Is the title of the song and as the song goes, the shit has hit the fan, at least for John Hammar,
an ex-Marine from Ft. Pierce, Florida, a town just a few miles north of
me. I'm sure you've heard that he's been jailed under one of Mexico's
tough and comically ineffective gun control laws. Of course your sense
of comedy may differ on this point.
Seems Hammer and
his friend had planned to drive across the Mexican border
near Matamoros in a Winnebago filled with surfboards and camping gear --
and an old shotgun he'd inherited from his great grandfather which, as
purchased from Sears, has a 24" barrel -- an inch too short for
Mexico, although just fine in Florida. US officials told him that
all he had to do was to file some papers with the Mexican authorities
and it would be legal, but they were wrong and Mr. Hammar now sits
chained to a cot in a Mexican jail cell hoping at least for Lawyers and
money. No more guns please.
Fox News of course is
running around screaming and yelling about "trumped up charges" which
seems strange, US laws about barrel length being just as arbitrary as
Mexico's and carry punishments at least as severe. In fact US laws
require gun owners to know more than you'd expect the average lawyer
knows and are just as arbitrary as concerns lengths and dates of
manufacture and type of stock. It's possible in fact for a gun to be
quite legal to send through the mail and an identical one with a one
digit serial number difference to be felonious. It's possible to own a handgun to which fitting a folding stock can put you in jail for being
below a certain arbitrary barrel length. Mexican law, unbeknownst to Hammar and his advisors, classifies a
nearly antique relic from Sears Roebuck as a military weapon, a practice quite akin to the US classification of an ordinary rifle as being an assault rifle because of the shape of the stock or the country of manufacture.
But I digress. Our Republican friends and faithful defenders of chaotic reasoning are hinting that this is all Obama's
doing and that were he a real 100% American President like John Wayne,
he'd be down in Matamoros waving a pair of six guns and displaying a
pair of something even less attractive. Life being somewhat less of a
vintage cowboy movie than Fox would like us to think, he isn't. He's in
Washington being the president; a task that requires him to deal with
more serious things like North Korea playing with ICBMs and trying to
prevent the Middle East from once again dragging us into a war. Traducing Obama -- that's
what Fox does. That's what Fox is for.
I'm sure that
if we still carry enough clout with Mexico, we might, or rather the
Executive branch might be able to get the man released, even though pleas
from Mexico to have mercy on their citizens have been rudely and
routinely snubbed. We are as you know, God's own chosen "leaders of
the Free World" and fuck you very much. I do hope we can because it looks like
the man never intended to break any laws, just as so many Americans run
afoul of so many counter-intuitive legal niceties of our crazy quilt of
emotionally driven crime bills, bans and statutes.
Mexico,
as I said, is a nice example of the failure to prevent people from causing
problems by controlling and banning objects or substances. That, low tax, business
friendly, country with a weak government has become a slaughterhouse
despite it's tough, restrictive gun laws and the even tougher gun laws
in China have produced a flood of mass school stabbings
and that country is now considering registering kitchen knives and
cleavers. Meanwhile, despite stringent gun control measures, and because of its drug laws, the drug
cartels have made Matamoros one of the most dangerous places in the
hemisphere. The jail in question recently lost 20 inmates in a single
gang related fight despite the illegality of weapons in a prison.
Is
there a lesson we even need to consider thinking about? Is tough talk
and tough law the best solution to systemic failures of a society, or
are such policies the result of parsimony and a distaste for looking
for the roots of problems? Is the prohibition of Marijuana and "get
tough" drug laws the root failure here? Oh but we're Americans so why consider what happens abroad as being a lesson? We're unique!
Strange things mobilize individuals into collective action.
ReplyDeleteThe civil rights movement was just something that was happening "down south" until the pictures from Birmingham of Bull Conner releasing police dogs on innocent protesters. Those news photos mobilized the public.
Now, you can argue whatever you want inregards to the outcome and whether the voting rights act of 1964 improved anything or not but you cannot deny the shock of that incident and the mobilization of society as a whole.
In Vietnam, you had the picture of the girl running naked down a dirt path crying that probably did much more to change our attitudes to the war than any marching in the streets by antiwar protesters ever did.
I hope that after today;s events in Connecticut that we, as a society come to our senses, and enact some serious gun control.
