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.

Google's blog hosting requires JavaScript

...so I couldn't use it during the period we were all supposed to disable JavaScript.

How gun maker propagandizing has shot up Wikipedia

I looked up "assault weapon" on Wikipedia and, as a Wikipedia editor, I made the following entry in the "talk about" page concerning this article. These "talk about" pages are where Wikipedia editors can hash out their differences.



: I concur with those who say that this edit reads as though it was written by the NRA on behalf of the gun manufacturers. I'm not surprised, because in my experience debating with NRA types online, I've found that they police discussions of firearms online vigilantly, and frequently use their knowledge of firearms to deceive people who are not as knowledgeable about small arms as they are. In this case, throughout the entry I see a consistent effort to delegitimize the term as being vague and misleading. However, what they're really doing is de-emphasizing important similarities between civilian assault weapons and their military cousins while at the same time over-emphasizing differences between civilian assault weapons like the AR-15 and military-issue assault weapons like the M-16 and AK-47. Their purpose is to head off the possibility of an assault weapons ban, as President Obama proposed today, in fact.

This starts with omitting the historical context, which explains why assault weapons exist, and what their various design elements mean as a gestalt. That would be included in a legitimate encyclopedia entry. Basically the iconic firearm of WWII was the M-1 Garand rifle, a gas-operated semiautomatic that takes an 8-round internal clip, not an external magazine, and fires a .30 cal. round. The rifle is accurate at long range and the round has considerable penetrating power--as through the metal door of a vehicle, for example. However, military science found that in combat soldiers tend not to use their weapon in the way that the M1 is optimized for. Soldiers needed what became the assault rifle, a much lighter weapon carrying a much lighter round, so they could carry a lot more ammo into combat, and so the rifle could be maneuvered more quickly than the older, more ponderous rifles like the M-1, and fired automatically or semi-automatically. However, they soon discovered that assault weapons ran out of ammo too quickly in full-auto mode and these lightweight guns also tended to jam and cook off rounds if used in full auto mode. Now small arts tactics dictate using them either in single shot mode or in 2-3 round bursts. The goal is to lay down suppressive fire on a charging enemy force at close enough distances so that the greater maneuverability of the weapon is vital.

Consequently the difference in being able to be fired automatically or just in single-shot mode is an inconsequential difference between the M-16 and the AR-15, especially since civilian assault weapons like the AR-15 can be fired with amazing rapidity (and poor aim) in "bump fire" mode, using the effect of the gas-operating mechanism on the trigger to fire nearly as rapidly as you could in full auto mode. In the Aurora shooting incident the shooter was timed at getting off 30 rounds in 27 seconds (heard via a 911 call made by one of the theater goers). The NRA is highly incentivized to claim that full-auto capability is the be-all and the end-all of the term "assault weapon" so they can avoid another assault weapons ban. It is highly likely that most profits of arms manufacturers come from sales of assault weapons. They've sold literally millions of these weapons at premium prices.

This has been paralleled in arms manufacturer marketing, which sold these weapons as assault weapons--emphasizing the "commando" context with ads showing the guns being used in what appear to be combat patrols--until very recently, when the marketing suddenly changed on the part of the manufacturers so they could pretend these guns were never sold as assault weapons.

What does make a significant difference from older-generation combat arms like the M-1 is the assault weapon's ability to accept extended magazines. In a number of spree killing incidents, people nearby were able to take down the shooter when he had to reload. Even if reloading only takes a few seconds, that was enough to stop the Arizona shooter in the Gabby Giffords incident, for example. Because weapons like the M-1 use an internal clip instead of an external magazine, it can only fire 8 rounds before needing to be reloaded, and can't be reloaded as quickly as an external magazine can be swapped out, and can't accept clips with more than 8 rounds. The Arizona shooter was able to do as much damage as he did because his Glock assault weapon--a pistol in this case--had a 30-round extended magazine, and he was able to prevent anyone from getting to him before he emptied that magazine.

Likewise the .223 round used by the AR-15 and the M-16 differs greatly from the .30 cal. round of the M-1 and the .22LR "plinker" round of standard lightweight hunting rifles. At the shorter ranges found in most spree killing incidents, and absent body armor on the intended victims, it's the ideal round for mass murder, with a "wobbly" bullet that achieves far more damage upon entry in a body than a standard .22LR round does--especially since it has three times the muzzle velocity of civilian rounds like the .22LR. Coupled with the light weight of the .223 round, it means that a spree killer can carry many more rounds and fire them much more quickly and have them inflict much more damage.

So a lightweight assault weapon shooting .223 rounds via extended magazines in semi-automatic mode with occasional bump firing is a very different weapon than a standard hunting rifle trying to do the same thing, even those that are semi-automatic. It's the mobility of the weapon, the ability to prevent people from grabbing the shooter due to the large capacity magazines, and the lethality of its munition coupled with the easy of carrying a large amount of ammo that makes assault weapons assault weapons.

NRA types poo-pooh the "atmospherics" of the assault weapon in the article--the way it looks. However, as I indicated earlier, the gun makers considered these atmospherics important marketing tools until the prospect of another assault weapons ban arose. And spree killers commonly see themselves as commandos on a mission, as the rants by the Virginia Tech shooter demonstrated. For example, a folding stock is the functional equivalent of a wooden stock in most applications, but for a spree killer folding up the stock would help in maneuvering the weapon in close quarters to kill as many people as possible in a short time, and of course it contributes to the overall light weight of the weapon.

