Is America the world's murder capitol?

Naw. We're just number 100 from the least murderous. Dozens of countries are worse.

The FBI crime report for 2011 (the most recent available) shows that:

In 2011, the overall murder rate for America was 4.7 per 100,000 inhabitants, a 1.5% decrease when
compared with the rate for the previous year.

Rate in "total cities"                                        5.5
Rate in "metropolitan statistical areas"           4.9
Rate in "Cities outside metropolitan areas"    4.4
Rate in "Nonmetropolitan Counties"              3.2
Rate in cities with a population of 250,000 to 499,999:           11.7 (the highest)
Rate in suburban areas & in cities with under 10K population: 2.9 (the lowest) (lower than in rural areas)

67% with firearms

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2011/crime-in-the-u.s.-2011/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement/offenses-known-to-law-enforcement

Now let's compare the lowest rate--2.9 per 100,000 in the 'burbs--with that of other countries:

American suburbs come out the same as Libya and worse than 79 other countries.

Our suburban murder rate is:
--about three times the murder rate of the Western European countries, Australia and New Zealand.
--15 times the murder rate of Hong Kong.
--7 times the rate of Japan.
--3.6 times the rate of Germany and Spain.

The differential is roughly comparable to the number of American homicides committed with guns.

Of course all this is unfair. Most other countries have cities, suburbs, and countryside as well--especially the rich countries.

So let's compare the murder rates by country. Our rate--using 2010 figures like Wikipedia does--puts us as more murderous than 100 other countries. Our neighbors-in-murder-rate include Thailand, Cuba, and Belarus. Russia is twice as bad. South Africa is 6.6 times worse. The most murderous country on Earth, Honduras, is 19 times worse than us.

On the other hand, countries safer than us include all other rich countries plus even countries like India, Turkey, Chile, Taiwan, and China.

And America is six times more murderous than rich countries like Germany and Spain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate

Biden said women should use shotguns for home defense--was this stupid?

The gun crowd had a big laugh about Joe Biden's advice for women to use shotguns for home defense.

The gun crowd mocked Biden, talked about how stupid he is about guns, and posted YouTube videos showing women being knocked on their butts when they try to fire their boyfriends' shotguns.

But anyone who knows anything about shotguns knows that the average woman can find a shotgun she can handle, and adjust it to fit her dimensions and strength. Which makes the statements of these gun nuts both sexist and ignorant about guns, which they claim to be experts about..

Or maybe they actually know better but figure you don't, so they can get away with lying to the rest of us.

True, most women can't handle a standard 12 gauge shotgun. So what? Who said all shotguns are 12 gauge models sized for men? Biden didn't.

The problem for most women is that most shotguns are designed for men's dimensions and strength. But a 20 gauge shotgun has less recoil while still having plenty of stopping power for home defense. A semiautomatic shotgun has less recoil for whatever gauge it is, because part of the gas expansion got to reloading the next shell instead of recoil--and it enables the user to get off more shots quickly.

There are also lower-power loads for shells, and even smaller-gauge shotguns-- 28 gauge and even .410s. Those have less stopping power, but most crooks are not going to be standing there evaluating the stopping power of a given shotgun. Most will be hightailing it out of there once they find themselves staring down the big barrel of a shotgun.

As for dimensions, you adjust the gun's cast, pitch, length of pull, drop at the comb, and drop at heel, to make it fit the different dimensions of most women.

For more information about women shooting with shotguns, read the article "Women and shotguns" in that noted Commyewnist online publication Shotgunlife.com:

Bottom line for people who aren't gun owners: don't trust ANYTHING the gun nut crowd says about guns. I've found that they don't hesitate to lie to non-gun owners about firearms.

Update on the marathon bomber(s)

Turns out I was right about who the bomber(s) were--not American leftists or rightists.

As I write this one of the perps is dead, the other being hunted. I hope we capture the second one alive so we can better understand how an apparently normal, rather secular immigrant becomes radicalized and murderous.

And then try, convict and execute him. Wanting to understand the enemy does not correlate with being soft on crime. It has to do with not being stupid on crime.

What's worth saying about the Boston Marathon bombing at this point?

Nobody but the bomber(s) knows who did this, at this point. Still, we know some things.

First, the bomber intended to kill and maim as many people as possible--and a pretty random assortment of people at that, since this wasn't a political event. That doesn't guarantee that this was a terrorist event, but it makes it more likely.

It doesn't guarantee that this was a terrorist event because it's at least possible that the bomber was simply a lone psychopath who wanted revenge for a lifetime of rejection and frustration. As the Newtown shooter showed, just because someone is a psychopath doesn't mean they're stupid, or that they can't plan out something carefully over a period of time.

It also shows that the bomber isn't suicidal--or he'd have shown up with an AR-15 and started shooting until he got shot or got cornered and shot himself. This bomber doesn't want to get caught. Which almost certainly means he plans to do this again.

But the absence of some kind of communiqué implies a diffuse motive. Acts of terrorism designed to change government policy are rarely self-evident as to the policy changes the bomber wants, unless the intended target makes it obvious.

