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Javier E

Opinion | Civil Liberties Make for Strange Bedfellows - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...supreme-court-nra-aclu.html

free speech viewpoint discrimination NRA SCOTUS

shared by Javier E on 15 Jun 24 - No Cached
  • where is the line between government persuasion and government coercion?
  • In Justice Sotomayor’s words, “At the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.”
  • When the government can pick sides in an ideological debate and wield its power to suppress opposing views, then you’ve laid the foundation for authoritarianism. If free speech is the “dread of tyrants,” then censorship is one of the tyrant’s greatest weapons.
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  • As Douglass argued, “To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
  • Acts of intimidation are as grave a threat to free speech as restrictive government policies. Again, Douglass said it well: “There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments.”
Javier E

The N.R.A. Protection Racket - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-nra-protection-racket.html

control gun republicans

shared by Javier E on 21 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • The message to Republicans is clear: “We will help you get elected and protect your seat from Democrats. We will spend millions on ads that make your opponent look worse than the average holdup man robbing a liquor store. In return, we expect you to oppose any laws that regulate guns. These include laws requiring handgun registration, meaningful background checks on purchasers, limiting the right to carry concealed weapons, limiting access to semiautomatic weapons or anything else that would diminish the firepower available to anybody who wants it. And if you don’t comply, we will load our weapons and direct everything in our arsenal at you in the next Republican primary.”
  • According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the N.R.A. spent almost $19 million in the last federal election cycle. This money is not just spent to beat Democrats but also to beat Republicans who don’t toe the line.
  • the party establishment should refuse to endorse anyone who runs in a primary with N.R.A. money against a sitting Republican. If the establishment refuses to support Republicans using other Republicans for target practice, the N.R.A. will take its shooting game somewhere else.
Javier E

Fareed Zakaria: The solution to gun violence is clear - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...2-b6f0-e851e741d196_story.html

gun control homicide international comparison policy

shared by Javier E on 20 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • In fact, the problem is not complex, and the solution is blindingly obvious.
  • What we should be trying to understand is not one single event but why we have so many of them. The number of deaths by firearms in the United States was 32,000 last year. Around 11,000 were gun homicides.
  • To understand how staggeringly high this number is, compare it to the rate in other rich countries. England and Wales have about 50 gun homicides a year — 3 percent of our rate per 100,000 people.
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  • Many people believe that America is simply a more violent, individualistic society. But again, the data clarify. For most crimes — theft, burglary, robbery, assault — the United States is within the range of other advanced countries. The category in which the U.S. rate is magnitudes higher is gun homicides.
  • The U.S. gun homicide rate is 30 times that of France or Australia, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and 12 times higher than the average for other developed countries.
  • So what explains this difference? If psychology is the main cause, we should have 12 times as many psychologically disturbed people. But we don’t.
  • Is America’s popular culture the cause? This is highly unlikely, as largely the same culture exists in other rich countries.
  • The data in social science are rarely this clear. They strongly suggest that we have so much more gun violence than other countries because we have far more permissive laws than others regarding the sale and possession of guns. With 5 percent of the world’s population, the United States has 50 percent of the guns.
  • There is clear evidence that tightening laws — even in highly individualistic countries with long traditions of gun ownership — can reduce gun violence. In Australia, after a 1996 ban on all automatic and semiautomatic weapons — a real ban, not like the one we enacted in 1994 with 600-plus exceptions — gun-related homicides dropped 59 percent over the next decade. The rate of suicide by firearm plummeted 65 percent. (Almost 20,000 Americans die each year using guns to commit suicide
  • There will always be evil or disturbed people. And they might be influenced by popular culture. But how is government going to identify the darkest thoughts in people’s minds before they have taken any action? Certainly those who urge that government be modest in its reach would not want government to monitor thoughts, curb free expression, and ban the sale of information and entertainment.
  • Instead, why not have government do something much simpler and that has proven successful: limit access to guns.
  • A few hours before the Newtown murders last week, a man entered a school in China’s Henan province. Obviously mentally disturbed, he tried to kill children. But the only weapon he was able to get was a knife. Although 23 children were injured, not one child died.
Javier E

