- Invisible Men: We now send so many people, especially young black men, to prison – where they are not counted in most official government statistics – that it badly distorts statistics on high school drop-out rates, employment, wages, and voter turnout. “…inmates and ex-inmates are at once constantly under surveillance and effectively unseen.”
- America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead Eliminating lead from children’s environments might be the most important anti-crime measure we could take. Kevin Drum has been writing up a storm about this; here’s a round-up of his lead blogging.
- Thirteen theses on cannabis policy
- Seventeen Magazine Promotes Body Hatred by partnering up with the TV show “Biggest Loser.”
- The Transformation Of Labor Unions From Opponents of Immigration Reform To Its Biggest Champions
- Children, Parents and Mass Incarceration
- Player Piano Roll Copying is Killing Music (And It’s Maybe Illegal)
- In New Castle, Pa., trying to break free of poverty. A long but very interesting story about one teenage girl’s struggle to climb the economic ladder.
- A Lesson Is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible. This comic strip cracked me up.
- Melinda Gates’ New Crusade: Investing Billions in Women’s Health.
- Robert George explains natural law. (PDF file).
- Revealed: how the FBI coordinated the crackdown on Occupy | Naomi Wolf
- A Letter To The Guy Who Harassed Me Outside The Bar
- House Republicans Derail Bill Targeting Rapists
- “I can find no way around the thicket of laws and precedents that effectively allow the executive branch of our government to proclaim as perfectly lawful certain actions that seem on their face incompatible with our Constitution and laws while keeping the reasons for their conclusion a secret.” – Judge Colleen McMahon, regarding the Obama administration’s secret rules for deciding when it’s okay for the US government to assassinate US citizens. (Via.)
- Rabbi Shmuel Herzfeld’s Sermon on Same-Sex Marriage: An Appreciation
- Back when 50 miles was a long way. A very neat historical map of travel times.
- President Obama Would Choose to Fight the Horse-Sized Duck
- “…As I sit here in my skinny jeans and fitted top, for the first time in my life I am fat, female, and unashamed.”
- Ten Rules for Fat Girls
- A Rape At Burning Man
- Is there objective morality in the Universe? – The Good Atheist
- Cartooning Plagiarism Scandal: It’s About Time!
- Plagiarism allegations hit Bill Day in closing days of fundraising campaign. And as well as reading that, it’s hard to appreciate what an embarassment Bill Day is to political cartooning without at least skimming through That Cartoon Critic.
- To Stabilize the Debt, Policymakers Should Seek Another $1.4 Trillion in Deficit Savings — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
- ‘There’s nothing mutual about it’: White evangelicals, privileged distress and grievance envy
- ” Does the right to religious freedom include the right to impose your views on others? Does it include the right to impose your views on a diverse workforce? On customers and patients seeking your services you offer the public? Does it include the right to close the door – in your office or your bakery or your emergency room – because you disagree with the person seeking services?”
- “Justice Clarence Thomas broke his nearly seven-year silence at Supreme Court oral arguments Monday. But no one is sure exactly what he said.”
- Petition: Remove United States District Attorney Carmen Ortiz from office for overreach in the case of Aaron Swartz.
- Anti-Feminist Press Crows Over Book Celebrating Domestic Abuse, Then Finds Out How Bad It Can Get
- Sex, Stereotyping, and Same-Sex Marriage
- “She’s the first ever out trans person in the United States to compete in the Miss Universe pageant system and has the goal of attempting to become the first trans Miss USA and trans Miss Universe. “
- The White House’s official reply to the petition to “Secure resources and funding, and begin construction of a Death Star by 2016.” This, and also the ducks video, via Elayne.
- Covering Up Climate Change | Andrew Sullivan
- An oldie but a goodie from Garfunkel and Oates:
Nobody, LOL! I honestly haven't run into that factoid before.
Despite considerable opposition within the ruling Conservative Party, the UK parliament voted tonight in favour of allowing same sex marriage.
I’m very pleased that my local MP (Labour) voted for the measure.
Now it’s just a question of whether the House of Lords decides to go with the Commons on this or whether they will attempt to block the law. The voting passed with a wide enough margin that it would be difficult for the Lords to justify blocking the measure, but that doesn’t mean that they won’t.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/blog/2013/feb/05/gay-marriage-debate-politics-live-blog
Hi Amp! Assuming I haven’t misremembered, Slings And Arrows is your favourite television show of all time. As such, I thought you might be interested in the weekly TV Club Classic reviews that are currently being posted at the AV Club (and the discussion in the comments as well). Here‘s a link!
