Gun in 60 Seconds

As we slowly drag some of America's less-evolved citizens toward the reality that the Second Amendment is not Holy Writ, I've noticed a number of very specific bad debating tactics that the NRA likes to use.

There's all the usual suspects: attacking the messenger ("you liberals hate guns! And the Constitution!"), the slippery slope argument ("if they ban assault weapons, next they'll ban all guns!"), and on and on.

Most of them are pretty easy to combat, if you know what you're talking about. And let's be real: if you are required to accept "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" without any limitations, then the Second Amendment isn't restricted to guns, either. Nuclear weapons are "arms," and therefore all citizens should be allowed to own them.

Since even the most conservative member of the Supreme Court says that there can, in fact, be limitations on gun ownership, maybe it's time for somebody to put a muzzle on Wayne LaPierre and let the adults talk.

But on that subject -- knowing what you're talking about -- there is one little thing that bothers me. In blogs and on talk shows, I keep hearing people making obvious, blatant mistakes that occasionally get them in trouble. So let's put a little reality into our side of the argument. Here's some little facts relevant to the gun debate that you should probably know.

Guns aren't difficult to understand, nor are they difficult to use. Literally any idiot can learn to use one, and most of them can learn to use them very well. (Here's where I want to follow up with "...for example, look at the Marines," but my son is a Marine now, and I've promised to be good.) However, just like any other hobby enthusiast, there is a certain amount of specialized knowledge involved.

To put it another way, gun nuts are like LARPers or comic book geeks: they have specific terminology, and a knowledge of trivia that is unique to their hobby, and if you get any of it wrong, they'll scream like little bitches and try to say that you don't know anything about the subject.

Trust me: having carried one for 21 years, I'm reasonably familiar with the subject, and it isn't rocket science. So here's the least you need to know.

Always be sure that you're using the right terminology. We want an "assault weapons ban," not a ban on assault rifles.

There's are important reasons for this, and most of them have to do with the legal definitions of these two terms. See, an "assault weapon" is a generic term, and can be expanded or contracted to cover a multitude of sins.

An assault rifle, on the other hand, has a very specific definition (and yes, I'm using Wikipedia here - it's the most accessible source I found, and it is at least getting this part of the debate right):

An assault rifle is a selective fire (selective between automatic, semi-automatic, and burst fire) rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine....

Assault rifles are categorized in terms of using an intermediate cartridge power that is between light machine guns firing full power cartridges, which are intended more for sustained automatic fire in a light support role, and submachine guns, which fire a lower powered pistol cartridge rather than a rifle cartridge.

Fully automatic fire refers to an ability for a rifle to fire continuously until the magazine is empty and no rounds remain; "burst-capable" fire refers to an ability of a rifle to fire a small yet fixed multiple number of rounds with but one press of the trigger; in contrast, semi-automatic refers to an ability to fire one round per press of a trigger.

I could go on about the difference between the full-auto sear (a little metal piece on the inside of the M-16 that allows it to keep firing until you run out of ammo), and the burst-fire sear (which I thought was an awesome innovation when it came out), but all you really need to know is that replacing a sear isn't difficult.

More than that, though, there are conversion kits that make it even easier. So don't let anybody try to tell you that it takes some kind of mystic metalwork to convert a civilian AR-15, which is an assault weapon, into a functional assault rifle. A couple of pliers, a small punch (I usually ended up using a small screwdriver) - there are specialized tools that make working on an M-16 easier (like a barrel wrench), but damned few of them are required.

There are other terms that drive the gun hobbyists crazy: the bullet is the metal bit that flies out of the gun. The whole thing, including the casing, the powder and everything, is a shell, a round, or a cartridge. Never call it a bullet.


For some reason, this makes them crazy (or "crazier, maybe).

Also, don't say "clip," say "magazine." This is another of those stupid pedantic things that make spittle fly across the room. A clip can feed ammo into a magazine - a magazine feeds ammo into a weapon. If you really care enough to read about it, go here - but otherwise, just avoid it.

They also can get really cranky about the word "gun" - it's a very generic term that covers everything from handguns to Howitzers. Just so you know.

(Overall, I find the whole thing funny - it's like listening to comic nerds screaming "You don't even know the relationship between the Golden Age and Silver Age Superman! Why should we listen to you about anything?" But I find a lot of things funny, even when nobody else does.)

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(If you want to get even farther into the argument, here's a piece I ran across in gathering links for this post. I tend to avoid DailyKos just out of habit, but the writer gets into a lot of the tactics and terminology that might come in handy for somebody.)

Talking to the Man, Once Again

So, every so often, I like to reach out to my governmental representatives (OK, and sometimes I like to reach out to other people's representatives, but let's not worry about that now...).

So, today, I sent emails to my guys in the Senate and the House. (Both good, noble men fully worthy of my support. So far.) And, because I'm lazy, they were identical except for the greeting. (I've mentioned that I'm lazy, right? Because it's true.) And it went like this.