Also, famous military experts such as General Colin Powell and General Stanley McChrystal (both infantry officers) both used the term "assault weapon" in interviews in the last few days, without feeling the need to launch into more definition than mentioning the Bushmaster as an example. And both generals said that they believed there was no justification for assault weapons--naming the Bushmaster as example--being in civilian hands in most circumstances (one notable exception would be for hunting wild pigs from helicopters, which is less hunting than pest management). When authorities like these men use the term and voice a strong opinion about assault weapons, that should be included in this entry. Their mention and evaluation of assault weapons should be included in the article.

I believe that NRA members generally know all of this, but choose to be deceptive, here as elsewhere.

The big Gun Grab

Here's who talks about confiscating everyone's guns, and why:

1. The gun makers, their lobbying organization the NRA, and their political arm, the GOP
Reason: profit. Every time the gun makers and their minions mount a campaign about some mythical "gun grab,"gun sales skyrocket.

2. The Angry Billionaires' Club (including such luminaries as the Koch brothers), and their well-paid servants the RWM (Right Wing Media)
Reason: profit. The ABC makes more money for themselves the less they are regulated--this is not money for any Americans but the richest .1%, which is why all the enormous gains in productivity by American workers over the last 40 years has been appropriated by the .1%, leaving Americans working harder and harder, longer and longer, with nothing more to show for it. The ABC wants Americans not to notice this. It has succeeded. The ABC wants to prey on individual Americans--polluting their air, poisoning their water, working them to death--without the Americans organizing and without the Americans' government protecting them. Thus the ABC has been carrying on a multi-billion dollar campaign dedicated to making Americans hate and distrust the federal government, so as to weaken it. This has succeeded largely--hence no bankers going to prison over their crashing the American economy in 2008.

3. The RWM (Right Wing Media), whose compensation from the ABC is proportional to their influence--especially the size of their audience. Well, their audience increases whenever there's an emergency, whenever they can scare or enrage their audience.
Reason: profit, consequently. Ad rates are based on eyeballs. The more eyeballs, the more advertising, the more money per ad and the more subsidization from their patrons, and the more speaking fees, and the more book sales. So profit comes from pandering.

4. Right Wing Politicians (I don't call them Conservatives, since they've upended the original meaning of that word).
Reason: profit. Most right wing politicians "represent" congressional districts so gerrymandered that whoever the GOP nominee is will win; so they only fear a challenge from their own right in the primaries, and as Bob Bennett can attest, you can never be right wing enough to eliminate that fear. A majority of Congressmen leave office vastly wealthier than they are when they enter, and the longer they hang onto their seat the wealthier they become.

And in terms of rhetoric, the way to defend the indefensible is through the straw man argument. Few gun owners--much less non-gun owners--think it's a good idea for people to be able to buy guns without a background check. But the NRA and its patrons don't want the law changed, so they can sell guns to criminals and crazy people--a gun sale is a gun sale, after all. This is indefensible, so the NRA and its lackeys in politics starts screaming about gun confiscation, and the Democrats start talking about how they aren't trying to confiscate guns, and the original point--universal background checks--gets lost, just as the NRA wants it to be.

Talk about gun confiscation is a diversionary tactic. Anyone who takes it seriously is being played for a fool by the gun makers and their lackeys.

Once more, the Debt Ceiling...with feeling

The Republican pitch sounds plausible--they won't vote for raising the debt ceiling unless the Democrats get serious about spending reduction, because the deficit is the single most important issue before America today.

But the more you unpack their pitch, the less plausible it becomes. And the real reason becomes more visible: the Republicans' attempt to achieve minority rule over America.

Start at the end. Not only is the deficit not our most pressing issue (not that it isn't pressing), but the behavior of the Republican Party has demonstrated a complete disregard for the deficit over the past 13 years.

You can't be sure of what a party's spending priorities are when it isn't in power. Nowadays the GOP acts as if a different party was in power during the Bush II era of misrule. As if they collectively had a conversion "on the road to Damascus" the instant President Obama took the oath of office in 2008. But it's the same people. Even the so-called Tea Party Republicans aren't new to politics. Nearly all Tea Party activists are long-time Republican activists who are both social and fiscal conservatives, but who conceal their social activism until they gain office, and then go to town on their pet social issues, mostly oriented towards retrofitting women to the 1950 standards Tea Party types fondly recollect.

So--why talk about deficits if you don't mean it? To conceal the real goal, which is to cripple the federal government.

Why want to cripple the federal government? To prevent them from being able to effectively regulate the rich and powerful, who almost invariably have as their life goals becoming even more rich and more powerful. Only government stands between the solitary individual citizen and the rich and powerful, especially since the American union movement has been largely destroyed outside the public sector (and that's well on the way down the tubes--in part due to public sector employee avarice, to be honest).