Justice, British style:
Statutory Rape of 13-Year-Old Yields No Jail Time, Because of Defendant’s Cultural Insularity
From a link at the above page to the U.K. Daily Mail:
Analysis at the link by a law professor, if you’re interested. Isn’t multiculturalism wonderful when it’s given special status in the law?
There’s nothing in the law that gave multiculturalism a special status. This was an invidual judge making a judgment call to give a suspended sentence. I don’t know enough about the circumstances of the case to say whether he was right or wrong to do so (I would have been entirely appalled if the judge declared him innocent, but that’s not what happened), but surely you know the difference between the law making special exceptions and a judge deciding to be lenient.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJmKStqugMc
I adore this song 27 years after hearing it & am grateful the inter web allowed me to refind it.
Robert, in this thread:
Robert, a handful of posts later, same thread:
That didn’t take long. :-p
By the way, this is just a variation on the old “if the killers didn’t have guns, then they’d just kill 12 people at the post office by using a stapler” argument, which expects us to believe that gun owners are irrational idiots who spend hundreds of dollars on weapons (or in this case, features) that confer no advantages whatsoever.
A high-capacity clip (Oh no! I used the word “clip”!) allows a shooter to fire many more bullets in a shorter time span. It is ridiculous to think that this makes no difference to how destructive a school shooter might be. Similarly, a foldable stock makes a rifle easier to transport and to conceal. It’s inane to claim that there is no circumstance under which that would be useful (both to legit owners and to criminals). It’s easier to handle a rifle you’ve just been shooting a lot if you can grab it’s barrel without getting burned. Etc, etc.
Contrary to what you’d apparently ask us to believe, Robert, gun owners aren’t a bunch of drooling idiots eager to spend hundreds of dollars on completely useless features that could never ever make any difference.
By the way, given the choice between being burgled and being murdered, what would you choose? I find that an easy choice, but apparently you find it a stumper. (Regarding rape, I find the “more guns less rape” arguments completely unpersuasive, in party because no one who makes the argument has ever, that I’ve read, betrayed even a passing familiarity with research on causes of rape.)
Amp, there’s a difference between knowing whether I would want a shotgun or a pistol or a rifle in a particular tactical situation, and having broad knowledge of how guns work, what features do what, etc.
High-capacity clips were not part of the assault weapon description/definition that you sent in. Convenience of transport is not lethality, and neither is an enhanced ability to hold the barrel. I stand by my comments there; that’s a list of cosmetic/convenience features, not things that make a gun more deadly. Gun owners do not have to be idiots to pay extra money for cosmetic/convenience features; you’re attempting to set up a tautology where the only thing a gun owner is paying for is lethality and so anything they buy that costs extra must be lethal, or else they are irrational. My mother paid $300 more for her tablet PC than I paid for mine; they have broadly equivalent functionality (mine’s better in many ways) but hers is cooler-looking. She isn’t an idiot and neither am I.
If I have perfect knowledge of the future and know that the single burglary will result in no loss of my life, then I suppose I would choose to be burgled. But that isn’t the comparison; the comparison is how much quality of life is lost owing to X burglaries and the worry and fretting over same, and the worry over what may happen to loved ones or dependents, etc.
Would you rather get shot once, or have the house where your nieces lived “hot” burgled X times, with them running the risk of assault, murder, rape, etc. each time? And X could be a pretty damn big number; there are a LOT more burglaries than gun murders. In the US, 11,000 gun murders vs. 2,000,000 burglaries.
I don’t think “armed women” have anything to do with the *causes* of rape, but I think that the response to rape and the cultural conditioning and material circumstances of the victim population contributes to the equation about numbers of actual attempted/completed rapes. Causation is only one number in that equation; the environment controls the other numbers. Rapists are hardly creatures of pure reason running analytics to determine whether it’s worth committing their crime, but they are not blind animals who ignore risk, either.
To put it another way, GPS location technology has nothing to do with the causes of car theft, but the existence of GPS tracking has produced radical changes in the car theft ‘industry’, both in the way the crime is committed and in the total number of crimes. “Cause” is by far the most important thing to look at MORALLY, but we’re not talking morality, we’re talking risk.
Robert, the “armed women = less rape” trope is based on the idea of stranger rape. If someone jumps out of the bushes and attempts to rape me, and I have a gun, he’s probably much less likely to be successful than if I don’t. (Whether I go to jail for murder is a separate issue. I’m not real confident that a system where women are assumed to be lying about or at fault for rape is going to take a woman who just killed someone at her word.)
