Month: July 2009

Quote of the Day

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The religious purpose of modern schooling was announced clearly by the legendary University of Wisconsin sociologist Edward A. Ross in 1901 in his famous book, Social Control. Your librarian should be able to locate a copy for you without much trouble. In it Ed Ross wrote these words for his prominent following: “Plans are underway to replace community, family, and church with propaganda, education, and mass media….the State shakes loose from Church, reaches out to School…. People are only little plastic lumps of human dough.” Social Control revolutionized the discipline of sociology and had powerful effects on the other human sciences: in social science it guided the direction of political science, economics, and psychology; in biology it influenced genetics, eugenics, and psychobiology. It played a critical role in the conception and design of molecular biology.

There you have it in a nutshell. The whole problem with modern schooling. It rests on a nest of false premises. People are not little plastic lumps of dough. They are not blank tablets as John Locke said they were, they are not machines as de La Mettrie hoped, not vegetables as Friedrich Froebel, inventor of kindergartens, hypothesized, not organic mechanisms as Wilhelm Wundt taught every psychology department in America at the turn of the century, nor are they repertoires of behaviors as Watson and Skinner wanted. They are not, as the new crop of systems thinkers would have it, mystically harmonious microsystems interlocking with grand macrosystems in a dance of atomic forces. I don’t want to be crazy about this; locked in a lecture hall or a bull session there’s probably no more harm in these theories than reading too many Italian sonnets all at one sitting. But when each of these suppositions is sprung free to serve as a foundation for school experiments, it leads to frightfully oppressive practices.

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

How Can People Still Believe This

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How Can People Still Believe This?

The levels of delusion that people are able to achieve still astound me. The piece I wrote a bit back, How’s that Gun Control Working Out for You? got linked at an online gamer’s forum. Apparently one member there is virulently anti-gun. Well, someone found another thread at the site, and linked to the piece again – but here’s the part of that thread – written by said anti-gunner – that inspired this post:

The UK has strict gun control and our last schoolyard shooting was Dunblane in 1996.
Australia has strict gun control and their last spree shooting was Port Arthur – also in 1996. Both of those incidents were followed by the introduction of draconian legislation to stop such incidents completely. It would be absurd to claim that there will never be another such incident. But 23 years without a repeat indicates quite a high barrier to the aspirations of would-be spree killers.

I think it works like this:

(1) Make it very hard to buy unnecessary firearms.
(2) Offer amnesties to get the existing toxic pool of unnecessary firearms out of drawers and cupboards throughout the nation
(3) Now it is very hard for low-level housebreakers to pick up an untraceable gun
(4) Now there are very few gun-dealers, so the police can take time to investigate ‘break-ins’ by which their guns are passed to criminals.
(5) Now, there is a very restricted market for bullets – it’s possible to trace the bullets used in a crime back to the shop and back to the purchaser. Arms dealers get more cautious about who they sell bullets to.
(6) Now its hard to shoot someone dead on impulse – so your murder rate is dropping
(7) and the chaotic, unstable criminals at the bottom of your society can’t get a gun at all.
(8) You drop the insane, vindictive multi-lifetime jail sentences for crimes against property – so it makes logical sense for a thief to surrender instead of trying to kill all witnesses or die attempting to get away.
(9) So the more ‘professional’ criminals don’t need guns for self-defense. And they don’t want the extra jail time they get for carrying a lethal weapon.

Result: A low level of guns in your society and a low level of gun crime. It’s not a zero crime rate. But about 8,000 fewer Americans will be shot dead each year.

Why do I think this would work ? Because, if you look at the top 25 developed nations, you’ll see that it is the US of A which has an unhealthy love affair with hand guns. And a demonization of ‘the criminals’ who are given 99 year sentences which they don’t have the life-span to serve.

And the US of A has three times the murder rate of those other developed nations. Doesn’t look that mysterious an issue to me.

So . . . draconian gun control has prevented another Dunblane or Port Arthur. OK, I can understand that reasoning, even if I disagree with it. It’s the same logic that says the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have prevented any more 9/11-like suicide attacks on U.S. soil.

Correlation ≠ Causation, but I understand the idea.

Now, let’s look at the rest of “Grungekitty’s” assertions.

(1) Make it very hard to buy unnecessary firearms.
Hard for whom? For the law-abiding, obviously, since pretty much anything you want is available on the streets in the UK for the right price.