Gun Violence in America: The 13 Key Questions (With 13 Concise Answers) - Jonathan Stra... - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...272727

guns facts violence statistics history

shared by Javier E on 27 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • There were 8,583 homicides by firearms in 2011, out of 12,664 homicides total, according to the FBI. This means that more than two-thirds of homicides involve a firearm
  • Gun violence also affects more than its victims. In areas where it is prevalent, just the threat of violence makes neighborhoods poorer. It's very difficult to quantify the total harm caused by gun violence, but by asking many people how much they would pay to avoid this threat -- a technique called contingent valuation -- researchers have estimated a cost to American society of $100 billion dollars.
  • 19,392 of 38,264 suicides in 2010 involved a gun (50%), according to the CDC.
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  • There were 606 firearm-related accidents in the same year -- about 5% of the number of intentional gun deaths.
  • There are about 310 million guns in the country. About 40% of households have them, a fraction that has been slowly declining over the last few decades, down from about 50% in the 1960s.
  • current federal gun regulation (see above) contains an enormous loophole: While businesses that deal in guns are required to keep records and run background checks, guns can be transferred between private citizens without any record. This makes straw purchases easy.
  • The most comprehensive public list of U.S. mass shootings is the spreadsheet of 62 incidents from 1982-2012, compiled by Mother Jones. Their list shows:
  • Mass shootings happen all over the country. Killers used a semi-automatic handgun in 75% of incidents, which is about the same percentage as the 72% in overall gun violence. Killers used an assault weapon in 40% of incidents. This is much higher than overall assault weapon use in crimes, estimated at less than 2%. The guns were obtained legally in 79% of mass shootings. Many of the shooters showed signs of mental illness, but in only two cases was there a prior diagnosis. There were no cases where an armed civilian fired back.
  • they account for only a small fraction of gun violence in the United States.
  • It's also possible that gun ownership is a deterrent to crime, because criminals must consider the possibility that their intended victim is armed.
  • . In 2010, different researchers re-examined Lott's work, the NRC report, and additional data up through 2006, and reaffirmed that there is no evidence that right-to-carry laws reduce crime.
  • The most comprehensive estimate is that a 10% reduction in U.S. households with guns would result in a 3% reduction in homicides.
  • gun ownership has gotten much more concentrated among fewer households: if you own one gun, you probably own several
  • There's abundant evidence that under the current system, guns flow easily between legal and illegal markets.
  • guns are used to commit a crime about 10 times as often as they are used for self-defense.
  • Won't criminals kill with other weapons if they don't have guns? The crux of this question is whether most homicides are planned, or whether killers more often confront their victims with no clear intention. In the second case, adding a gun could result in a fatal shooting that would otherwise have been avoided.
  • In 1968, Franklin Zimring examined cases of knife assaults versus gun assaults in Chicago. The gun attacks were five times more deadly
  • Here are some approaches that don't seem to work, at least not by themselves, or in the ways they've been tried so far: Stiffer prison sentences for gun crimes. Gun buy-backs: In a country with one gun per person, getting a few thousand guns off the street in each city may not mean very much. Safe storage laws and public safety campaigns.
  • We don't really have good enough evidence to evaluate these strategies: Background checks, such as the Brady Act requires. Bans on specific weapons types, such as the expired 1994 assault weapons ban or the handgun bans in various cities.
  • These policies do actually seem to reduce gun violence, at least somewhat or in some cases: More intensive probation strategies: increased contact with police, probation officers and social workers. Changes in policing strategies, such increased patrols in hot spots. Programs featuring cooperation between law enforcement, community leaders, and researchers, such as Project Safe Neighborhoods.
  • Removing legal restrictions that prevent the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies from tracking and researching gun violence is also a sensible idea, and follows a long history of calls from scientists (see: what don't we know).
  • We lack some of the most basic information we need to have a sensible gun policy debate, partially because researchers have been prevented by law from collecting it. The 2004 National Research Council report discussed above identified several key types of missing data: systematic reporting of individual gun incidents and injuries, gun ownership at the local level, and detailed information on the operation of firearms markets. We don't even have reliable data on the number of homicides in each county.
  • Centers for Disease Control, the main U.S. agency that tracks and studies American injuries and death, has been effectively prevented from studying gun violence, due to a law passed by Congress in 1996.
  • anonymized hospital reporting systems are the main ways we know about many other types of injuries, but the Affordable Care Act prevents doctors from gathering information about their patients' gun use. A 2011 law restricts gun violence research at the National Institutes of Health. The legal language prevents these agencies from using any money "to advocate or promote gun control."
marleymorton

Trump proposes racial profiling as a tactic 'to start thinking about' - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...cial-profiling-gun-control-nra

politics US

shared by marleymorton on 14 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 14 Nov 16
     
