fisk – Page 3 – The Smallest Minority

All Markadelphia All the Time

May 13, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

Well, not much longer.

Perennial commenter and fellow blogger Markadelphia has decided to spend more time at his own blog and less at mine (*sniffle*), but I dropped by the other day and found a couple of posts that just begged commentary, so I indulged.

Dammit.

Anyway, Markadelphia responded with a comment that just requires a reply. Here’s his comment with my response. (Yes, I fisked it):

I don’t really have a belief system, Kevin, other than my belief in Christ. I have plenty of problems with liberals. In fact, the list is probably at least two thirds as long as the problems I have with conservatives.

So far, Mark, the problems you appear to have with most self-described liberals seems to be that they’re not liberal enough. It’s that “turning up the power” problem that I keep referring to as “Do it again, only HARDER!“

If I don’t understand your philosophy, it certainly isn’t for lack of trying…it is for lack of clarity on your part.

No, it’s because our worldviews are so completely divergent. You simply cannot comprehend that I do not believe the things you believe are true about all people, thus you keep trying to make me fit into your mental image. You convince yourself that if you try just a bit harder you can convince me that you’re right. After all, it’s so obvious to you. You have, after all, asked yourself the right questions! (You knew I had to throw that one in, didn’t you?)

You say you are a classic liberal, the champion of freedom and liberty, and yet you are willing to sign it all away in the name of national security.

That’s how you interpret it, but (as exampled in the comments to the post above) you keep misinterpreting perfectly good complete, meaningful sentences. Meanwhile, what are you willing to sign away in the name of “social justice”?

You shout at the top of your lungs about free speech and yet you blow a bowel when any book, tv program, or film questions our current international policy-calling them kooks and/or traitors and discouraging critical thought.

Here’s a perfect example. What does the First Amendment’s protection of free speech mean? As I understand it, it means that the government cannot shut people up. It does not protect people from any repercussions. If I want to stand directly across from protesters and tell them they’re assholes, the GOVERNMENT can’t shut me up either. If I want to take out a full-page ad directly across from theirs, same thing. If I want to boycott their product or their advertisers and encourage others to do the same, I’m perfectly free to do so. The First Amendment’s freedom of speech clause does not mean you get to protest unopposed. It means the government doesn’t get to threaten you, jail you, or kill you for exercising it. This has, however, been violated under color of law. Abraham Lincoln did it, Woodrow Wilson did it. FDR did it.

You aggressively advocate an “alternative” education to the “socialist crap” being taught in our “collapsing” schools and yet it is clear to me that what you really desire is dissemination of propaganda–propaganda which does go farther back than eight years.

The irony of your view on education is that the exact opposite of your view is the reality: virtually all American History textbooks include your version of US history. We are always acting as a force of good and when we are misunderstood it is the fault of the other and not us. I would recommend you read the book Lies My Teacher Told Me by James Loewen for what is actually the problem with social studies curriculum as opposed to the psychosis that is Goldberg’s view.

First, that little factoid must explain why history doesn’t appear to be taught in school much anymore. My daughter graduated from high school in 1997. She had no idea what Pearl Harbor was or its significance. She was aware, however, that Thomas Jefferson fathered children on one of his slaves though!

I looked up the book. I found this (since one of your commenters mentioned how “Loewen really busts out the whupping stick on Woodrow Wilson”) very interesting. From the Barnes & Noble site, first part of the Publisher’s Weekly review:

Loewen’s politically correct critique of 12 American history textbooks-including The American Pageant by Thomas A. Bailey and David M. Kennedy; and Triumph of the American Nation by Paul Lewis Todd and Merle Curtis sure to please liberals and infuriate conservatives.

Surprise, surprise. Now, from an excerpt from the book itself:

Over the past ten years, I have asked dozens of college students who Helen Keller was and what she did. They all know that she was a blind and deaf girl. Most of them know that she was befriended by a teacher, Anne Sullivan, and learned to read and write and even to speak. Some students can recall rather minute details of Keller’s early life: that she lived in Alabama, that she was unruly and without manners before Sullivan came along, and so forth. A few know that Keller graduated from college. But about what happened next, about the whole of her adult life, they are ignorant. A few students venture that Keller became a “public figure” or a “humanitarian,” perhaps on behalf of the blind or deaf. “She wrote, didn’t she?” or “she spoke” — conjectures without content. Keller, who was born in 1880, graduated from Radcliffe in 1904 and died in 1968. To ignore the sixty-four years of her adult life or to encapsulate them with the single word humanitarian is to lie by omission.

The truth is that Helen Keller was a radical socialist. She joined the Socialist party of Massachusetts in 1909. She had become a social radical even before she graduated from Radcliffe, and not, she emphasized, because of any teachings available there. After the Russian Revolution, she sang the praises of the new communist nation: “In the East a new star is risen! With pain and anguish the old order has given birth to the new, and behold in the East a man-child is born! Onward, comrades, all together! Onward to the campfires of Russia! Onward to the coming dawn!” Keller hung a red flag over the desk in her study. Gradually she moved to the left of the Socialist party and became a Wobbly, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), the syndicalist union persecuted by Woodrow Wilson.

So we’ve established the horrible hidden historical secret that Helen Keller was a socialist! And more, that Woodrow Wilson persecuted the union to which she belonged!

But wait! There’s more!

What we did not learn about Woodrow Wilson is even more remarkable. When I ask my college students to tell me what they recall about President Wilson, they respond with enthusiasm. They say that Wilson led our country reluctantly into World War I and after the war led the struggle nationally and internationally to establish the League of Nations. They associate Wilson with progressive causes like women’s suffrage. A handful of students recall the Wilson administration’s Palmer Raids against left-wing unions. But my students seldom know or speak about two antidemocratic policies that Wilson carried out: his racial segregation of the federal government and his military interventions in foreign countries.

Under Wilson, the United States intervened in Latin America more often than at any other time in our history. We landed troops in Mexico in 1914, Haiti in 1915, the Dominican Republic in 1916, Mexico again in 1916 (and nine more times before the end of Wilson’s presidency), Cuba in 1917, and Panama in 1918. Throughout his administration Wilson maintained forces in Nicaragua, using them to determine Nicaragua’s president and to force passage of a treaty preferential to the United States.

Fucking right-wing capitalist warmonger!

Wilson’s invasions of Latin America are better known than his Russian adventure. Textbooks do cover some of them, and it is fascinating to watch textbook authors attempt to justify these episodes. Any accurate portrayal of the invasions could not possibly show Wilson or the United States in a favorable light. With hindsight we know that Wilson’s interventions in Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Nicaragua set the stage for the dictators Batista, Trujillo, the Duvaliers, and the Somozas, whose legacies still reverberate.

—

All twelve of the textbooks I surveyed mention Wilson’s 1914 invasion of Mexico, but they posit that the interventions were not Wilson’s fault. “President Wilson was urged to send military forces into Mexico to protect American investments and to restore law and order,” according to Triumph of the American Nation, whose authors emphasize that the president at first chose not to intervene.

See! He did all this for the corporations!

But “as the months passed, even President Wilson began to lose patience.” Walter Karp has shown that this version contradicts the facts — the invasion was Wilson’s idea from the start, and it outraged Congress as well as the American people. According to Karp, Wilson’s intervention was so outrageous that leaders of both sides of Mexico’s ongoing civil war demanded that the U.S. forces leave; the pressure of public opinion in the United States and around the world finally influenced Wilson to recall the troops.

See! See! Warmonger!

And he was a rabid anti-communist!

His was the first administration to be obsessed with the specter of communism, abroad and at home. Wilson was blunt about it. In Billings, Montana, stumping the West to seek support for the League of Nations, he warned, “There are apostles of Lenin in our own midst. I can not imagine what it means to be an apostle of Lenin. It means to be an apostle of the night, of chaos, of disorder.” Even after the White Russian alternative collapsed, Wilson refused to extend diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. He participated in barring Russia from the peace negotiations after World War I and helped oust Béla Kun, the communist leader who had risen to power in Hungary. Wilson’s sentiment for self-determination and democracy never had a chance against his three bedrock “ism”s: colonialism, racism, and anticommunism. A young Ho Chi Minh appealed to Woodrow Wilson at Versailles for self-determination for Vietnam, but Ho had all three strikes against him. Wilson refused to listen, and France retained control of Indochina.

And, like all right-wingers, he was a racist!

At home, Wilson’s racial policies disgraced the office he held. His Republican predecessors had routinely appointed blacks to important offices, including those of port collector for New Orleans and the District of Columbia and register of the treasury. Presidents sometimes appointed African Americans as postmasters, particularly in southern towns with large black populations. African Americans took part in the Republican Party’s national conventions and enjoyed some access to the White House. Woodrow Wilson, for whom many African Americans voted in 1912, changed all that. A southerner, Wilson had been president of Princeton, the only major northern university that refused to admit blacks. He was an outspoken white supremacist — his wife was even worse — and told “darky” stories in cabinet meetings. His administration submitted a legislative program intended to curtail the civil rights of African Americans, but Congress would not pass it. Unfazed, Wilson used his power as chief executive to segregate the federal government. He appointed southern whites to offices traditionally reserved for blacks. Wilson personally vetoed a clause on racial equality in the Covenant of the League of Nations. The one occasion on which Wilson met with African American leaders in the White House ended in a fiasco as the president virtually threw the visitors out of his office. Wilson’s legacy was extensive: he effectively closed the Democratic Party to African Americans for another two decades, and parts of the federal government remained segregated into the 1950s and beyond.

A racist and an anti-communist, a warmonger and a colonialist. All undeniably true.

But there’s still more:

Wilson displayed little regard for the rights of anyone whose opinions differed from his own. But textbooks take pains to insulate him from wrongdoing. “Congress,” not Wilson, is credited with having passed the Espionage Act of June 1917 and the Sedition Act of the following year, probably the most serious attacks on the civil liberties of Americans since the short-lived Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. In fact, Wilson tried to strengthen the Espionage Act with a provision giving broad censorship powers directly to the president. Moreover, with Wilson’s approval, his postmaster general used his new censorship powers to suppress all mail that was socialist, anti-British, pro-Irish, or that in any other way might, in his view, have threatened the war effort. Robert Goldstein served ten years in prison for producing The Spirit of ’76, a film about the Revolutionary War that depicted the British, who were now our allies, unfavorably. Textbook authors suggest that wartime pressures excuse Wilson’s suppression of civil liberties, but in 1920, when World War I was long over, Wilson vetoed a bill that would have abolished the Espionage and Sedition acts. Textbook authors blame the anticommunist and anti-labor union witch hunts of Wilson’s second term on his illness and on an attorney general run amok. No evidence supports this view. Indeed, Attorney General Palmer asked Wilson in his last days as president to pardon Eugene V. Debs, who was serving time for a speech attributing World War I to economic interests and denouncing the Espionage Act as undemocratic. The president replied, “Never!” and Debs languished in prison until Warren Harding pardoned him. The American Way adopts perhaps the most innovative approach to absolving Wilson of wrongdoing: Way simply moves the “red scare” to the 1920s, after Wilson had left office!

So Wilson was quite happy to use the Constitution as toilet paper, too.

And all those words are taken from the text of Loewen’s book.

But what does Loewen leave out?

That Woodrow Wilson wasn’t just associated “with progressive causes like women’s suffrage,” he was a dyed-in-the-wool Progressive – the predecessor to today’s “liberal” (who today want to call themselves “Progressives” because we’ve figured out that “liberal” is a word that’s been hijacked). He was the perfect Progressive for his time – nationalist, Darwinist, admirer of Hegel, Christian, and a staunch advocate of reform of the nation through the power of the Federal government.

PBS reports (you believe PBS, right? Bill Moyers’ network?):

An academic rising star, Wilson returned to Princeton in 1890 to become a professor of jurisprudence and economics at his beloved alma mater. The most popular professor on campus, Wilson lectured on the growing gap between the haves and the have-nots in America in the early 1890s. Captains of industry like the Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans had become fabulously wealthy, while the majority of American workers lived in poverty. Wilson proposed the federal government be given more power to rein in big business. Publishing his views in magazines like Harper’s and accepting numerous speaking invitations, Wilson soon became a nationally-known public figure. In 1902, Wilson was unanimously elected president of Princeton University.

and

“He apparently had an extraordinary effect on audiences. His voice was powerful and very moving…I think he’s probably at his best when he spoke.” – Louis Auchencloss, historian

Boy, does that description remind you of anyone?