Dear Sen. Bingaman, (or "Rep. Heinrich," depending)

The Republicans are now trying to spread the lie that the penalty that's imposed under the Affordable Care Act for not having health insurance is a tax. You should probably get out in front of this, and for one good reason.

If it's a tax, they can repeal it through the reconciliation process.

Fortunately, this is easy to rebut. Justice Roberts didn't say that the penalty is a tax: what he said was, it was legal for Congress to levy a penalty in exactly the same way that it is legal for them to apply a tax.

And if you go to his opinion (all 150 pages or so), Roberts comes right out and said that it isn't a tax.

Page 11:

Before turning to the merits, we need to be sure we have the authority to do so. The Anti-Injunction Act provides that “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessmentor collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person, whether or not such person is the per-son against whom such tax was assessed. 26 U. S. C. §7421(a). This statute protects the Government’s abilityto collect a consistent stream of revenue, by barring litigation to enjoin or otherwise obstruct the collection of taxes.

Translation: "We can't rule on it if it's a tax. We're ruling on it. Think about it." Page 12:

According to amicus, by directing that the penalty be “assessed and collected in the same manner as taxes,” §5000A(g)(1) made the Anti-Injunction Act applicable to this penalty.

The Government disagrees. It argues that §5000A(g)(1) does not direct courts to apply the Anti-Injunction Act,because §5000A(g) is a directive only to the Secretary of the Treasury to use the same "methodology and procedures" to collect the penalty that he uses to collect taxes. Brief for United States 32–33 (quoting Seven-Sky, 661 F. 3d, at 11).

We think the Government has the better reading.

Translation: "This guy says it's a tax; the government says it isn't. We agree with the government."

So, later on, (page 35) when he writes "The same analysis here suggests that the shared responsibility payment may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax, not a penalty," he isn't saying it's a tax, just explaining what part of the Constitution applies (which is why he phrased it "may for constitutional purposes be considered").

You need to keep them from taking over the argument by rewording reality. Go out on the floor and explain, on the record, in simple words, that life doesn't work like that.

If you want to get the attention of the media, apologize that reading is so difficult for our Republican friends. Or explain that things like this are why the Texas GOP is trying to ban critical thinking.

Or maybe explain that, if they're so upset that the Affordable Care Act is constitutional after all, they should consider getting on anti-depressants. After all, admitting that you suffer from depression isn't going to count as a preexisting condition any more.

Lost In Translation

Word from Hollywood via NPR:

There's a backup plan: If U.S. movie audiences don't buy tickets to see The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo in Swedish, Hollywood is already gearing up for an English-language remake.

IOW, if Americans don't like the original then Hollywood will bowdlerize it. And since Dragon Tattoo is not going to open in my local cinema, this will very likely happen. There's nothing "liberal" about the destruction of culture by translation. I can already see where Hollywood can go wrong just by watching the trailer.

My favorite semester at college was spent in International Studies 120 and 220, Culture Through Cinema I and II. The professor was very, very good at teaching the signs and signals we needed to really appreciate a film like Nobody Loves Me. It was because of Dr. Adler that I was able to appreciate the best moments in Seven Samurai for the very first time and actually understood the cultural existentialism of Lost In Translation.

Which is the operative phrase, because all of this is destroyed when Hollywood translates. Their version of Dragon Tattoo will inevitably disappoint me after seeing the original with subtitles. As our good friend Dr. Joseph Suglia put it to me in an email today:

Films such as Takashi Miike's One Missed Call, Open Your Eyes, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, etc. irritate the American entertainment industry. There is only one thing to do: neutralize the irritation by homogenizing everything in those films that is heterogeneous, familiarizing everything within them that is strange. That is the purpose of a "remake": to domesticate the foreign.

And how. City of Angels seems incredibly pretentious when you've seen Wings of Desire. There is a segment of America that is aware of books it has not read but chooses to read them after seeing the movie to avoid disappointment. Having worked in bookstores and spent far too much time in libraries, I cannot count the number of times I have heard this said.

Hollywood is quite aware of this. My local cinemaplex will not be showing the Swedish version of this movie. As usual, I must travel at least an hour, probably three, to witness it in an actual theatre. This is because Hollywood obeys Barnum's dictum of lowest common denominator: no one in Tinseltown ever went broke underestimating taste. Art is inevitably made artifice. Characters are recast as comic relief. A fart joke must be inserted.

And there must always be more violence.

I maintain that Inglourious Basterds is a meta-narrative about this very phenomenon. It isn't about the Holocaust of World War II, but the cinematic holocaust of Hollywood. Language is indivisible from culture; when Hollywood translates, it adopts spectacle to give the masses blood. What makes me say all this is the amazing passage I found at the beginning of Steig Larrssen's novel:

The policeman was a hardened veteran...He had been involved in nine murder or manslaughter cases.