If we have any sense of a civil society we have no choice. It may not totally solve the issue of violence in our society but it will go along way in establishing once again, that we are a civil society and that maybe the most important lesson we as individuals need at this time.
Strange things capture the imagination and raise the ire. Sometimes good things occur, sometimes, not so good -- Remember the Maine? Public outrage is the mother of many bad things, if also some good ones. Is violence against children really on the increase? or is this a chronic American tendency independent of what weapons are used?
ReplyDeleteBut what you say is what I feared would happen -- a call for "serious gun control" as though that were some snake-oil balm with undefined ingredients from out of a tube that would soothe our wounds. The problem is that it will lead to something outwardly useful but really useless -- it so often has. Has all the passion and anger behind the Brady bill prevented such things as it was supposed to do? Psychos can wait three days, can't they? What we really need is not some ill thought out but passionate proposal that soothes the fear but is based on incorrect perception of what the problem is and what can actually be done.
It isn't really that we've become more violent, it's that the schools have become a place for bloody psychodrama. It's a fact that dozens of children die every year in bus accidents, but the emotional content is different so we don't go into hysterical fugues for days on end, crying about bus control.
All I'm asking for is reason and reasonableness and that isn't going to happen with all the intransigent phobics grinding the same old axes. Some people aren't going to be satisfied until all dangerous things magically disappear. Others want us to arm the 8 year olds. It's all magic thinking. Nothing we're talking about will satisfy those people, but everything that is being proposed is coming from them or being directed toward them.
"Reason" and "Reasonableness"? Lets just start with what exactly is the reason for someone to need a semi automatic pistol, or rifle, or extended clips, or assault weapons?
DeleteTo me when I listen to someone go on and on about the attributes of these weapons I can only remember back to the 1960's and early 70's when as a teenager we would brag about the power in the engine in our cars.
Just like Civil Rights laws never made everyone "equal" in the eyes of everyone, no gun control will make everyone safe from everyone. But that does not mean we need not try. If we follow your logic then we never would have enacted any Civil Rights legislation, and we wouldn't bother with equal pay for women or have anything to do with gay rights. Why bother? Nothing really changes, look at our history! We attempted something like that in the past and it didn't work. Is equal rights really the problem?
Yes, dozens of children die every year in bus accidents and every year we attempt to establish ways to make buses safer for kids. Every year people die in plane accidents and we have the NTSB to find the causes and hopefully prevent that accident from occuring in the future; people still die in plane crashes but it is fewer and fewer every year.
Its society's "constant improvement" routine. Yet on gun control we do nothing.
As far as "a chronic American tendency" well it might be. Americans also have a chronic tendency of being racist and hateful but that does not stop a few of us from attempting to work beyond it for something better.
The law does not require a prior need in order to be permitted to drink alcohol even though it's a factor in most violent crimes. The notion that it did cost thousands of lives and increased the desire to drink, but I'm tired of analogies. This is about pragmatism, about recognition of what has been done, about what can be done; the need to do something being the mother of many a bad measure.
ReplyDeleteThe law insists that our right to be armed "shall not be infringed." I think we need to respect that or change that else be accused of trying to prevent crime by committing a crime. The liberal concept of freedom behind our laws does not include a need to justify one's existence or demonstrate need to own any kind of property, real or personal.
No, the second amendment does not say that any kind of weapon is protected or that the right to own one cannot be denied with due process and that's why I can't buy a cannon or hand granades and why there's hope we can reduce the risk without making half the peaceful population into criminals. There's no hope for rational discussion however, when reason itself is subject to ad lapidem dismissal.
I think you are grossly misstating what you call "my logic" but that's part of the argument by stereotype always rampant on this subject. But no, complete safety is impossible even with the kind of police state that would allow it to be approached. I see a lack of evidence that this crime was primarily the result of some particular technology and I do see evidence that such things occur frequently in countries with the most stringent gun control and outright gun bans. Think of suicide bombing, think of the bloodbath in Mexico and when thinking of gun-free countries we have the example of the recent school slaughter in China -- the large increase in knife crime in London.
It takes more than anger and a bit of misinformation to make for good law. It takes enforceability for one and history teaches that bans don't work and bans create crime. It takes recognition of reality for another.