    "I think profiling is something that we're going to have to start thinking about as a country," Trump told CBS's Face the Nation.
jlessner

They Are Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...betraying-ourselves.html

syria refugees politics history US crisis culture policy

shared by jlessner on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • et in January 1939, Americans polled said by a two-to-one majority that the United States should not accept 10,000 mostly Jewish refugee children from Germany.
  • If the Islamic State wanted to dispatch a terrorist to America, it wouldn’t ask a mole to apply for refugee status, but rather to apply for a student visa to study at, say, Indiana University. Hey, governors, are you going to keep out foreign university students?
  • Or the Islamic State could simply send fighters who are French or Belgian citizens (like some of those behind the Paris attacks) to the U.S. as tourists, no visa required. Governors, are you planning to ban foreign tourists, too?
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  • Refugee vetting has an excellent record. Of 785,000 refugees admitted to the United States since 9/11, just three have been arrested for terrorism-related charges, according to the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
  • If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this.
Javier E

They Are Us - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...betraying-ourselves.html

refugees syria emigrants

shared by Javier E on 20 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Refugee vetting has an excellent record. Of 785,000 refugees admitted to the United States since 9/11, just three have been arrested for terrorism-related charges,
  • If Republican governors are concerned about security risks, maybe they should vet who can buy guns. People on terrorism watch lists are legally allowed to buy guns in the United States, and more than 2,000 have done so since 2004. The National Rifle Association has opposed legislation to rectify this.
  • Although Donald Trump fulminates about President Obama supposedly wanting to bring in 250,000 or more Syrian refugees, that’s preposterous: Obama proposes admitting 10,000 Syrian refugees over a year. That’s tiny, just 1 percent of the number that Lebanon has accepted.
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  • The Islamic State is trying to create a religious divide and an anti-refugee backlash, so that Muslims will feel alienated and turn to extremism. If so, American and European politicians are following the Islamic State’s script.
  • Let’s be careful not to follow that script further and stigmatize all Muslims for ISIS terrorism.
maddieireland334

The Quest For a Safe Gun - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...423909

shared by maddieireland334 on 16 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Gun-safety technology has barely improved over the decades, even as many firearms have become more powerful.
  • n a speech at the White House earlier this month, President Barack Obama announced he’s directing the departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security to conduct or sponsor research into what it would take to make guns harder to use without authorization, and less likely to fire accidentally.
  • For one thing, gun owners often want their weapons to be instantly accessible and usable. That’s why so many people choose not to store their firearms in safes
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  • Making guns personalized so that they only work for approved users is a major theme in gun-safety technology today, but not everyone agrees that fingerprint sensors are the way to go
  • A review by America’s 1st Freedom, a publication run by the NRA, called Armatix’s smart weapon “sleek” but unreliable and ultimately “disappointing.” The review also raised questions about remote hacking, an aspect of personalized authentication that is likely to continue to come up.
  • TriggerSmart is developing its own RFID-enabled gun, one that he hopes—like many of the people developing advanced gun-safety technologies—will appeal to law enforcement
  • If gun enthusiasts see police officers and members of the military using a certain weapon, they’re more likely to buy the same thing.
  • That’s the idea, anyway. TriggerSmart is still testing its product, a painstaking process, and one that McNamara estimates will take a couple more years. “Because they’re such serious weapons,” he said. “We need to go and test technology rigorously in extreme conditions—in the desert in Africa and in the snow up in Alaska—to make sure that they perform perfectly well.”
  • “Nobody’s trying to take away guns,” McNamara said. “This is just offering another kind of gun. There’s thousands of types of guns. This is just another one. I don’t think, in any stretch of the imagination, that there’s anything in the president’s announcement that we’re taking away anybody’s guns. But of course there’s the fear-mongering. Paranoid fantasies.”
  • In the United States alone, there are some 350 million firearms—or, as The Washington Post recently pointed out, more guns than people. “The majority of gun owners are responsible,” Hirsch said. “I don’t know if guns are any more lethal than they used to be. The problem is they’re falling into the wrong hands.”
  • That’s true. People do kill people, just like guns-rights advocates like to say, but they wouldn’t always be able to without guns.
  • “Just the simplicity, pulling the trigger. It’s not something like a construction machine, where if you make a mistake you might lose a hand. You’re playing on a much higher level when talking about safety.”
johnsonma23