But that’s not the likely rape scenario. The rapist is much more likely to be someone the woman knows, who uses either intoxication or the fact that she thinks he’s her friend (or both) to put her in a position where he can rape her. So we’re not talking about carrying a gun just when you have to walk through shady neighborhoods at night, or keeping it in your car, but every minute of your life, around people you trust (who will, without a doubt, take it personally that you feel you have to carry around them).
See also this whole comment thread for both the unlikeliness of guns preventing rape and a more realistic approach to what would happen to women who shoot attempted rapists.
Kelly, you’re undoubtedly right on all points. I’m not holding out gun ownership as a panacea that would stop rape; my original point was that rape and burglary rates are higher in the UK, but that gun homicide rates are higher in the US. There are some tradeoffs in play; tradeoffs do not always have to be absolute. Something can make a little, or some, or a lot of difference. The difference in gun culture specifically (and response to crime more generally) between the two countries appears to play into the different distributions of crimes.
Robert,
Regarding high-capacity clips, I should have said “detachable magazines.” My bad. But (and correct me if I’m mistaken), I believe all rifles that can take high-capacity magazines are included in the group “rifles that can take detachable magazines,” so it’s a distinction without much difference, for my purposes.
Are you now claiming that detachable magazines are a feature that makes no difference, by the way?
As for the rest of your “lethality” arguments, they are nonsense. A feature that makes it easier to sneak a gun into an environment – thus making it less likely that the gunman will be denied entrance, and putting off the moment that the police are called – can lead to a situation in which a gunman is able to kill more people before he is stopped. No, it’s not more “lethal” in the sense of making each individual bullet more deadly; but the claim that there is no way in which a removable stock could lead to a higher kill count is ridiculous.
In this context, you posited that the US gun culture means more murders but fewer burgles. You’re claiming there’s a murder vs burgles trade-off. If that trade-off exists, then I doubt that many, or any, people would actually prefer to be on the “I got murdered instead of burgled” side of the trade-off.
You’re trying to wiggle out of this by saying “maybe the burglar will murder me as well.” But you were the one who claimed that the trade-off existed. If a higher rate of burglars meant a higher rate of murders (due to burglars murdering), then the trade-off you claim exists, wouldn’t exist.
In any case, I highly doubt that there’s any legitimate evidence of a trade-off at all. Is there any reason to believe that the difference you report is causation, rather than correlation?
I’m not claiming a murder vs. burgle tradeoff; I’m claiming (or strongly positing, anyway) a gun-ownership vs. burgle tradeoff, and a gun-ownership vs. murder tradeoff. More guns = more murder, more guns = less burglary.
If you reject the latter tradeoff, do you accept the former? If you believe that more guns can result in (note I do not say cause) more murders, then why is it facially implausible that more guns can result in fewer burglaries?
In the context of an armed civilian facing a bunch of unarmed victims – which is what I’m presuming we’re talking about here – using three 10-cartridge magazines is unlikely to be less lethal than one 30-cartridge magazine. It only takes a couple of seconds to swap them out. That might make a difference if one of the intended victims is armed and is shooting back, but not so much if everyone is ducking and diving and cowering; which to my understanding is usually the case in “gun-free zones” (a.k.a. “target-rich environments”).
Ron, there have been at least three documented mass killings in which the shooter was disarmed when he paused to change magazines. (The 1993 LIRR shooting, the 1998 Kipland Kinkel shooting, and the 2011 Tucson shooting.) How can you possibly claim those shootings would have had the same outcome if the shooters had been armed with the 100-round drum magazine James Holmes used? (ETA: Just to make it clear, Holmes’ drum jammed, so in effect he “only” had a 33-round drum magazine.)
In the Giffords shooting, the small child who was shot to death was killed by the 13th bullet in the shooter’s magazine. Can you really be absolutely sure she wouldn’t have lived if the shooter had paused to reload before she was shot?
It’s true that some people can swap magazines quickly and efficiently, in “only a couple of seconds.” But as far as I can tell from having witnessed people doing it, it’s a skill, and not one all amateurs have. Someone who can do it really fast and efficiently can get a little admiration for it, precisely because it is a skill, not something everyone can do instantly. Add in the situation of a mass shooting – where the shooter is under immense pressure, very excited, may have sweaty palms, etc – and the chance of a fumble, of taking ten seconds instead of two, of having to fish in one’s pocket or backpack for the fresh clip – goes way up.