The other reason to trumpet the deficit deceitfully is Southern white revanchism. Many white Southerners (and their rural soulmates in other states) are still fighting the Civil War. Look at their near-psychotic hatred of President Obama for a hint about this. Leftists hated Bush, of course, given his unusual mixture of towering ambition coupled with mediocre abilities--but they never claimed he wasn't an American citizen. They never claimed he wasn't a Christian. They never claimed he hated America. They never compared him to a monkey. And, of course, Bush was by historians' estimates the 6th worst president in American history, while Obama was rated as 15th best. Meaning that leftists' dislike of Bush was also more justifiable.

One more sign of the deceitfulness of the GOP's talk about the deficit being the most important thing is their rejection of ending the Bush tax cuts across the board--which would be best for reducing the deficit in immediate terms. And their rejection of any cuts to military spending. And their unwillingness to state just which so-called entitlements they'd cut, beyond general platitudes. It all makes their talk about the deficit a hollow trojan horse.

The NRA Fake Fact Factory is working three shifts!

Anytime there's a mass murder committed with assault weapons, the gun lobby's Fake Fact Factory kicks into high gear, cranking out the same sort of supposedly accurate information that the cigarette industry put out for decades in its successful effort to protect its equally deadly profits.

The irony is that the gun lobby--through its political wing, AKA the Republican Party--has effectively banned agencies of the federal government from studying gun violence or even reporting the statistical data accumulated.

Using private research, though, you can draw some conclusions:

1. Almost every single thing a gun rights advocate says is factually incorrect.

2. Guns turn violence into homicide.

3. Assault weapons turn homicide into mass murder.

Here's the c>>onclusion of FactCheck.org, the most reputable nonpartisan factchecking organization:

>>among advanced countries, the U.S. homicide rate stands out. “We seem to be an average country in terms of violence and aggression,” says Harvard’s Hemenway. “What we have is huge homicide rates compared to anybody else.”

Says Wintemute: “The difference is that in this country violence involves firearms and firearms change the outcome.”<<

http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/

The gun lobby and its shills tools also make mathematically impossible claims about all the lives saved by defensive gun use. Turns out the hundreds of thousands they cite are more like a few hundred (compared to the 10,000 lives lost because of our gun culture). The most popular fake "study" (which turns out to be a methodologically invalid survey by a gun nut with a PhD) was subjected to a statistical analysis by people who actually understand statistics, and ripped it to probabalistic shreds:

ScienceBlogs: How many lives are saved by defensive gun use?
http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/1994/10/19/dgu-00007/

Woman uses gun to defend herself!

Yes, a woman used a gun to defend herself. A gun nut stated this on an Amazon.com forum triumphantly, as if that proved that everyone should be armed to the teeth. 

This was my response:


re: A civilian successfully uses a gun in self-defense.

In 2% of car crashes, the driver/passenger(s) would have been better off if they hadn't worn seat belts.

Therefore cars shouldn't have seat belts.

That is your reasoning.

I strongly recommend taking a free, online course in statistics before you pontificate on comment threads again.

Here's a good one--very entertaining, by one of the best online teachers, Salman Khan:

http://freevideolectures.com/Course/2564/Statistics

Oh, and the relevant stats here:
Lives saved by gun defense each year: around 200.
Lives lost by gun homicides each year: about 10,000.
Ratio of homicide (gun or otherwise) in the US vs. other rich countries: about 8 to 1. The level of violent crime is comparable--but ours are more likely to result in homicide due to this country being awash in guns.

Of course the gun industry lobbying organization, the NRA, put out scads of fake facts about all this.

FactCheck.org assessed them and found them self-serving and largely fact-free, to put it mildly.

Here's the link:

http://factcheck.org/2012/12/gun-rhetoric-vs-gun-facts/

It's all about the deficit, stupid. Or is it?

If the national debt is, as the Republican leadership says daily, the Number One problem facing America, then they should have been voting for all the Bush tax cuts expiring and the sequestration happening, since those would reduce the national debt substantially.

Only they're against both those things, which means right off the bat that they don't think the deficit is our number one problem. The deficit uber alles meme is propaganda. We have a deficit problem, but the Republicans are using it as a cover for their real agenda--as their opposition to letting the tax cuts for the richest of the rich expire, and to shrinking some of the costliest aspects of government. Above all they're not serious about the deficit because they refuse to name exactly what government benefits they'd shrink or cut off.

It's easy to talk about the debt as this huge problem in the abstract. But fixing it requires doing things nearly everyone doesn't want: reducing particular government services and raising nearly everyone's taxes. 

Of course Republicans want to reduce the size of government. Or so they say. But one of the biggest contributors to the size of government is the military. And that's sacrosanct, despite the complete absence of another world power capable of meeting us on the battlefield anywhere, and the fact that we spend more on our military than the next 13 nations combined.

Another very large source is overspending on medical care by doctors and hospitals doing tests and procedures that have been proven not to be useful for the patient's situation. But Republicans cry "death panels" if you bring up this little $700 billion item. 

And another very large item is rich people's tax dodges--fake company headquarters in overseas tax havens and other dirty tricks that rob the treasury of the nation's fair share of their income. But that's sacrosanct too, because apparently rich people are emotionally fragile and will withdraw from commerce if we hurt their feelings. 