6 takeaways from the Democratic debate - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

debate US politics

shared by johnsonma23 on 18 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • Bernie Sanders is mad as hell -- and he's hoping Democratic voters are, too.
  • Hillary Clinton tied herself tightly with President Barack Obama and argued she'd build on his legacy, as the Democratic presidential contenders clashed Sunday night in Charleston.
  • Sanders = Trump
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  • Clinton promised continuity. She highlighted her record. She touted her ability to get results within the limitations of the modern political climate.
  • We have the pharmaceutical industry pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into campaign contributions and lobbying and the private insurance companies as well."
  • When the debate shifted to foreign policy in its second hour, Clinton displayed a command that was in sharp contrast to Sanders' quiet.
  • She accused Sanders of calling Obama "weak" and "ineffective" when it came to perhaps Clinton's most vulnerable subject
  • Sanders' shoot-for-the-moon liberalism and Clinton's embrace of Obama were clearest in their biggest fight of the evening: health care
  • Clinton = Obama
  • Just two hours before the debate, Sanders had rolled out a tax plan that would fund his Medicare-for-all proposal to scrap private health insurance entirely and replace it with a government-run program.
  • But as the primaries draw near, voters often spend time thinking about the commander-in-chief test -- and Sanders has a long way to go in convincing voters of his readiness to handle foreign affairs.
  • On gun control, health care, financial regulation, her "many hours in the Situation Room advising President Obama" and more, Clinton cast herself as the defender of Obama's legacy
  • Sanders had said many Democrats are "deeply disappointed" in Obama's shifts rightward, and a primary opponent could "begin contrasting what is a progressive agenda as opposed to what Obama is doing."
  • Purity vs. pragmatism on health care
  • "He has voted with the NRA, with the gun lobby, numerous times. He voted against the Brady Bill five times. He voted for what we call the Charleston loophole. He voted for immunity for gun makers and sellers," she said.
  • Nobody's hitting the Republicans
  • Health care and gun control, in particular, have emerged as key splits in the Democratic race where Clinton believes she can win liberal voters from Sanders.
  • 6 takeaways from the Democratic debate
  • Sanders willing to throw punches
  • "You've received over $600,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs in one year," he said, later turning his focus to criminal justice and noting that "not one of their executives is prosecuted" for actions during the 2008 economic crisis.
Javier E

How Russia's Propaganda Campaign Exploited America's Prejudices - Talking Points Memo - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...ts-exploit-american-prejudices