Thus a bombing of Exxon's headquarters or an abortion clinic or a federal IRS office are all pretty self-explanatory. But unless the bomber has it in for marathon runners and their supporters, the Boston event isn't one of these. In Iraq, bombings have often been designed to undermine people's belief that the government can protect them. But it would take a lot more bombings by this bomber to even start to convey that idea.

The bomber is probably a lone individual. The bombs used were neither highly sophisticated nor primitive--somewhere in between. The bomb recipe used it easily available online, and a moderately technically competent individual could build one. And if the bombs could have been placed higher up (they were placed on the ground), more people would have been killed rather than just having their legs maimed or blown off. If a group had been planning this and carrying it out, I suspect they'd have been able to kill a lot more people just from better logistics and placement. Likewise the second bomb went off too soon compared to the first one--a bit later and it would have hit more emergency personnel, impeding efforts to save the victims of the first blast more than having it go off just a few seconds after the first one.

These indicate a lack of professionalism in this attack, perverse as it is to use such a word in connection to with terrorist attacks.

If this was political terrorism--or psycho terrorism with a political angle--it seems more likely to be Islamofascist rather than American Left wing or Right wing. American Leftists are far more likely to attack banks, corporations, and other obvious targets of left wing ire. Right wingers are far more likely to attack social targets like abortion clinics or government targets if they're right wing militia nuts--the kind who regard the federal government as a foreign occupying force.

I don't see how a marathon finish line scene would be a logical target for American leftists or rightists. However, it would make a fine target for jihadis who have declared war against all Americans, and who don't regard innocent civilians as acceptable collateral damage, but instead regard them as the actual targets.

However, after the Oklahoma bombing my first thought was jihadis, and of course that was wrong. After the Atlanta bombing law enforcement authorities ruined the life of a security guard who was actually a hero in the event, in their efforts to offer up a perp to the public.

It took a long time to find the actual perpetrator, who very much didn't want to be found. Ditto the Unabomber. So nobody should be surprised if the current case takes a long time--even in this age of ubiquitous cellphones with cameras and security cameras.

And when we do, don't be surprised if it turns out the bomber is technically sane. Studies of suicide bombers captured before they could complete their missions revealed that they were quite sane. Just in the grip of an ideology.

After all, it's sane for an individual to sacrifice himself for his family, his tribe, his nation. Every year our military hands out posthumous medals for such people. If you watched the "martyr videos" of the London subway bombers, it was obvious that they were sane. Just ideologues who had come to believe that only by such extreme measures could they protect their people, as they saw the situation.

So when people call this bombing "senseless" I think that's off the mark. Nobody just sits in a room and says to himself "Let's see. I could watch a Gilligan's Island rerun or build a bomb. I'll flip a coin." And later, nobody says to themselves "Shall I set off this bomb in a cornfield or in a bank or at the finish line of the Boston Marathon. I'll flip a couple of coins."

Being able to see your enemy's viewpoint enables you to oppose him far more effectively. Refusing to think that your enemy has a viewpoint, or that the viewpoint is "pure evil"--a common right wing fallacy--just makes the job harder.

Nor does trying to understand a mortal enemy mean going soft on the perp when you catch him. I support the death penalty for such people--Colonel Hassan for example--as long as there isn't the slightest doubt as to his guilt, as is the case with Hassan.

What should determine a congressman's vote? The will of the people?

Congressmen serve at least half a dozen masters: (1) the individuals who bankroll their campaigns; (2) the party they belong to, which can determine whether they get primaried or not, and which may demand that they sacrifice the interests of their constituents in some instances for overall Party demands; (3) the welfare of the voters in their district, (5) the wishes of the voters in their district, and (6) the congressman's personal principles. 
 
And what determines the wishes of voters in a congressman's district? What if they've been the target of a clever, lavishly funded propaganda campaign by special interests who exploit those voters' fears and prejudices? 
 
In Nazi Germany, I'm sure a majority of voters believed everything bad was all the fault of the Jews. Here, today, for example, a majority of Republican voters still believe that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. They didn't just think that up. They were victimize by Republican demagoguery. 
 
And today a majority of American voters don't accept the fact that we're in the midst of dangerous global climate changes caused by human activity. They don't accept this because Exxon and the Koch brothers and other major petrochemical firms have spent a huge amount of money (from a non-billionaire viewpoint) in getting people to believe that. 
 
It isn't in their best interests to believe that. And their Congressman has a moral obligation to help convince them otherwise and to vote himself accordingly.  
 
With guns, here again a small group of immensely wealthy men involved in gun manufacturing and sales have spent a whole lotta money propagandizing people about guns, leading them to believe all sorts of patent falsehoods about guns and gun violence.  
 
A Congressman will feel immense pressure to cave in to the wishes of his patrons and his propagandized, badly misled voters. To think it's moral for him to cave in to this is, well, anything but moral.

The NRA disrespects the 2nd Amendment. That's right. Disrespects it.

It's a pity the gun maker's lobby--misleadingly calling itself the NRA--and the one third of its live members (as opposed to the million dead ones they keep on the rolls to make it look larger than it is)--have no respect for the 2nd Amendment, which was interpreted by the Supreme Court's current right wing majority as conferring a right to bear arms for individuals and a right to regulate those arms by governments. That second part is clearly stated in the first half of the 2nd Amendment.

