For a Good Time on the Intertubes — Today!

It’s that time of the month again — the third (usually) Wednesday, when I do my Virtually Speaking Science gig.

This afternoon at 6 p.m. eastern time I’ll be talking again to Naomi Oreskes, historian of science and co-author of Merchants of Doubt,an account of how a small(ish) cadre of cold-war scientists became hired guns for Big Tobacco and the anti-climate change brigade.

Naomi and I spoke in 2011 about the threats posed by the spread of “scientistic” argument — the use of a science-like language, couched in the rhetoric of disinterested skepticism, to obscure critical knowledge for public audiences.

Well, flash forward a year and a half, and we come to an America in which we have experienced years of devastating drought, superstorm Sandy, this week’s tornado, and the breaching of the 400 ppm atmospheric carbon threshold, and it’s time to talk again about the cost of denialism and the misuse of perceived authority by our still-thriving doubt peddlars.

The tornado provides a great touchstone in fact — as Naomi and I have been emailing back and forth on the question.  What’s happening is that there is a growing body of increasingly firm research on the impact of climate change on all kinds of circumstances.  Changing and possibly deepening patterns of drought are pretty clearly on the table.  A boost in the number of severe hurricanes too.  Significant ice melt and sea level rise too. But what will happen to tornado patterns as climate change proceeds is still unclear.  So what to make of that lacuna?

Here’s my take (not to put any words in Naomi’s mouth):  If you are a rational person, you say we need more research on that particular concern, but the broad pattern is clear:  human-driven climate change is in progress and it is causing a host of changes that directly conflict with the way we’ve rely on our built environment and on all the things we do (grow cereals in the midwest, e.g.) needed to keep our societies going.  And we’ll get back to you on the twisters, asking you to bear this thought in mind:  if you are a betting person, how much do you want to wager on the possibility that increasing the amount of heat trapped in the lower atmosphere won’t kick up some extra nasty storms?

We won’t confine ourselves to climate and the weather, by the way.  Merchants of Doubt has given me a frame for looking at a lot of news, and I see the same desire to conceal useful knowledge the doubtists serve in the somewhat different technique of simply blocking research that might be used to produce inconvenient truths.  See, e.g. the NRA – led ban on research on gun violence and the  the recent Republican proposal to forbid the US Census from doing anything but a decennial count, thus eliminating, among other things, our ability to measure unemployment.

So come on down.  Listen live or later here.  Y’all can head over to the Exploratorium’s Second Life stage as well if you do that virtual world thing.

Image:  Pieter Brueghel the Younger, Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee, c. 1596.

Oh Brave New World…

…that has such people in’t

(via)

A 3D printable plastic handgun is now (more or less) available.

As the linked article suggests, there is a nasty possibility of having the thing blow up in your hand if you use too-powerful ammunition…but still.

Talking Points Memo is also on the story, with a gussied up video that adds swelling music and shots of WW II bombers to the mix.  They grabbed this quote (warning – do not read while eating lunch):

“I recognize that this tool might be used to harm people,” Wilson said, according to Fox News. “That’s what it is — it’s a gun. But I don’t think that’s a reason to not put it out there. I think that liberty in the end is a better interest.”

Presented without further comment, this story, also now up on TPM.

And this one.

And…hell, wait half an hour and there will be another tragedy to report. (At somewhere north of 50 gun suicides per day, that’s a reasonably non-hyperbolic time period — to say nothing of gun violence imposed on others.)

The nuts, Civil War revanchists, and simple thugs who drive gun policy in this country are a danger to themselves and everyone else.  Demographics are getting them too...but not nearly fast enough.

Outsourced entirely to Charles P. Pierce:

If your “way of life” involves handing deadly weapons to five-year olds, your way of life is completely screwed up and you should change it immediately because it is stupid and wrong. (And, again, also, too: goddammit, “learning to use and respect a gun” means at least knowing that the fking thing is loaded when it’s sitting in the corner of the parlor like it’s a damn umbrella stand or something, and we should talk about that part, too.) It is not in any way “normal” to hand a kindergartner a firearm. If a mother from the inner-city of, say, Philadelphia did that, and the kid subsequently shot his sister to death, Fox News never would stop yelling about the crisis in African American communities and the Culture Of Death, and rap music, too. If your culture is telling you that children who have only recently emerged from toddlerhood should have their own guns, then your culture is deadly and dangerous and that should concern you, too. If your culture demands that, in the face of a general national outrage over the killing of other children, your politics work to loosen the gun laws you have, as they apparently did in Kentucky, then your culture is making your politics stupid and wrong and you should change them, too. I do not have to understand these people any more, and it is way too early in the day to be drinking this much.