The New Jersey Democratic Party political bosses, who mistakenly thought the college president would play the part of political stooge, convinced Wilson that their support would guarantee his election as the state’s governor. Once in office, Wilson successfully pushed a decidedly progressive agenda, and along the way outwitted the very bosses who thought Wilson a puppet for their use. His New Jersey successes positioned Wilson at the forefront of the cresting, national wave of progressivism.

Surprised?

During his first two years as president, Wilson demonstrated his political acumen in accomplishing one of the most impressive strings of domestic legislative victories in history.

Under Wilson the income tax was passed. Under Wilson, the eight-hour workday, child labor laws, and anti-trust legislation were all herded through Congress.

The Democrats carried majorities in both houses of Congress, and many newly elected rank-and-file lawmakers were eager to gain favor with Wilson by supporting his agenda. Party leaders, controlling powerful committee chairs after many terms in the minority, were also willing to give the president much of what he wanted. Wilson exerted his power boldly-more than any chief executive had done before-by drawing from his strengths as orator, educator and political scholar. He cast complex legislation in moral and uplifting terms. He often conferred with party leaders, to find and build consensus. He participated actively in drafting the details of proposed legislation.

Lest anyone claim that all he did was sign the bills that came to his desk.

Looking ahead to re-election, however, Wilson calculated that further reform was the only politically viable means to capture a second term. Wilson saw as his best course a consolidation of his support among Democratic Party progressives and those of the former Progressive Party. Political realities dovetailed with his own convictions to produce a legislative agenda attractive to social reformers, farmers and labor. In a second flurry of legislative productivity, Wilson championed some of his more far-reaching, previously shelved reforms, including the Nineteenth Amendment extending suffrage to women.

All this from that racist, warmongering, colonial, anti-communist corporatist!

Whose philosophy was thoroughly modern Leftist – the use of power to make the world a better place, as he saw it.

Don’t you find it ironic that you bemoan Rousseau and yet, when it comes to you country, all you see is the good in it?

No, Mark, I see a lot more than just the good. I’m not the one who wrote “We have to face the unpleasant fact that our country is horribly broken and I am simply not going to attempt to appease these psychotic putzes anymore.”

Is the country broken? No, it’s about as fucked up as it usually is, but at least I see the good.

You were bang-on-the-money when you said this, though: “I realize that it is pointless to try to see the middle ground on issues where there is no middle ground.”

You almost grasp that there is no “Third Way” (which is what Obama keeps promising, though he never calls it that) when the philosophies are so widely divergent. You have a philosophy, Markadelphia, a belief system. But it’s one that you’ve just slapped together haphazardly. It’s internally contradictory (most are, but yours… whew!), and you bend it to suit whatever situation comes up, but it’s a system you apply daily. I have read your blog.

I’ll finish up with one more excerpt from one of your posts, and then I suggest that we not darken each others doorsteps again:

Fellow blogger Kevin Baker asked me this question on his blog the other day: how will Obama heal our souls? The question reminded of another question that was asked in comments last week: how will Obama get able bodied men to work who are lazy and don’t want to? The answer to both questions is the same.

Barack Obama is not the messiah. He will not heal our souls. What he can do is lead us to the beginning of the path and the rest of it is up to us.

So he’s not the Second Coming of Jesus, he’s the Second Coming of Moses?

In effect, each one of us is a messiah to ourselves. Believe me when I tell you, we really NEED to start down that path or it’s over for our country.

Each of us has that Christ power that inside of us. Every one of us has the capacity for love, hope, and peace. Everyone of us has the power to take these three fundamental traits and put them into action, not just in our communities but in our country at large. We can do this by picking an issue in our communities, getting involved and making it better. I think the reason why most conservatives don’t grasp this concept is that they don’t understand the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation.

Sure we do. But we also understand that a lot of people who say they’re doing things to improve the world are doing things to improve themselves at the expense of others. As for the ones who really are trying to make a better world, the majority of them get damned dangerous if they get their hands on that power.

They can’t understand people who are motivated to do the things purely for the joy of doing them. Most conservatives believe the only way to motivate people is through money…and fear. It really doesn’t have to be that way.

When you break out of that system, you gain power.

Woodrow Wilson believed precisely what you believe – that the Power of God would allow him to fix everything. Everything he did, he did believing that it would Make the World a Better Place. You think Obama can inspire people to Make the World a Better Place, but for some reason the only place he can do that is from behind the desk in the Oval Office.

What that last excerpt proclaims is what was once known as Social Gospel. Well, you’re at least keeping in theme. Give that last link a read. You’ll reject it out of hand, but still, I keep trying…

Personally, I’m against government trying to make people… better. Because the only tool governments have is force, and using that tool, they tend to break a lot of things. When they build mass social movements, they tend to kill a lot of people.

Like the people they think they can make better.

And when that doesn’t work, they try again, only HARDER!

Just remember one thing: THIS “psychotic putz” is armed.

January 15, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

Including “Happiness” on the National Spreadsheet.

Tight on the heels of my piece Freedom and Equality comes this bit of news out of France (via Eternity Road):

French President Wants to Include Happiness in Measures of Nation’s Economic Growth

Which means Sarkozy A) has no grasp of economics, or B) wants to deflect bad news by sleight-of-hand. You have three guesses, and one of them can be “all of the above.”

PARIS (AP) — What price happiness? French President Nicolas Sarkozy is seeking an answer to the eternal question — so that happiness can be included in measurements of French economic growth.

He’s turned to two Nobel economists to help him, hoping that if happiness is added to the count, the persistently sluggish French economy may seem more rosy.

“Seem” being the operative word here. And if two Nobel-winning economists are involved in it, they ought to have their medals revoked.

“It reflects a general feeling in Europe that says, ‘OK, the U.S. has been more successful in the last 20, 25 years in raising material welfare, but does this mean they are happier?'” said Paul de Grauwe, economics professor at Leuven University in Belgium.

Meaning “we envy the Americans their cars, their homes, their plasma TVs, their…”

“The answer is no, because there are other elements to happiness,” said Grauwe, once a candidate for the European Central Bank governing council.

And now you know why he didn’t get the job.

In terms of gross domestic product, the internationally recognized way of measuring the size of an economy, French growth lagged behind the U.S. throughout most of the 1980s and ’90s and in every year since 2001.

What?? In that socialist worker’s paradise which has the best universal health care system in the world??

How can that be?!?!?

Although recent turmoil in financial markets may hit the U.S. economy harder, the loss of speed in the world economy’s biggest player will also drag down growth in France. Economists say growth may fall short of the government targets this year.

Read that: “Growth may fall short of the already lackluster targets this year.”

Sarkozy’s move raised questions about whether he wants to ward off disappointing growth numbers as a rise in oil and food prices combined with a slowdown in the U.S. clouds the effect of his economic reforms.

He’s got nothing else up his sleeve.

Since his election in May he has sought to boost growth, notably by encouraging people to work longer than the much maligned 35-hour week.

A move I’m certain that has gone over about as well as changing the law to allow employers to fire slackers did.

Sarkozy has often appeared impatient with the French economy’s lackluster performance, once declaring: “I will not wait for growth, I will go out and find it.”

“And failing that, I will fake it!”

Frustrated with the what he termed Tuesday “the growing gap between statistics that show continuing progress and the increasing difficulties (French people) are having in their daily lives,”

…otherwise known as reality…

Sarkozy said new thought should be given to the way GDP is calculated to take into account quality of life.

At a news conference Tuesday, Sarkozy said he asked U.S. economist Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the 2001 Nobel economics prize and a critic of free market economists,

…and free market economics…

and Armatya Sen of India, who won the 1998 Nobel prize for work on developing countries, to lead the analysis in France.

Which is now relegated to the status of a “developing country.”

Sen helped create the United Nations’ Human Development Index, a yearly welfare indicator designed to gear international policy decisions to take account of health and living standards.

Would that include measures like ones that rank countries higher if their health care systems are paid for by the State, regardless of how well they perform?

Once the preserve of philosophers, measuring happiness has now become a hot topic in economics.

Where it absolutely doesn’t belong.

Heinlein again:

Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.

Obviously that never stopped anyone.

A recent report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development considers taking into account leisure time and income distribution when calculating a nation’s well-being.

Right. So if all the money is equally distributed and nobody works, that’s the best possible score?

And the European Commission is working on a new indicator that moves “beyond GDP” to account for factors such as environmental progress.

Words. Fail. Me.

Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics and author of the 2005 book “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” said Sarkozy may be seeking recognition for policies, popular in Europe, that promote well-being but don’t show up in the GDP statistics.

Governments are rated on economic performance, and this influences policy in favor of boosting GDP, the value of goods and services produced over a calendar year, he said.

“But people don’t want to think they live in a world of ruthless competition where everyone is against everyone,” Layard said. “Valuable things are being lost, such as community values, solidarity.”

They “don’t want to think” it, eh? Sounds familiar. Over here they call themselves the “reality-based community.”

His book shows that depression, alcoholism and crime have risen in the last 50 years, even as average incomes more than doubled.

And taxes have done… what, exactly?

Jean-Philippe Cotis, the former OECD chief economist who took over as head of France’s statistics office Insee two months ago, said Wednesday that a measure of happiness would complement GDP by taking into account factors such as leisure time — something France has a lot of.

Which explains why their growth is so slow.

And I’m not even an economist!

France’s unemployment rate is stubbornly high, and when French people do work they spend less time on the job — 35.9 hours per week compared with the EU average of 37.4.

And the American average of…? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Cotis said he looked forward to a “passionate” debate beyond the traditional realms of his science.

“Statisticians are also interested in happiness,” he said.

Especially since they are totally unable to quantify it.

And so, it would seem, are presidents.

Ditto.

Basking in the happy glow of new love with model-turned-singer Carla Bruni, Sarkozy showed on Tuesday that his concern for happiness is universal.

A president, he said, “doesn’t have more right to happiness than anyone else, but not less than anyone, either.”

I’ve seen pictures of his babe. YOWSA! You can bet HE’S happy.

But just remember one thing, Sarko. No matter how beautiful she is, someone somewhere is tired of her shit. (I kid! I kid!)

January 1, 2008 KevinLeave a comment

The 2007 TSM Year In Review:.

In a rehash of last year’s first post of the year, I again offer a month-by-month retrospective of posts for those of you ~~suffering~~ recovering from the evening’s festivities. Nothing to overstress your gray matter.

January of 2006 brought the conclusion of another of my exchanges with the ~~forces of evil~~ anti-gun “experts” who seem to have no problem getting column space in the local (and sometimes national) press. This time it was John D. Kelly IV, a physician in Philadelphia who places the blame for Philly’s skyrocketing homicide problem on (as always) the easy target – guns. The concluding piece of this three-parter was I’m Finished with THIS Particular Windmill…

February brought us The Great Zumbo Incident of 2007, and much sound and fury ensued across the blogosphere and into the real world. My post of choice for this month is The Sport of Kings. It was a difficult call, but this one gets the nod.

March brought the D.C. Federal Court of Appeals Parker v D.C. decision, and this time the choice was simple: Light a Seegar, it’s the Best Birthday Present EVER! The reaction of our opponents was swift and predictable, so I got some fisks in that month, too.

April was another story. That month brought the Virginia Tech massacre. But instead of bolstering the gun-control side I think it made a lot more people understand the realities of life, so again the choice was simple – The Right to Feel Safe. There isn’t one. You can choose to address your safety, or ignore it, but signs saying “Gun Free Zone” only disarm the people you don’t need to worry about.

May was a more normal month, but AlGore published a new book about how stupid we all are, and Time published an excerpt, so I fisked it in Al Gore’s Internet.

In June I was busy and didn’t post much, but there were a couple that I think deserve re-reading. The first was about a defensive shooting in which we got a little more background information than normal – An Update on the Cape Coral Defensive Shooting. And another on someone who finally decided that feeling safe was their own responsibility – Ignorance = Fear. Education is the Key.

In July a Connecticut family found out that their safe, quiet neighborhood, wasn’t, and a popular and respected physician lost his family in about the most horrible way possible. I wrote about it, and the community reaction, in Awakenings.

In not-so-related news, I bought my first firearm of the year in July. My apologies for slacking, but I did change jobs in April.

August brought a reminder of why I will never license nor register my firearms. I also discovered that my new (to me) pistol didn’t work, but that was OK, because I won her sister.

In September I did a rather long and detailed post on introductory handloading that has proven quite popular – probably more because of the cost of factory ammunition than my writing skills.