fb campaign election influence targeting advertising conservative

shared by Javier E on 12 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • most of the ads unearthed thus far appear to have been devoted to reinforcing the American electorate’s own prejudices;
  • For example, YouTube videos recently uncovered by the Daily Beast feature two black men with African accents deriding Black Lives Matter and calling Clinton an “evildoer” while praising WikiLeaks. One meme posted on a Russian troll-operated Facebook account read—with a dropped article worthy of Boris Badenov—“Why do I have a gun? Because it’s easier for my family to get me out of jail than out of cemetery.”
  • Facebook has said the Russian-bought ads were probably viewed 10 million times; Columbia University professor Jonathan Albright has suggested that the ads actually were viewed hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of times.
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  • , such examples of ham-handed propaganda likely didn’t raise eyebrows at the time because the function of social media is to affirm its users
  • On Facebook, as opposed to a medium like television, “you’re able to hone in on someone who will likely vote Republican or will likely vote Democrat and hold on to them a bit more,” Borrell told TPM. “You don’t see a lot of crossover. They’ll hold onto you as a voter—at least that’s what [social media] campaigns appear to do.”
  • Facebook, Twitter and Google have flattened the media ecosystem to such a degree that traditional news outlets like the Washington Post and the New York Times effectively compete with whitewashed demagoguery masquerading as information on sites like InfoWars and Breitbart. The Google News ranking algorithm gives those sites equal footing, and until very recently treated digital troll hive 4Chan as a news source. 
  • “One of the reasons people are dismissing this stuff is they’ll look at one particular instance of this stuff and say, ‘That looks like it might be vaguely anti-Trump,'” Hendrix told TPM. “And you’ll dig under it and see that while it may initially appear anti-Trump it has a subtler purpose, to discourage people from being engaged or to suggest that all politics are so corrupt that there’s an equivalence between the candidates.”
  • The Trump campaign didn’t need conservatives who didn’t dig Trump as a candidate to like him—they just needed those holdouts to believe he was better than Clinton, and the image of a black person supporting him, or at least deriding her as a “racist bitch,” might do the trick.
  • “A lot of it does seem to really prey on identity politics,” Hendrix said.That identity politics was already surging in reaction to the presence of a black president: Conservative pundits have been quick to attribute any unrest that follows episodes of police brutality to Black Lives Matter, wielding #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter hashtags on social media, and to tie all Black Lives Matter positions to Obama, whose justice department had taken first steps toward police reform. Russian-operated accounts gleefully exploited that festering sore spot
  • A Facebook account called “Blacktivist” posted ostensibly pro-black liberation rhetoric that was filled with dogwhistles designed to play on the worst right-wing fears: “Our race is under attack, but remember, we are strong in numbers,” one post uncovered by CNN proclaimed. “Black people should wake up as soon as possible,” said another.
  • People who fear disloyalty don’t just fear activists like BLM. Trump’s resoundingly anti-immigrant campaign, with its cornerstone of a border wall he may or may not ever build, and the nativist grievances that anchor his base dovetail with the Putin government’s desire to see less military and diplomatic cooperation across the West.
  • The @tpartynews account was quick to tie together everything the right fears about undocumented people: “Illegal Immigrants today.. Democrat on welfare tomorrow!” Russian-linked Facebook pages went a step further: “Due to the town of Twin falls, Idaho, becoming a center of refugee resettlement, which led to the huge upsurge of violence towards American citizens, it is crucial to draw society’s attention to this problem,” read a post on the SecuredBorders page,
  • Another Russian-linked group called Heart of Texas, with about 225,000 followers, successfully organized anti-immigrant rallies protesting “higher taxes to feed undocumented aliens” and warned of the scourge of “mosques,”
  • Undergirding both the anti-immigrant and anti-black sentiment the Russian propaganda campaign capitalized on is a fear of violence. It’s something the NRA exploited throughout the tenure of the United States’ first black president to great effect, and it was easy for Russian trolls to exploit too.
  • Looking at the ads—though scant few of them have been unearthed by reports as tech companies have declined to publicly release them—it’s clear that the issue of race is paramount. The ads that have surfaced play relentlessly on prejudices against black people, immigrants and Muslims, and Trump’s campaign was a symphony of insults maligning all three groups.
  • Advertising from the Trump campaign was notable for the brazenness of its racialized invective; the Russian propaganda campaign followed suit with a microtargeted series of ads explicitly playing up racism and bigotry, rather than trying to sanitize it with coded phrases and winks. The results were inexpert and scattershot—the improbably named “Williams and Kalvin” seem to be looking at cue cards occasionally in their videos—but Facebook, Twitter and their peers had honed the delivery mechanism so carefully that the r
  • “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in computer science to use Facebook’s targeting tools,” Hendrix said. “These are tools that were built for anybody to be able to target messages and ads to any constituency. They’re designed for the lowest common denominator—to be as simple as possible and to work at scale.”
Javier E

When bias beats logic: why the US can't have a reasoned gun debate | US news | The Guar... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-gun-control-debate-bias

guns debate culture crisis politics nuance discourse polarization logic bias

shared by Javier E on 08 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Jon Stokes, a writer and software developer, said he is frustrated after each mass shooting by “the sentiment among very smart people, who are used to detail and nuance and doing a lot of research, that this is cut and dried, this is black and white”.
  • Stokes has lived on both sides of America’s gun culture war, growing up in rural Louisiana, where he got his first gun at age nine, and later studying at Harvard and the University of Chicago, where he adopted some of a big-city resident’s skepticism about guns. He’s written articles about the gun geek culture behind the popularity of the AR-15, why he owns a military-style rifle, and why gun owners are so skeptical of tech-enhanced “smart guns”.
  • Even to suggest that the debate is more complicated – that learning something about guns, by taking a course on how to safely carry a concealed weapon, or learning how to fire a gun, might shift their perspective on whichever solution they have just heard about on TV – “just upsets them, and they basically say you’re trying to obscure the issue”.
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  • In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.
  • Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.
  • The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.
  • It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.
  • But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.
  • The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.
  • When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”
  • When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.
Javier E

