I'm Not Sure They Thought This Through Beforehand

While there is still some hysterical hyperventilation on the right over the "First Terrorist Attack Since 9/11", they seem to have dialed it back some as of this morning. Which is so unlike them.

And I can't help but wonder if maybe it was because the guy used a gun.

If a few angry losers want to kill people, they're not going to get it done with whacked-out plots to blow up Sears Tower or the Brooklyn Bridge. They can get it done using guns. Thanks to the extraordinarily lax gun laws in most states in this country, they can kill a whole lot of people with guns.

(In the case of George Tiller, of course, they didn't have to kill a lot of people; one was enough to make their point.)

Pointing that out--as they do, inadvertently, when they call the murder of Private William Long "terrorism"--does not serve the interests of the gun fetishists.

Random Flickr Blogging: img_4188

Please also see these fine contributions from Generik, catharine, Ben Varkentine, Anthony Cartouche, and nash.

Originally uploaded by mkeblx.
Random Flickr-blogging explained.

The Clinton campaign was accused of employing an aggressive and unorthodox get-out-the-vote methodology last week in South Carolina.

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Originally uploaded by ushio.

A law-abiding citizen prepares to exercise his 2nd Amendment rights, defend his home and family, and reduce the density of housing in his subdivision, all at the same time.

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Originally uploaded by Kendall Bruns.

It's good to know that, with the wedding over...

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Originally uploaded by vix130.

...the honeymoon is proceeding pretty much as planned.

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Originally uploaded by pubarso.

Anxious to put pressure on the Writers' Guild, television executives appealed directly to the viewing public, threatening the "nuclear option":

Curling in prime time.

Guns and Liberty

Second Amendment fetishists like to argue that guns in themselves preserve liberty; we see this from a commenter on Steve's post, and we see it at wingnut sites like this one.

They always argue this in the abstract, though. The whole guns-as-guarantors-of-freedom argument would be more credible if a) they could come up with a plausible mechanism by which it accomplishes the task, and b) it had any basis in how American history has actually played out.

Which, if you look at it for five minutes, it doesn't. Widespread ownership of guns did nothing to prevent, say, the internment of Japanese-Americans or the Red Scares of the '20s and the '50s. It didn't prevent the wholesale extermination of Native Americans; in fact, much of the slaughter was carried out not by the military but by armed settlers, in violation of treaties (but, we suppose, in full accordance with the Second Amendment). We'll likely have more spasms of mass oppression in the future, and I'm pretty confident in predicting that guns won't prevent any of it.

(What does protect liberty: phones. Faxes. Copiers. E-mail. Satellite communications. Those are the things that made the difference when the Soviet-backed regimes fell in Eastern Europe. Not perfect, not always decisive, but a whole lot more effective as a weapon for freedom than guns will ever be.)

Conversely, look at groups that have taken up arms (or, if you will, 'exercised their Second Amendment rights') against what they perceived as oppression: the SLA, the Ku Klux Klan, the Aryan Nations...and of course the traitorous Southern militias, which by any real-world standard took up arms in defense of oppression. (Off the top of my head, the only really justified example I can think of is John Brown...and he got hanged for 'exercising his Second Amendment rights'.) All of which illustrate another serious problem with the guns-as-liberty argument: the least reasonable are the first to embrace violent means.

Finally, there's the problem that we Gringolandians can't even agree on what rights are worth protecting. Habeas corpus? Not an issue for a lot of gun owners. (Here I have to give Bob Barr, wingnut though he is, credit for consistency.) Vaporizing prairie dogs with assault rifles? Now there's a 'right' worth protecting. If some truly (as opposed to pseudo-) fascist regime took control, what are the odds that the gun owners will be on the right side? How realistic is it to imagine that we would rise as one to oppose injustice? Isn't it far more likely that if it came down to shooting, it would be Gringolandian against Gringolandian, with sizable minorities on each side and most of the guns on the side of evil?

Quote of the Day

Steve M, commenting on an editorial by Glenn Reynolds that begins with an anecdote about a student who, on Monday, felt unsafe on campus without her gun:

May I say something harsh here? If there's a maniac on the loose in central Virginia and that makes you afraid for your safety in Tennessee, then I'm not exactly sure I want someone with your temperament carrying a gun at my school.

I would go further than Steve: I would say that as a general matter, anyone who doesn't feel safe without a gun is exactly the sort of person who shouldn't have one¹.



¹Exceptions, obviously, for people who have a reasonable fear of physical harm from some identifiable source--women with stalker exes, e.g.

Guns Don't Kill People; Law-Abiding Citizens Excercising Their 2nd-Amendment Rights Kill People. With Guns.

Right after something goes wrong -- even horribly wrong -- is not the time to talk about how it happened and what to do about it.

Uh huh.

That was a paraphrase; what you'll actually hear is something like this:

Today, in the white hot moment of grief and anger, is probably not the best time to have the debate over gun control.

And from the NRA:

The National Rifle Association joins the entire country in expressing our deepest condolences to the families of Virginia Tech University and everyone else affected by this horrible tragedy. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families. We will not have further comment until all the facts are known.

How convenient for the gun nuts! Is that so after a few days we might forget there was even a gun involved and move on to something else?


At least one fact is already in: Somebody murdered 33 people on Monday. With a gun. If you need to know anything else (was it an assault rifle or a handgun? Did he have a criminal record? Did he own the gun legally? Was it a "good" gun, or a "bad" gun? Was it a pretty gun, or an ugly gun? What color was the gun?), then you're on your way down that road to good ol' American-style hair-splitting equivocation.

The survivors won't have the luxury of grieving differently based on the answers to those questions -- their loss is absolute and irrevocable. They are the ones who pay the cost of somebody else's so-called "freedom".

What's the cost to me personally? Two family members. So far.

Quite a few years ago now, somebody walked up to my cousin Charlie while he was making a call in a Florida phone booth, and blew him away with a "Saturday-night special". We still don't know who it was. That's not the case with another cousin's daughter; she was stalked by an ex-boyfriend with no criminal record and murdered on her front steps with a legally-registered gun.

It's bad enough that we are reactive rather than proactive as a nation. But we go beyond that to being a crippled, broken society if we can't address 30,242 preventable deaths a year. By my calculations, that's 169,355 since 9/11/2001, when 2,973 died in the World Trade Center attack. Tomorrow, it will have been 169,438. That's 5,700% of the terrorism death rate over that time.

If we reclassify gun crimes as terrorism, could we then have the appropriately hysterical response? Since 9/11, I have to be strip-searched if an airline ticket agent doesn't like the way I look. Yet, among all the measures taken in the 9/11 aftermath, there was never a mention of tightening security around weapons.

On the other hand, to fly a light airplane (2,400 pounds, fully loaded), I had to get a background check, be fingerprinted, and provide all sorts of documentation just to get a badge to allow me onto the ramp at the airport where I fly; all presumably so that something that might blow away in a stiff wind won't be used as a terrorist weapon. Last week, Massport threatened to send the State Police to my house to confiscate my badge until I provided the same documentation, because the inept TSA had somehow destroyed the records. I don't have a high-powered NRA-style lobby bullying legislators (unless the AOPA counts), so I have to suck it up if I want to keep doing what I do.

It would be pretty difficult to do the kind of damage that was done on Monday at Virginia Tech with a single-engine Cessna. That's even if I filled the tanks and flew it into a building -- say, the one where 60,000 NRA members are gathering in St. Louis for their annual meetings.

Don't tempt me.