Image:  Portrait of a girl with gun and hound, after the style of Joshua Reynolds, 18th or 19th century

“You Can Keep The Gun” — Guest Post

What follows are friend-of-the-blog Jim Bale’s reflections on our recent bad days in Boston, Cambridge, Watertown and environs.  He picked up the loathesome suggestion by an Arkansas state rep who misunderstands so much about both Boston and the concept of society that I could come up with nothing but sputtering obscenities.  Jim, a better man, has something much smarter to offer.

______________________

Jim Bales here, with thanks to Tom for the loan of his soapbox.

During the hunt for the Marathon bombers, Arkansas State Rep. Nate Bell (a Republican) tweeted:

“I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?”

He followed with an apology for the timing of his words, but not the words themselves.

 

I sent him the following email (his contact information is at http://www.arkansashouse.org/member/256/ )

Dear Representative Bell,

I am fortunate to have had multiple opportunities to visit the beautiful state of Arkansas, and to spend time staying with friends and relatives in your state. I was taken aback to read your tweet that you wondered “how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine?” I was then saddened to read your apology for “for the poor timing of my tweet earlier this morning.”

What you don’t seem to understand that your words themselves are offensive and ignorant, no matter when expressed. I urge you to take the time to reflect upon your words, and try to wrap your head around the fact that the good liberals in Boston (and I am one of them) recognize that only a fool believes that a personal firearm is a magic talisman that makes one safe.

Our safety is based on our recognizing that we are a Commonwealth – that our individual well-being is strengthened by our commitment to each other, through our words, our deeds, and our taxes. We put our tax money into training and equipping our law enforcement officers. We put our trust and our support behind them. We don’t try to do their job for them, and we understand that possessing an AR-15 cannot magically make us invulnerable.

And so, because we have faith in our law enforcement officers, we did not cower in fear behind a firearm. Rather, we calmly stayed home, were alert, and stayed out of the way of our brethren in law enforcement.

I urge you, in your capacity as Member of the House of Representatives of the great State of Arkansas, to review the support your state gives its law enforcement agencies, and (if necessary) vote to increase taxes to ensure that the good people of Arkansas can reasonably enjoy the same level of faith in those agencies as we in Boston (and Massachusetts) enjoy in ours.

Trust me; having competent, well-trained and well-funded law enforcement is far more reassuring than holding an AR-15!

Image:  John Singer Sergant, Repose, 1911.

 

Best,

Jim Bales

 

120,461

That’s the minimum number of years lost to guns in the United States of America in the 99 days of this blood-soaked year.  Click the link for an amazing data visualization that captures the loss of lives and  years to homicides (and some suicides) thus far in 2013

The scandal, of course, is that the last three months or so is no more crimson than any similar slice of time in recent memory.  Here’s the 2010 version of the same data visualization, representing homicides only (and not quite all of them, if the CDC is to be believed).  The tally that year:  9,595 people, robbed of 413,838 years.

Ass long as the rump of gerrymandered Confederate and exurban white voters can be turned to provide the .01% sufficient political power to keep on robbing us blind, there is seemingly no end in sight.  Guns trump vaginas, non-pale folks, even moochers as the eternal touchstone of aggrieved right politics.  And until that chain that binds power to the untouchable civic virtues of 30-round clips, we’ll continue to live in a country where some 30,000 people each year will fall too soon to the wrong end of a gun.  That most of them will be gun owners themselves; hell that most of them will take their own lives [PDF -- see p. 19] makes no difference to the debate.

One hundred and twenty thousand, four hundred and sixty one years that will never pass.  2,739 of our fellow citizens gone.  Obama is still trying.  Reid is still trying.  Maybe they’ll be able to rescue a life or two.  But not if the leaders of the  Party of Death have their way.

It’s gorgeous outside my window as I type this; sunny, 70 degrees and something, convertible top down weather.  Why does it feel so damn grim in these United States?

PS:  Optional soundtrack for this post.