(2) Offer amnesties to get the existing toxic pool of unnecessary firearms out of drawers and cupboards throughout the nation
Yes, they’ve been doing that for quite a while now in the UK – a place where all legally possessed firearms have been registered with the government. However, a 2003 amnesty brought in a lot of weapons, but most everyone asked said that “it appears to have had little effect in the communities where it really matters.” Another in 2004 brought in few firearms. In 2007 after a boy died after being shot with an air rifle, an amnesty in Wales brought in:

10 air rifles
4 air pistols
2 BB guns
1 blanks firing pistol and ammunition
1 hunting knife
1 imitation handgun
3 boxes of air gun pellets
1 crossbow

Wow.

And after each amnesty, gun crime increased.

(3) Now it is very hard for low-level housebreakers to pick up an untraceable gun
Too right. Now they have to fence the stuff they steal and buy an untraceable gun! Or just rent one. There’s apparently an active rent-a-gun business in the UK these days, for the down-on-his-luck criminal who can’t afford the fifty quid necessary to purchase one.

No one knows how many guns are in circulation across Britain. Senior police sources confirm that they are ‘easy and quick’ to obtain. Whether they rent, borrow or buy, young men have no difficulty getting ‘tooled up’. Semi-automatic pistols remain the weapon of choice, although Trident officers admit ‘military hardware’ has found its way onto the streets.

That quote comes from a September, 2006 piece.

(4) Now there are very few gun-dealers, so the police can take time to investigate ‘break-ins’ by which their guns are passed to criminals.
Oooh! “Break-ins” with scare quotes! From that same September report:

Elsewhere, thousands of AK-47s from east Europe are reported to have ‘gone missing’ in Britain. One senior police source admits halting the supply of weaponry into Britain remains a thankless task: ‘We suspect a number enter the UK via lorry drivers using secret compartments. The issue is that we’re concentrating on drug and human imports and yet bringing in a handful of guns is, relatively, dead easy.

Who needs to break in to a gun shop? It’s easier to smuggle in the stuff that legal gun dealers can’t even handle – handguns, submachine guns, hand grenades, and assault rifles. The kind that actually have select-fire switches.

(5) Now, there is a very restricted market for bullets – it’s possible to trace the bullets used in a crime back to the shop and back to the purchaser. Arms dealers get more cautious about who they sell bullets to.
Really? And where do you get that idea? If it’s easy to smuggle in weapons, ammunition is a snap. Your ignorance is showing, grungekitty!

(6) Now its hard to shoot someone dead on impulse – so your murder rate is dropping
And THIS is the one that leaves my jaw on the ground. The UK has done everything on this list, and their murder rate continues to INCREASE. I’ve done this comparison before, but here it is again – the ratio of homicide rates between the U.S. and Scotland, and the U.S. and England & Wales since 1946:


So the U.S. without all that “draconian gun control” has been experiencing a decline in homicide rates, while Scotland and England & Wales have had a slow but steady increase in their rates. If you project the slopes on out, you’re looking at a 1:1 ratio about what, 2012?

But we’re not done yet!

(7) and the chaotic, unstable criminals at the bottom of your society can’t get a gun at all.
Riiiiight! Just like in the UK, WHICH IS AN ISLAND. I believe I’ve already addressed this bit of cranial flatulence.

(8) You drop the insane, vindictive multi-lifetime jail sentences for crimes against property – so it makes logical sense for a thief to surrender instead of trying to kill all witnesses or die attempting to get away.
Words fail me.

(9) So the more ‘professional’ criminals don’t need guns for self-defense. And they don’t want the extra jail time they get for carrying a lethal weapon.
Words fail me still.

Result: A low level of guns in your society and a low level of gun crime. It’s not a zero crime rate. But about 8,000 fewer Americans will be shot dead each year.
Give her credit, she’s wrong about everything, and she finishes BIG!

Sorry, grungekitty, but we’ve seen the petri dish of the UK. We know what actually happens. The government succeeds in disarming the victim pool, and the criminals are emboldened. So not only does the homicide rate increase, but all other forms of violent crime go up too. After all, they’re not afraid of the police, who – as crime victim Nikki Goeser explained, can’t be everywhere all the time. No, the cops show up just in time to put out the crime scene tape and take photos of your loved ones. Not their fault. Protecting you and yours isn’t really their job.

It’s yours.

Sweet bleeding Shiva, the things people can convince themselves of in the face of all the evidence.