Yet another huge component is welfare, all right--corporate welfare. Farm subsidies to giant agribusinesses. Oil subsidies to companies with a bigger GNP than half the world's countries. And a welter of industry-specific, taxpayer-funded special deals for every business sector that can send a team of lobbyists with bags of campaign donation money to Washington. 

So it's not the size of government per se that the Republicans want to cripple. It's the ability of government to protect you and me from being stomped on by the kind of people who keep teams of lawyers on retainer that bothers the corporatists, along with the ability of government to protect minorities from the Southern white establishment in the states of the old Confederacy. 

The Republicans want to turn the federal government into a giant, toothless cash cow for the financial benefit of the GOP's corporate/Wall Street benefactors and "bigotry benefit" of its undereducated, aging white Southern/Midwestern "base." 

Let's give up on the Constitution?

That's the title (sans question mark) of an op-ed piece in the December 30 New York Times. Written by a constitutional law professor, its main point is that Constitution is frequently violated and we just pretend we didn't do so; every non-unanimous Supreme Court decision means one or more veteran Supreme Court justices believe that ruling was unconstitutional.

Moreover, several other rich nations have no constitution at all, and none have collapsed into chaos or dictatorship (while many tyrannies do have constitutions).

And our Constitution is un-Confederational. That is, it was written in defiance of the orders of the American government of that day, which had tasked the Framers with offering some amendments to the Articles of Confederation--not to supplant it with something else.

But above all, our Constitution was written for an almost completely different country. The USA of 1789 was a rural country where nearly everyone lived by farming; where there were no means of communications other than riders on horseback and newspapers; where we had almost no foreign trade in either direction; where we kept slaves, denied blacks, women, and men without land the vote; where "arms" to be borne meant flintlock muskets...need I go on?

The op-ed writer says we should be deciding on the validity of laws based on today's America rather than trying to divine what a handful of men who lived 200 years ago wanted for their infant country.

Naturally the RWM (Right Wing Media) are in their usual apoplexy about this--but instead of speaking to the argument's merits or weaknesses, they claim that the author is a Leftist and may therefore be ignored.

Yet another proof of the profound lack of critical thinking skills on the part of so many self-style conservatives.

How the Gun Makers Arm Psychos & Crooks

Look at it from the gun maker's point of view. A sale of a gun to someone who's criminally insane or a criminal nets the gun maker just as much as a sale to a responsible NRA member who only uses his firearms legally.

Actually, in some ways it's better (assuming your sense of obligation as a gun maker is, as Milton Friedman said, only to profit), since it lets you argue for people buying guns to defend themselves from the people you've sold guns to.

Every time there's a massacre, the gun makers' lobby (AKA the NRA) and its political servants (AKA the GOP) first say it's political opportunism and an insult to the dead to take up gun control "at this time." Then, a week or so later, after they've lined up their ducks in those good old smoke-filled back rooms, they make a public statement that the problem of gun massacres is everything but guns, and the solution is always "more guns" along with measures that will supposedly keep the gun out of the hands of criminals and psychos, because "guns don't kill. People kill."

Well, people kill with the connivance of the NRA. Because the gun makers and their shills have successfully ensured virtually free access to guns by crooks and nuts. And by "guns" I mean assault weapons above all, because they are the most profitable segment of the gun market by far. 

Here's how the gun makers make getting guns a snap without discriminating on the basis of race, creed, criminal record, or psychiatric record:

1. "Felons Finding It Easy to Regain Gun Rights: Decades of lobbying have loosened laws, allowing felons to regain gun rights often with little or no review."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/us/felons-finding-it-easy-to-regain-gun-rights.html

2. "Some With Histories of Mental Illness Petition to Get Their Gun Rights Back: States are increasingly allowing people who lost their firearm rights because of mental health issues to appeal to have them restored."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/03/us/03guns.html

3. "States Struggle to Disarm People Who’ve Lost Right to Own Guns: There is serious vulnerability when it comes to keeping guns out of the hands of the mentally unstable and others."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/us/06guns.html

4. "N.R.A. Stymies Firearms Research, Scientists Say: Researchers who study guns and violence say the influence of the group has all but choked off funds."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/26/us/26guns.html

5: "Guns in Public, and Out of Sight: As states ease concealed weapon laws, some of the permits are ending up in the wrong hands."

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/27/us/more-concealed-guns-and-some-are-in-the-wrong-hands.html

6. The NRA sponsors/endorses bogus "research" supporting more guns/fewer controls.

http://propagandaprofessor.net/tag/dr-kleck/

7. "Over 62,000 guns unaccounted for in U.S. since 2008...weak federal gun laws and irresponsible gun dealers allow tens of thousands of firearms to leave gun shops without background checks or a record of sale"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/25/AR2011012500867.html

8. "NRA-led gun lobby's powerful influence: The NRA-led gun lobby has consistently outmaneuvered and hemmed in the ATF, using political muscle to erect barriers to tougher gun laws."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/14/AR2010121406045.html

9. Book: "Ricochet--Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist"
--shows how the NRA, among other things, works behind the scenes to weaken gun laws that would otherwise protect civilians from guns being wielded by psychos and crooks. The book is aimed at NRA members; its central thesis is that the NRA exploits its members with phony 2nd Amendment scares but really just works for its top management (the best-paid of any nonprofit organization in America) and the gun makers.

http://www.amazon.com/Ricochet-Confessions-Lobbyist-Richard-Feldman/dp/0471679283/ref=sr_1_5?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1356645217&sr=1-5&keywords=NRA

What wrong with the NRA's "Arm everyone!" pitch

It is emotionally very, very satisfying to see the intended victim turn the tables on the attacker. That's the essence of the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, actually. I hate the fact that nearly all the time it turns out the other way. And with us already the most gun-toting society on Earth, it's very likely that more guns would only make it worse.