Thus according to Heller the federal government can require the national registration of all firearms, require universal background checks, make straw man purchases a felony, ban unusual and dangerous firearms such as assault weapons, RPGs, flame throwers and machine guns, and more.

Rejecting half of the 2nd Amendment is worse than rejecting all of it, because it couples rights with responsibilities. Rights without responsibilities leads to chaos, just as responsibilities without rights leads to tyranny.

Thus the NRA and its shills are acting like spoiled five year old boys who want all the rights of grown-ups but none of the responsibilities of grown-ups.

They should show some respect for our Constitution. Their disrespect for it is downright unpatriotic. They call themselves conservatives when in fact they're anarchists.

Can you serve two masters? When it comes to gun control, Republican pols are having trouble doing so. Hence the filibuster.

Until we get public financing of elections, every politician must serve two kinds of master: voters and patrons.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the gun regulation debate. Especially with universal gun registration, supported by over 90% of voters and even over 2/3 of NRA rank and file members--but opposed by the gun makers, major patrons and congressional job-killers of those who bring down their wrath.

The solution? Prevent a vote. That way the general voting public won't notice that your first loyalty is to your patrons, not your voters. Heck, most Republican districts are so radically gerrymandered you can't lose to a Democrat anyway. So what even Republican voters want doesn't matter all that much.

And of course when one side is being promoted by a multibillion dollar industry and the other by a few grieving parents and a few politicians with a conscience, voters are more apt to hear the blaring bullhorn than a few teary pleas.

In addition, from time immemorial the rich and powerful have always had a core of shock troops--their bully boys--to go out and defend their interests. In Tehran it's the thug militias who go out and club and shoot protesters against the mullahs. Here it's more peaceful but still has that flavor: that is, the million or so gun nuts--not to be confused with most gun owners--the gun nuts who believe they have a right to own military ordnance without the government knowing they do and without any meaningful protections from crooks and psychos having almost equally free access to firearms of all types.

It's an unequal fight. The one positive sign is the growing disenchantment of Republican voters watching even their opinions being flouted flagrantly by the people they voted into office. 

...and a few Republican senators who are manning up and denouncing the threatened filibuster, including John McCain.

The Right Wing Media swoons over just-dead Margaret Thatcher--a European Socialist

The RWM (Right Wing Media, from Rush Limbaugh to Instapundit to Drudge to PowerMax) all unite in their adoration for Britain's Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who died yesterday.

Yet if she had been American and had run for the presidency here, today's Republican Party would have condemned her as a "European-style socialist."

Huh? you say--here's the Prime Minister who famously privatized whole industries, who was notoriously indifferent to the welfare of all the working-class people her policies kicked to the curb. She was, after all, a grocer's daughter who fought her way to the top by being tougher than anyone else.

But even someone as conservative as she was realized that for-profit medicine is a ridiculous idea. She always stoutly supported Britain's socialized medical system. Which was, in fact, socialized medicine. I have to point this out because our RWM has redefined "socialist" as "any form of government regulation, no matter how lightweight."

And the income tax rates she promoted were far, far more progressive than those of Barack Obama.

Moreover, she wasn't much of a social conservative. Once a working scientist with a degree in chemistry, she believed in evolution as all real scientists do. At a time when homosexuality was a crime in Britain she voted to legalize it. And, worst of all (from an American right wing point of view), she supported legalized abortion. So the GOP's Christianist base would have loathed her.

There isn't the slightest chance of her being able to get support from today's Republican Party for running for any public office in America, much less the presidency.

The Right Wing Media's lionization of Margaret Thatcher only proves once more that they have no respect for the truth or for history, promptly rewriting and revising both as it suits them.

So when your conservative relatives and workmates stand around lauding the Iron Lady in coming days, point out these matters of record and watch them squirm.

Republicans want death clerks getting between you and your doctor

Seems like every month or so the House GOP majority passes another bill repealing the Affordable Care Act--dozens of times at this point.

The fig leaf of replacing it with anything but the pre-Affordable Care Act status quo was dropped long ago. Now the GOP is all about going back to the Good Old Days.

Well, the Good Old Days featured your health insurance provider being able to cancel your health insurance whenever you turn out to really need it, as decided by some anonymous clerk. The healthcare providers have whole departments who job is to find an excuse to cancel your healthcare insurance the moment it becomes unprofitable for them.

Better yet, once they find that excuse, they also go back and sue you for any benefits you've gotten in the past.

I call those clerks "Death Clerks."

Try calling them that next time you get into it with your hard-right Uncle Harry or your Libertarian co-worker.

The irony is that one reason for Americans paying vastly more for their healthcare with poorer results than any other rich country is around 3/4 trillion dollars each year spent on unnecessary procedurs. The Affordable Care Act provides for looking into this source of waste and fraud--and the Republicans are dead set against it.

The Republicans LOVE waste and fraud, as long as it benefits rich people. They only want to throw the book at middle class and poor people who waste taxpayer money. It's the middle class and below who get these useless procedures--many of which have their own dangers, in fact--but it's the rich who profit from them.

Those are the "death panels" the GOP thundered against. Meanwhile they love the actual Death Clerks who routinely sentenced people to death in the name of healthcare insurance provider profits.