October brought us the Second Annual Gunblogger’s Rendezvous which I enjoyed very much, but if comments are any judge, my post The Mystery of Government was more popular.

November brought my third gun for the year (I want to buy one-gun-a-month, but my income won’t support that!) but the most popular post (by commentary) was a remarkably short one, for me: Why the Left Believes the Media is “Right-Wing” I ~~blame~~ credit commenter Markadelphia for the really long comment threads over the last few months. I gigged him over a post of his from the Great Zumbo Incident and he followed me home!

December brought another überpost, this one inspired by a film recommended by Markadelphia – Why We Fight. It’s probably the longest thing I’ve written here in one piece, but I’ve gotten good feedback on it.

And, to end the year, I received an Instalanche! (OK, so it was a YouTube video I found elsewhere, but Glenn linked to me! Hahahahah! 2,000+ hits in one day! I realize this is nothing for big-time bloggers, but for lil’ old me, it’s a lot!)

My best wishes to you all for a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year. Remember, it’s going to be nothing but politics until November, so buy aspirin, Pepto Bismol, waders, gloves, and ear and nose plugs. It’s going to get thick and deep.

September 6, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

Tilting at Windmills,.But Someone Needs to Do It

Striderweb fisks an anti-smoking op-ed by trying to explain to a nanny-state type the concept of personal freedoms and choice versus collectivist edict. Excerpt:

Okay, let’s pause right there a moment. “[W]e understand that the issue presented is convenience vs. health”. Clearly you understand nothing, then. The issue at hand is personal freedom in an ostensibly free society. You curtailing others’ rights for your own convenience, Ms. Grady, is the issue. Business owners have a right to allow their customers to smoke (well… should). You have the right to either patronize those establishments, or not, as you choose.

Good piece.

Wait a Minute…

August 19, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

…you mean it’s not the fault of “too many guns”? Another op-ed from the Sunday Times over where Great Britain used to be:

Gangs, alas, are offering what boys need

Harriet Sergeant

What are the reasons behind the spate of murders by feral gangs of youths? And can we as a society do anything about it?

For my report on the care system, I spent last year interviewing young men who, as Norman Brennan, director of the Victims of Crime Trust, said, “put a knife in their pockets as routinely as they pull on their trainers in the morning”. Drugs and alcohol (and weapons – Ed.) are merely the symptoms of a deeper problem. Too many young men suffer from an absence of authority at home, in school and on the street. We have created a moral vacuum around our young people. We should not be surprised at how they fill it.

Young boys join gangs, they told me, because they are afraid. There is nobody else to protect them, certainly no responsible adult. “You don’t start off as a killer,” said a 19-year-old gang leader, “but you get bullied on the street. So you go to the gym and you end up a fighter, a violent person. All you want is for them to leave you alone but they push you and push you.” Another boy aged 13 explained that in his area boys “would do anything” to join a gang. If they join a gang with “a big name” people will “look at them differently, be scared of them”.

This echoes Grim’s observation that I quoted in It’s most important that all potential victims be as dangerous as they can:

Very nearly all the violence that plagues, rather than protects, society is the work of young males between the ages of fourteen and thirty. A substantial amount of the violence that protects rather than plagues society is performed by other members of the same group. The reasons for this predisposition are generally rooted in biology, which is to say that they are not going anywhere, in spite of the current fashion that suggests doping half the young with Ritalin.

The question is how to move these young men from the first group (violent and predatory) into the second (violent, but protective). This is to ask: what is the difference between a street gang and the Marine Corps, or a thug and a policeman? In every case, we see that the good youths are guided and disciplined by old men.

The author of this piece seems to grasp this, dimly.

The police and the Home Office have not taken crimes against young people seriously because they do not know they are happening.

Oh bullshit. They know, but recording those crimes would make the already horrible numbers from Britain even worse.

The British Crime Survey, described by the Home Office on its website as “the most reliable measure of crime” does not include crimes against anyone under 16.

The Home Office admits that young men aged 16-24 are most at risk of being a victim of violent crime. But only at the beginning of this year did a Freedom of Information request to each of the 43 police forces reveal that four out of 10 muggings are committed by children under 16 — and that is only the ones reported.

How can protecting young people on the streets take priority when the Home Office does not acknowledge the number of crimes against them? It is no wonder one young gang member said, “There’s no one to look after me but me.” He is quite right.

Note here, however, that Ms. Sergeant has completely omitted any reference to family – for her, if the State isn’t there to protect you, then you are, by definition, all alone. Where is this kid’s father? Where are the older men who used to guide boys away from the “violent and predatory” culture to the “violent but protective” one? They don’t exist. And the government won’t lead him there either. The society, seeing only “violence,” wants him to at least act as though he’s on Ritalin.

It is the same story in the majority of inner-city schools. As a mother of a 14-year-old boy and a 17-year-old girl I know that young men are a different species to the rest of us. In times of war we value their aggression, their sense of immortality, their loyalty to one another. But in peacetime they are at best a nuisance, at worst a threat.

See? For her, the “violent but protective” behavior of soldiers at war is indistinguishable from the “violent and predatory” behavior of youth gangs. She literally cannot see a difference. Violence is violence to Ms. Sergeant, and all violence is bad – unless it’s carried out by sanctioned members of the State.

Teenage boys need different treatment to girls to become responsible members of society. They need a role model.

As said Grim, above.

When my son was about nine he became resentful of his young female teachers. He had no respect for them. He then moved to his middle school where most of his teachers were male. The change was dramatic. Suddenly it was all, “Sir says this and sir says that.” In state primary schools 80% of teachers are female.

I am lucky. I can afford to send my son to a private school. The discipline, pastoral care and academic rigour do a good job at counterbalancing parental failings. Compare his experience with that of boys in the inner cities.

Those with a chaotic family life need school to be a refuge and a contrast. Even more than middle-class boys with a stable background, they need school to provide authority, moral leadership and an outlet for their aggression. It should be giving boys what they need to thrive: discipline, sport and a group with which to identify. Instead what do they get?

My son does one to two hours of sport a day with a match on Saturday. He is so exhausted by the evening he can barely pick up a knife to eat, let alone stab anyone.

State schools, by contrast, offer only one hour of sport a week. Then teachers wonder why adolescent boys play up and have difficulty concentrating on lessons. When boys look around for a group to join, too often it is not a school sports team but the local gang.

I think what she’s advocating here is pretty much the same idea as “midnight basketball.” The results of which would be just as predictable.

With their hierarchy and strict discipline, street gangs are nothing more than a distorted mirror image of the house system common in private schools where loyalty and team effort are all important. As one young gang leader chillingly told me, “You have to know the people, you have to trust the people, because you do everything together. When you stab, you stab together.”

Then instead of authority and leadership, boys in state schools too often find themselves taught by teachers ashamed of their values. One young man teaching in a school in a deprived area in the northeast said his “main focus” was not to offend his pupils. “I don’t want to push my middle-class values on them,” he explained earnestly. When a pupil described his hopes for the future, stacking shelves in the local supermarket, “I pointed out the many positive aspects of the job — meeting people and so forth.” There was little attempt by the school, he admitted, to provide pastoral care or raise pupils’ expectations. He saw no link between this and his No 1 problem — pupil apathy.

Now here she’s on to something. This is a classic example of what “liberal” education has done to the education system itself – it’s produced teachers who hate the society that produced them, because that’s what they’ve been taught their whole lives. Western Civilization – “middle-class values” – are responsible for all the evils in the world: slavery, Colonialism, war, pollution, and now, Global Warming. I’m sure I missed a few items on that list. How can you respect a teacher who cannot respect his own society, and thus himself?

It is not surprising that teenage boys are, as a recent report from the Bow Group think tank points out, “the main cause of the discipline crisis in our schools”. A “cotton-wool culture” and lack of competitive sport means one in five aged 13 or 14 were suspended from school last year. They are four times more likely than girls to be expelled from school and 2 times more likely to be suspended.

Here’s a hint: Boys have always been the primary discipline problem in schools. It’s that biology thing that Grim pointed out. The difference now is that there’s no discipline at home and no discipline at school – one result of that “cotton-wool culture” thing that views corporal punishment as child abuse, that tries to stivle the natural behavior of boys instead of direct it, and tries to make girls – “a different species” – out of them. It’s the rebellion against that “cotton-wool culture” that has made The Dangerous Book for Boys an international best-seller. A book, I imagine, that would make Ms. Sergeant shudder.

The result is catastrophic for them and for society. At 14, one in five boys has a reading ability of a pupil half his age and at 16, a quarter of boys — almost 90,000 — do not gain a single GCSE at grade C or above. For members of the general public such as Garry Newlove the implications are more serious. Three out of 10 murders are done with a sharp instrument. The most likely person to be equipped with a knife is a boy aged 14-19. And the most likely of all is an excluded school boy.

We have failed to provide a safe, disciplined and principled environment in which young people can relax, find themselves and channel their best efforts. Instead we have relegated many of them to a ghetto of violence and despair. The results stare us in the face.

Well, she sees at least half of the problem. At least she didn’t blame either knives or guns. But like most people mired in a socialist or socialist-lite society, she looks to government for the solution – the very same government that produced the problem in the first place.

The society needs to change, that’s for sure, but it won’t be through passage of new legislation. And it won’t happen any time soon. It’s difficult to imagine how the former Great Britain could pull back from the mess they’ve created for themselves now.

This is What Licensing and Registration are For

August 17, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

And it’s why I will never register my firearms (and why I’m still not too happy about having to get government permission to carry concealed.)

A lot of blogs were talking about the news from Taxachusetts last week when they reported that gun permit renewals were down 25% over the last six years, and 30% in Boston.

Gun permits drop 25% in Bay State

Culture shift, fees are cited

Normally I don’t include the photos from these stories, but in this case, I will:

Obviously Massachusetts has taken a page from Maryland’s playbook. Continuing:

The number of licensed gun owners in Massachusetts has declined by more than a quarter in the past six years, a falloff driven by restrictive laws, higher licensing fees, and cultural change, according to police officers and gun owners.

The drop is especially dramatic in the eastern part of the state and in urban areas. The number of licensed gun owners fell at least 30 percent in Boston, Springfield, Quincy, Fall River, and Waltham. It dropped at least 20 percent in more than 220 of the state’s 351 communities.

The number of licensed owners climbed in about 40 mostly smaller communities in the central and western parts of the state. It also rose in a handful of eastern suburbs and cities, such as Weston and Brockton, according to data from the state’s Criminal History Systems Board, which tracks licensed gun owners.

Overall, the number of people in Massachusetts with a license to carry a weapon has declined from about 330,000 to about 240,000 from 2001 to 2007. Over the past three years, the number of licensed owners has declined by 15,000.

While some law enforcement officials praise the decline, police, politicians and antigun advocates caution that there are still plenty of illegal guns on the streets, contributing to a steady pace of violence.

Well THERE’S a shocker.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: These laws can disarm only one group – the law-abiding. Note that the piece blames part of the decline on “cultural change.” They’re correct. I’m willing to bet that many gun owners are leaving. Let me quote The Geek with a .45 on his 2003 decision to depart from New Jersey for the (relative) freedom of Pennsylvania:

We’ll be starting the house hunt after the first of the year. With the miniGeeks, we need a bigger place anyway, and shortly, this will all be a bad dream.

The thing is, I don’t think that’ll be the happy end of the story. I think the story is just beginning to be told.

As I mentioned to Kim, there is a hidden exodus that you won’t read about in the papers:

“People are moving away from certain states: not because they’ve got a job offer, not because they want to be closer to family, but because the state they are living in doesn’t measure up to the level of freedom they believe is appropriate for Americans. We are internal refugees.”

The fact that things have gone so far south in some places that people actually feel compelled to move the fuck out should frighten the almighty piss out of you.

Ten or fifteen years ago, I would’ve dismissed that notion, that people were relocating themselves for freedom within America as the wild rantings of a fringe lunatic, but today, I’m looking for a real estate agent.

It is a symptom of a deep schism in the American scene, one that has been building bit by bit for at least fifty, and probably more like seventy years, and whose effects are now visibly bubbling to the surface.

Just open your eyes and take a long look around you.

If you’re an informed firearms enthusiast, you know how much has been lost since 1934.

Even if you lay aside gun rights issues, let me ask you some questions.

No, on second thought, let’s save the 50 questions for another posting, for now, lets just ask one:

When was the last time you built a bonfire on a beach, openly drank a beer and the presence of a policeman was absolutely no cause for concern? Hmmm?