Eduoard Maney, The Suicide, 1877-1881.

Will No One Rid Me Of This Vexatious Solon?

I’m guessing that most of those who read this blog will already have heard about John McCain’s latest descent into former decency:

Constituents at a town hall hosted by Sen. John McCain Wednesday in Phoenix cheered after the Arizona Republican told the mother of an Aurora, Colo. shooting victim that an assault weapons ban could not get through Congress.

“My 24-year-old son, Alex, was murdered in a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.,” Caren Teves said. “These assault rifles allow the shooter to fire many rounds without having to reload. These weapons to do not belong on our streets.”

“I can tell you right now you need some straight talk. That assault weapons ban will not pass the Congress of the United States,” McCain responded. The video, posted Thursday by Phoenix’s KTVK, showed the line drawing applause and cheers from the crowd.

YMMV, but from where I stand, it takes a special sort of person to tell the mother of a murdered child that they need “straight talk.”  And by “special” I mean…

…you know what I mean.

He’s got the self-righteous condescension act down, certainly.  I have no doubt that Ms. Teves has an abundance of experience of blunt reality, but John McCain still found it in him to set her straight. That’s impressive — albeit in a wholly unimpressive frame.

So far, we’re on familiar territory. John McCain is no maverick, never has been.

 

But for all that I didn’t catch the next level of wretchedness in this encounter until dinner time, when I told my son about it.  He listened, and then asked the question so obvious that I’m still wondering why it didn’t occur to me first:

Would McCain, my twelve year old wondered, would he have told a man that he needed some straight talk about his murdered son, and the implications of that death?

Who can say?  It’s a counterfactual, meant to stimulate thought, not to secure a certain answer.

But damn, that’s an instructive question.

The dismissive tone of McCain’s answer was obvious, of course.  But I didn’t at first quite hear the gender condescension.  If McCain’s questioner had been a 6′ 5″ guy with muscles and facial hair, would he have so blithly offered “straight talk?”

Maybe.  But I can’t convince myself that the president-of-the-Sunday-morning-shows would have let it fly quite so readily.

In any event, my takeaway from this (besides that I am, as usual,  proud of my son) is it sure took guts for John McCain to bully Caren Teves to make a few points at a town hall, didn’t it?  In that context, ISTM that the defining quality of all those few, unhappy few members of the GOP’s should-no-better faction  (and yes, I’m looking at you, Lindsay Graham, et al.)… is that core property of the sane-ish rump of the national party is cowardice.

It’s ugly as hell to watch, but I am comforted that these are the markers of an institution far down the oblivion express.  I share John’s weariness at having to whack the same damn moles day after day — but I am increasingly confident that it hurts them more than it hurts us.

And with that — it’s time to return to the last of the wine to wash down an excellent (and on-sale) rib-eye.

Image:  Alfred Bierstadt, Study of Wild Horses, before 1902

 

Proceed, Whack Jobs

Via TPM, I was sent to this website, [fair warning:  crazy people on the other end of that link] to find this image:

There has been plenty of ridicule directed at the project depicted here — see, for example, posts by others at my alternate blog-home, Balloon Juice.  If you haven’t been keepign up, it’s called the Citadel — that Wingnut fantasy of a Dungeons-and-Dragons-and-Bushmasters retreat in Idaho where no liberals need apply.

All fine — if it were up to me, I’d encourage every gun nut to retreat to their bastions — whether up in the Idaho panhandle, where generations of actually competent folks have found it so easy to construct self-sustaining livelihoods …or in GlennBeckistan, that to-be self-sustaining (sic!) entertainment and intellectual hub to be constructed somewhere in Texas.

Go! Here’s your hat; what’s your hurry?

Seriously:  if they would only do the rest of us the favor of retreating to their own private Somali-o’s, our politics and our societies would be that much saner and safer.

But we knew that already, and that’s not what caught my eye.

Nah.

Here’s the story:  As I’d just opened the picture above, my son happened to come into my study.  He asked what I was looking at — it seemed to him a sketch from one of the medieval combat games he likes and knows I don’t, and he wondered what would possess me to bother with such a thing.

I told him that, no, this wasn’t history or fantasy,* but rather somebody’s actual idea of someplace that would serve to protect them from an overweening federal government.  He just looked at it pityingly, wondering, and he asked me, “have these folks never heard of cannon?”

