Comments Elsewhere: Guns and Rape

Over at LGM, in their discussion of the abuse heaped on Zerlina Maxwell for some simple truth-telling, I made a few comments:

March 10, 2013 at 8:56 pm

Since nobody, for better or for worse, is seriously arguing that all guns should be banned…

I am, but nobody listens to me.

Hunting can be done with bow and crossbow.

Self-defence should be done with blunt and edged weapons.

Sexual coercion of all sorts should be stigmatized to the point where all rapes and sexual assaults are treated the way we treat child molestation, necrophilia.

Oh, and everyone should take a lot more history classes in college.

March 10, 2013 at 9:19 pm

Oh, and that “only criminals will have guns” thing? Yup, that’s the idea. If you’ve got a gun, and you don’t have a uniform and a badge, you’re a criminal, and should be treated like a dangerous rabid animal.

It’ll take some time to get the bulk of the guns out of circulation, yeah. But gradualism will only confuse things: Make ‘em all illegal for private ownership now, and let things get better more or less immediately, and from that point forward.

I’m open to a black-powder recreator exception for the weapons, but not for bullets: putting anything but black powder and wadding in the muzzle constitutes a felonious weapons violation.

In a different thread, I said

March 10, 2013 at 8:48 pm

According to NCVS there were 108,000 defensive gun uses in 2010. Even if we assume that half of them were someone’s fantasy, that’s 54,000 people not robbed, raped, beaten, or killed each and every year. Somehow or another all those people managed to clear leather fast enough to not be a victim.

I would assume that 90% were over-reactions or escalations that would not have happened without the presence of the gun, and that 9% were responding to the presence someone else’s unnecessary gun.

Arrogant Worms: Wouldn't it be great if everyone had a gun?

I can't believe nobody I read has posted a link to this yet. This is in honor of Glenn Reynolds, Russell Pierce, and so many other numbskull ideologues. (No, I'm not linking. Find them yourself, but be ready for the unfunny, irony-free version.) The song is the important thing, but this version of the video is brilliantly pastiched, well worth watching.

Picture: Dragonfly In Flight

Remember Summer?

Comments Elsewhere: Birtherism and the Ground Game

After watching 80-odd comments on the birth certificate issues miss the point, I added

There’s a whole raft of birther-related bills floating around statehouses, targetting the next round of primaries and national elections: filing season is going to come up in a matter of months. Releasing these documents now is a reminder to every state attorney general, every state legislature that they will mire their state in costly legislation, and if they craft a bill that excludes Obama’s documentation, they’ll be in violation of constitutional due process and full faith and credit protections, and if they don’t, they’ll just look like idiots for missing their target.

Frankly, the short-form birth certificate was enough, legally, but this just drives it home.

Probably won’t stop them from trying, but it could peel away enough cost-conscious state senators or governors to keep the legislation sane and/or kill it outright.

Comments Elsewhere: Politics

It's been a day of heavy political discussion.

In a discussion of the recent elections with Anne Zook, I wrote:

1/6th of the population will reliably vote, and vote Democrat; 1/6th of the population will reliably vote, and vote Republican; 1/6th of the population, the most motivated of the remaining 2/3rds, will show up and vote their outrage, and the winner is determined by whether inconsistent voting Republicans are more outraged than inconsistent voting Democrats in any given cycle.

A lot of research about independent voters has convinced me that they actually constitute a very small share of the population compared to weak-voting Democrats and Republicans who only show up to vote when they're angry. So the "independent voter" in exit polls oscilates from cycle to cycle not because independents are changing their minds, but because different people are showing up.

Then, in response to Rich Puchalsky's declaration of late-blooming anarchism, I responded:

The problem with anarchism, for me, has always been the absurdly optimistic endgame: if we remove all the structures of oppression and power (and we can't tell the difference), we'll all be happy sharing people!

It feels weird, but as a Lockean/Millsian left liberal, I've become a kind of Burkean conservative: Look, we had these systems and traditions and they worked pretty well! Let's not change them too quickly or expect too much from people! Revolutions get out of control! Especially theirs!

More to the point, perhaps, is that I don't see how you solve the problem of scofflaws by abandoning the concept of law: if your ultimate goal is to create a society of decency, I don't see how law can be anything other than an insufficient but necessary condition of its existence.

We're potentially on the verge of a techologically-aided revolution in law and decency: the ability to document, share, and shame systems of power. Or maybe not, because the same systems of surveillance and publication can even more easily be used against us as methods of control, but it seems to me that fact that we're having the debate about Yoo and Bybee now, less than a decade after the crimes were committed, is a step forward from the decades that disclosure and reckoning used to take. Our skill at self-justification is as great as ever, though, so it might not matter as much as I think.

That said, I feel a lot like I'm clinging to something that really won't support us anymore. Puchalsky's right that the big winners in this process are the plutocrats and "the rule of law" has never significantly affected the national security aspects of the state or economy; Zook is right that the political process is a poisoned well surrounded by idiots.

Comment Elsewhere: The Smoking Gun as a Stake Through the Heart

In a rare emergence at Peevish, we got into a discussion of Bush administration criminality and Republican obstructionism, and I said:

We need the smoking gun. We need proof that Bush and Cheney and Libby and Rove and Kagan (and Kagan, and Kagan, etc.) and Kristol and Rumsfield actively conspired to put partisan success over national welfare, put ideological barriers in the way of reality, put profit ahead of people. I can see the bullet holes, you can see them too, but until we can put that gun in their hand and their prints on the trigger and the bullets, people will consider the Republicans to be just another political party, rather than a treasonous criminal conspiracy. If we can do that, we can make the Republican party as dead as the Whigs and the Know-nothings, and we can get on with our lives. There will still be a conservative movement, a business party (a big chunk of the Democratic party qualifies!) an anti-liberal movement. But they will have to abjure the Republican legacy to remain legitimate.

All I want for Christmas is a smoking gun email....