Like Robert, you’re taking a nonsensical “there is no benefit to having these expensive features” stand. Of course there’s a benefit to having a high capacity magazine. Otherwise, people wouldn’t want them.
* * *
By the way, Robert, I wouldn’t dare call your mother stupid. But either she’s the worse shopper in the world, or you’re fantastic, or she got some other expensive benefit (early adopter of a new toy before prices fell, or a diamond-encrusted ipad case), or her tablet is in fact better than yours but she doesn’t actually use those features, or there’s something weird about your story. I find it a little implausible that two equally skilled shoppers could go shopping for the same common device, (ETA:) at about the same time after release of the device, and the one who spends $300 less winds up with a device with better specs or hardware. How did that happen?
ETA: I don’t add that last paragraph to be a part of the policy argument we’re having. I’m just curious.
This blogger lists several ways that lower-capacity magazines could lower fatalities at mass shootings:
She has an iPad, I have an Acer Android-based tablet. Your statement about prices indicates a faith in market efficiency that I find astonishingly strong, particularly in view of the more-or-less consensus that Apple overcharges for its products, and people buy them for the cachet of the design or some other intangible reason.
People will pay for intangibles. That doesn’t make the people irrational; people have different values. That’s why markets work in the first place.
Okay, so you guys bought entirely different tablets. I’m not sure I’d agree that an Acer is better than an Ipad, but of course that depends partly on which Acer versus which Ipad, and also on what you want to do with them.
Anyway, thanks for explaining that.
I will concede, by the way, that there are features on that ‘assault weapon’ description that could in some relatively minor ways make the gun more useful to a mass murderer. The same features generally provide a larger benefit to the law-abiding user of the gun, at least on a population basis, and the concept of ‘assault weapon’ as some uniquely terrible weapon that can be rationally delineated from other, presumably ‘good’ weapons, continues to be absurdly stupid – but you are right that at least some of these things would be handy for killers.
My Acer is way better than any stinky iPad. Apple sucks. ;)
Thanks for that concession, I appreciate it.
Was anyone saying this back when “assault rifle” was a term that was used almost exclusively by the gun industry and gun owners?
Anyhow, the idea isn’t that assault rifles are “uniquely terrible” weapons, just that they are marginally more destructive weapons.
I personally suspect that it’s also an attempt to give the GOP something relatively unimportant that they can “win” on – blocking the assault weapons ban – therefore making it easier for at least a minority of GOP legislators to swallow the more significant items (ban on high-capacity clips, and I’m using the word “clip” specifically to annoy you, Ron :-p , and ending the so-called gun show loophole).
Well, I don’t want to comment on that. You know me – I don’t like commenting on religious disputes. :-p
I didn’t say ‘assault rifle’. Assault rifle is indeed a term of art in the military; it means a rifle firing a certain size of bullet from a detachable magazine, with fire selection between automatic, semi-automatic, and burst modes. Assault rifles have been mostly illegal in civilian hands for almost a century. (A few collectors still have old ones; they are essentially never used in crimes. The last use of an assault rifle in a crime that I’m aware of was in the 1980s, when a cop-gone-bad used a police-issued rifle to do some killings.)
I said “assault weapon”. You may sincerely think the terms are interchangeable; they are not. One of them has a coherent meaning and the other requires illustrated posters to sort-of-define it. Your side of the argument would like to use the one with the coherent meaning, but basically can’t, because those guns are not in civilian hands any longer and haven’t been for longer than any of us have been alive.
And no, the gun folks never talked about ‘assault weapons’ until the banners started hitting that particular drumbeat.
“You know me – I don’t like commenting on religious disputes. :-p”
That means you’ll end up burning in computer agnostic hell, where you have to reinstall a cross-platform third-party implementation of Flash every day and write your own video device drivers to get rudimentary functionality from your home-built, home-brewed, non-standardized display devices.
The only game is Nethack, and it segmentation faults whenever any of 17 common game events occur.
Sorry I mixed up the terms. That said, your side is obsessed with scoring “you used the wrong term” points (hence the newfound contempt for the term “clip” we’ve seen so much of recently); I guess that relying on wordplay becomes attractive when your actual arguments are so lacking in substance.
I’ve already linked you to the proposed legal definition of “assault weapon,” which is perfectly coherent.
Of course, to some extent, all legal boundaries are arbitrary; you could claim that speed limits are incoherent (it’s not like there’s an objective reason that 59 miles an hour should be legal but 60mph should not). Having a speed limit is rational, even if the particular line drawn is necessarily arbitrary in the sense that it also could have been drawn somewhere else.