And damn if that hadn’t been literally my first thought on reading the caption “Interior Defensive Walls & Towers.”  I mean, artillery much?

The stupid.  It burns. With the white-hot-heat-of-a-thousand-suns.

*Well, it is.  But not that kind.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

Via twitterer @Dhunterauthor, we learn that America’s sheriff, Maricopa County’s Joe Arpaio may have some — how should we put this?– issues with his unsolicited provision of defenders of youth.

You may recall that Arpaio, last seen vainly trying to keep Birtherism on life support (whilst the Kenyan Usurper enters his second term of occupation of the Definitely-Not-Black-House) had declared that his posse (his term) of possibly (house) trained armed yahoos would provide a weaponized security presence at local schools, whether or not those schools sought or welcomed such “assistance.”

Nothing to worry about, right?  Nothing says “good idea” like kids and guns.

Let me surrender the floor to Wonkette:

Arpaio told ABC/Univision in December that it was not up for debate whether the schools had posse members posted outside.

“It doesn’t matter whether they like it or don’t,” he said. “I’m still going to do it. I can’t imagine criticism coming when they’re given free protection.”

Well, yeah! Who would object to free protection from volunteers who are no doubt carefully vetted and very responsible and definitely good people to be carrying firearms? Oh wait:

And then there was Jacob Cutler. According to a Flagstaff police report, Cutler threw his girlfriend to the ground and choked her while trying to sexually assault her in 2008. When she didn’t cooperate, he allegedly threatened to call police and said they would side with him, because he “has a badge.” He was a member of Arpaio’s posse at the time.

There’s more, up to and including report that the posse now offering unavoidable “protection” to schools that just happen to be filled with kids (who knew?) includes a member with a record of arrest for “sexual crimes against children.”

So I guess this is the line of reasoning:  more guns, even those wielded by thugs with toy badges, make us safer.  Good to know.

Go get the rest at Wonkette — but better lock the alcohol away first; this is truly one of those drive you to drink stories.

Image: Arthur William Devis, Emily and George Mason, between 1794 and 1795.

GOPsters Fighting The War On Science Have Blood On Their Hands

First, consider this, from Nate Silver:

An American child grows up in a married household in the suburbs. What are the chances that his family keeps a gun in their home?

…the odds vary significantly based on the political identity of the child’s parents. If they identify as Democratic voters, the chances are only about one in four, or 25 percent, that they have a gun in their home. But the chances are more than twice that, almost 60 percent, if they are Republicans.Whether someone owns a gun is a more powerful predictor of a person’s political party than her gender, whether she identifies as gay or lesbian, whether she is Hispanic, whether she lives in the South or a number of other demographic characteristics.

Now take note of this piece by Alex Seitz-Wald, published in Salon back in July.  (h/t Maggie Koerth-Baker at BoingBoing)

Over the past two decades, the NRA has not only been able to stop gun control laws, but even debate on the subject. The Centers for Disease Control funds research into the causes of death in the United States, including firearms — or at least it used to. In 1996, after various studies funded by the agency found that guns can be dangerous, the gun lobby mobilized to punish the agency. First, Republicans tried to eliminate entirely the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the bureau responsible for the research. When that failed, Rep. Jay Dickey, a Republican from Arkansas, successfully pushed through an amendment that stripped $2.6 million from the CDC’s budget (the amount it had spent on gun research in the previous year) and outlawed research on gun control with a provision that reads: “None of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control.”

David Satcher, the then-director of the CDC, wrote an Op-Ed in the Washington Post in November of 1995 warning that the NRA’s “shotgun assault” on the CDC was dangerous both for public health and for our democracy:

“What ought to be of wider concern, is the second argument advanced by the NRA — that firearms research funded by the CDC is so biased against gun ownership that all such funding ought to cease. Here is a prescription for inaction on a major cause of death and disability. Here is a charge that not only casts doubt on the ability of scientists to conduct research involving controversial issues but also raises basic questions about the ability, fundamental to any democracy, to have honest, searching public discussions of such issues.”

Exactly so.

But hey, maybe the ban didn’t matter.  After all, it’s not “advocating” gun control to do simple epidemiology.  Right?