I saw a cop give an account of how she killed a mass murderer who'd invaded the church she attended. She wasn't just armed. She had the spine to shoot a bad guy--to pull that trigger--and the training needed to know how to protect herself while shooting him. Training reinforced by being a beat cop day in, day out.

I took an intro flight recently. Got to take the plane off myself after an hour of ground school and do various mild maneuvers up in the air. I'd love to fly, but I realized that no one is safe being a pilot unless they can fly frequently and keep up with their skills practices in various aspects.

You need training to be able to hunt wild game safely. But that's a patch on what you need to be prepared for armed combat. And I bet most ex-military personnel from the combat arms would agree with me. A civilian who buys a gun, gets a few hours' training on the practice range, and keeps it in her purse would be like me, a scuba diver, having a knife strapped to my leg in case a shark attacks. Most of the time once a shark is coming at you in full attack mode and gets close enough for a knife to reach the shark he's going, like 30mph or more. And you might just as well be waving a toothpick for all the chance you have of that knife helping.

Unless you get special training in shark attacks and practice that training every weekend.

Now if we were like Sparta and every single young male--and, this being America, every single young female--got military combat training, and it was with the firearm they'd have thereafter in civilian life, and trained in firearms and other combat every weekend for many hours...that would be one thing.

But that's not realistic. The gun was once called the "great equalizer," but that concept has very real limits in the real world.

And in my experience some people couldn't handle armed combat no matter how much training you gave them.

The cop was in the right place at the right time and though off duty was armed. She is a genuine hero. But we can't possibly have enough trained cops watching out at every single place people gather in groups. It's not practical. And one guard per crowd scene wouldn't be remotely enough for most situations.

Sorry, but the only realistic solution is fewer guns overall, and the ones that are in private hands all registered and the owner licensed in a way that reflects the deadly capabilities of a firearm.

I'm not trying to be hard on gun owners. Some of my best friends etc. Well, that's a lie. I only know one guy who owns a gun, and he's a veteran cop in Sacramento. Oh, and the guy at church who's in the California Highway Patrol. But he's moving to Reno. And I didn't really know him. Oh, and one of my wife's nephews who's in Homeland Security.

I haven't seen combat myself--just boot camp. But even there I remember how different being on maneuvers was from the firing range. So many things to remember about the operation of your firearm. Easy to recall if you practice frequently. But easy to lose that edge, get a little stale.

You can't arm the multitude and expect it to come out well, any more than if I hung scuba gear on everyone, gave them a few hours' instruction, and tossed them in the drink. I've been on over 650 open ocean dives and I still consider myself a beginner because each annual dive trip is like starting over at first.

Training, training, training. And I shouldn't have to mention that a human silhouette on a target flipping up on a firing range is not a guy with crazy eyes aiming an assault weapon at you, about to fire in less than a second.

The NRA's "arm everyone" pitch is great for the gun makers, but it's peddling a fantasy that fails the Real Life test.

on Amazon.com's forums

I've been active on the forums run by Amazon.com.

These are large, active, and remarkably hard to find if you don't know where to look.

But if you post anything on an Amazon.com forum a window appears towards the upper-right corner of the page, showing the forums you've posted on recently.

Here's the main page for the Politics forum, which has many, many threads.

And I have many entries hither and thither--mainly, lately, on gun control.

As is true of most public forums that deal with politics in any way, the Amazon.com ones throng with angry, suspicious right wingers who are contemptuous of All Things Liberal and hate President Obama so intensely that Nathan Bedford Forrest would approve of what they say.

Here are some threads I've started and defended against all comers:

Don't ask "Why ban assault weapons?" Ask "Why permit them?"

The NRA backs its claims with fake facts while suppressing real research

NRA spokesman Wayne LaPierre is right--violent video games ARE dangerous

The mutually respectful thread on gun regulation. I hope.

Free advice for NRA members

A baker's dozen of reasonable gun control measures we should adopt nationally

President Obama is a Republican

The Republicans are attacking Susan Rice to get Scott Brown a Republican Senate seat.

Who should Clinton's running mate be in 2016? I say Charlie Christ.

The new GOP prime directive: Stop Clinton in 2016!

Let's follow India's lead and set up a national biometric ID database

On the Religion forum:

American Christians & other religious people have a religious duty to urge their legislator to support reasonable gun regulations

Favorite Christmas CDs to get from a religious perspective

Enduring tragedy without the consolation of religion

What about the war on Christianity now going on across Muslim countries?

Why do some theists care about atheists & empiricists?