I can’t help but wonder if Mr. Edward Arsenault wishes he’d joined that “hidden exodus” some time ago. His right to own a firearm rests only on the whim of a licensing board.

Still, regardless of the fact that these laws disarm only the law-abiding, the opposition sticks to its endless mantra that it’s the number of guns that’s responsible for the carnage:

“Fewer firearms on the street makes life safer for everyone,” said Robert F. Crowley, Quincy’s police chief. “The average citizen who has a gun 24-7 I don’t believe has the experience, knowledge, and training to know when and if they should use a firearm.”

To paraphrase somebody, your belief does not negate my rights.

Many attribute the drop to a 1998 state law, the Massachusetts Gun Control Act, and subsequent changes, which dramatically changed the gun licensing landscape by increasing fees and making it more difficult for people with old legal problems to renew their license.

It now costs $100 for a six-year license for a handgun, shotgun, or rifle. It costs $25 for a six-year permit for a chemical repellent, with no renewal fee. A lifetime permit for a rifle used to cost $2. It can take about two months to get a license.

“People come in to renew and are shocked it’s $100,” said Keith MacPherson, deputy police chief in Waltham.

The power to tax is the power to destroy. As I have also noted, this is how it worked in England, as well. Make legal gun ownership expensive and onerous and the number of legal owners will decline. Increase the onerousness, and the decline will increase. It’s not worth the hassle to most people for whom guns are just (at best) recreational devices used about as often as a tennis racket. (Got one of those in your closet?) Once the number of legal owners declines far enough, the rest of the population becomes apathetic towards protecting the right to arms – and that right, for all practical purposes, ceases to exist. It’s $100 every six years now? Why not make it $100 annually? And you can only apply to renew on each third Wednesday of the month between 8:00 AM and 4:00PM (but not between 12:00 and 1:00). You must appear in person with a notarized copy of your birth certificate (a new copy for the file each year.) Certified check or money order only, and it must be for the exact amount – which will change by a few cents each year. Processing fees, you understand.

What, that’s not a “reasonable restriction”? Says who?

Other New England states do not appear to have experienced a similar drop, although comparisons are hampered because permitting and records differ widely.

Limited data show that the number of nonresident permits have increased by more than half in Maine and have more than doubled in New Hampshire since 2000 and 2001, respectively. Pistol permits are down slightly in Rhode Island and are up slightly in Connecticut.

“We saw a big increase after 9/11,” said Sergeant William Gomane of Maine’s State Police.

Right, when some people figured out that they were responsible for their own protection. But it didn’t really sink in with the majority of the population.

The law in Massachusetts was changed in 1998, and in later years, so that anyone convicted of a violent felony is disqualified from ever obtaining a state license. Those convicted of a misdemeanor or a nonviolent felony are also disqualified for five years following conviction or release. People convicted of assault and battery on family members, or crimes involving drugs or guns, are also disqualified.

This is an expansion of U.S. Code Title 18, Chapter 44, Section 922 (g) (1) in which anyone “who has been convicted in any court of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year” no longer has a right to arms. Note that you don’t have to actually receive a sentence of more than one year, the charge just has to be one that can result in a sentence of more than one year.

Apparently stealing a chicken at age 9 qualifies.

It makes you wonder what else does, too, doesn’t it?

“A slew of people are now prohibited,” said Dennis Collier, a police captain in Revere.

You betcha!

Even before the new law, license applications were filed with local police chiefs, who have some discretion for granting or denying licenses. For instance, a person whose state and local background check shows he or she has been on trial for violent crimes, but not convicted, can be denied a license by the chief.

With even tighter restrictions, some gun owners have been infuriated, considering it an unjust and a transparent attempt to deny honest hard-working residents their right to own a gun.

But not infuriated enough to cause them to do a Marvin Heemeyer. Not yet, anyway.

Edward Arsenault, 70, of Fairhaven, was turned down for his license renewal earlier this year because he had been convicted in juvenile court of stealing a chicken from a chicken coop when he was 9 years old, in 1946.

Arsenault said he barely remembers the incident.

Seeing as it happened only sixty years ago, I can’t imagine why he would have problems remembering it. It should have been seared, seared into his memory! Obviously someone with that kind of mental defect should be denied access to something as dangerous as a firearm!

“I have no problem with gun control or background checks, but let’s not get ridiculous,” said Arsenault, a gun license owner since the 1980s. “Something done when someone is 9 years old carries over until they are 70? We’re not talking about robbing a bank; we’re talking about stealing a chicken.”

No, we’re talking about guns – a talisman of evil to some people, and a reminder to others that some of us still believe in the concept of personal sovereignty. Remember, “when dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril.” Here’s a hint, sir: It’s already gone way past ridiculous, because people like you “have no problem with gun control.”

But you do now, don’tcha?

He appealed the ruling to New Bedford District Court in April and won, at least partly thanks to Fairhaven Police Chief Gary Souza, who testified on his behalf. It was the first time in more than four years on the job that Souza stood up for someone who had been denied a license, he said.

In Boston, the number of licensed owners fell from 7,577 in 2001 to 4,374 this year, a drop of 42 percent. In the same period, gun licenses in Cambridge dropped 25 percent to 782; 71 percent to 484 in Brookline, and 33 percent to 1,150 in Newton, state records show.

“We’re pleased that the number of gun owners has decreased in our city, but the real issue is illegal guns, and we need more laws to deal with illegal guns in our cities,” Mayor Thomas M. Menino of Boston said in a statement.

No, Mayor Menino, the real issue is violent criminals, not the tools they use.

But it’s so much easier to blame an inanimate object, isn’t it?

Mayor James E. Harrington of Brockton, a member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a national organization, said that while it is good fewer firearms are around, the bigger problem is guns that make their way to the street illegally. He would like more restrictions on bulk out-of-state sales of guns by dealers.

What, he wants to make it super-duper illegal? I assume he’s talking about multiple handgun sales. Handguns that can’t be sold to someone from out of state? And that multiple purchases of which are reported – by law – to the BATF? (Which seems to do fuck-all with the information.)

What “more restrictions” would he like? I love these vague ideas that the gun-control people keep touting.

John E. Rosenthal, founder of nonprofit Stop Handgun Violence, said the drop in ownership is primarily because of the law, but might also be because of increased awareness of gun safety and violence. Maybe “moms who are the primary caregivers are concerned about guns in the home and maybe they are influencing the men in the home,” Rosenthal said.

Right. Sure. It’s the “civilizing influence” of nurturing mothers.

The drop did not surprise Andrew Arulanandan, a spokesman for the 4-million-member National Rifle Association.

He attributed the reduction to higher fees. “When you add additional taxes on any universe of people, there are going to be people who are forced to give up whatever pursuit that is being taxed. The victims here are the people with limited means and not the criminals. The criminals won’t stand in line to . . . pay the tax.”

They don’t stand in line at “gun buybacks” either.

Don Hunt, owner of Hunter’s Trading Post, a gun shop in Weymouth, thinks the dropoff is partly because of negative media stories, which he said poison young people’s minds toward firearms.

“This is not a gun sport friendly state,” he said.

And it’s getting less friendly by the month, too.

It’s all part of the plan.

Attitudes toward firearms vary widely. Many people in rural areas and in the western part of the state enjoy hunting and guns.

In Chester, nestled in the foothills of the Berkshires, “the joke is, you don’t live in Chester unless you own a gun,” said Police Chief Ronald Minor. The town of 1,300 has about 185 licensed gun owners. Owning a gun “is like second nature, like having a car,” Minor said. “It’s just a different way of life.”

Well, they’d better get used to the idea of not owning a gun when the overwhelming majority of their mostly-urban neighbors decide that there is no right to arms worth protecting, and their civil masters in the legislature – who know pretty much where every legally-owned firearm in the state is – demands they give them up.

And are then surprised by the fact that the “illegal guns” are still out there, and in ever-increasing numbers.

Validation from the Left

July 5, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

Happy 4th of July to everyone. This will be my last post on TSM for a while, as I’ll be out of town without internet access for several days. Others have done a creditable job of writing patriotic holiday posts, so I will forbear doing so in order to write this one. (Warning! 5,900+ words follow.)

Joe Huffman put up another of his “Quote of the Day” posts this morning which reinforced for me something I wrote back in April. Joe’s quote is this:

Emotion is what wins arguments, and there is a tremendous amount of emotion among those fighting to reduce gun violence — there always is when someone gets hurt or must go through the tragedies that we experience in this country as a result of gun violence.

…

That is important emotion, and it will do more for the argument for stronger gun laws than any facts or figures ever will.

…

We have to show legislators the human side of this issue, too, and force them to base their own decisions and policies off of that emotion…

I went to the Gun Guys site (no link – on purpose) and ran down the piece referred in it. It’s a excerpt from Emory University Professor of Psychology Drew Westen’s book The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

The piece I wrote? Gun Banners Have to Use Emotion…

Let’s see what Mr. Westen had to say:

Despite Large Majorities, Democrats Are Chicken on Gun Control

Right off the bat, Mr. Westen bases his entire essay on an incorrect hypothesis – that Democrats are chicken about “gun control.” Let’s see what he has to say to bolster his erroneous thesis:

On April 16, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, Virginia, carried two semiautomatic pistols onto campus and killed 32 people. It was the deadliest shooting in modern American history.

The following week, a nation listened in horror as witnesses recounted stories of how they had barricaded desks against their classroom doors to keep the psychotic young man from entering, only to hear him spend a round of ammo, drop the spent clip, and reload in seconds.

Democratic leaders offered the requisite condolences. But that’s all they offered. They didn’t mention that the Republican Congress had let the Brady Act, which banned the sale of semiautomatic weapons, sunset in 2004.

True to form, a lie within the first three paragraphs. A blatant, unapologetic, bald-faced LIE. A lie, so far as I am concerned, deliberately written so as to inspire anger in the reader. Remember, this is an excerpt from a published book, and a piece also published in American Prospect. I thought these people had editors?

While most of my regular readers are aware of the facts, let me state them plainly for those who may come here and read this that don’t: The bill Mr. Westen refers to is not “the Brady Bill.” It’s the 1994 “Assault Weapons Ban” that wasn’t. That law did not “ban the sale of semiautomatic weapons.” It banned the sale of a small number of specific firearms – mostly rifles – and some semiautomatic firearms with certain specific features. Semiautomatic firearms were still perfectly legal to sell, and sell they did. I happen to own a “post-ban” semi-automatic AR-15 rifle I had legally custom built during the period that law was in effect.

What that law most emphatically did not do was place any restrictions whatsoever on the types of firearms used by Seung-Hui Cho – a Glock Model 19 9mm semiautomatic handgun and a Walther P22 semiautomatic handgun. While the law did affect the availability of new “standard capacity” 15-round magazines for the Glock, it did not affect the availability of used ones. At this point I am unsure whether Mr. Cho used 15-round or post-ban 10-round magazines in his shooting spree, but realistically it hardly matters. No, the point here was to lie to the reader, and induce strong emotion. In addition, from the reports I’ve seen Mr. Cho had only two magazines for each weapon, so he hardly was able to constantly “drop the spent clip, and reload in seconds.” He had to stop and reload the magazines, too – a relatively slow process. But this fact detracts from Mr. Westen’s narrative.

Continuing:

They didn’t mention that in the decade or so after the passage of that act, 100,000 felons lost their right to bear arms, but not a single hunter lost that right.

Unless, of course, some of those felons were, you know, hunters too.

Instead, the Democrats ran for political cover, waiting for the smoke to clear.

This wasn’t the first time Democrats scattered when threatened with Republican gunshots. They were silent as the Beltway sniper terrorized our nation’s capital a month before the midterm elections of 2002. And they have been silent or defensive on virtually every “wedge” issue that has divided our nation for much of the last 30 years. When the Republicans tried to play the hate card again in 2006, this time under the cover of immigration reform, Democrats scrambled to pull together a “policy” on immigration, instead of simply asking, “What’s the matter, gays aren’t working for you anymore?”

What I find really interesting here is just who’s “playing the hate card.” Apparently (according to Mr. Westen) the Rethuglicans hate gays and brown people, as that’s the only conceivable reason they would support or oppose legislation on those topics. I’d say that’s “hate speech” on the part of Mr. Westen, myself, but what do I know? I’m one of those oppressive white conservative types who likes guns.

So how did we find ourselves where we are today, with an electorate that has finally figured out that the once larger-than-life Wizard of Terror was nothing but a projection on a screen — and an opposition party that can’t seem to find its heart, its brain, or its courage, and instead wonders what’s the matter with Kansas?