Poison oak and gun control

The NRA says the solution to gun violence is more guns.

America has more guns per capita than any other country,

Therefore America is the safest country on Earth.

Only it's the most dangerous rich country on Earth--by FAR.

Hmm. A paradox.

To we simple minded folk, it seems like telling someone covered with poison oak to scratch it to relieve the itching.
Of course then it iches even more. So you just scratch it even more....and more...and more...

What isn't a paradox is that you can trust the NRA's proposals to ALWAYS involve making and selling more guns. 

The problem you face talking to Uncle Harry the gun nut

If you want to understand what happens when you try to reason with a gun rights zealot, you need to

remember that Gary Larson cartoon "What dogs hear."


It shows a man lecturing his dog about getting into the garbage. Of course all the dog recognizes is his name.
Similarly, in an argument with a gun nut (as opposed to a responsible gun owner), all your arguments sound like to him is "enemy tribesman speaking, therefore is all lies."

Then when he responds, mostly with stuff from the NRA's Fake Fact Factory, to you it sounds mostly like nonsense that anyone could refute with a few minutes' research of nonpartisan fact checking organizations such as factcheck.org and politifact.com.

But the gun guy would reject anything from those sites because it doesn't support his tribe--what we imagine to be the Republican Party, but now reconstituted as a primitive tribe--100% of the time.

The fact that the fact checkers challenge liberals daily for their own exaggerations and misrepresentations means nothing to Republican tribesmen, because everyone and everything is either friend or enemy, and anyone and anything that isn't 100% friend is 100% enemy.

And they don't actually know how to think. They were raised to take in ideas worshipfully, in church. They really have no idea what analytic thinking is. It just looks like defective worshipful thinking to them.

Add to this the fact that they usually know a lot more about guns and how they operate than liberals do. They use their superior knowledge of guns as further proof that no one who doesn't agree with them has anything useful to contribute, and that they're speaking ignorantly.

So you won't even get a foot in the door, metaphorically speaking, unless you educate yourself about guns. It doesn't take long--it ain't rocket science,  folks. And it's worth it just for the confused look they get on their faces when you show you see through their malarkey (they frequently lie about guns to liberals, figuring that they can get away with it).

Gun makers propaganda

A few weeks ago former GOP presidential candidates Huckabee's radio show propagated gun maker propaganda right and left.

Actually, just "right."

He interviewed the head of Gun Owners of America, which is to the right of the NRA, if you can imagine that.

Huckabee positions himself as the reasonable right winger, but all he's talking about is his tone of voice, which is reasonable-sounding in a preacherly sorta way. However, the words being said in a reasonable tone are pretty much the same as on the shows by the screamers who led to right wing radio being called Hate Radio.

In this interview--in which, of course, all his questions were softballs--he and the GOA prez agreed, chuckling, that Joe Biden was an idiot on the subject of guns. They mocked his saying you should have a shotgun for self defense instead of an assault weapon, maintained that "assault weapons" were really "defense weapons" and described a video on the GOA website that showed small women being knocked over shooting shotguns while another small woman was firing an AR-15 easily, shot after shot. The two pals also concurred that the 1994 assault rifle ban had failed, that universal background checks were a bad idea because they led straight to gun registration which was unconstitutional, and the cops were useless because they couldn't get to your home fast enough, and most homicides were committed with handguns, not rifles, and on an on, lie after lie after bald-faced lie. Baldfaced because with many of these points Huckabee as a veteran gun owner/hunter knew better. Lie because even when what they said was nominally true, it was by cherrypicking the data and making points out of context.

Huckabee bragged about what a gun guy he was, finishing up by saying how sore his shoulder was after a day of duck hunting with a shotgun.

Well I'm sure that a woman wielding a shotgun would have a sore shoulder after a day of defending her home against a horde of zombies attacking. And she'd be knocked over by the blast of a shotgun IF she'd received zero training in firearms. And of course the GOA video showed--as they admitted, laughing--that the women being knocked over had gotten zero training in handling a shotgun. While the woman firing the AR-15 was a trained gun users.

And they didn't mention that the smaller AR-15 round--the .223--is a mankiller round with tremendous muzzle velocity and a bullet designed to wobble destructively as it enters a human body at short to medium range. That's what makes it such an effective assault weapon and such an ineffective sniper weapon.

But it's not so good for home defense because it needs to be aimed more precisely than a shotgun,

Something to say to your uncle Harry the gun nut...

If you're a gun owner and want to address this topic, do your side a favor and address the actual laws being considered now in Congress.  
 
So don't rant about how you have a constitutional right to bear firearms. You do. OK? Now the issue is what firearms under what circumstances, and what do we do about the issues of bad guys getting their hands on guns. 
 
For example, don't you think it's reasonable to have a federal law making it a felony to sell or give a firearm to someone who would fail a background check because he's a felon or a psycho and has been officially judged not to qualify for firearm ownership? 
 
After all, it's becoming clear that the average thug with a gun got it from a "straw man" buyer or one of a minority of gun shops that sell guns by the truckload to criminal syndicates and then "lose" the paperwork. 
 
Seems to be that the best way to maintain the right of good guys to bear arms is to try much harder to disarm those who have no such right. And the states, by themselves, haven't been able to do it. Modern transportation makes it all to easy to buy a gun in Virginia and take it to D.C. 
 