Can we please recognize this without the emotionalism? "We do nothing?" Seriously? Have you looked into Federal and State gun laws? Can you really say that with a straight face? We do nothing that seems to work would be more like it and I think that's because we act out of panic and outrage and listen to activists call for amorphous and vague "do somethings" based on nothing but anger and fear. Are you seeking to put a genie back into a bottle after 200 years? Think we can make a hundred million firearms disappear? 200 million, 300 million? Are you an expert on rates of fire and ballistic characteristics and do you know how many weapons are legally owned in the US and how many magazines and speed loaders there are available? Why can't facts enter into the conversation without accusations of gun-nuttery and all the other elements of ad hominem by stereotype?
And that's what I'm talking about. I'm tired of hearing how we have no gun control and that we need more things that simply do not work, or that since I don't have a need for a 600 hp boat or a 200 mph car and since at any time I might go insane, there should be a blanked prior restraint -- I should be prohibited from endangering the public by having them.
I would be interested in ideas of how the mentally defective can be kept away from weapons of all sorts and sometimes confined as a public danger. I'm not interested in hearing that I'm arguing for something I am not arguing for or that I belong in some category not to be trusted.
And as an aside, "assault weapons" were successfully banned for the most part in 1937 and that ban is still in effect. To own one, or any automatic weapon you need a special Federal "destructive device" license available to arms dealers, manufacturers and police departments. That attempt to ban things that looked outwardly like military weapons but were not: non-automatic rifles with a certain kind of stock, that were made after a certain date in certain countries, failed to do a damned thing but to increase demand for those toys. Store shelves and catalog pages were well stocked with American made pseudo-assault weapons and "pre-ban" accessories. In fact the very term seems to have been coined to make ordinary rifles seem scarier.
ReplyDeleteIt's telling to observe what a place of honor that misunderstanding has in discussions of how to deal with constitutional law while protecting the public safety and wouldn't you know, in the first hours of this tragic obscenity, bringing back that assault weapons ban -- that fraud designed to be cosmetic only, that had no effect on anything, that was the darling of hoplophobes everywhere, was the first thing the media found to talk about.
No, Capt. Fogg, I am not an expert on guns, that is why I read your posts. That is why I access the web, I am looking for people with knowledge who might point something out that could make a difference.
ReplyDeleteOutside of psychological testing and a licensing process rather than a rudimentary background check, there really is nothing we can do and in all honesty we won't even try that will we?
At the end of the day you just can't help but realize that no matter how hard we attempt to believe in the philosophy of Locke and Rousseau the reality is that Thomas Hobbes was right all along.
The trouble is, I say to any human here, that too often when we hear from those who are just as excited as can be about their 2nd. Amendment rights, they go out of their way to tell us just how reasonable they are, how much they support reasonable rules and laws regarding gun ownership and "carrying," etc. But when it comes down to it, that often turns out to be a dodge: THIS weapon, you see, isn't technically an "assault weapon" (even though it can easily be used to mow down fifty people in ten seconds flat, and hey, you COULD modify just about any rifle to do that anyway), and THIS rule is a bad rule because after all, it wouldn't be 100% effective so it's quite pointless, and besides, bad things happen -- whatcha gonna do? (Shrug.) Why, this year only x hundred people died in mass carnage, whereas last year ten percent more died. See? the statistics tell us that it's all a big deal about practically nothing. And so on and so forth, ad nauseam. I find that line of middle-school-level bullshit sickening. The sum total of it all is that absolutely nothing can ever be done, and things are fine as they are.
ReplyDeleteDino,
ReplyDeleteSorry, I admire you very much and you may be the smartest person I've talked with, but I think I neither said nor implied what you seem to say I did. It's certainly not what I mean.
I talked about that deceptive piece of legislation only because the networks and our old friend Diane Feinstein are offering a reprise of something that did absolutely nothing as our desperately needed solution to the problem of violence in our country. I think that, like Prohibition, it made things worse. Are we being like the Tea people clinging to trickle-down economics despite it's abject and demonstrable failure?
The alleged assault weapon ban was designed not to do anything and especially not to harm the arms industry. It took not one weapon off the shelf nor out of private ownership. On the contrary it spurred the desire to own a cheap de-fanged AK lookalike to the point where sales skyrocketed and stores couldn't keep them in stock.