America's first Evangelical President harmed Christianity more than any other

On the Science forum:

Global warming effects more severe than previous estimates

Gun use is not being studied scientifically in America because the NRA banned it

Scientifically-minded people should celebrate Christmas

Bad as the Right is about science, the Left has serious problems with science too

Ocean acidification from human C02 output sparks crisis for Washington State shellfish industry

Global warming is making North American winters harsher

The Republican Party's war on science jeapordizes America's democracy

A vote for Romney is a vote against science

Turns out Ebeneezer Scrooge was a devout Christian

U.S. Should Adopt Higher Standards for Science Education

Proposed: intelligent, technology-using aliens look pretty much like us due to evolutionary convergence

How's this for a moral principle to guide scientists?

Evolution is no longer effectively taught in a majority of American high schools

Both the Left and the Right include many science deniers

Is the constant posting of climate change denialist threads here being financed by polluters like Exxon and the Koch Bros.?

The torrent of global warming denialist postings on this and other forums is being directed and financed by fossil fuel-related firms

Instant cosmology--Brian Green on the air today

Abortion and Christianity

What's moral in an abundant, empty land overflowing with trees and streams and plains is different from what's moral in a lifeboat.

Christianity enshrines the human race's instinctive urges to "be fruitful and multiply." Those urges made sense until the abundant land that Earth once was turned into a lifeboat with no rescue in sight and more people on the boat than supplies to sustain them.

Today it would take at least two planet Earths to sustain even the people we now have in the circumstances they now live in, yet we only have 1.0 Earths, and humanity's numbers are currently swelling at the rate of 140 more people total every single minute. 

For example, within this century the world's coral reefs will be extinct, along with the rich ecosystem that depends on them, thus denying the main protein source for many millions of people who live in the tropics. This is because the oceans are becoming acidic, due to all the C02 humans are producing. With the coral reefs all the oceans' shellfish will also go extinct from the same cauise, denying us another important food source. And there's almost certainly nothing we can do to reverse this process at this point. 

Already many millions of people don't have access to potable water. They drink filthy water and get terrible diseases as a consequence. China is running out of water, pumping its wells dry, and so it will dam the Mekong River that today sustains Vietnam. This will turn much of Vietnam into something close to a desert. Futurists predict that the next major wars will be over water, since so many rivers flow from one country into another. We already did that to Mexico when we dammed the Colorado and destroyed Mexican agriculture in the Colorado delta. 

The price of staple foods is soaring all around the world. Anyone who shops for their family has noticed it, but we can absorb the price jumps. In the third world many can't, and consequently more and more people are moving into the "food-insecure" category.

The world had a billion people in 1804. It has 7 billion now, and that is double what it was just a few decades ago. 

The agricultural production revolution of the 1970s moved the cliff farther away, but humanity didn't use the respite to mend its ways. Now the cliff is getting nearer and nearer, and there won't be another tech revolution to save us this time, wishful thinking notwithstanding.

So talk about abortion must take place in the lifeboat, not in the Eden, and what was moral and even desirable in Eden is a very different matter in the lifeboat.

Christianity thus far has totally refused to face this. Understandably. Because it entails agonizing choices that go directly against instincts honed over millions of years. But it is intellectual and spiritual cowardice not to face things as they are.

Christianity thus far is acting like someone who's been told they have cancer. You know the drill: denial, rage, bargaining, grieving, acceptance. 

Christianity is still at "denial." (along with every other major religion of course)

The moral decline of America...or moral ascent?

Never before in the history of our country has life here gotten so close to the ideals expressed in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

When in our past have women had a better shot at "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" ? Or any of our minorities and ethnicities? At our inception only white male property owners could vote. My own white ancestors were here for a long time--perhaps centuries--but they were poor tenant farmers, so, like so many white male Americans, they could no more vote than could slaves or women. Even after slavery ended, the South set up a system of near-serfdom and vote denial that kept blacks in bondage until the 1970s. 

Cripples and blind people only gained the right to access public buildings without help recently. 

It's not remotely rosy, of course. Many older people remember when they didn't have to lock their doors. Racial tensions continue in many places. We imprison more people per capita than any other rich country and most other poorer countries, partially as a system to emasculate black men and prevent them from voting. Too many immigrants from Mexico and their offspring continue to regard themselves as Mexican even when they have American ciizenship. Not since the Gilded Age of the Robber Barons have the richest people moved such a large proportion of the nation's wealth from everyone else's pockets and into their own. Over half of America's public school students graduate (or just leave) with no idea how to do critical thinking, making them the pawns of slick demagogues. A third of the nation are theocrats who believe, like the Muslim Brotherhood, that God gave them the right and the obligation to impose their narrow view of morality on the majority--which is deeply immoral. 

Still, when my wife & I come back from abroad (we've been in a dozen countries together), we always click our heels and say "there's no place like home; there's no place like home; there's no place like home."

Americans who haven't traveled extensively can't know that the deepest morality of America rests on its citizens desire to obey the law voluntarily. A few years ago all the power went our in my town for 24 hours. No street lights, and not nearly enough cops to man the intersections. Yet people obeyed the law and moved through intersections fairly quicl;ly, because we all knew that if we all obeyed the law we'd all get where we were going more safely and quickly. 

Foreigners are often flabbergasted at how law-abiding we are. Go to YouTube and search on "Russian drivers." The resulting videos are absolutely terrifying. Now I know why my Russian friends are so happy to be here. I wouldn't drive on Russian highways unless I was in a HumVee with a roof gunner.