Bottom line: it would allay the fears of the majority of Americans who don't own guns if gun owners would start publicly stating that they agree that the Second Amendment does not confer a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose. And that they agree that the Second Amendment supports laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. And that the government can and should ban the sale to civilians of particularly dangerous and unusual weapons. 

Put nuts in nuthouses

It's true that our former treatment of crazy people--or of people who weren't, but whose relatives wanted their money--was often abominable.

But we've leapt from the frying pan into the fire. People who are full-bore psychotic can't be involuntarily committed for more than 72 hours. Crazy people prowl the streets of major cities and towns, harassing passersby and pooping in the bushes, and cost the taxpayers a fortune in ambulance and hospital fees from regular bouts of OD'ing on drugs/alcohol.

The fact of one extreme (our former treatment of crazy people) does not justify the other extreme (protecting their "rights" at both their and our expense). There is such a thing as the public good. Neither the public nor the crazy people are being served by the current system. One trait most crazy people share is that they don't believe they're crazy. So they won't commit themselves, they won't take their meds...but their craziness does not preclude some of them from plotting and then executing a massacre.

So you can't recide a litany of the abuses of the Bad old Days to justify the Bad New Days. Propose something that guards against the excesses of the past while removing the gaping failings of the present.

Currently society does NOT protect crazy people from themselves, from their families--who often live in terror of a crazed adult son, with the cops telling them their hands are tied--and from society in general.

The shooters at Newtown, Aurora, and Virginia Tech were all psychos, and it was obvious to everyone around them. This isn't always true but it is more often than not (Charles Whitman was not obviously crazy, for example, and I'm not sure the Norwegian shooter showed his psychosis either).

Drugs don't work because they stop taking them even when they do work. That means crazy people should be insitutionalized. I believe we can do this fairly, adding safeguards that didn't exist in the Bad Old Days,

It anyone thinks they have a better way, suggest it. I haven't heard one yet.

Don't give up on gun control

Gun rights zealots believe they will always win--and that the rest of us will always lose. They have nothing but contempt and active dislike for anyone and everyone who advocates any form of gun ownership control, no matter how minor. If pressed, they claim their right to own any kind of gun they choose is based on the Constitution's 2nd Amendment having the purpose of enabling citizens to go into armed revolt against the government, using firearms comparable to those used by our military.Their message to gun control advocates is despair: "You are incompetent to talk about guns, your proposals are unconstitutional, and we OWN Congress (and every state legislature). Give up. We will always defeat you. And you deserve to be defeated, you contemptible worms."

They are that far out.

Equally far out is their defense of crazy people and criminals being able to get guns. Of course gun rights zealots say the exact opposite when they speak in generalities. But gun rights zealots are, as a group, self-centered and emotionally immature. So they see anything we could do to keep guns out of the hands of nuts and crooks only from the perspective of potential limitations to the zealots' rights to own guns--and to keep government agencies from knowing that the zealots have guns, and knowing which guns those are.

So they oppose changing the current federal privacy and mental health laws, which currently make it nearly impossible to institutionalize crazy people who don't think they're crazy--which is most of them. And they oppose universal gun registration, which would let us track straw buyers who are the source of most of the guns crooks possess.

Don't confuse gun rights zealots with gun owners in general, most of whom support at least some forms of gun control--especially universal background checks.

The only thing gun rights zealots support to deal with these all-too frequent massacres and gun homicides is more guns in more hands, which they say is the only way to more safety.

Of course every nation is an experiment in governance that other nations can study.America has more guns per capita with fewer controls than any other nation with comparable demographics. Comparisons prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our path--more guns, less regs--leads to four to eight times as many homicides (not just gun homicides) as comparable countries, and the more gun controls, the fewer homicides. It's that simple and that plain. The rate of violence is comparable to that of comparable counties--the difference with America is that here that violence is vastly more likely to result in death.

The gun makers know this, but they have proven repeatedly is that all they care about is profit. Their shills, who lead the NRA, tread a well-worn path after every massacre:

1. Loudly denounce gun control advocates who dare to use the massacre to try to get gun control legislation enacted--denounce them as exploiting the suffering of the victims and their families for political gain. Demand a period of weeks to "respect the victims" before launching any discussion about the massacre, which gives the NRA time to marshall its forces and lobby legislators.

2. Try to slow-walk such discussions--the more time that elapses between the massacre and the discussion, the more time the NRA has to prevent--or gut--any legislation that does ensue.

3. Loudly insist that the ONLY solution to gun violence is more guns in more hands. Claim that the expired assault weapons ban didn't work (a baldfaced lie--it did to a a degree, hampered by the gun lobby gutting the bill). Claim that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns (a baldfaced lie--other countries that restrict guns have their criminals using knives mostly). Claim that massacres happen everywhere (they do--but they do several times as often here, and more are killed in each massacre here on average).

4. Trot out anecdote after anecdote showing how having a gun protected someone. This works because most people are innumerate and thus don't understand statistics (along with most abstractions).

5. Send forth the gun control zealots to overwhelm every newspaper and blog forum that mentions gun control, after stirriing them up with wild accusations.