And most importantly, how do we find our way back home?

***

Visions of Mind

Behind every campaign lies a vision of mind — often implicit, rarely articulated, and generally invisible to the naked eye. Traces of that vision can be seen in everything a campaign does or doesn’t do.

The vision of mind that has captured the imagination of Democratic strategists for much of the last 40 years — a dispassionate mind that makes decisions by weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions — bears no relation to how the mind and brain actually work. When strategists start from this vision of mind, their candidates typically lose.

Mustn’t. Lose. Self. Control… BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA! “Weighing the evidence and reasoning to the most valid conclusions”??? We’re talking about legislators here – a group of people at best only tenuously tethered to reality! Regardless of which side of the aisle they sit on.

Democrats typically bombard voters with laundry lists of issues, facts, figures, and policy positions, while Republicans offer emotionally compelling appeals, whether to voters’ values, principles, or prejudices. As a result, we have seen only one Democrat elected and reelected to the White House since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Bill Clinton, who, like Roosevelt, understood how to connect with voters emotionally) and only one Republican fail to do so (George Bush Senior, who ran like a Democrat and paid for it).

G.H.W. Bush lost for one reason and one reason only: “Read my lips. No new taxes.” Had it not been for that, I believe, not even Ross Perot would have derailed his re-election. Note also that, while Bill Clinton did win twice, neither time did he win a majority of the vote. He might have been able to “connect with voters emotionally,” but he didn’t reach most of them.

Our brains are nothing but vast networks of neurons. Of particular importance for understanding politics are “networks of associations” — bundles of thoughts, feelings, sounds, images, memories, and emotions that have become linked through experience. People can’t tell you much about what’s in those networks, or about what’s likely to change them (which happen to be the central determinants of voting behavior). They can’t tell you because they don’t have conscious access to them, any more than they can tell you what’s going on in their pancreas. And if you ask them, they often get it wrong.

In polls and focus groups, voters told John Kerry’s consultants that they didn’t like “negativity,” so the consultants told Kerry to avoid it. To what extent those voters just didn’t know the power of negative appeals on their own networks, or didn’t want to admit it, is unclear. What is clear is that George W. Bush won the election by spending 75 percent of his budget on negativity against a candidate whose refusal to fight back projected nothing but weakness in the face of aggression — precisely the narrative Bush was constructing about Kerry.

Oh, please. “I actually did vote for the $87 billion dollars before I voted against it” had nothing to do with that image? “Christmas in Cambodia“? Even über-lefty blogger Markos Moulitsas understood how bad a candidate John “Reporting for Duty” Kerry was, and said as much in his 12/24/04 piece What the Hell Happened

Of course, there’s a silver lining to all of this. A Kerry presidency would’ve been an unmitigated disaster, with a hostile congress, budget woes, the mess in Iraq, etc. Not a good time to be in charge.

Actually, I think it’s remarkable he got as many votes as he did, because I think a lot of people understood what an unmitigated disaster a Kerry presidency would have been. But no, according to Mr. Westin, it’s all because George W. Bush (more likely Karl Rove) spent 75% of his campaign money on “negative ads.”

The American electorate are such mindless sheeple.

Continuing:

If you start with the assumption of a dispassionate mind — of voters who weigh the utility of each candidate’s stand on a range of issues and calculate which candidate has the greater utility — you inevitably turn to pollsters as oracles to divine which issues are up, which are down, and which are best avoided. The vision of the dispassionate mind represents public opinion in one dimension — a straight line, from up to down, high to low, pro-choice to anti-abortion, anti-gun to pro-gun.

But this is a one-dimensional rendering of three-dimensional data. If you start with networks, you think very differently about campaigns, from the way you interpret polling data to the way you handle the wedge issues that have run Democratic campaigns into the ground for decades. On virtually every contentious political issue — abortion, welfare, gay marriage, tax cuts, and, yes, guns — polls show a seemingly “mixed” pattern of results, with the electorate endorsing what seem like contradictory positions. The vast majority of Americans support gun regulations but also support the right to bear arms. So are Americans pro-gun or anti-gun?

The majority is pro-gun, Mr. Westen. They’re anti-CRIME.

That’s the wrong question. And it inevitably leads Democratic strategists to the wrong answer: “Take the issue off the table — it’s radioactive.”

This kind of one-dimensional thinking fails to appreciate that voters may be of two minds about an issue. The same issue often activates two or more networks that lead to different feelings in the same person (e.g., concern about guns in the hands of criminals, and support for the rights of law-abiding citizens to protect their families), and different groups of voters may have radically different associations to the same thing (whether to guns, gays, abortion, or immigrants). Unfortunately, these are just the kinds of issues that arouse the most passion and, hence, have the biggest impact on both voting and get-out-the-vote efforts. And they are generally the issues Democrats try to avoid.

If you cede the contentious issues, you cede passion to the other side. And given that people vote with their “guts,” if you cede passion, you ultimately concede elections.

Wait… wait. NRA membership: approximately 4 million. Brady Campaign membership: ?? Who’s ceding what? It’s a numbers game, Mr. Westen. And people don’t like being lied to (see paragraph 3 above.) They really don’t like it when they realize they’ve been manipulated. But that’s what you’re advocating here, isn’t it? For our own good, no? Because you know better than the voter, and they should just do what you tell them without complaint, no?

Republicans go straight for these gut issues, and they now have the confidence that they can do so even when support for their position is in the range of 30 percent, as is the case with their absolutist stance on abortion (that abortion is murder and should be illegal under all circumstances) and guns (that the right to bear arms is inviolable, no matter what the death toll). Democrats usually don’t contest them, the public never hears a compelling counternarrative, and public opinion gradually shifts to the right.

WHAT? You mean all that television time, all those prime-time episodes of Law & Order and CSI Paducah where gang-bangers buy full-auto weapons from eeeeevil neo-Nazi licensed gun dealers, and Desperate Housewives accidentally (?) shoot their lovers, and all the news coverage of 19 year-old “children” gunned down doesn’t count as “compelling counternarrative”?

I’m shocked, shocked I tell you!

If you understand how networks work, you understand that candidates should never avoid anything — particularly when the other side is talking about it. Doing so gives the opposition exclusive rights to the networks that create and constitute public opinion.

***

Hunting for principles

If ever there was an issue on which Americans are of two minds, it is guns. Most Americans believe in the Second Amendment, but most Americans also support a host of restrictions on gun sales and ownership. In the 2004 pre-election Harris poll, slightly more than half of Americans reported favoring stricter gun laws, but far fewer — only one in five — wanted to relax the current laws. (When Harris framed the question more specifically in terms of handguns, the percentages became even more lopsided, closer to 3-to-1 in favor of stricter regulations.) Only a small majority, however, supports tougher gun regulations, and many of these people are clustered in large urban areas and on the coasts. This is one of those mixed pictures that lead Democratic strategists to run for the hills.

The point so often (always) left out here is that so few people actually know what the existing restrictions on gun sales and ownership are. By far the best current example comes from this piece at Seraphic Secret:

“I can’t believe I’m here. I’ve been against guns and violence my whole life.”
“Did Ned threaten you, physically, I mean?”
“Said I belong to him and no one else. That’s about it. But I know what he means.”
“What did the police say?”
“The last cop, as he was leaving, whispered for me to get a gun.”

I tell her that owning a gun isn’t sufficient. She has to take safety classes, self-defense classes. She has to know what she’s doing. I grab NRA brochures from the counter, make her promise that she’ll sign up as soon as she gets her gun in ten days.

“Ten days?” she cries.

“First you have to take a test, here in the store, a written test. They’ll give you a booklet to study from. Then you get a certificate making you eligible to buy a weapon in California. After you purchase the gun there’s a ten-day waiting period until you take possession.”

“But why?”
“Background check. To make sure you’re not a felon, a psychopath, an illegal immigrant, a terrorist, a drug addict; it’s the law.

And because people like her have “been against guns and violence” – and in support of “stricter gun laws” – their whole lives.

Revelations like this come as a shock quite often when people finally understand who it is that’s responsible for their protection.

Al Gore epitomized Democrats’ discomfort with guns in an exchange with Bush in their second presidential debate in 2000:

Moderator: So on guns, somebody wants to cast a vote based on your differences, where are the differences?

Gore: … I am for licensing by states of new handgun purchases … because too many criminals are getting guns. There was a recent investigation of the number in Texas who got, who were given concealed-weapons permits in spite of the fact that they had records. And the Los Angeles Times spent a lot of ink going into that. But I am not for doing anything that would affect hunters or sportsmen, rifles, shotguns, existing handguns. I do think that sensible gun-safety measures are warranted now.

Look, this is the year — this is in the aftermath of Columbine, and Paducah, and all the places in our country where the nation has been shocked by these weapons in the hands of the wrong people. The woman who bought the guns for the two boys who did that killing at Columbine said that if she had had to give her name and fill out a form there, she would not have bought those guns.

Behind this response we can hear the whirring of the dispassionate mind — the gratuitous reference to the Los Angeles Times, the reference to Columbine without offering an evocative image. But what is most striking about this response is the lack of any coherent principle that might explain why Gore would place restrictions on new handguns but not on old ones. (Are the existing ones too rusty to kill anybody?) Nor does he justify why he is excluding hunting rifles, although the viewer can infer (correctly) that he wants to get elected.

Bush couldn’t respond to the most powerful part of Gore’s response, about the woman who had handed the guns to the Columbine shooters. So after reiterating his opposition to requiring gun purchasers even to show photo identification, he switched to a “culture of life” message (aimed at activating anti-abortion networks under the cover of guns) and a “culture of love” message (suggesting that somewhere out there there’s a child longing to be told he’s loved — which would presumably prevent massacres like Columbine). Bush’s message was not only cognitively incoherent; it was actually lifted from a phenomenally moving eulogy Gore had delivered at Columbine.

True to the dispassionate vision of the mind, Gore failed to mention that he had been at Columbine. With all their debate preparation, his campaign strategists never realized that the vice president’s best weapon on guns was that magnificent eulogy, in which he artfully invoked “that voice [that] says to our troubled souls: peace, be still. The Scripture promises that there is a peace that passes understanding.”

Bush presented Gore with a golden opportunity to personalize the issue, to put the face of a child on it. With a response like the following, he would have placed in bold relief the extraordinary indifference implicit in Bush’s response and the extremism of the conservative narrative Bush was embracing:

Governor, I walked with those shocked and grieving parents, teachers, and children at Columbine; I shed tears with them; and I delivered a eulogy that Sunday by their graveside. I remembered with them the heroism of their beloved coach and teacher Dave Sanders, who bravely led so many to safety but never made it out of the building himself. I remembered with them a young girl named Cassie Bernall, whose final words were “Yes, I do believe in God.”

I just told you how the woman who bought the guns that took the lives of Dave Sanders and Cassie Bernall wouldn’t have done it if she’d just had to fill out a form and show a photo ID. And you still can’t feel for Coach Sanders’ wife and children, who’ll never wrap their loving arms around him again? You still can’t weep for Cassie’s parents? You still think it’s sensible to require someone to show a photo ID to cash a check but that it’s too much to ask that they show an ID to buy a handgun?

Americans do have a clear choice in this election. And it is about a culture of life. They can do something to honor the lives of those who died that day at Columbine. Or they can vote for a man who, as governor of Texas, signed a law allowing people to bring guns into church.

Right. Texas, where seven defenseless people were shot dead in a church in 1999. Boy, those “gun free zones” really do make people safer, don’t they? That law allowed the law abiding to legally carry a defensive firearm. It did nothing to help or inhibit the shooter that day.

But to people who see firearms as totems of evil, it doesn’t matter who has the firearm (unless they wear a uniform and collect a government paycheck). Guns are bad, mmmmkay?

Although most Americans were much closer to Gore than Bush on guns in the 2000 Harris poll, they thought Bush was stronger on gun control. Although Kerry had hunted all his life,

“Can I get me a huntin’ license here?”

Bush was the overwhelming choice of American sportsmen, even though he’d purchased his Crawford ranch as a prop only two years before running for president — something Democrats never thought to mention in two presidential campaigns. Nor did they mention, as James Carville and Paul Begala have pointed out, that Bush had stocked his ranch’s man-made lakes with fish because the river running through it was too polluted.

These are just the kinds of facts and images that win elections. And they are just the kinds of facts and images that should win elections, because they tell where a candidate really stands, not just where he stands for photo ops.

This is precisely the kind of information that informs the emotions of the electorate.

