Tag Archives: guns

Political Rants

Such a quiet boy, a bright boy

I’m not fond of doing blog posts about mass shootings. Part of the reason for this is the fact that they happen all the time, and it’s manifestly obvious that none of our political leaders are willing to do anything substantive to prevent them. Still, this shooting at the Tops supermarket in Buffalo is particularly heinous. Yes, this is about guns, but it’s about more than guns. It’s about assholes, too.

No, I’m not referring to the shooter, though he is clearly an asshole. The primary responsibility for this atrocity belongs to more powerful people. This kid didn’t pluck racist “great replacement” theory garbage out of thin air. This crap is being circulated by politicians, pundits, and other well-paid voices eager to draw some attention to themselves. Young people like the shooter are susceptible to the toxic logic behind these crackpot theories. Those who propagate it know this, and they have blood on their hands.

Legally obtainable

According to press reports, the shooter legally obtained his Bushmaster assault rifle. (Apparently he had his man card checked.) This in spite of the fact that he had made threats against his high school – threats serious enough for the school to report it to the NY State Police. And yet, with all that, he was able to buy the gun. Was that a grievous mistake? An unfortunate clerical error? Or the soft terrorism of flaccid gun laws?

I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter. Even in a state like New York, our gun laws are weak. Worse, the Supreme Court is closing in on a decision on NY State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which involves a challenge to the NY State law requiring gun-toters to show probable cause before getting their concealed carry permit. It seems likely that this law will be overturned, which may mean more white nationalists will be packing heat in a supermarket near you.

Twitter gate crashers

Then there’s the Swanson fortune heir. You know – the one on T.V. that occasionally cackles like Felix the Cat. Now, I’m certain that his pathetic little junior Nazi producers funnel dark web conspiracy theories up the the boss on a regular basis. That replacement theory BS, though – that’s old as fuck. That shit likely rode into Tucker’s mouth on the same silver spoon that delivered his pablum. He’s heir to more than frozen dinner money, you know. Pater and Mater left him a handsome legacy of country club racism as well.

Of course, he likes to have his audience pretend that he’s not a member of the elite – that it’s those people on the left telling you what to think and lording it over you. He’s talked about the “gatekeepeers” on Twitter who get “hysterical” when he talks about the great replacement. Not sure how anyone on Twitter can be a “gatekeeper” for a guy with the top rated show on cable news. Right wingers are super sensitive little butterflies, aren’t they?

I’m just using Carlson as an example. There’s plenty of prominent reinforcement for bad ideas like replacement theory. He could disappear tomorrow and it would still be a problem.

What now?

The answer to hate is better organizing. I don’t see any other way. We need to help people understand that their problems are not being caused by other workers who happen to look, talk, love differently.

What to do about the Court’s broad interpretation of the second amendment? Well, I believe Congress can pass legislation that’s outside the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court. Here’s the relevant passage, from Article III, Section 2:

…the Supreme Court shall have appellate jurisdiction, both as to law and fact, with such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.

“With such exceptions, and under such regulations as the Congress shall make”? That’s not nothing.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.
Political Rants

Doing the wrong thing. Again.

We live in a violent society. I think that’s as close to a truism as anything can be. Mass shootings are a fact of life in America, and they happen with a sickening regularity. Gun violence takes a very heavy toll, and violent crime has spiked since the pandemic – specifically, homicides over the course of 2020. It was, of course, a year of exceptions, though many pundits and prognosticators have claimed that the increase is largely the result of police going into a kind of defensive crouch in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent uprising.

I’ve no doubt that police departments have pulled back. Some made a point of doing so after previous high-profile deaths of people of color in police custody. On the podcast Why Is This Happening?, Patrick Sharkey talks about the various factors behind this rise in violent crime. Less aggressive policing is one, but he makes the point that a lot of community-based services that contribute significantly to reducing crime were shut down during the pandemic.

This, in some ways, reflects the divide between right and left perspectives on how best to address crime. Not surprisingly to anyone who follows this blog, I come down on the left side of this question, and I do so with what I consider to be really good reasons.

Fighting Crime With Crime

The idea that, as a society, we should reduce crime by over-policing disadvantaged communities is cynical beyond belief. Yes, you can marginally depress crime by mass arresting people, throwing them in jail for long terms, harassing people of color, etc., but in so doing you do irreparable violence to entire communities. That in itself is criminal far beyond the level of anything you might hope to prevent.