6. Constantly try to change the subject from gun regulation to gun confiscation, despite the fact that no politician in America talking about gun confiscation.

7. Constantly try to change the subject of gun control to the subject of violent mental illness. It's a valid subject but not instead of gun control--it should be as well as gun control

8. Deny that there's any such thing as an assault weapon--important since the bulk of gun maker profits come from selling assault weapons, despite the fact that they're marketed to gun buyers as assault weapons, using military commando mission atmospherics.

9. Depend on the fact that the million-odd gun rights zealots wake up each morning thinking about guns, and typically associate gun possession with virility, so this group will ceaseless promote their position, while most people only think about guns for a few days or weeks after each massacre.

10. Continue to lobby to suppress any attempt to study gun violence by government agencies (a sucessful effort for decades).

11, Continually talk about video games and violent movies as the cause of massacres, ignoring the literally millions of young men who play such games and see such movies all the time and never commit acts of physical violence, also ignoring the difference between "shooting" cartoon people with a computer mouse vs. shooting human-shaped targets with real bullets fired from a real gun on a real target range.

12. Continually frame the debate as one between patriotic Americans and people advocating foreign ideas that violate the Constitution (talk about Constitution constatnly), bordering on treason. Use inflamed and inflammatory rhetoric, including denouncing the President for having Secret Service protection for his children when he doesn't want that for yours.

13. Try to wear down the other side on every front. Constantly belittle  gun control advocates for being ignorant about firearms and gun violence research (ironic since the NRA has prevented the government from studying gun violence).

Gun rights zealots typically know a lot more about firearms than gun control advocates. I'm not as ignorant about firearms as most gun control advocates, but even so I've found myself having to do hours of research to get up to speed enough to really debate with these guys.

And once I was up to speed I found that gun rights zealots--and the NRA--habitually and knowingly lie to the rest of us in order to advance their desire to own firearms of any type they like without impediments. I only discovered this after I'd done my homework. It was not obvious at first. This was especially interestting because gun rights zealots represent themselves as the most moral, patriotic, upstanding citizens. But in my experience they routinely practice taqiyya (an Arab term "honorable lying to Infidels") with those outside the gun community. If the NRA asserts something, you can safely assume it's a baldfaced lie unless proven otherwise.

For example, NRA membership claims include tens of thousands of members who are no longer alive, along with members whose membership was a freebie including with a gun purchase or gun show admission. It includes a million or so gun rights zealots along with three million or so gun owners whose views differ strikingly from those advocated by the zealots and the NRA leadership.

So when you debate with gun rights zealots, take note of the claims they make, and when you find out they're lying, and exactly how, consider the likelihood that they knew they were lying when they said that to you--and let them know, calmly but inexorably.

That is, use the techniques my spouse used to use when she worked as a collecor for a computer peripherals manufacturer. She never got mad but she never let people off the hook--and she took note of every promise they made, and used that in subsequent conversations, so as to draw the noose progressively tighter and tighter. And of course she never called them liars. She just pointed out what they said, what was factual, and asked them to account for the disparity.

That's the twofer. Never get mad--never relent.

It looks as though the gun makers and their eager shills will mostly win the current fight going on in Congress. But remember how many fights homosexual rights advocates lost before they started winning. Most political victories stand on the shoulders of innumerable losses.

And this is important.

Hope clouds observation--for the Right and Left alike

Man-caused global warming, if acknowledged fully, would severely crimp the short-term profits of many very large corporations--along with the lifestyle of the average American.

So it doesn't exist. Not for those corporations and right-wing Americans at least.

Evolution, if acknowledged fully, would mean that important scriptural works like the Bible and the Q'uran must be taken figuratively, not literally.

So it doesn't exist--not for fundamentalists at least. And that's a majority of Americans.

The overpopulation crisis, if acknowledged fully, would lead to all nations adopting China's One Child policy, providing every form of birth control to everyone with no questions asked--including abortion--as well as leading to a poorer lifestyle for everyone in graying rich country populations, as well as leading to a disproportionate need to reduce nonwhite populations on the whole, for exigent reasons. 

So it doesn't exist--not for doctrinaire right wingers, due to the abortion aspect and the lifestyle crimp aspect--and not for doctrinaire left wingers, due to the nonwhite aspect leaving one open to accusations of racism.

President Obama's intelligence and discipline have been obvious and repeatedly demonstrated for decades. But he's a black man. And black men are not intelligent--not if you're an angry old white man of the Southern persuasion.

So the President's intelligence doesn't exist. Remember all the right wing japes about him only being clever when he had a teleprompter? Not to mention all the other nonsense they've said about his smarts. 

Race makes racism possible. But racism is wrong. So race doesn't exist. At least not if you're a doctrinaire leftist. 

I was thinking about that last one yesterday when the NY Times published a longish essay by a philosophy professor about how race is a "social construct" yada yada.

Hundreds comments mostly agreed with the good professor, blathering endlessly about how there's no such thing as race.

Here's my comment, which you can see in the thread near the end:

The Republican Party's hostility to both science and scientific thought is so blatant and widespread that's it's easy to overlook the ways in which doctrinaire Leftists show the same character defect.