Nine. In a long career of urban policing.

This is one way America stays stupid about the world.

Adding: I have just remembered I wrote a short story called "Lost In Translation."

Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs

I hate the word "blog" the way I hate most cutesy, childish terms like "cookie" that have somehow infiltrated the world of computers. At least the attempt to make us all say 'puter died the miserable death it deserved, but we're stuck with blog. It's even lost the vestigial apostrophe it sometimes used to have when 'blog was a cute adolescent bit of geeky hipness. Peter Merholz, in fact is given credit for coining 'blog' on his Petermemes personal website in the Oxford Dictionary. But that was ten years ago - back in ancient times only very uncool people remember, and when cell phones were larger and were for making phone calls, 'text' was a noun and not everyone had a weblog.

Of course without Brad Graham complaining in jest about that annoying word on his blog Bradlands back in 1999, we wouldn't have the word 'blogosphere.'

Where are we headed? Will personal publishing soon be described as being "as simple as falling off a blog"? Shall we see ultra-conservative gays start weblogs and dub themselves Blog Cabin Republicans? Track the tides with an Ebb Blog? Is blog- (or -blog) poised to become the prefix/suffix of the next century? Will we soon suffer from (and tire of) blogorreah? Despite its whimsical provenance, it's an awkward, homely little word.

Goodbye, cyberspace! Hello, blogiverse! Blogosphere? Blogmos? (Carl Sagan: "Imagine billions and billions and billions of blogs.")

Graham was found dead yesterday in his St. Louis home of "natural causes." Goodbye Brad -- we'll always have blogosphere.

Questioning Profanity

This is a post about the word F*** & the increasing inability of our world to imaginatively & sensitively communicate. So those of you with sensitive eyes might want to stop reading.

I’m old enough to remember a time when to say the word “F***” was considered oh so crude & boorish. Down right offensive even. And for those of us of the female persuasion – tantamount to creating a small scandal.

But no more. The word “F***” is now freely & boldly used by both genders & by people of all classes, creeds, religions, etc, etc, etc. For we on the western side of the Atlantic this is a fairly recent development. We are still swaggeringly making use of this word to sound oh so daringly cool. But then there are the Brits who seem to use the word so often (for so long) that I’m not entirely sure what they actually think it means anymore. As for the rest of the world – my feeble impression is that it is similarly following us all down the road of rhetorical despair.

(Lord only knows what F*** sounds like in other languages.)

Now – speaking HONESTLY for myself – if anyone were to hear what I say under my breath, muttering to myself throughout the day, one would hear the word “F***” uttered freely, with great frequency & often with gusto. Somehow it just seems to fit so many different moods & situations. However – I try to limit my use of the word “in public” or out loud for all to hear. When I do so slip it sends a message to the hearer – "gee . . . Squid is really worked up about such & so or Squid is passionate about such & so . . . . . . or . . . . . don’t mess with Squid ‘cause she’s having a moment."

Now I try not to ever cause offense & genuinely am extremely careful about whom I allow to hear me say THE word. My parents would keel over whilst swooning if ever they heard “F***” escape their daughter’s lips. My poor mother cringes whenever she hears me use the word “sucks” – an absolutely favorite word of mine. Suits more situations even than "F***." It would never occur to me to use the “F-word” in a professional context. I would also never aim the word at anyone in the manner of “F*** you!” – nope – that’s too offensive for me to say to anyone no matter how angry I may be.

OK – so now that I have confessed to my own rhetorical transgressions . . . there are times when I am acutely aware of the over use of this word – increasingly so – in my world – and I am not just referring to the sound of “bleeping” on TV reality shows . Is the tossing off of this word becoming so acceptable that it is beginning to lose its bite, its radical-ness, its bluntness – or whatever mystique it has ever laid claim to? And if so, what does this mean? Are we becoming such a boorish culture that we have lost the ability to express ourselves in any more creative of a fashion? Are we now so devoid of sensitivity that we do not care who we offend? And – if we keep using the word so much that we completely desensitize ourselves to its actual meaning (which in truth, is quite offensive depending on how the word is used – Mother-f***** is extremely offensive I think) then what will we do next? What word in our language can top "F***?" Is there such a word? The “C-word” is also rising in popularity (much to my utter dismay) though its gendered specificity makes it even more offensive – another discussion for another day perhaps. “F***" is a much more egalitarian word – I’ll give it that much!

Any my final ULTIMATE question – to what extent does our use of language define us as individuals? And as a culture? As a society? Honestly holding myself up to scrutiny - What does it say about Squid that she frequently declares that things "suck" & curses "F***" under her breath?

So those are my rhetorical thoughts for the day. Even we on-line folk, it occurs to me, have an abbreviation for it – do we not? “WTF?” Comments are welcome, but please tread carefully – let’s not cause offense to anyone. OK?