Then why didn’t it?

***

Gunning for common ground

To understand the poll numbers on guns in three dimensions, you have to consider the different associations the word “gun” evokes in urban and rural America. If you prime voters who have grown up in big cities with the word “gun,” you are likely to activate a network that includes “handguns,” “murder,” “mugging,” “robbery,” “killing,” “crime,” “inner-city violence,” “machine guns,” and “criminals.” If someone in New York City is packing a piece, he isn’t hunting quail.

No, but that someone might be Margaret Johnson, a resident of Harlem who defended herself from a mugger with her .357 Magnum. Or Ronald Dixon, a resident of NYC who shot an intruder in his child’s bedroom.

You don’t hear much about these people because it’s so damned hard and expensive to get a permit to possess a firearm in New York – unless you’re famous or politically connected. Of course, that difficulty doesn’t seem to affect the criminals….

But now suppose we prime a group of voters — let’s make them men — in rural America with precisely the same word, “gun.” This time, the associations that come to mind include “hunt,” “my daddy,” “my son,” “gun shows,” “gun collection,” “rifle,” “shotgun,” “protecting my family,” “deer,” “buddies,” “beer,” “my rights” — and a host of memories that link past and future generations. A voter who lives in a rural area knows that if an armed intruder enters his house, it could take a long time before the county sheriff arrives. The notion of being defenseless doesn’t sit well with southern and rural males, whose identity as men is strongly associated with the ability to protect their families.

An idea apparently stripped from the metrosexual urban male?

Just askin.’

There are some voters you just can’t win. As my colleagues and I discovered when we scanned the brains of partisans during the last presidential election, roughly a third of Americans’ minds won’t bend to the left no matter what you do or say (roughly the percent who continue to support Bush). But southern and rural voters are not unambivalent in their feelings toward guns. Rural voters have no fondness for what happened at Columbine or Virginia Tech, and they have little genuine affection for handguns or automatic weapons. If the National Rifle Association scares them into supporting semiautomatics for felons and teenagers with its slippery-slope argument about “taking away your guns,” the fault lies as much with the Democratic Party, which has put such a powerful safety lock on its own values that no one knows where Democrats really stand — on this or virtually any other moral issue.

Ah, more fearmongering! “Supporting semiautomatics for felons and teenagers.” Yes, this is exactly what the NRA is doing! As opposed preventing the goverment from taking my private property in violation of the Second Amendment, which is what the Left (and Mr. Westen) is advocating.

When a party finds itself courting potentially winnable voters who have seemingly incompatible associations, the first task of its strategists should be to look for two things: areas of ambivalence and ways of bridging seemingly unconnected networks to create common ground. The areas of ambivalence on guns are clear, but Democrats should be searching for the common ground that connects left to right on guns. One of the most powerful “bridging networks” revolves around law and order. A central appeal of conservative ideology is that it emphasizes the protection of law-abiding citizens. Those in the cities who want gun control for the protection of their families and those in the countryside who decry the lawlessness of the cities share the same concern: the freedom and safety of law-abiding citizens. Democrats should also connect the dots between the extremist message of the NRA and another powerful network: terrorism. You can’t fight a war against terrorists if you grant them unrestricted access to automatic weapons on your own soil.

Err, I’m sorry, but isn’t this exactly the strategy advocated by the Violence Policy Center in 1988? Aren’t they the ones who published a white paper on banning “assault weapons” which included this passage:

It will be a new topic in what has become to the press and public an “old” debate.

Although handguns claim more than 20,000 lives a year, the issue of handgun restriction consistently remains a non-issue with the vast majority of legislators, the press, and public. The reasons for this vary: the power of the gun lobby; the tendency of both sides of the issue to resort to sloganeering and pre-packaged arguments when discussing the issue; the fact that until an individual is affected by handgun violence he or she is unlikely to work for handgun restrictions; the view that handgun violence is an “unsolvable” problem; the inability of the handgun restriction movement to organize itself into an effective electoral threat; and the fact that until someone famous is shot, or something truly horrible happens, handgun restriction is simply not viewed as a priority. Assault weapons — just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms — are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons — anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun — can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

There’s a lot more, but that’s the gist of it. “Get them to vote our way through the exploitation of fear – and to hell with the facts.” This is precisely what Mr. Westen is advocating with his language of “granting (terrorists) unrestricted access to automatic weapons on your own soil.” Lying to inspire fear. It’s not like this is a new idea.

This convergence of networks suggests a simple, commonsense, principled stand on guns that Democrats could run with all over the country:

Our moral vision on guns reflects one simple principle: that gun laws should guarantee the freedom and safety of all law-abiding Americans. We stand with the majority of Americans who believe in the right of law-abiding citizens to own guns to hunt and protect their families. And we stand with that same majority of Americans who believe that felons, terrorists, and troubled teenagers don’t have the right to bear arms that threaten the safety of our children. We therefore support the right to bear arms, but not to bear arms designed for no other purpose than to take another person’s life.

As someone once said, if the guns I own were “designed for no other purpose than to take another person’s life,” then all of them are defective. I own an M1 Garand – a weapon designed by a government employee and described by General Patton as the “greatest battle implement ever devised.” Was it designed for “no other purpose than to take another person’s life”? Should I be allowed to “bear” that arm? I own a 1911-pattern semi-automatic pistol, the sidearm issued to our military for over fifty years. What about it? I own an AR-15 carbine, another semi-automatic firearm that most police departments currently issue to their patrol officers. In fact, many departments issue the fully-automatic M-16 version. Are the police issued arms that have the sole purpose of “taking another person’s life”?

Facts are pesky things, aren’t they? Emotion is so much easier to manipulate.

***

Shooting blanks

At Virginia Tech, we witnessed another Terri Schiavo moment, when Democrats could have asserted a progressive moral alternative to an extremist narrative of the far right. But once again, they cowered in the corner, hoping to convince the American public that they’re almost as right as the Republicans. Unfortunately, you never win elections by being almost as principled as the other side. If only one side is talking about its values, its candidate — not the moral runner-up — will win over voters.

With the polls strongly at their backs, Democrats had a historic opportunity to turn the Republicans’ indifference to the suffering at Virginia Tech into a moral condemnation, and to put every Republican in Congress on record as caring more about the blood-soaked dollars of the NRA than about the lives of our children.

Isn’t this more “hate speech”? Rethuglicans are “indifferent” to suffering? The NRA’s “blood-soaked dollars”? I’m personally pretty pissed off at Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker, who applauded that school’s “no guns on campus” policy on the grounds that it made people feel safe, when in fact it made them all defenseless.

Instead, they turned tail and ran, fearing they’d be branded as “anti-gun” and pushed down the slippery slope the NRA has used to pick them off at the ballot box for years: “They want to take away your gun.”

Because, in fact, you want to take away our guns. The ones you define as “designed for no other purpose than to take another person’s life.”

That would be pretty much all of them, I think.

But you only have to worry about getting branded and being pushed down slippery slopes if you’re playing checkers while the other side is playing chess — worrying about their next move when you should be anticipating six moves ahead. Democrats didn’t do what they knew was the right thing because of their concerns about the political fortunes of red-state Democrats like Heath Shuler in North Carolina.

Wait! Wrong metaphor. Not checkers, not chess, but three-card-Monty. What, precisely, Mr. Westen, is “the right thing”?

Could it be “taking away our guns”?

Could it be anything else?

But they wouldn’t have had to worry — and they would have picked up a lot of “security moms” and plenty of dads — if they had simply put Shuler in front of the camera, flanked by a couple of pro-gun Democrats like Montana Senator Jon Tester, with a hunting rifle over his left shoulder and an M-16 over his right, armed with a simple message:

This [pointing to the gun on his left] is a rifle.
This [the gun on his right] is an assault weapon.
People like you and me use this one [left] to hunt.
Criminals, terrorists, and deranged teenagers use this one [right] to hunt police officers and our children.
Law-abiding citizens have the right to own one of these [left].
Nobody has the right to threaten our kids’ safety with one of these [right].
Any questions?

Yes, I have a few. Isn’t the one on the left a “long-range sniper rifle”? Why are our police armed with the one on the right? And where can I buy a new M16? They’ve been off the market since 1986. A used one costs in excess of $16,000. That is, if you live in a jurisdiction that will allow you to own one, and you can jump through all the legal hoops – background check, permission of your local head of law-enforcement, $200 transfer tax – to qualify.

Once again, facts are pesky things, aren’t they?

If you can’t speak the truth and win elections, you need to learn another language. The language that wins elections is the language of the heart.

And here’s the heart of it. Translation: If the truth doesn’t work, lie. Lie big. The bigger the better. And go on the offensive. Change the subject when challenged on your lies, but never back down from the lies. Make the lies bigger, because you’ve got to lie in order to frighten the idiot sheeple in the direction you want them to go.

Risking invocation of Godwin’s Law, does that remind you of anything?

Let me finish with the conclusion reached by James D. Wright and Peter H. Rossi in their 1983 meta-study of gun control laws, Under the Gun: Weapons, Crime and Violence in America – a cold, factual assessment of gun control:

The progressive’s indictment of American firearms policy is well known and is one that both the senior authors of this study once shared. This indictment includes the following particulars: (1) Guns are involved in an astonishing number of crimes in this country. (2) In other countries with stricter firearms laws and fewer guns in private hands, gun crime is rare. (3) Most of the firearms involved in crime are cheap Saturday Night Specials, for which no legitimate use or need exists. (4) Many families acquire such a gun because they feel the need to protect themselves; eventually they end up shooting one another. (5) If there were fewer guns around, there would obviously be less crime. (6) Most of the public also believes this and has favored stricter gun control laws for as long as anyone has asked the question. (7) Only the gun lobby prevents us from embarking on the road to a safer and more civilized society.

The more deeply we have explored the empirical implications of this indictment, the less plausible it has become. We wonder, first, given the number of firearms presently available in the United States, whether the time to “do something” about them has not long since passed. If we take the highest plausible value for the total number of gun incidents in any given year – 1,000,000 – and the lowest plausible value for the total number of firearms now in private hands – 100,000,000 – we see rather quickly that the guns now owned exceed the annual incident count by a factor of at least 100. This means that the existing stock is adequate to supply all conceivable criminal purposes for at least the entire next century, even if the worldwide manufacture of new guns were halted today and if each presently owned firearm were used criminally once and only once. Short of an outright house-to-house search and seizure mission, just how are we going to achieve some significant reduction in the number of firearms available? (Pp. 319-320)

Yup. Facts are pesky. Emotion’s all they’ve got.

I’ll be back in a while. Thanks for visiting.

Al Gore’s Internet

May 18, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

Al Gore has another book coming out. This one’s not about how the world is going to be destroyed by Global Climate Change if we don’t immediately cut back to a subsistence agriculture society. No, this one is about how stupid we Americans are. It’s entitled The Assault on Reason. Time magazine has a short excerpt from the book, and you know what? I actually agree with some of what Al has to say – just not necessarily for the same reasons. Let us fisk:

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This chamber is, for the most part, silent — ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.”

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

And he writes this with (one assumes) a straight face!

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

A somewhat smaller, but hopefully growing number of people are asking “What has gone wrong with our REPUBLIC?“

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but during the Revolutionary War our opponents wore uniforms and fought in accordance with the rules of honor. If you want a more apt comparison, you need to go back and look at what our government did against the American Indian population before, during and after the Revolutionary War.

How quickly we forget, when it’s convenient.

It is too easy — and too partisan — to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us?

It sure looks that way.

Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason — the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power — remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger — not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

What, no mention of the percentage of people who think that the U.S. Government was complicit? Or directly involved?

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess — an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake.

Nice to know I sit in the ranks of “hardly anyone.” I guess I get to pick a comfy chair, and there’s lots of elbow room.

Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

That is, if your definition of “right” is “leaving Saddam & Sons in power in Iraq after dropping the sanctions against him.” Which explains why the majority of Congress voted for the war before they voted against it.

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd’s incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money—much of it from special interests—to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign.

What?!?! McCain-Feingold didn’t work?!?

I’m shocked.

The Senate was silent because Senators don’t feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore — not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.

In no small part because of the speeches of Senators like Robert Byrd.

Our Founders’ faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point — in the First Amendment — of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.

Which doesn’t cover Senate speeches. And your point is?

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention — but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day — 90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.

In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation.

And this was different when newspapers ruled… how, exactly? Because they’d publish your (heavily edited) letter to the editor, maybe, a few weeks after it was no longer timely?

Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.” Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.

“In danger,” hell. We’re already there. And a “smaller number of larger corporations?” Same for newspapers. And, if you’ll notice, television news is hemorrhaging viewership too.

In practice, what television’s dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics — and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role. That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources.

Oh, please. The #1 job of the elected official is to keep getting re-elected – either to the same seat, or one higher up the totem pole. Money has always ruled. It just costs more to be a player today. So? Back when Pulitzer was manipulating the electorate, Paddy the Milkman couldn’t affect the political system either.

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many ‘points’ [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.

As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.

While I’m not surprised at Al’s self-centered example, the one almost everyone else thinks of first is the televised debate between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy. The people who heard it on the radio thought Nixon won. The people who saw it on TV thought Kennedy did.

“Never let them see you sweat,” I believe is the expression.

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to “psychographic” categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science.

AGAIN with a straight face!

We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.

And here I’m going to interrupt Mr. Gore’s interesting rant for a bit longer interjection. Gore is blaming the media for taking advantage of the public’s gullibility.

He never once questions why the electorate is so gullible. Here’s a clue: As Bill Bennett wrote some time back, a hundred years ago our high schools taught Latin and Greek. They taught rhetoric and logic. They taught world geography, and ancient and modern history.

Now our public universities teach remedial English and basic arithmetic to incoming freshmen.

Others have commented on the quality of many of the letters written by Civil War soldiers on both sides of that war – their literary, historical, and biblical allusions, their excellent grammar and punctuation. Have you perused LiveJournal recently? Or randomly sampled some of the personal blogs on Blogger? What language is that?

Thomas Sowell recently wrote:

A recently reprinted memoir by Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has footnotes explaining what words like ‘arraigned,’ ‘curried’ and ‘exculpate’ meant, and explaining who Job was. In other words, this man who was born a slave and never went to school educated himself to the point where his words now have to be explained to today’s expensively under-educated generation.

There is really nothing very mysterious about why our public schools are failures. When you select the poorest quality college students to be public school teachers, give them iron-clad tenure, a captive audience, and pay them according to seniority rather than performance, why should the results be surprising?

Ours may become the first civilization destroyed, not by the power of our enemies, but by the ignorance of our teachers and the dangerous nonsense they are teaching our children. In an age of artificial intelligence, they are creating artificial stupidity.

In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.

You want to know the main reason for the ills you’re protesting against, Al? Our government has destroyed the public education system. It’s done it slowly, methodically, systematically and deliberately. And why?

TO PRODUCE A POPULACE THAT CAN BE EASILY LED AROUND BY ITS POLITICAL MASTERS.

What you’re protesting here isn’t that the American public is too easily manipulated, you’re upset because they apparently can’t yet be manipulated into doing what YOU want. As you say, it’s too easy – and too partisan – to simply blame George Bush, or even just the Republicans. No, it took both parties, a hundred years, and hundreds of billions of dollars to get to where we are today. It started with John Dewey at about the turn of the 20^th Century, and it’s gone downhill from there. Formation of the federal Department of Education in 1980 seems only to have accelerated the problem. (There’s a surprise.)

You don’t want to “create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future.” Politicians aren’t interested in no longer “tolerating the rejection and distortion of science.” They’re out to shut up the opposition by labeling them as ignorant drooling boobs who must be led by the hand by our political masters. I said as much in a piece I wrote during that 2000 election debacle, An Uncomfortable Conclusion:

With the continuing legal maneuvers in the Florida election debacle, I have been forced to a conclusion that I may have been unconsciously fending off. The Democratic party thinks we’re stupid. Not “amiable uncle Joe” stupid, but DANGEROUSLY stupid.

Lead-by-the-hand-no-sharp-objects-don’t-put-that-in-your-mouth stupid.

And they don’t think that just Republicans and independents are stupid, no no! They think ANYBODY not in the Democratic power elite is, by definition, a drooling idiot. A muttering moron. Pinheads barely capable of dressing ourselves.

Take, for example, the position under which the Gore election machine petitioned for a recount – that only supporters of the Democratic candidate for President lacked the skills necessary to vote properly, and that through a manual recount those erroneously marked ballots could be “properly” counted in Mr. Gore’s favor. They did this in open court and on national television, and with a straight face.

So, it is with some regret that I can no longer hold that uncomfortable conclusion at bay:

They’re right. We are.

Not all of us, of course, but enough. Those of us still capable of intelligent, logical, independent thought have been overwhelmed by the public school system production lines that have been cranking out large quantities of substandard product for the last thirty-five years or so. The majority of three or four generations have managed to make it into the working world with no knowledge of history, no understanding of the Constitution or civics, no awareness of geography, no ability to do even mildly complex mathematics, no comprehension of science, and realistically little to no ability to read with comprehension, or write with clarity. And we seem to have developed attention spans roughly equivalent to that of your average small bird.

After all, about half the public accepted the Democratic premise that we were too stupid to vote correctly because their guy didn’t win by a landslide, didn’t they? And the other half was outraged, not that they made such a ludicrous argument, but that they didn’t want to play fair and by the rules that no one seems to understand or to be able to explain.

The other majority party isn’t blameless in this; they like an ignorant electorate too. It’s easier to lead people who can’t or won’t think for themselves. It took both parties and many years of active bipartisan meddling to make the education system into an international laughingstock.

As you can see, I’ve held this opinion for some time now.

Would you like some example of what I’m talking about here? I have just the thing, thanks to Dr. Sanity. Here are some quotes by psychologists – certainly the recipients of some of the highest levels of education – specifically on what they believe the function of public education ought to be, via PsychQuotes.com:

“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is insane because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our founding fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural being, and toward the sovereignty of this nation as a separate entity. It’s up to you as teachers to make all these sick children well – by creating the international child of the future”
Dr. Chester M. Pierce, Psychiatrist, address to the Childhood International Education Seminar, 1973

“We have swallowed all manner of poisonous certainties fed us by our parents, our Sunday and day school teachers, our politicians, our priests, our newspapers, and others with a vested interest in controlling us. ‘Thou shalt become as gods, knowing good and evil,’ good and evil with which to keep children under control, with which to impose local and familial and national loyalties and with which to blind children to their glorious intellectual heritage… The results, the inevitable results, are frustration, inferiority, neurosis and inability to enjoy living, to reason clearly or to make a world fit to live in.”
Dr. G. Brock Chisholm, President, World Federation of Mental Health

Teaching school children to read was a “perversion” and high literacy rate bred “the sustaining force behind individualism.”
John Dewey, Educational Psychologist

He says that like individualism is a bad thing.

The school curriculum should “…be designed to bend the student to the realities of society, especially by way of vocational education… the curriculum should be designed to promote mental health as an instrument for social progress and a means of altering culture…”
Report: Action for Mental Health, 1961

“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their school masters would have wished … The social psychologist of the future will have a number of classes of school children on whom they will try different methods of producing an unshakable conviction that snow is black. Various results will soon be arrived at: first, that influences of the home are ‘obstructive’ and verses set to music and repeatedly intoned are very effective … It is for the future scientist to make these maxims precise and discover exactly how much it costs per head to make children believe that snow is black. When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Bertrand Russell quoting (one assumes approvingly – ed.) Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others – Prussian University in Berlin, 1810

“…through schools of the world we shall disseminate a new conception of government – one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interests of all people.”
Harold Rugg, student of psychology and a disciple of John Dewey

Dewey raises his ugly head again.

“Education does not mean teaching people to know what they do not know – it means teaching them to behave as they do not behave.”
National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) sponsored report: The Role of Schools in Mental Health

“This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Unites (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable.”
Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education

These are the kind of people who have been influencing public education for the last century.

And you wonder why so few Americans have critical thinking skills anymore? Let’s not blame television. The populace had to be prepped first.

Continuing with Gore’s piece:

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush’s economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that “issue advocacy” was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president’s controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.

Was the .gov piece run as a “public service” spot? Did CBS run any other paid “advocacy” commercials? I mean besides for excessive beer drinking? Did CBS deny MoveOn commercial time on any evening sitcoms or during its Evening News broadcast?

Sorry, but I’m just not getting all that worked up here. I understand that the SwiftBoat Veterans for Truth had some trouble getting their ads placed on national television as well.

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the “vividness” experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium—as opposed to the “hot” medium of print—was hard for me to understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of “heat” in his metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.

As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that “the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed — I mean the attachment of the people.”

Thomas Jefferson beat him to it:

The people cannot be all, & always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive; if they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.

Lethargy we’ve got, in abundance.

Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think.

Case in point: today’s “compromise” immigration legislation.

They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America’s self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their “consent” to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they’re interested in receiving from citizens — feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.

“Lack of authenticity” from a guy who did a creditable imitation of a cardboard cutout and had to pay Naomi Wolf for advice on how to act like an “alpha male.”

Gore should do standup.

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in — with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources — is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.

Translated: “We need their money.”

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself — because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations.

Wait…

The 20^th century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths? I thought television was at fault for all of this. We didn’t get TV until the latter half of the 20^th century. Prior to that it was newspapers and radio.

Let’s put the blame for the 20^th century’s ideological bloodbaths where it belongs: on the shoulders of failed philosophies that were emotionally appealing, but logically insupportable – communism and fascism. And the majority of the victims of the 20^th century’s bloodbaths were victims of their own governments – not victims of war between opposing powers. Further, television wasn’t all that widespread in those countries. That required the benefits of capitalism.

When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

Err… what? When people DO have the opportunity to interact and test the validity of what they’re being taught is when they resist the assumption that the “experts” know best. It’s when they’re denied the ability that “groupthink” arises. Why do you think there’s a press on to reinstitute the “fairness doctrine?” To stifle voices one side doesn’t want you to hear – the side questioning the “experts.”

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way — a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Here’s where I finally start to agree with Gore.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason.

But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets — through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law.

The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies — have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people — as Lincoln put it, “even we here” — are collectively still the key to the survival of America’s democracy.

While I agree with what he says here, I cannot help but believe that what he actually intends would have a result counterproductive to his (stated) ends. Or am I exhibiting critical thinking skills here and questioning the expert?

Fool me once, shame on you…

Not Even A Mention of the EEEEEEEvil NRA!

May 6, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

Insty points today to an interesting New York Times piece, A Liberal Case for Gun Rights Helps Sway Judiciary. It’s interesting enough that I’m not going to fisk it so much as expand upon it:

In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

Only a few decades before that and that same decision would have been a foregone conclusion.

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

Err, no. There was a scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protected only the rights of white men – perhaps the most blatant example of this attitude being exhibited in Florida’s 1941 Watson v. Stone decision, where one of the concurring judges wrote:

I know something of the history of this legislation. The original Act of 1893 was passed when there was a great influx of negro laborers in this State drawn here for the purpose of working in turpentine and lumber camps…. [T]he Act was passed for the purpose of disarming the negro laborers and to thereby reduce the unlawful homicides that were prevalent in turpentine and saw-mill camps and to give the white citizens in sparsely settled areas a better feeling of security. The statute was never intended to be applied to the white population…. [I]t is a safe guess to assume that more than 80% of the white men living in the rural sections of Florida have violated this statute…. [T]here has never been, within my knowledge, any effort to enforce the provisions of this statute as to white people, because it has been generally conceded to be in contravention of the Constitution and non-enforceable if contested.

This quote is excerpted from a Robert Cottrol and Raymond Diamond Chicago-Kent Law Review paper available here. A shorter version of this quote appears in the Amicus Curae brief filed on behalf of Parker et al. by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

The first two editions of Professor Tribe’s influential treatise on constitutional law, in 1978 and 1988, endorsed the collective rights view. The latest, published in 2000, sets out his current interpretation.

Which the paper leaves out, but I will not since it’s one of my favorite quotes:

Perhaps the most accurate conclusion one can reach with any confidence is that the core meaning of the Second Amendment is a populist / republican / federalism one: Its central object is to arm ‘We the People’ so that ordinary citizens can participate in the collective defense of their community and their state. But it does so not through directly protecting a right on the part of states or other collectivities, assertable by them against the federal government, to arm the populace as they see fit. Rather the amendment achieves its central purpose by assuring that the federal government may not disarm individual citizens without some unusually strong justification consistent with the authority of the states to organize their own militias. That assurance in turn is provided through recognizing a right (admittedly of uncertain scope) on the part of individuals to possess and use firearms in the defense of themselves and their homes — not a right to hunt for game, quite clearly, and certainly not a right to employ firearms to commit aggressive acts against other persons — a right that directly limits action by Congress or by the Executive Branch and may well, in addition, be among the privileges or immunities of United States citizens protected by §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment against state or local government action.