It’s Not Just John Stossel

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It’s Not Just John Stossel

PJTV’s Steven Crowder does some undercover investigation of Canada’s much-vaunted (by Democrats) socialized health care system. And, being on the web, his report can be ten times longer than ABC would allow. The results should enlighten you:

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&w=560&h=340]
If you’re a human being in Canada and you want a blood test, you’d better have your own physician, because the walk-in clinics won’t do it, and the hospital emergency rooms won’t do it, you have to have a personal doctor for such tests as cholesterol or a PSA (prostate cancer screening). If you don’t have a doctor? You get to wait 2-3 years, as Stossel illustrated.

Quote of the Day

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At the start of WWII millions of men showed up at registration offices to take low-level academic tests before being inducted.1 The years of maximum mobilization were 1942 to1944; the fighting force had been mostly schooled in the 1930s, both those inducted and those turned away. Of the 18 million men tested, 17,280,000 of them were judged to have the minimum competence in reading required to be a soldier, a 96 percent literacy rate. Although this was a 2 percent fall-off from the 98 percent rate among voluntary military applicants ten years earlier, the dip was so small it didn’t worry anybody.
WWII was over in 1945. Six years later another war began in Korea. Several million men were tested for military service but this time 600,000 were rejected. Literacy in the draft pool had dropped to 81 percent, even though all that was needed to classify a soldier as literate was fourth- grade reading proficiency. In the few short years from the beginning of WWII to Korea, a terrifying problem of adult illiteracy had appeared. The Korean War group received most of its schooling in the 1940s, and it had more years in school with more professionally trained personnel and more scientifically selected textbooks than the WWII men, yet it could not read, write, count, speak, or think as well as the earlier, less-schooled contingent.
A third American war began in the mid-1960s. By its end in 1973 the number of men found noninductible by reason of inability to read safety instructions, interpret road signs, decipher orders, and so on—in other words, the number found illiterate—had reached 27 percent of the total pool. Vietnam-era young men had been schooled in the 1950s and the 1960s—much better schooled than either of the two earlier groups—but the 4 percent illiteracy of 1941 which had transmuted into the 19 percent illiteracy of 1952 had now had grown into the 27 percent illiteracy of 1970. Not only had the fraction of competent readers dropped to 73 percent but a substantial chunk of even those were only barely adequate; they could not keep abreast of developments by reading a newspaper, they could not read for pleasure, they could not sustain a thought or an argument, they could not write well enough to manage their own affairs without assistance.

Consider how much more compelling this steady progression of intellectual blindness is when we track it through army admissions tests rather than college admissions scores and standardized reading tests, which inflate apparent proficiency by frequently changing the way the tests are scored.

—

Back in 1952 the Army quietly began hiring hundreds of psychologists to find out how 600,000 high school graduates had successfully faked illiteracy. Regna Wood sums up the episode this way:

After the psychologists told the officers that the graduates weren’t faking, Defense Department administrators knew that something terrible had happened in grade school reading instruction. And they knew it had started in the thirties. Why they remained silent, no one knows. The switch back to reading instruction that worked for everyone should have been made then. But it wasn’t.

In 1882, fifth graders read these authors in their Appleton School Reader: William Shakespeare, Henry Thoreau, George Washington, Sir Walter Scott, Mark Twain, Benjamin Franklin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, John Bunyan, Daniel Webster, Samuel Johnson, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others like them. In 1995, a student teacher of fifth graders in Minneapolis wrote to the local newspaper, “I was told children are not to be expected to spell the following words correctly: back, big, call, came, can, day, did, dog, down, get, good, have, he, home, if, in, is, it, like, little, man, morning, mother, my, night, off, out, over, people, play, ran, said, saw, she, some, soon, their, them, there, time, two, too, up, us, very, water, we, went, where, when, will, would, etc. Is this nuts?”

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education

No, it’s not nuts. It’s sabotage. Deliberate, intentional sabotage.

Once More, Into the Breach

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Once More, Into the Breach

Robb over at Sharp as a Marble discovered someone I just had to invite, one Marc Rubin:

Mr. Rubin:

I’d never read your Examiner column prior to today, but I have to admit that I was fascinated by your assertion:

“In an earlier article about the 2nd amendment I proved beyond a shadow of any doubt that the 2nd amendment has nothing to do with an individual right to own a gun. And the facts are irrefutable.”

You see, I am apparently one of those “many people ignorant of what the 2nd Amendment means” and who insists that it is all about an individual right to own a gun.

And I really, truly enjoy debating the topic with those of opposite mind.