What I glean from this article and most of the comments is how easy it is to get a Liberal Arts college degree without learning even the rudiments of science. Instead we see smug academic parochialism.

Race is a feature of every kind of living organism, not just people. It's the first step towards speciation--the way in which evolution leads to a different species, genus, family, order, class, and even phylum. The human species started out as a race of proto-hominid that evolved into a separate species--ours--which then spread out and started to subdivide, in the same way that other species of organisms do--through geographical and/or ecological isolation, with differing evolutionary pressures on each isolated gene pool. 

Only two kinds of people deny that human beings are living creatures that evolved like other living creatures: religious fundamentalists and liberals--strange bedfellows indeed.

You can't deny that there are human races unless you also deny that there are different races of, say, corn, or cats, or malaria. Yet no one in this thread has talked about our species in the context of the rest of Earth's biosphere.

A Liberal Arts BA needs to include far better grounding in science and critical thinking in general.

--------------------

I added some details about just what "race" means scientifically as a response to another comment in the thread:

 The evolution of one species of living organism into two or more starts with gene pools of that species becoming geographically and/or ecologically isolated (eating different kinds of foods, for example), leading to that species developing into different races, as any introductory biology course would teach.

Thus Orientals and Caucasians differentiated from common stock in western Asia roughly 50,000 years ago, when the former moved east and the latter, west. Orientals had to evolve adaptations to the harsh winters of the central Asian steppes, including the epicanthic fold, while Caucasians had to evolve lighter skin so they could still synthesize Vitamin D under the cloudy skies of western Europe.

Racial differentiation usually continues to the point where individuals from the isolated groups can no longer produce fertile offspring when they try to interbreed. This process is called speciation.

For example, horses and donkeys--different species of the same genus--can reproduce but the offspring (mules/hinnies) are not fertile. In time, in the natural environment, their descendants would no longer be able to produce any offspring at all--as is now the case with their more distant cousins the tapirs and rhinoceroses.

How anyone with a college education might imagine that homo sapiens is exempt from these evolutionary processes, to which all other living organisms are subject, is beyond me.

Drones: war criminals or winged justice?

The problem with drones is that using them to kill people not on the battlefield per se doesn't fit neatly into our existing categories of "war" and "police work."

This may seem like a new problem, but it isn't. It's a problem that reappears every time the rules of the game(s) change.

Take the American Revolution. The Brits thought we were war criminals because we didn't always meet them on the field of battle--where their highly disciplined Redcoats could make up for the slow firing pattern of the flintlock musket by arranging to have one row firing while the next row was reloading, and the like.

So instead our soldiers would sometimes not meet them on the "field of battle" where the Redcoats had an advantage, but instead stow snipers in the trees along the routes back to the barracks or tents or whatever, and shoot them in the back as they passed by.

And many Southerners thought General Sherman was a war criminal because he attacked the South's ability to feed & otherwise supply its troops--in the process put many Southern civilians in starvation conditions.

To which accusation Sherman famously replied "War is hell." In the judgment of history, Sherman did the nation a favor because he cut off the South's army at the knees, shortening the war. And thus he even did the South a favor.

And the recent effort to grant women the ability to serve in combat featured the argument that women were already serving in combat--just not getting credit or advancement for it--because what and where is the battlefield today?

The "battlefield" is everywhere and everywhen anyone or any group waging war on our country and its people is preparing to attack us or actually attacking us.

War is no longer just between nation-states. With the Islamofascist movement, our enemy can be anywhere, with no fixed capitol to defend, no land to defend, which, if lost, means the enemy is defeated. 9/11 was planned in Hamburg Germany operationally, and in Afghanistan strategically, and carried out by Saudis for the most part.

Now when that planning is taking place in another country that controls all its territory, has diplomatic relations with us, and is board with our efforts to combat terrorists, then police work is usually the best way to nab them. That was the case with Germany--less so with Saudi Arabia for what should be obvious reasons.

However, Afghanistan was another case. The Taliban controlling it were no friends of us but they were just hosting the Islamofascists who attacked us--who, when defeated, just moved their base of operations elsewhere.

Then what? Our enemies are operating in countries that are either completely hostile to us or which are not in control of the territories where our Islamofascist enemies are operating.

That leaves us with three choices, basically:
1. Invade, in force, countries that aren't at war with us but in whose territory groups at war with America are operating.
2. Concentrate solely on defensive measures within our own territory and rely on other countries' police forces within their territory.
3. Carry out military incursions by special forces, drones and the like.

There's one other option: withdraw completely from all territory that Islamofascists want us out of, and/or convert en masse to Salafist Islam. I won't comment on this option further.

The people who call drone-based assassinations "war crimes" divide between those on the Left, who obviously want Option 2, and those on the Right, who divide between NeoCons who want Option 1 and Isolationists (like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul) who seem to waffle between Options 2 & 3 (though for many their real position appear to be simply opposing anything Obama does, even if he's doing exactly what their guy was doing just a few years ago).

The flaw in Option 2 is that Pakistan's police force mostly hates our guts and will do nothing to help us--in fact they'll mostly help our enemies; Iran's police force is actively helping terrorists who want to attack us and our allies; Somalia's police force doesn't control a lot of Somalia, and ditto for Yemen, and ditto for the Texas-sized north of Mali, and so forth.