We queue for movie tickets and pretty much everything else. Line jumpers are rare and seriously frowned upon. Again, we're not ideal, but compared to most other countries we are an amazing civilization. 

And among all the nations of Earth, of how many of them is the image of one of its citizens limited to one image of one kind of person or at most a narrow range? Here it could be someone who looks like anyone from any other country.

Something the rest of the world should heed, since so many places are mired in tribal conflicts.

This is a center right country...really?

How many times have you heard Republican pundits say this?

There are a few problems with this statement, though.

Polls show that more Americans do identify themselves as conservative than liberal--35% to 25%. But 41% say they're "moderate"--neither conservative nor liberal.

That does fit the statement that this is a center-right country.

But in the last election, a solid majority of Americans voted for President Obama.

And that, my friends, says pretty clearly that we are at this moment a center-left country.

The trick is the plurality of moderates. They aren't exactly in the middle. Most tip one way or the other, since they have to choose between a Republican and a Democratic candidate.

Obviously more chose the Democratic one.

Another reason to think this is a center-left country is what changed between 2004 and 2012. The % of "conservatives" went up 1%; the % of moderates went down 4%; and the % of "liberals" went up 4%. This combined with the actual vote shows America trending leftward.

Another factor is the fact that while no "liberals" are Republicans, some "conservatives" are not Republicans. There's the slice of the "Old" part of the GOP who are moderate-to-liberal Republicans who have been driven out of the Republican Party by its extremism. These people still think of themselves as conservatives--but they don't think of the GOP as conservative. They consider it a radical, theocratic, corporatist organization that has lost the right to call itself "conservative."

Hence people like Colin Powell, who endorsed the President. The fact that Republicans responding by accusing Powell of racism instead of answering his carefully thought-out reasoning just shows how far off the edge the GOP has gone.

They would respond by saying the Democrats have gone as far left as the GOP has gone to the right. This is true-ish. The Democrats do lean more leftward than they used to. But I think this is a center-left country, and if the Democrats were as extreme as the Republicans are, President Obama wouldn't have won re-election.

So the next time someone tells you "this is a center-right country" ask them who won the last election...

The gun debate under the hood

The National Rifle Association used to be a national club for hunters and target shooters, with a dash of home defense thrown in.

But in the 1980s the percentage of gun owners in the population started declining and is still declining.

This is probably due to young people generally preferring to play first person shooter video games instead of going out at 3am on a weekend morning and sitting in a duck blind for hours, or hiking through cold muddy woods looking for deer that you may or may not see.

Then the gun industry discovered something: military weapons sell. The look of a battlefield weapon, all black and beautifully ugly and menacing--think Daniel Craig, the latest 007--turned out to be irresistible to existing gun owners--generally older men. So the gun industry too battlefield weapons and tinkered with them to make them street legal, and started a sales boom going on to this day, albeit muchly consisting of sales to folks who already own guns.

And it discovered something else: the NRA would make a splendid vehicle to use to sell these guns. It's hard for any enthusiast association to resist monied attention from an associated industry, and it didn't. Besides which the hard core of NRA members--the 29% who oppose closing the gun show loophole that means 40% of American gun sales are done without background checks.

The gun makers discovered that these gun owners will go to rallies, pepper congressmen with phone calls and emails, and generally work as diligent unpaid shills for the gun makers. Sweet.

One problem: military weapons aren't great for hunting or for home defense. Hunting rifles are good for hunting, shotguns are ideal for home defense. Assault weapons are good for killing people en masse. They're generally not aimed closely but instead used to lay down fire into a crowd of people--ostensibly a platoon of charging Taliban fighters. But kindergartners are even more killable, so if your main purpose is revenge against society through a high body count of its most precious members...well, an AR-15 will do the job beautifully.

So consequently the very essence of an assault weapon is a high rate of fire (plus a new generation of rounds that have vastly more killing power than older rounds of similar diameter). The law bans machine guns, but that's easy to get around. The gun makers redesigned their assault weapons to not be able to be fired automatically, but it doesn't matter because in semiautomatic mode an AR-15 with a 100 round extended cartridge can empty that cartridge into a crowd in a minute or less.

You can't keep up that rate of fire--the gun will start to jam and get "cook off" rounds--but if your goal is to quickly kill a lot of people before the cops arrive and then kill yourself, the AR-15's rated sustainable fire rate of 15 rounds a minute is irrelevant.

So while assault rifles and pistols--all semiautomatics designed to accept giant clips or even drum cartridges--are thrilling to own by ordinary gun enthusiasts--and by golly you look incredibly manly cradling a gun that looks like what Navy SEALs use--their real purpose is massacres, and the guns don't discriminate between Taliban fighters and a first grade class at Sandy Hook Elementary school.

This creates a public image issue for the NRA and the gun makers who control it completely at this point.

So when a massacre happens, the NRA says they're sad. Then a few days later they say we mustn't discuss gun policy now because it's a time for mourning. But the gun policy discussion never happens. Instead they lobby Congress to loosen gun laws instead of tightening them.