Gun Rights, 'Positive Good' and the Evolution of Mutually Assured Massacre - Talking Po... - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...n-of-mutually-assured-massacre

gun rights positive evolution rationale evil psychology

shared by Javier E on 23 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Of course no country – not in the midst of endemic civil violence or civil war – has ever tried having totally unrestricted access to any number of firearms and any amount of ammunition either. We’re already in uncharted territory.
  • The fact that Trump suggested this idea was entirely predictable. I would almost go as far as to say that it is the mainstream policy response from “gun rights” Republicans, which is to say almost all Republicans who are vocal on this issue.
  • But it goes back further still, more than a decade to a largely discredited and significantly disgraced “gun rights” economist named John Lott. Lott wrote some foundation studies that didn’t withstand serious scrutiny. He also got in trouble for creating fake online identities to praise his work
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  • What Lott did was apply a kind of crude game theory to the gun question – call it Mutually Assured Massacre.
  • if everyone is armed or any given person might be armed, you’re going to be a lot more cautious about going for your firearm and shooting someone. Because they might be armed too. They might shoot back.
  • we can only understand this development by looking back to an earlier period of American history, particularly the last two decades before the Civil War.
  • in practice, almost everything is wrong with this logic. It relies on an extremely crude version of economic rational action and an even cruder form of game theory. This is particularly the case when you realize that the fraught, angry situations where people impulsively kill other people are by definition not rational.
  • This doesn’t even get into situations like school shootings where the assailant usually intends to die in the massacre. It also doesn’t get into accidents, misunderstandings. I
  • the policy arguments from gun rights advocates mostly come back to John Lott: more guns in private hands means more safety. Same with open carry and a bunch of other parts of the “gun rights” agenda. It’s pervasive. It’s gospel.
  • In the abstract, where no humans actually exist, there’s actually a compelling logic to this
  • In the first decades of American history, there were many slaves and many slaveholders. But there were very few defenders of slavery per se. Virtually all respectable Southerners understood slavery as an evil, perhaps a necessary evil
  • This began to change in the 1830s and 1840s as slavery came under more genuine and immediate threat. There was more anti-slavery agitation in the North. Great Britain had begun a process of gradual emancipation.
  • This spurred a basic rethinking of the matter for a simple reason based on human nature: no one wants to go into a critical argument with the basic assumption that you’re actually wrong. This was the spur for the so-called “positive good” theory of pro-slavery politics.
  • simply, far from being a necessary evil or a flawed and unjust institution slaveholders’ ancestors had saddled them with, slavery was not only a good thing but the only foundation of a just society. It was right that Africans should be slaves and that whites should be their masters. Full stop
  • The prevailing ideas entertained by him and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old constitution, were that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally, and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with, but the general opinion of the men of that day was that, somehow or other in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away.
  • Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the government built upon it fell when the “storm came and the wind blew.”
  • Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.
  • In retrospect, this evolution seems inevitable. People can’t go to literal or figurative war with an ambivalent commitment. The need for a positive defense of slavery was critical.
  • The NRA wasn’t always against all gun restrictions. In the 1980s and 1990s, it didn’t oppose some very limited restrictions. That changed over the course of the 1990s, for a variety of reasons.
  • the main reason for this change is that as long as you recognize the basic reality that guns are dangerous, fighting even the most minimal kinds of restrictions is inherently difficult. You need to change the game. You need a theory that is coherent and in line with your goal.
  • Lott’s theory created a logic for that. The problem with massacres isn’t too many guns. It’s too few guns. Guns aren’t the problem. They’re the answer. It was the NRA’s ‘positive good’ argument, comparable to the one pro-slavery intellectuals devised in the 1850s.
  • if you look at the progression of gun regulation over the last twenty years, it is entirely in this direction. We not only have a dramatically higher number of guns in circulation today. We not only lack the limited protections from the 1990s. We have a whole movement making on-demand concealed carry the norm across much of the country. We also have more open carry laws. All public policy has moved toward more guns, not fewer and more freedom to bring them anywhere you want.
  • This was the movement Lott, with his error-riddled study, was trying to advance: maximizing the number of people carrying a concealed weapon in daily life.
  • Indeed, something called the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 is on the verge of passage in Congress today. That would force states with tighter gun laws to honor the licenses of the most permissive ones. In other words, effectively nationalizing the right of anyone without a felony conviction or a recent mental health hospitalization to carry a loaded weapon whenever and wherever they want.
Javier E