Having limits on what guns are available to the general public, and also having strong background checking before guns are purchased, makes sense. But nothing in the debate makes me think that gun advocates agree with that principle and are just trying to make sure that the exact line drawn, is drawn in the most sensible and practical place. Rather, my sense is that the goal of the NRA, and their fellow-travelers, is to make sure that guns are entirely unregulated, and failing that, to make sure that any regulations passed are as toothless and ineffective as possible.
Regarding your claim that less guns = more burgles, I think it’s a plausible story, but not one that the most reliable evidence seems to uphold.
There have been a lot of peer-reviewed studies comparing different US states, and as I understand it, the majority have found no significant connection in either direction between non-homicide crimes and guns, a significant but not enormous correlation between guns and criminal gun deaths, and a stronger correlation between more guns and the number of successful suicides.
On the other hand, there is the UK/USA comparison you brought up. But I don’t think the UK and the USA are alike apart from the differences in gun culture, so I don’t see how you can claim that it’s the guns – rather than hundreds of other differences – causing the difference in burglary rates. (True, no two states are alike, but they’re a heck of a lot more similar than the US and the UK are). Furthermore, state-by-state comparisons provide many more points of comparison than a US-vs-UK comparison.
“But nothing in the debate makes me think that gun advocates agree with that principle and are just trying to make sure that the exact line drawn, is drawn in the most sensible and practical place. Rather, my sense is that the goal of the NRA, and their fellow-travelers, is to make sure that guns are entirely unregulated, and failing that, to make sure that any regulations passed are as toothless and ineffective as possible.”
Once my NRA minions succeed in overcoming Congressional resistance and enact our Universal Gun Deregulation Agenda, I will have orbital Gauss cannons at my disposal, and I’ll make you sorry you said that.
Here’s the problem with your belief re: the NRA:
Why haven’t we done that, then?
You write as though for decades the US has been in the grip of the fanatically antigun inner core of the Green Party, with a thick hedge of regulation created by the Elder Gods surviving despite the ongoing massive partisan NRA offensive against it owing only to the huge majority, both politically and demographically, the antigunners have maintained for all those years.
Except that this is the exact opposite of the truth. Though the right-wing conspiracy fanatics are hypersensitive to every possible infringement of gun rights by liberal-minded politicians, in fact for the majority of our history the NRA and its ilk have maintained solid, when it was not absolutely crushing, majoritarian status in Congress, in the state legislatures, in the sheriff’s offices. Not on every issue, certainly, and not in every last venue – but in terms of gun rights and gun laws, it has been florid-cheeked Republican fat cats writing the rules while hollow-eyed Democratic sex criminals have mourned from the sidelines. Places like DC with its total handgun ban, and Chicago with its insanely tight gun control regimen, are far outliers, not the norm.
But if the goal of these noble reactionary swine was to make sure guns are unregulated, then why do we have so many darn regulations about guns? Since the Sullivan Act in 1935, the murder-porn-coolest and most effective weapons, automatic weapons, have been illegal. Legislatures in just about every state have passed regulations seeking to keep guns out of the hands of convicted felons. States have rules and regulations concerning where you can have a gun and how you can carry it.
The NRA itself, by the way, lobbied FOR the Sullivan Act and FOR the 1968 Gun Control Act. The organization has changed its mind on some provisions of those laws but not their essential core, which created federal licensing for gun dealers and greatly diminished the scope of the interstate arms trade (which used to be huge). The organization currently lobbies for increasing sentencing for gun-related crimes, tightening the restrictions on felons and loonies, and strengthening gun-related wildlife management programs.
You’re right that they are against more regulation, in that they think that nearly every regulation proposed by you and your ilk is either misguided or a subterfuge intended to be a backdoor gun ban. But thinking “Barry’s communist ideas about disarming America are idiotic” is not the same thing as wanting a total deregulation; the NRA is not a libertarian institution by a long shot. A look at its public advocacy confirms that; they are strong-state conservative-minded (though not always conservative-principled, there are plenty of liberals) people who want a hierarchy of governmental control that keeps a watchful eye on armaments.
They just also want armaments to be broadly legal, and available to the American people.
They’ve been around for more than 150 years. They aren’t a guerrilla rag-tag; they’re the (practically Colonial-era) establishment. If they wanted what you say they want, I’d think they’d have managed to get it done by now.