Other approaches work better, frankly – mutual aid, community-based counseling and mentorship services, nutrition programs, housing support, direct aid to families and individuals, etc. They also build communities, not destroy them.

Dirty Harry Syndrome

The advocates for hyper-aggressive policing work to create the impression that cases like the murder of George Floyd are necessary by-products of the service police provide. Sure, goes the argument, occasionally someone gets killed who probably shouldn’t have died, but that’s the price you pay for having safe streets. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few skulls … I mean, eggs, right?

There’s a visceral appeal to this argument – a kind of cathartic, give-them-what-they-deserve attitude that makes a lot of white people feel right with the world. There’s a reason why movies like Dirty Harry were big hits – it’s a very attractive narrative for people who don’t do a lot of thinking.

The Political Economy of Policing

Of course, we know that political careers are made on hyper-aggressive anti-crime politics. That’s true of everyone from your local DA to the President of the United States. It’s a lot easier to get taxpayers to pay for MRAPs and sophisticated weapons for the cops than it is to get them to fund after-school programs and free breakfast for kids of color. And even though aggressive policing is a bad solution to the problem of crime, it’s an easier sell for politicians than the much more effective and less destructive approach that involves supportive community services.

Let’s face it, there’s a lot of money in expanding the police/prison state, just like there was a lot of money in slavery. That’s why defund causes so much consternation – it hits them where it hurts. Very insightful on the part of BLM to work that out. We need to carry that knowledge with us as we seek real solutions to this dysfunctional system.

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.

Political Rants

Fire one.

Last Friday, I thought there had been two mass shootings in a single week. Michael Moore’s podcast Rumble set me straight on this. Based on law enforcement’s definition of a mass shooting – four or more victims – there were seven that week. As I said in my last post, this is nuts. We’ve become a nation of people waiting to be shot. For the more than 80 percent of us who do not own firearms of any sort, that’s a pretty nerve-wracking place to be. It’s not like there’s a safe place. Shootings happen in schools, movie theaters, grocery stores, outdoor concerts, restaurants, you name it. Anyplace a gunman can enter, so too can the gun, and like that Chekhovian cliche, if there’s a gun in the first act, you know that someone will be shot by the end of the play. So the operative question is, how do we get the gun out of the first act? If we’re depending on Congress to answer that question, it’s going to be a long play.

I will admit, I thought for certain that Sandy Hook would have been sufficient to put gun control over the edge. A hideous massacre of young school children – that had to be enough to shock the conscience of a nation. Perhaps …. only not this nation. Of course, Obama was president, the House was in Republican hands, and the Senate – while still run by a significant Democratic majority – was tied up in knots by its fealty to the modern version of the filibuster. Even the small-bore gun law they proposed could not make it through, and ultimately it was dropped. Now we live in a post-Heller gun-owners paradise, in which a particularly expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment – one that implies a personal right to gun ownership – rules the day. I have to think that even if we were to get meaningful gun measures through Congress and signed by the president, the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court might well knock them down.

There are some who defend this notion of the Second Amendment. People like Joe Scarborough are fond of saying that the amendment “says what it says” – a kind of shorthand textualist approach. The trouble is, they don’t seem to know what the amendment says. (Scarborough in fact affected to read it from memory on his show last week, and added in a few terms not found in the original.) For one thing, they all seem to ignore the dependent clause at the beginning of the text; the part about the well-regulated militia. If you’re a strict textualist, shouldn’t that, too, be considered sacrosanct? But setting that aside for a moment, the fact is that this is clearly not an unlimited right – we do, in fact, limit our interpretation of the Second Amendment, like we do with every other text. The word “gun” appears nowhere in the document. It uses the term “arms”, which we interpret narrowly as meaning “guns”. I think most people agree that there is no constitutional right to own chemical or nuclear weapons, even though those are “arms”. I suppose a bazooka could be considered a kind of “gun”, and yet we disallow ownership of those under the Second Amendment. (At least, as of now.)

I guess what I’m getting at is that we are all potential victims of semantics. If we could limit our interpretation of “arms” to our Founding Fathers’ use of the term, Americans might have a limited right to own flintlocks and other muzzle-loaders. I think I could live with that kind of originalism. How about you?

luv u,

jp

Check out our political opinion podcast, Strange Sound.