Sun Yat-sen - Wikipedia - 0 views

en.wikipedia.org/...Sun_Yat-sen

china Repubic history

shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • Sun saw the danger of this and returned to China in 1917 to advocate Chinese reunification. In 1921 he started a self-proclaimed military government in Guangzhou and was elected Grand Marshal.[81]
  • By this time Sun had become convinced that the only hope for a unified China lay in a military conquest from his base in the south, followed by a period of political tutelage that would culminate in the transition to democracy. In order to hasten the conquest of China, he began a policy of active cooperation with the Communist Party of China (CPC). Sun and the Soviet Union's Adolph Joffe signed the Sun-Joffe Manifesto in January 1923.[83] Sun received help from the Comintern for his acceptance of communist members into his KMT. Revolutionary and socialist leader Vladimir Lenin praised Sun and the KMT for their ideology and principles. Lenin praised Sun and his attempts at social reformation, and also congratulated him for fighting foreign Imperialism.[84][85][86] Sun also returned the praise, calling him a "great man", and sent his congratulations on the revolution in Russia.[87] With the Soviets' help, Sun was able to develop the military power needed for the Northern Expedition against the military at the north. He established the Whampoa Military Academy near Guangzhou with Chiang Kai-shek as the commandant of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA).[88] Other Whampoa leaders include Wang Jingwei and Hu Hanmin as political instructors. This full collaboration was called the First United Front.
  • In 1924 Sun appointed his brother-in-law T. V. Soong to set up the first Chinese Central bank called the Canton Central Bank.[89] To establish national capitalism and a banking system was a major objective for the KMT.[9
Javier E

It's time to say last rites over American conservatism - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-92c9-376b4fe57ff7_story.html

extremism gop far right crisis trump history

shared by Javier E on 26 Feb 18 - No Cached
  • After years of drifting steadily toward extreme positions, conservatism is dead, replaced by a far right that has the Republican Party under its thumb.
  • Conservatism is a complex creed, some of it less than appealing and some of it noble.
  • The less-attractive kind involves an ideology whose main purpose is to defend existing distributions of power and wealth, and to resist reforms that might redress the grievances of those facing discrimination and marginalization.
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The enticing brand of conservatism is rooted in an affection for a particular place and its way of life.
  • . Conservatism’s positive function is to warn against measures designed to fix things that are wrong, but whose main effects are to undermine institutions that are widely valued
  • at its best — conservatism is supposed to be resistant to extremism precisely because it is, in principle, the antithesis of a revolutionary creed
  • for two decades, the tweedy sort of conservatism has been giving ground to the extremists who want not simply to defeat their adversaries but to crush them; who traffic in conspiracy theories rather than in respect for facts and history; and who are willing to destroy the very institutions they claim to be trying to save
  • thanks to Trump, European-style ethno-nationalism has become so much a part of the movement that Maréchal-Le Pen’s visit seemed almost natural.
  • the National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful forces within the Republican Party and the conservative movement. It uses paranoid rhetoric and incendiary attacks on its foes to justify riotously permissive firearms policies that no other democratic republic would dream of adopting.
  • What should worry us is that the radicalism of the NRA is not exceptional on the American right. It is what the right is all about.
  • The Post’s Dave Weigel reported on an otherwise little-noticed CPAC speech by White House Counsel Donald McGahn linking Trump’s judicial appointments to his dismantling of regulation.
  • “There is a coherent plan here where the judicial selection and the deregulation effort are really the flip side of the same coin,”
  • Remember when conservatives criticized the politicization of the judiciary? McGahn is describing a judicial branch that is little more than an instrument of right-wing executive power.
knudsenlu

White House vows to help arm teachers and backs off raising age for buying guns - The W... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-bc72-077aa4dab9ef_story.html

guns teachers US history crisis culture trump

shared by knudsenlu on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • The White House on Sunday vowed to help provide “rigorous firearms training” to some schoolteachers and formally endorsed a bill to tighten the federal background checks system, but it backed off President Trump’s earlier call to raise the minimum age to purchase some guns to 21 years old from 18 years old.
  • “We are committed to working quickly because there’s no time to waste,” she said on a conference call with reporters on Sunday evening. Invoking past mass school shootings, she continued, “No student, no family, no teacher and no school should have to live the horror of Parkland or Sandy Hook or Columbine again.”
  • “This plan is weak on security and an insult to the victims of gun violence,” Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) said in a statement. “When it comes to keeping our families safe, it’s clear that President Trump and Congressional Republicans are all talk and no action.”
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  • Trump has said he was personally moved by the shooting — and by the persistent and impassioned calls for action from some of the teenage survivors as well as parents of the victims — and elevated the issue of school safety in his administration. He has called for raising the minimum age for purchasing an AR-15 or similar-style rifles from 18 to 21 years old.
  • The administration will start working with states to provide “rigorous firearms training” to teachers and other school personnel who volunteer to be armed, said Andrew Bremberg, director of the White House Domestic Policy Council. The White House has not proposed offering states new funding for this training.
  • Lastly, the administration wants to better integrate mental health, primary care and family services programs, and the president has ordered a full audit and review of the FBI tip line, he said. The FBI has said it ignored a warning that 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz might attack a school just weeks before he allegedly carried out the rampage in Parkland.
  • While some gun-control advocates welcomed the move, others argued that it would be better for Congress to pass legislation banning the devices. Federal officials had in years past concluded that they could not legally regulate bump stocks, and the new move to do so is likely to be met with lawsuits from manufacturers of the devices. The NRA does not oppose regulating bump stocks under existing law, but it does object to new legislation.
malonema1