So in the case of the places where Islamofascists who have declared war on us are mostly headquartered and operating training camps, Option 2 restricts us to police work within our borders. I doubt many Americans find that acceptable.

Nor do many Americans support going to a full war footing, with a draft and rationing and the whole WWII thing, which is what it would take to invade all the wild places where our enemies are--Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Mali, Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq and more, simultaneously (since otherwise they'd just go where we aren't).

The notion that the Islamofascist declaration of war on America--on every single American citizen and every bit of our territory and assets--is exactly the same as a criminal gang planning a bank robbery--is ludicrous.

The problem isn't the drones, but the simple-mindedness of ideologists who think "war" still means what it meant during WWII (which it didn't even then, in fact). Not just simple-mindedness, but also the tendency of lawyers to think everything is a legal issue, as in "to a hammer, everything looks like a nail."

We are in a war not of our choosing, with an amorphous, shifting, many-headed enemy that is supported by a number of countries but is not those countries, and which can't be defeated via military invasion of any one or two or three or four of those countries.

It's a war of shadows. Our drones operate out of sight. Our special forces work in the night. They sometimes kill civilians because civilians are ALWAYS killed in wars--the wonder is that we kill so few civilians, and so many fewer civilians then if we were carpet-bombing the areas in question, and so many fewer than when we started out with drones some years ago.

Sometimes drone pilots will loiter over an enemy force for hours, waiting until they can get a clear shot with no civilians nearby. Many drones fly slowly and quietly at pretty high altitudes, with much longer dwell time airborne than manned craft can sustain.

And of course unlike the Islamofascist enemies, we don't target civilians as they do--and they murder vastly greater numbers of civilians that we do in drone strikes and special forces operations. But every time a drone strikes, the enemy publishes grisly photographs of dead babies on the Net, which they claim we killed instead of them. Sometimes--most times--they're lying, but Arab Joe Lunchboxes have zero training in critical thinking and mostly have been indoctrinated from birth to hate us.

So drones and special forces incursions in areas where police forces won't or can't collaborate with us are the least bad of our options.

Don't let anyone deny this without describing what they think we should do instead. I submit that most of what they propose is patently silly--and anachronistic as well.

Calling drone strikes "war crimes" is the same as the Revolutionary Era Brits calling us war criminals for shooting their soldiers--and those red and white uniforms were a great aid for targeting--from concealed positions by sharpshooters.

Nothing the folks whining about "war crimes" have to propose would even start to be effective, showing that they live in a world bounded by their limited imaginations.

The "war crime" would be our nation's government not acting to protect us--protect us from people who are not at war with our armed forces--they're at war with every single one of us.

Gun control advocates don't always stick to the high ground

At Connecticut state legislature hearings over the Newtown massacre, MSNBC presented--and the gun control world accepted--the proposal that gun nuts had been heckling a grieving father.

Wrong. MSNBC lied through editing the video--the grieving father had asked a rhetorical question during his testimony, demanding to know whether anyone could justify assault weapons being in private hands, then saying no one had an answer to his question--upon which several gun rights advocates in the crowd shouted out 2nd Amendment-type answers.

MSNBC edited out the relevant parts showing that the father had kind of set up the gun rights advocates by presenting what was obviously a rhetorical question, then acting as if he's asked a real question. And the MSNBC editors knew better.

Now at the same hearings a Sandy Hook father made an impassioned defense of gun rights that the RWM (Right Wing Media) ballyhooed. Then it turned out that more artful editing--this time from the other side--had concealed the fact that he wasn't a grieving father of a Sandy Hook Elementary murdered child at all--he was the father of a child who attended another school altogether.

This father hadn't pulled a fast one--he never claimed to be the father of a Sandy Hook victim--but the RWM did in promoting his gun rights rant as if he was.

We're never going to succeed in opposing the gun makers and their enthusiastic pawns if we stoop to their level. It gives them ammunition (so to speak) and lets them justify their own underhandedness.

When guns are registered, we'll know where outlaws' guns came from

The NRA now opposes even doing background checks on gun buyers--any gun buyers.

It gives a bunch of reasons for this, which you can see described here.

They boil down to hassle, slippery slope, and crooks won't bother.

The hassle argument is contemptible.

The slippery slope argument is, as are all slippery slope arguments, an attempt to argue against a different proposal than the one being proposed. It's like arguing against issuing parking tickets for parking in red zones because they could lead to the death penalty.

The "crooks won't bother" argument is a baldfaced lie. People with criminal records were stopped trying to buy guns from gun stores 1.7 million times in recent years--by background checks.

What the background checks don't stop is straw buyers, and even though that's illegal, you have to prove that the straw buyer knew the real buyer wasn't entitled--and that would require requiring a background check for every gun sale (including supposed "gifts").

Nearly every gun used in a crime was purchased legally originally. So we need to focus on the people who move a gun from the legal world to the illegal one--and nail them. Universal background checks are key to stopping the movement of guns from legal to illegal ownership.

And the NRA's opposition is yet another piece of evidence to the idea that the NRA represents the gun makers, not legitimate gun owners--and that the NRA works for gun maker profits without regard to whoever gets the guns.

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