If challenged, NRA spokesmen say it's not the gun's fault. It's the psycho's. It's violent video games. (But now do you see why they're always trying to get violent videogames restricted?)
It's liberal atheists taking God out of the schools. And sure, all the other rich countries have vastly lower murder rates but they're just as violent. People use knives if they can't get guns.

Well duh. That's why they have a much lower murder rate a third the number of school massacres.

Finally they spend millions to defeat any politician who tries to restrict gun ownership in any way whatsoever.

In the last election they focused on seven Congressmen and the President. They lost four of the seven congressional race and lost even bigger on the President.

Seems like their mythic reputation of being able to crush any politician who opposes them is just that: a myth.

So that's the drill. We managed to ban assault weapons in 1994 but it didn't work because they grandfathered in all the existing assault weapons and added so many loopholes it wasn't hard to work around them, selling assault weapons with one or two features omitted but never the crucial one: the capacity to accept extended cartridges (cartridges designed for the new rounds with higher killing power).

No other rich country permits assault weapons, and that's the main reason why the average massacre happens here.

So even banning assault rifles isn't enough. We won't get anywhere unless we ban all guns--rifles and pistols--designed to accept extended cartridges, and don't grandfather in the existing ones. They'd have to be confiscated (and a fair market price paid for them, unfortunately), along with their extended cartridges.

The NRA's hardcore 29% would go berserk, naturally. These are the kind of people who believe that the Constitution gives them the right to own any kind of firearm without having to so much as register it. They're disdainful of the Supreme Court saying that guns can be regulated. They harbor dark fantasies of another Civil War, and though they'd never say it in public, the civil war they envision is whites against the rest. They read about home invasion by gangs of thugs, and even though they may live thousands of miles away from such events, they spend a lot of time thinking about personal and national disaster scenarios.

Some belong to private militias, or are survivalists. Some don't. All hate Obama with a fiery passion--it has to be seen to be believed. And they seriously dislike Liberals, and speak to and of them with contempt. To be fair, Liberals speak of them as "gun nuts" and are equally contemptuous, but they aren't armed...

And of course the NRA (=the gun makers' lobby) stokes these apocalyptic fires assiduously--not in what they say to the world at large but in what they say to the faithful.

So much so that if you dare to question their assumptions some will tell you you're stupid and should deal with something you know about. Not very persuasive, but they're used to getting their way through intimidation, so it's a familiar modus operandum.

They'll also blame the psychos and our inability to lock 'em up until after they've killed someone. They're right about this. The average "homeless" person is mentally ill. A third of prison inmates are mentally ill. Both should be in insane asylums, which back in the 1970s both liberals and conservatives wanted to close, and close them they did.

Now it's nearly impossible to institutionalize a crazy person, no matter how crazy they act, unless they commit a major crime.

Coming up with a better policy on psychos won't stop them all. Confiscating assault weapons won't stop all gun homicides. But we have to do both, not one or the other.

As for violent videogames--I don't play them myself, but even though they cut into gunmaker profits I don't find that sufficient cause to ban them. Their contribution to violent behavior is unclear. Killers play them before killing, but non-killers play them too.

Assault weapon owners say they shouldn't be punished for the crimes of a few, just as violent videogame players would say. But while the games may lead to violence, you can't shoot a real person with a videogame. You can with an assault weapon.

And they wouldn't be being punished. The problem is that they seem to have nearly rejected the social compact--you know, where we surrender a measure of personal freedom for the benefits of living in a society. They talk about the social compact like a five year old boy being told to behave himself.

The irony is that liberals seem to have just as much trouble with the social compact, focusing on the rights of crazy people without considering the right of the rest of us not to be killed by crazy people.

Talking giving something up "for the greater good" is anathema to hardcore NRA types, but seriously--they'd still have their hunting rifles, their shotguns, their revolvers. They just wouldn't have military weaponry. They already know they can't have M-239s or shoulder-mounted Stingers. They just don't realize that the AR-15 shouldn't be in private hands.

And the only way to ensure that crooks and crazies don't have them is to ensure that nobody has them. Sorry, but nothing else will work.

To NRA members

If you look around and see which way the tide is flowing, there's going to be gun control legislation, and it's going to pass, and the President is going to sign it.

It will in all likelihood reinstate the assault weapons ban, along with banning extended magazines. The questions are about what will be defined as an assault weapon, how many rounds will define an extended clip, which handguns will fall under the assault weapon provisions--and, possibly most important of all, how they will close the gun show loophole that 71% of NRA membership wants to close, not to mention everyone else. 

So all the talk you see on online forums stoutly defending against any and all gun controls is spitting in the wind. If you want to do something constructive for gun owners, tell the NRA leadership to stop working as the gun manufacturers' lobby and start acting as an advocate for gun owners. And contribute to the specifics of what the inevitable upcoming gun control legislation should do.

The gun industry has successfully defeated all legislation for decades. If you think that's still true, you need to get out more. Keep it up and you'll just be contributing to the destruction of the NRA as a player in Washington. Because it's becoming toxic to be associated with the NRA. You can only stop it by acting like responsible citizens and parents as well as gun enthusiasts. And that's the only way you can avoid the upcoming gun regulations from being even harsher than they're going to be.

The train is pulling out of the station. You don't want to be galloping down the tracks after it, watching it disappear over the horizon