Florida school shooting: Where do US protests go from here? - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-us-canada-43119205

US culture crisis

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • At 14:21 on 14 February, gunman Nikolas Cruz entered Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, and began shooting.Seven minutes later, he walked out, having shot dead 17 students.About 40 hours later, one survivor, Cameron Kasky, became the first person to use the hashtag #NeverAgain on Twitter.
  • By one count, there have been 15 major protests on progressive issues in the year since President Trump took office, including two Women's Marches and one against a far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
  • "But I do think with the other movements like #MeToo and the Women's March, we've seen a turning point. None of those powerful men in Hollywood expected something like that to happen. Lawmakers and the NRA [National Rifle Association] did not expect this to happen
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  • She found that almost 80% had attended the same event in 2017, 41% were at the March for Science on 22 April last year and 26% had turned out for the People's Climate March a week later.
malonema1

Trump unlikely to change policy on violent video games - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...cy-on-violent-video-games.html

US trump culture

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Trump on Thursday hosted a White House roundtable with video game company CEOs and representatives, who defended their industry in an ongoing debate about the alleged links between violent games and real-life violence. The advocates were matched by a number of critics, including Republican lawmakers, who have suggested a causal relationship between violent media and behavior.
  • The meeting, according to the White House, was an opportunity "to discuss violent video game exposure and the correlation to aggression and desensitization in children" in the wake of the shooting massacre of 17 students and adults at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14.
  • "We discussed the numerous scientific studies establishing that there is no connection between video games and violence, First Amendment protection of video games, and how our industry's rating system effectively helps parents make informed entertainment choices. We appreciate the President's receptive and comprehensive approach to this discussion," the group said.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Five years later, Republicans and Democrats alike forged a link between video games and school shootings. After it was revealed that the two teenagers who killed 13 people at Columbine High School in Colorado were fans of first-person shooting games, President Bill Clinton slammed violent games as tools that "make our children more active participants in simulated violence."
  • The National Rifle Association, in particular, has blamed video games as a major factor in mass shootings. After the December 2012 massacre of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, NRA leader Wayne LaPierre said: "Guns don't kill people. Video games, the media and Obama's budget kill people." Video game industry analysts strongly dispute the connection. "If there was actually a correlation between gun violence and video games then everywhere where violent video games are released you would find a similar level of gun violence, or at least a correlation," said Lewis Ward, research director of gaming at International Data Corporation. Industry analysts sa
malonema1

Gun control: Why US is different from UK and Australia - 0 views

www.cnbc.com/...ent-from-uk-and-australia.html

US trump culture policy

shared by malonema1 on 12 Mar 18 - No Cached
  • Gun control has returned to the forefront of the national debate since a mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, left 17 dead. And unlike previous massacres, this has been followed by a number of big companies announcing measures to limit gun sales or otherwise defy the will of the National Rifle Association and other pro-gun groups.
  • In the U.K., a mass shooting in Dunblane Primary School in Scotland in 1996 left 17 dead, including the shooter. The government reacted by banning all handguns — more powerful weapons had already been banned previously — and held a gun amnesty that collected more than 162,000 handguns.
  • "These are countries that don't have Second Amendment right to arms, so there's no constitutional right that has to be addressed with respect to gun reform policies of any type, whereas in the U.S., there is a legal headache," Miller said. "The Amendment forbids similar measures."
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  • "The NRA are a powerful counterweight to mass mobilization, even to sympathetic movements like the ones these kids have," Miller said, explaining that the NRA's members maintain a passionate dedication about guns and gun rights, more so than the individuals who want limitations on guns.
  • Although calls for change always happen after a tragedy such as the Parkland shooting, trends show that the attention usually gets swept aside after the initial intense outrage. The difference, however, is that public outcry feels different this time, according to Ruben, "there is a real chance that some real change can be implemented."
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