I am the proprietor of a blog, The Smallest Minority, where I invite you to debate this topic with me, in print, in public view. Now, I don’t expect to change your mind, or you to change mine, but what I endeavor to do is to put up both sides of the topic, argued by dedicated advocates using reason, logic, and citations so that those still on the fence – the ignorant, as you style them – can be educated and decide for themselves which argument makes more sense on the evidence.

Experience tells me that it takes a bit more than a single 3,500 word column.

I await your reply.

Sincerely,

Kevin Baker
Tucson, AZ

We shall see . . .

UPDATE: After 24 48 hours, no reply.

UPDATE to the update: Mr. Rubin finally replied by email on Sunday, July 19. My response is up.

The BBC Takes an Interest in Tennessee Gun Laws

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The BBC Takes an Interest in Tennessee Gun Laws

I guess since the UK has enacted “the toughest gun laws in the world”, designed to “put a firm brake on the development of a dangerous gun culture in the UK,” they have to find their jollies vicariously:

Tennessee gun law divides opinion

By James Coomarasamy
BBC News, Nashville, Tennessee

Just an aside, but I’d really be interested in Mr. Coomarasamy’s personal take on being in Tennessee. Since Knoxville seems to be Blogger Central, perhaps one of the many bloggers there could put on their pajamas and interview him?

Following a recent series of high-profile shooting incidents in the United States, the southern state of Tennessee is changing its gun laws this week.

It is relaxing them.

If a last-minute legal challenge fails, from Tuesday, gun owners in the state will be allowed to carry their weapons in a lot more public places – including bars and restaurants.

I went to Nashville to find out what local residents thought about the proposed law change.

‘Seconds count’

Nikki Goeser takes her Second Amendment right to bear arms very seriously.

One of Tennessee’s 250,000 registered gun owners, she saw her husband, Ben, shot dead in front of her in April.

She believes her right was denied when she needed it most.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/player/emp/external/player.swf
(Hooray for the BBC!)

I don’t believe Tennessee actually registers its gun owners – just the ones who have concealed carry licenses. Somehow I doubt Mr. Coomarasamy (or at least his editors) understands the difference.

Soon, Tennessee’s bars and restaurants will no longer be off-limits for registered weapons.

State legislators – a quarter of whom own firearms – have passed a law allowing guns into bars and restaurants, but preventing their owners from buying alcohol.

For the bill’s Democratic sponsor – State Senator Doug Jackson – it is a case of preserving the rights of individuals and those of individual states.

“People are fearful about tomorrow. They feel insecure. And the Second Amendment right is something that they cherish and it’s a means of protecting themselves and their family and defending what they have. It provides security in troubled times.”

But on the streets of Nashville, even some staunch defenders of Second Amendment rights fear that the Music City is about to become Dodge City. And that mixing guns and alcohol is a recipe for disaster.

Even though it’s not in any of the other states where it’s legal to do what Tennessee just enacted. Odd that Mr. Coomarasamy (or his editors) didn’t mention that.

Nashville restaurateur Randy Rayburn is anything but cool about the idea of his customers having guns.

He is leading a last-minute legal challenge to the law – to protect his barmen.

“Yes they’re scared, I’m scared, my wife is scared for our personal safety.”

He has done what restaurant owners are permitted to do – placed a sign in his window, saying “no guns allowed”.

But he is worried that the sign will not be enough to prevent people taking the new law into their own hands.

Er, what? Protect his barmen from what exactly? He expects CCW carriers to break the law, get drunk, and shoot the place up?

“We don’t need vigilantism inside my business,” he says. “I’m a gun owner, I have a gun at my home, but I keep it there, not at a public place where many people’s lives can be threatened.

Oh, right – vigilantism – he expects his patrons to pull out their gats and shoot bad guys for NO REASON. AND his barmen.

I think Nikki Goeser might want a word with Mr. Rayburn.

But Rayburn isn’t alone:

And he has support from the city’s police chief, Ronal Serpas, who does not believe that people who walk into bars with guns will steer clear of the shot glasses.

“If you think about how alchohol influences the choices people make… I don’t believe people are not going to drink and have guns, because I know they drink and drive,” he says.

“What process is going through their mind as it’s clouded by alcohol? [They’re] trying to do a good thing, but they have NO training, NO experience, NO time for reflective thought, and their minds are consumed by alcohol – it doesn’t make sense.”

So it’s Chief Serpas who believes that licensed CCW holders will violate the law and get drunk while armed, although up till now they’ve obeyed the law and not carried into establishments that serve alcohol. Always good to know what Law Enforcement thinks of the people it works for. In this case the Chief thinks that alcohol must give off the brain-altering waves that force people to drink.

