 reporting law enforcement agencies out of almost 400 account for more than half of that total. 

I don't have any numbers in front of me, but I bet gun violence specifically also tracks very disproportionately to particular geographic areas.  

At this point I'm sure some people are saying, "Well duh, Dave," and I understand that, but why then do our politicians and media approach the problem as though it's as prevalent across the land as it is in primarily urban hotspots?

Before I address what I think is the answer to that question in another post and also bring mass shootings into the discussion, I'll end this one by noting a couple of points.

Any violent crime is too much of course, and pockets of violence can happen anywhere, not just urban areas. Even my little city that abuts Minneapolis has some violent crime. But here and across most of the country the level of violence and murder is at or pretty near what could be understood as the human condition. Wasting efforts on those areas while people suffer in violent hellholes is immoral to an extreme.

The policy disconnect here does not go unnoticed by most gun owners and it is one reason they resist gun control so vehemently. Why should I, in my little house in my pretty peaceful little city, roughly 15 times more likely to be killed by Mother Nature than a gun, have to surrender my gun rights because violent crime is rampant in near-North/South sides of Minneapolis?

If gun control advocates would at least seriously consider that question we might be able to do something together that would have a real impact on violent crime and gun violence specifically. Assuming that's what they truly want.

Astounded

I realize it's a short clip, but can any additional context actually save this from eternal mockery?

 

Any? Any at all?

And I'm not talking about the "tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist” part, though you know what would have happened if Bush said that. No, I'm talking about government spending becoming so entrenched that even freakin' cowboy poetry has become a sacred budget line. 

If we can't cut that, can anything be cut?

Lies, Damn Lies, And Statistics

Your meaningless statistic of the day, brought to us courtesy of the author, one Ezra Klein:

And in the aggregate, of course, the business community spends much more than the unions — in 2010, business groups spent $1.3 billion, while unions spent $93 million.

This is one of those statistics we will see over and over and over that turns out to be just another myth of community-based reality. Why? Just follow the link directly above and see the prominently displayed disclaimer(emphasis mine):

The broadest categories that CRP uses to analyze the contributors of campaign cash are shown below. Business interests as a whole contribute far more money to candidates and political parties than do labor unions or ideological groups. Of course, business is a much bigger category than the others. However, business contributions tend to be overstated. Because CRP uses employer/occupation information to categorize donors, and because just about everyone works for a business, contributions from members of labor unions and ideological groups are often classified under business.

So, for example, a GM union worker's contribution gets classified as a business contribution. Then doesn't that sort of thing render that category somewhat meaningless as a measure of "business contributions"? 

Looking beyond bullshit artists and their meaningless statistics, further efforts at national campaign finance reform are doomed to fail because they are treating the symptom and not the disease. It's like giving a man with lung cancer a cough suppressant.

The problem is not money in politics, that's just the symptom. The disease is the enormous and growing power of the federal government to tax, spend, and increasingly regulate huge sectors of society. Of course people are going to want to influence those things, and they will spend money to do that. The more powerful the government, the more money that will be spent to influence that government. It's not rocket science. 

You want to reduce the influence of campaign contributions? First, reapply the 10th Amendment limits to the role of the federal government. Then dramatically simplify the tax code. Finally, end all payolasubsidies to industries and the pernicious market distortions that they create. Do those three things and we really would clean up government.

Hahaha...I know. It's almost like the politicians aren't sincere about that in the first place.

Enviro Mental

Via Memeorandum, the Los Angeles Times details a tale of clean energy stupidity in the Los Angeles Community College District that has to be read to be believed. This is the kind of waste and idiocy that will bankrupt our governments and drive our economy right into the ground.

This looks like the heart of the matter:

One thing was for sure: No matter how it was financed, the bill for all those solar panels and wind turbines would be huge. Eisenberg's cost estimates for taking the nine campuses off the grid ranged as high as $975 million — this for a college system that in 2010 spent less than $8 million on power bills.

Another consultant put the cost at $1.9 billion. Even at the lower cost the project is clearly insane. President Obama and friends talk about "green jobs" all of the time. I would like to know how many of those jobs are based on executing ridiculous projects like the one shown here. Kudos to the LA Times for this investigation, but what we really need is for them to take it to the next level.

They're Not?

I kind of figured that Greg Sargent's connection to reality was a little tenuous, but this takes the cake:

One of my favorite right wing fantasies has it that Democrats are broadly convinced that the vast majority of Tea Partyers are closet or overt racists. You hear this so often that it often seems as if some folks wish this were the case.

The latest example of this genre: A mini-tizzy is brewing on the right over a new book that suggests Obama himself may harbor that view. As the Drudge headline put it: "BOOK: Obama Says 'Race' a Key Component in Tea Party Protests."

Good grief. All one has to do is google "tea party" and "racist" to get around 2.1 million examples of Democrats, leftists, and even some Republicans screaming bloody murder about how racist those damned tea partiers are. I've been hearing it for two years now and to deny that is just stupid. Here are just a couple of examples from today:

• But one upshot is going to be a redoubling of efforts to prove the GOP isn't racist.
• And how quickly we've forgotten the overt racism while looking to justify the more subtle examples.

Are there racists in the various Tea Party organizations? Almost certainly, just like they are in the NAACP, both major parties, and probably pretty much any organization of a certain size. Racism has no boundaries when it comes to ideology or race and it can take many forms. In general though, I don't think most Americans are racist whether they are in a Tea Party or not.  

When individuals say or do racist things we should to call them on it, of course. But I'm not going to take ownership of that racism if it turns out that the racist associates with some legitimate group that I am in. And I'm going to resent it like hell if somebody tries to make me. Wouldn't you? I thought we had given up things like stereotyping and collective guilt and punishment. 

I guess not, no matter how hard Greg Sargent tries to wish that reality away. 

Newspeak

Can anybody square this?

Union leaders and other protesters said they plan to make a peaceful stand when police begin clearing out the state Capitol nearly two weeks after demonstrators first occupied the building. 

Police have said they will arrest anyone who refuses to clear out at 4 p.m. Sunday.

With this?

It's unclear how many protesters plan to be arrested rather than disperse, but the number could be in the hundreds. Protest leaders said they plan to cooperate fully and are urging everyone to remain calm.

How is it that people can plan passive resistance and then characterize it as "cooperate fully" and not get mercilessly laughed at? Do words mean anything anymore?

I'm not bitching about people deciding to choose to get arrested for refusing to leave, but don't try to tell me that it's cooperation. That's just fucking stupid.