My point is that we are clinging to solutions that do not and cannot work and have not ever dissuaded anyone from mayhem
That's not to say I don't want to talk about what kinds of weapons should be legal and where. I want to talk about things that can actually be done and to avoid the kind of magic thinking that suggests that hundreds of millions of things already in private hands can simply go away if they're banned.
It's not the NRA making recreational shooting and hunting popular. It's not some "Gun Culture." It's a country that listens to fearmongers at the NRA, but also a country where burglary and armed robbery and home invasion make the public realize that the police really can't help and that 911 number isn't likely to save your life.
It's America and any attempt to revoke the 2nd amendment would fall dramatically short of the needed votes and the odds are higher with each passing year. It's America, a country in which exhibition shooting used to be the national passtime, a country with a huge wilderness, a country where many people use firearms to feed their families, to keep the 'gator population and the nutria population down and keep wolves away from the flock. We are a complex and varied society in which a significant majority is not in favor of adding to our patchwork of gun control laws and most of those people have nothing to do with the NRA.
Do we need to allow autoloading pistols? To me, that's hardly the question. The question is can we legally make them go away? The answer is no any more than the death penalty made murder go away. Can we limit magazine capacity as many States do for hunting purposes? Probably impossible. Can someone empty a nine shot revolver as fast as a nine shot Glock -- a lever action Winchester or Henry from 150 years ago as fast as an "assault rifle?" Pretty much.
But I'm hardly saying we can't do what can be done. I'm advising not to hide behind angry rhetoric provided by politicians and lobbyists. Not to look for doomed ideas as a salvation or even as a partial solution to keeping criminal or unstable people away from weapons. Do we need to increase security in schools? Do we need more metal detectors, more cops? Let's talk and not limit the talk to banning things. I'm saying it's time to assess what can be done and to consider the things that happen when you ban something people want -- to realize that safety has a cost that rises the more sharply as you approach the absolute -- to try to figure out what we have done right during the quarter century during which violent crime has decreased -- and it has steadily done so.
TS,
ReplyDelete"Outside of psychological testing and a licensing process rather than a rudimentary background check, there really is nothing we can do and in all honesty we won't even try that will we?"
Maybe not hard enough, but to get a carry permit in Florida, you need to be fingerprinted and file them with the sheriff and the FBI both of whom need to certify that you've never been convicted. You have to take a safety and law course and reading the state and federal laws, you might just be persuaded to drop the entire issue because the patchwork of confusing and arbitrary laws can make anyone into a felon who has no intention of harming anyone. A single shot antique shotgun locked in your trunk? Don't drive into a post office parking lot or you can go to jail for quite a while. Same if you sit a a bar with a derringer in your pocket -- you're a felon, but not if you sit at a table. It's hard to remember it all. If somehow you shoplift something in florida, but your gun is at home, it can still be armed robbery, some with a minor drug charged. Gun at home in a safe, but you're going away for many years.
Sometimes I think it scares away more gun owners than it attracts. It certainly gives me pause to meditate on the wisdom of carrying a weapon, but it does seem that licensed people commit a tiny fraction of the crimes that scofflaws do and that's caused a great amount of public hostility to more gun control. How do you keep guns from people who just don't care what's legal and who plan to die in the process? I think this may have been American's answer to the suicide bomber and who has succeeded in countering that kind of terrorist by banning things?
I'm not defending or apologizing for mayhem, only looking for some way to make schools safer while acknowledging the failures of the past. Prohibition was going to make life safer and so was the war on drugs, after all.
The United States Power Squadron, of which I'm a past Commander used to teach safe boating classes at the high school, but of late we haven't been able to find an instructor willing to spend the time and money to undergo the necessary background checks now required to teach -- all because of a reaction to a murder in Tampa years ago.
So why is it that a guy from a hundred year old organization can't be allowed near 18 year old kids but can walk into an elementary school armed like Pancho Villa? Is it that we're taking the wrong approach?
Here is my issue with the Connecticut case:
DeleteWe have a woman, who by all accounts was legally allowed to buy and own guns. Now, there is a whole lot of speculation about her going on, most of which we will never resolve because she and her son are dead.
She was the mother of a "troubled" youth and I use that term rather than "aspergers" because so far no professional has come forward to validate this diagnosis. Now, comes the "news" and again, it might just be bullshit, that she was seeking conservatorship of her son so she could have him committed. Now, being the uncle of a young man with autism I can tell you that that is going to be real hard to do in light of the fact that he apparently had a drivers license. She was seeking conservatorship so she could have him committed; again that would be nearly impossible in light of the fact that she would have to testify that he was a threat to himself and or to others.