Nikki gets the last word in the piece, though:

But for Nikki – and other law-abiding gun owners – what does not make sense is being allowed to have a gun, but being prevented from using it when it counts

“I hear people say all the time, guns are made specifically to kill,” she tells me.

“My answer to that is: ‘yes a gun can kill, but in the correct hands, it can be used to save innocent lives’. I don’t care so much about a bad guy’s life. I’m sorry, I don’t. They make the choice to be evil, that’s their choice. If they choose that, and I am armed I know what I’m doing, I will try to stop them.”

And soon she will be allowed to – in a lot more places.

Boy, it’s a good thing the UK has the toughest gun laws in the world, and doesn’t have to worry about people carrying handguns into restaurants anymore . . .

Gunman opens fire in restaurant

A man and a 15-year-old boy are recovering from bullet wounds after a gunman opened fire in a packed restaurant in west London.

Both suffered non-life threatening injuries during the shooting in Harry Morgan’s restaurant in St John’s Wood High Street, at 2110 BST on Friday.

The attacker, carrying two guns, chased the 31-year-old man into the diner and opened fire, hitting him in the leg.

But that’s UNPOSSIBLE!! The UK has the TOUGHEST GUN LAWS IN THE WORLD!!

The Metropolitan Police said no arrests have yet been made.

Because they arrived just in time to put up crime scene tape and take reports.

Several shots were fired in the venue which was filled with people.

Pop star Rachel Stevens was dining at the venue at the time.

A spokeswoman for the former S Club 7 member said: “Rachel and her family were in a restaurant where there was gunfire. It was very frightening for everyone there but none of the diners were hurt.”

An eyewitness said diners threw themselves to the floor screaming and bullet-holes could now be seen.

And, being unarmed, all they could to was huddle there waiting to die.

BBC chief economics correspondent Hugh Pym was also in the restaurant at the time.

He said: “I immediately went to ground and pulled my 15-year-old son under the table.

“We were aware of a guy running through.

“He didn’t appear as if he had a weapon – it felt like he was the victim.”

Pym continued: “We were under the table and everyone was shouting ‘stay down, stay down’.

“Obviously there was a lot of broken glass and people gradually emerged from the tables.

“People were pretty shaken up and were wailing in shock more than anything else.”

Billy Osbourne was also in the restaurant and saw the first man run in.

“Then all of a sudden a guy in a motorbike helmet came in – he had two automatic pistols and he starts firing at the guy.

UNPOSSIBLE! Handguns have been banned in the UK since 1997!!

“As soon as I smelled the cordite I was under the table.

“Everyone was screaming and hitting the deck.

“It was unbelievable – it was a packed restaurant and it does not appear anybody [among the diners] was hurt.”

The shooter was probably a lousy shot.

Harry Morgan’s was established in 1948 by a London butcher and has been shortlisted in the Evening Standard Restaurant Awards.

I bet they counted on a “Gun Free Zone” sign to protect their patrons, too.

Oh, right. The entire country is a “Gun Free Zone.” How’s that working out for you?

(h/t AR15.com for these two stories.)

Quote of the Day

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In the first decades of the twentieth century, a small group of soon-to-be-famous academics, symbolically led by John Dewey and Edward Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College, Ellwood P. Cubberley of Stanford, G. Stanley Hall of Clark, and an ambitious handful of others, energized and financed by major corporate and financial allies like Morgan, Astor, Whitney, Carnegie, and Rockefeller, decided to bend government schooling to the service of business and the political state—as it had been done a century before in Prussia.

Cubberley delicately voiced what was happening this way: “The nature of the national need must determine the character of the education provided.” National need, of course, depends upon point of view. The NEA in 1930 sharpened our understanding by specifying in a resolution of its Department of Superintendence that what school served was an “effective use of capital” through which our “unprecedented wealth-producing power has been gained.” When you look beyond the rhetoric of Left and Right, pronouncements like this mark the degree to which the organs of schooling had been transplanted into the corporate body of the new economy.

It’s important to keep in mind that no harm was meant by any designers or managers of this great project. It was only the law of nature as they perceived it, working progressively as capitalism itself did for the ultimate good of all. The real force behind school effort came from true believers of many persuasions, linked together mainly by their belief that family and church were retrograde institutions standing in the way of progress. Far beyond the myriad practical details and economic considerations there existed a kind of grail-quest, an idea capable of catching the imagination of dreamers and firing the blood of zealots.

— John Taylor Gatto, The Underground History of American Education