It makes me feel good every time I read it – especially the part about the Fourteenth Amendment.

Several other leading liberal constitutional scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.

The earlier consensus, the law professors said in interviews, reflected received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution. “The standard liberal position,” Professor Levinson said, “is that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution.”

It had to be, otherwise you couldn’t selectively disarm different groups.

The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” (Some transcriptions of the amendment omit the last comma.)

If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as the First Amendment’s protection of the right to free speech is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government, though only for good reason.

Time for another of my favorite quotes, or part of one, this time from 9th Circuit Court Judge Alex Kozinski from his dissent to the decision to deny an en banc rehearing of California’s Silveira v. Lockyer “Assault Weapons Ban” case:

Judges know very well how to read the Constitution broadly when they are sympathetic to the right being asserted. We have held, without much ado, that “speech, or…the press” also means the Internet…and that “persons, houses, papers, and effects” also means public telephone booths….When a particular right comports especially well with our notions of good social policy, we build magnificent legal edifices on elliptical constitutional phrases – or even the white spaces between lines of constitutional text. But, as the panel amply demonstrates, when we’re none too keen on a particular constitutional guarantee, we can be equally ingenious in burying language that is incontrovertibly there.

It is wrong to use some constitutional provisions as springboards for major social change while treating others like senile relatives to be cooped up in a nursing home until they quit annoying us. As guardians of the Constitution, we must be consistent in interpreting its provisions. If we adopt a jurisprudence sympathetic to individual rights, we must give broad compass to all constitutional provisions that protect individuals from tyranny. If we take a more statist approach, we must give all such provisions narrow scope. Expanding some to gargantuan proportions while discarding others like a crumpled gum wrapper is not faithfully applying the Constitution; it’s using our power as federal judges to constitutionalize our personal preferences.

Amen.

The individual rights view is far from universally accepted. “The overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion supports the near-unanimous view of the federal courts that the constitutional right to be armed is linked to an organized militia,” said Dennis A. Henigan, director of the legal action project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “The exceptions attract attention precisely because they are so rare and unexpected.”

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

So say the intellectually dishonest…

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

If the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit does not step in and reverse the 2-to-1 panel decision striking down a law that forbids residents to keep handguns in their homes, the question of the meaning of the Second Amendment is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court. The answer there is far from certain.

That too is a change. In 1992, Warren E. Burger, a former chief justice of the United States appointed by President Richard M. Nixon, expressed the prevailing view.

“The Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all,” Mr. Burger said in a speech. In a 1991 interview, Mr. Burger called the individual rights view “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word “fraud” — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Even as he spoke, though, the ground was shifting underneath him.

Here’s one of the things I find really irritating. Yes, Burger said what is attributed to him here, but no one seems to be willing to give any context or background on his comments. The interview referred to was for Parade magazine – the tabloid included in most Sunday newspapers. Here’s what else he said in an essay in that magazine:

Americans also have a right to defend their homes, and we need not challenge that. Nor does anyone seriously question that the Constitution protects the right of hunters to own and keep sporting guns for hunting game any more than anyone would challenge the right to own and keep fishing rods and other equipment for fishing — or to own automobiles.

Where, I must ask, does the Constitution say anything about defending ones home or hunting? And what makes Justice Burger the exclusive authority? He was one of nine Justices on the bench. If ~~Samuel Alito~~ John Roberts were to say in an interview that the Second Amendment definitely protects an individual right, does the fact that he holds the Chief Justice’s chair give him some power that the other Justices lack? Granted, Burger made his speech and gave his interview after he retired, but thankfully he never “constitutionalized his personal preferences” on this topic while he sat on the bench.

In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”

And that piece is available all over the web. I highly recommend that you read it if you have not. It’s a very rare exhibit of intellectual honesty in print.

Robert A. Levy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group that supports gun rights, and a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Parker case, said four factors accounted for the success of the suit. The first, Mr. Levy said, was “the shift in scholarship toward an individual rights view, particularly from liberals.”

He also cited empirical research questioning whether gun control laws cut down on crime; a 2001 decision from the federal appeals court in New Orleans that embraced the individual rights view even as it allowed a gun prosecution to go forward; and the Bush administration’s reversal of a longstanding Justice Department position under administrations of both political parties favoring the collective rights view.

Filing suit in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.

“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.

Professor Bogus, a supporter of the collective rights view, said the Parker decision represented a milestone in that strategy. “This is the story of an enormously successful and dogged campaign to change the conventional view of the right to bear arms,” he said.

Correction: “conventional view” among members of the government – not the citizenry.

The text of the amendment is not a model of clarity, and arguments over its meaning tend to be concerned with whether the first part of the sentence limits the second. The history of its drafting and contemporary meaning provide support for both sides as well.

The Supreme Court has not decided a Second Amendment case since 1939. That ruling was, as Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a liberal judge on the federal appeals court in San Francisco acknowledged in 2002, “somewhat cryptic,” again allowing both sides to argue that Supreme Court precedent aided their interpretation of the amendment.

Still, nine federal appeals courts around the nation have adopted the collective rights view, opposing the notion that the amendment protects individual gun rights. The only exceptions are the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, and the District of Columbia Circuit. The Second Circuit, in New York, has not addressed the question.

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

What?!?! D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country with the ban in place! It traded off with Chicago several times. There’s no reason to assume that it can’t “win” that dubious position once again.

Here’s a bet I’m more than willing to make: End the ban. Allow residents of D.C. to possess firearms for their own defense again. At worst, criminal homicide in D.C. will remain unchanged. The rate will not go up.

The decision in Parker has been stayed while the full appeals court decides whether to rehear the case.

Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

I certainly hope so. But if the D.C. Circuit court overturns, I fully expect SCOTUS to deny cert. and dodge the question for another few years.

More Magical Thinking from Academia and the Media

April 22, 2007 KevinLeave a comment

It’s a double-shot! This piece from CNN is written by Tom Plate, former editor of the editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times and a professor of communication and policy studies at UCLA. Hat tip to Arms and the Law. Let us fisk:

Let’s lay down our right to bear arms

OK. The criminals go first, though.

Most days, it is not at all hard to feel proud to be an American. But on days such as this, it is very difficult.

The pain that the parents of the slain students feel hits deep into everyone’s hearts. At the University of California, Los Angeles, students are talking about little else. It is not that they feel especially vulnerable because they are students at a major university, as is Virginia Tech, but because they are (to be blunt) citizens of High Noon America.

“High Noon” is a famous film. The 1952 Western told the story of a town marshal (played by the superstar actor Gary Cooper) who is forced to eliminate a gang of killers by himself. They are eventually gunned down.

Yes, and if Gary Cooper’s character had laid down his right to bear arms, what would have been the outcome?

The use of guns is often the American technique of choice for all kinds of conflict resolution. Our famous Constitution, about which many of us are generally so proud, enshrines — along with the right to freedom of speech, press, religion and assembly — the right to own guns. That’s an apples and oranges list if there ever was one.

Not so! They are all of a single philosophy. And thanks so much for admitting that there’s a (significant) contingent of people out there who are not proud – generally or otherwise – of that document.

Not all of us are so proud and triumphant about the gun-guarantee clause. The right to free speech, press, religion and assembly and so on seem to be working well, but the gun part, not so much.

While I and many like me believe that the “gun part” is the crowning achievement of a document that established a government designed to protect the rights of individuals against the power of the State.

It’s all a matter of your worldview, I suppose.

Let me explain. Some misguided people will focus on the fact that the 23-year-old student who killed his classmates and others at Virginia Tech was ethnically Korean. This is one of those observations that’s 99.99 percent irrelevant. What are we to make of the fact that he is Korean? Ban Ki-moon is also Korean! Our brilliant new United Nations secretary general has not only never fired a gun, it looks like he may have just put together a peace formula for civil war-wracked Sudan — a formula that escaped his predecessor.

(Wishful thinking will get you nowhere. How much do you want to bet that “peaceful formula” fails? Bueller? Bueller?)

So let’s just disregard all the hoopla about the race of the student responsible for the slayings. These students were not killed by a Korean, they were killed by a 9 mm handgun and a .22-caliber handgun.

See? Magical thinking. The guns loaded themselves, transported themselves from Cho’s apartment to the campus of VT, levitated into the air, and started killing. It’s not his fault – the guns did it!

We allow this guy to teach?

In the nineties, the Los Angeles Times courageously endorsed an all-but-complete ban on privately owned guns, in an effort to greatly reduce their availability.

“Courageously”? Why “courageously”? Because it cost them circulation?

By the time the series of editorials had concluded, the newspaper had received more angry letters and fiery faxes from the well-armed U.S. gun lobby than on any other issue during my privileged six-year tenure as the newspaper’s editorial page editor.

Ah, I see. Let me repeat Tam’s cogent response to the legacy media’s insistence that it was the “gun lobby” that was responsible for the Zumbo incident: “Poor Lefties; they’ve been playing on astroturf so long that they don’t know grassroots even when fed a mouthful of divot.”

But the paper, by the way, also received more supportive letters than on any other issue about which it editorialized during that era. The common sense of ordinary citizens told them that whatever Americans were and are good for, carrying around guns like costume jewelry was not on our Mature List of Notable Cultural Accomplishments.

Note: if you support gun rights (and the Constitution) you’re a tool of the “U.S. gun lobby.” If you don’t, (i.e., you agree with the author) you’re a common-sense “ordinary citizen.”

Just so we know where we stand.

Generally this is known as “elitism.”

“Guns don’t kill people,” goes the gun lobby’s absurd mantra. Far fewer guns in America would logically result in far fewer deaths from people pulling the trigger. The probability of the Virginia Tech gun massacre happening would have been greatly reduced if guns weren’t so easily available to ordinary citizens.

This is known as “circular logic.” If there were no guns, no gun crime would occur. Well, duh. The problem is, guns do exist and they’re not going to go away. Ask the Brits. Wishing won’t make it so. Neither will “magical thinking.”

Foreigners sometimes believe that celebrities in America are more often the targets of gun violence than the rest of us. Not true. Celebrity shootings just make better news stories, so perhaps they seem common. They’re not. All of us are targets because with so many guns swishing around our culture, no one is immune — not even us non-celebrities.

Wait, wait… We’re all targets? So we should all disarm?

Anybody see the disconnect here?

When the great pop composer and legendary member of the Beatles John Lennon was shot in 1980 in New York, many in the foreign press tabbed it a war on celebrities. Now, some in the media will declare a war on students or some-such. This is all misplaced. The correct target of our concern needs to be guns. America has more than it can possibly handle. How many can our society handle? My opinion is: as close to zero as possible.

Well, at least you’re honest about it.

Last month, I was robbed at 10 in the evening in the alley behind my home. As I was carrying groceries inside, a man with a gun approached me where my car was parked. The gun he carried featured one of those red-dot laser beams, which he pointed right at my head.

Because I’m anything but a James Bond type, I quickly complied with all of his requests. Perhaps because of my rapid response (it is called surrender), he chose not to shoot me; but he just as easily could have. What was to stop him?

Apparently not you. Nor the police.

A question: Do you think that guy will “lay down” his gun?

This occurred in Beverly Hills, a low-crime area dotted with upscale boutiques, restaurants and businesses — a city best known perhaps for its glamour and celebrity sightings.

Oh, and police tell me the armed robber definitely was not Korean. Not that I would have known one way or the other: Basically the only thing I saw or can remember was the gun, with the red dot, pointed right at my head.

A near-death experience does focus the mind. We need to get rid of our guns.

Ah, Beverly Hills! Well now I understand the elitism. Regardless this is just more magical thinking.

No, we need to get rid of the people like the man who robbed you. They need to be removed from the general population. Had that man had a knife, would you still have complied? What if he’d threatened you with a piece of pipe?

What we have here is someone steeped in the belief that he has a “right to feel safe.”

Being exposed to the fact that there is no right to be safe has apparently not altered his worldview one whit. No “never again” for Professor Plate! For him the response will always be “please don’t hurt me!” Did he feel proud to be an American that day?

Here’s a clue for you, Professor: You didn’t stop the robber. The cops didn’t stop the robber. So he’s free to do it again, and again, and again until someone does. And disarming the people who didn’t rob you isn’t going to help. Just as ensuring the victims of the VT massacre were disarmed didn’t help them.

Here’s another clue: You can’t have mine.

So now what?