If that was true, then obviously, having an arsenal in the home wasn't a really bright idea.
As far as her belief that going to gun shooting ranges was a way for the two of them to bond, well anyone who has been around any child with a diagnosis of the autism spectrum will tell you that loud sudden sounds and the jerk of the recoil on the gun is going to be a very unpleasent experience for the child.
There wasn't any bonding going to occur, bonding is real hard for someone with limited social skills, if any at all.
All I know is that if we are to continue to believe in the concept of a civil society, this will be our test. It might be a lot tougher problem than any our society has ever had to deal with, but it is one we need to deal with urgently.
"having an arsenal in the home wasn't a really bright idea."
DeleteUm, yeah. I do wish there were some way to identify people with certain kinds of personality disorders without stomping all over their civil rights, but a very tough problem, as you say.
Too many people who turned out to be dangerous have exhibited signs that have alarmed friends and family and professionals although they've never committed a crime. Too many have exhibited no disturbing signs of any kind until running off the rails, but we're all supposed to be equal under the law and the possibility of being committed inappropriately against one's will is scary.
Frankly, other than to beef up security and pray, I don't have any answers that reduce the risk to near zero and that still respect the individual and his rights.
Capt. Fogg,
ReplyDeleteThere's a reason I didn't mention your name -- what I'm addressing is the shape of the public "discussion" that's sure to follow this event just as it has followed all the others. We will be told that nothing at all can be done, and any specific plan set forth will be dismissed out of hand as belonging in the subset of "things that would be unreasonable and can't be done." As I see it, for the gun industry and the gun lobby, "reason" is nothing but a cipher-term for the promotion of paranoia, bloodlust and greed.
I quite agree and as I said elsewhere, what looks like public discussion is always led by someone powerful with an interest in a certain outcome.
ReplyDeleteAny specific plan will rarely address the complex nature of all human events and will focus on furthering a political position at the expense of anything else, and anyone suggesting that inconvenient reality has to be dealt with will be dismissed with prejudice.
That's why I get angry at the howling about gun control without any description of what they mean by it nor any willingness to talk about workable efforts.
That's why I denounce the NRA and the Brady group as well, the first for insisting that any discussion of any rules means instant confiscation and the other for insisting that the failure of their efforts does not argue against more of the same and less of anything else -- while everyone else seems to want instant fixes for a problem we can't really understand and don't want to. Everyone seems either to assert that everything is getting worse or that everything is just fine.
Looking at PoliticusUSA in the sidebar, I see the headline: The Tide is Turning: Senator with a rating From NRA Calls for Rational Gun Control. Do we assume rational means "none at all" or do we read what he has to say or do we label him a gun nut and cover our ears? I think we know the answer. Do we see the stunning defect of determining policy on another headline: "Guns make it easier to kill people?" In my ears a fallacy alarm is rattling the windows and the stench of a false syllogism fills my nostrils, but on both sides there's an unwillingness to concede, a disinterest in viewing any but a selected set of facts, a crippling desire for simple solutions, a disregard for a democratic solution and a strong urge to burn witches.
As for the public in general, who can blame them for being so disgusted with the absolutism they don't support doing anything at all? Rightly or wrongly a large segment of the public sees too much intrusion into individual life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The half of the country that owns or wants to own a firearm does not feel criminal or sympathetic to criminals and doesn't want to be judged by what insane people do with planes, trains and automobiles. Rightly or wrongly people observe that other countries with a high number of guns per capita don't have the school shootings or drive-by shootings we blame on guns alone.
Should they feel that way? Should they be permitted to feel that way? Once again, nobody's right if everybody's wrong.
And by the way, those networks demanding that we mourn, that there's something wrong with us unless we weep and wail and pile up useless teddy bears -- why don't we hear anything like that when our beloved country kills thousands of children abroad, when police with guns shoot innocent children, when religious groups molest hundreds of children, when children in this abundant land suffer from abuse and neglect and hunger?
ReplyDeleteIt's not that I'm not horrified, depressed and angry, and maybe my cynicism has blinded me, but I think some of our tears might taste of salt.