Dickey’s clause, which remains in effect today, has had a chilling effect on all scientific research into gun safety, as gun rights advocates view “advocacy” as any research that notices that guns are dangerous. Stephen Teret, who co-directs the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, told Salon: “They sent a message and the message was heard loud and clear. People [at the CDC], then and now, know that if they start going down that road, their budget is going to be vulnerable. And the way public agencies work, they know how this works and they’re not going to stick their necks out.”

In January, the New York Times reported that the CDC goes so far as to “ask researchers it finances to give it a heads-up anytime they are publishing studies that have anything to do with firearms. The agency, in turn, relays this information to the NRA as a courtesy.”

The anti-science commitment by the GOP is not a mistake.  It’s not a clash of world-views.  It’s not that faith sincerely experienced renders the conclusions of science irrelevant.  Rather, the GOP, at least at the level where power can be wielded, is all about the ability to assert authority regardless of knowledge that contradicts belief.

We know how this song goes.  Anti-science is an old strand in human experience.  The determination to block independent assessments of reality you see here is the same thing the Church asserted when it confronted Galileo.    When  Galileo said, as he did in his famous letter to the Medici Grand Duchess Christina,  “I think that in discussions of physical problems we ought to begin not from the authority of scriptural passages, but from sense-experiences and necessary demonstrations…” Galileo, in all piety was making the claim that interpreters of the Bible must accomodate whatever it is that science demonstrates to be true about the world.  At the same time, he knew that the church, or elements within it could not risk acknowledging to the idea of autonomous expertise.*  Hence, Galileo told Christina, his antagonists

…make a shield of their hypocritical zeal for religion. They go about invoking the Bible, which they would have minister to their deceitful purposes. Contrary to the sense of the Bible and the intention of the holy Fathers, if I am not mistaken, they would extend such authorities until even in purely physical matters—where faith is not involved—they would have us altogether abandon reason and the evidence of our senses in favor of some biblical passage, though under the surface meaning of its words this passage may contain a different sense

As it was, so it is.

The Republican Party, taken over by extremists over a decades-long campaign (see the history laid out in the Mark Ames piece Anne Laurie linked to yesterday), has a broad resume when it comes to fighting science to avoid the necessity of confronting the basic facts of real life.  And it is this, to me, that makes the GOP not just wrong about almost everything, but unacceptably dangerous, a political force to be destroyed.

To return to the latest confrontation between the reality of gun violence, and the determination of the GOP not to know what it is inconvenient to understand:  legally enforced ignorance of the implications of the effectively unregulated presence of powerful weaponry throughout the country contributes to events like the Newtown massacre.

To anticipate an objection:  just as you can never tie a specific cigarette to a particular cancer, I cannot say that had we spent more effort really trying to analyze what happens when guns and the accessories that make them yet more deadly are so easily available we would have been able to stop that particular tragedy.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t discover epidemiological truths:  we know that smoking leads directly to an excess burden of cancer deaths among smokers.  You work out the rest…

The only hopeful thing I see is that the latest horrific events have forced more and more people to notice that the gun lobby and the worst wings of the worst political party I’ve ever seen in a half-century of living in America are one and the same.  Right now it’s important to press the case as hard as we can:  gun nuts aren’t defending freedom and long-established constitutional principles.  They’re preserving the profits of gun makers and serving the political ends of the party of the oligarchs.  We have a moment of advvantage in the fight against such forces.  If you take Silver’s argument seriously, the same demographics that propelled Obama to his second term put the gun lobby at risk.

But in the meantime, the suppression of knowledge about the actual human cost of gun ownership — to gun owners as well as the rest of us — is costing lives.  Those Republicans who block the pursuit of knowledge about what our weapons are doing to our country are complicit in the loss of lives by gun violence in the context of our artificially maintained ignorance.

*Which Galileo also knew many of them did not possess, writing, “Possibly because they are disturbed by the known truth of other propositions of mine which differ from those commonly held, and therefore mistrusting their defense so long as they confine themselves to the field of philosophy, these men have resolved to fabricate a shield for their fallacies out of the mantle of pretended religion and the authority of the Bible. These they apply, with little judgment, to the refutation of arguments that they do not understand and have not even listened to.”

Image: Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece, detail of Popes from the lower central panel, completed 1432.

Guns Are The Enemy Of Liberty

I’m going to be posting a number of shorter (for me) posts on this over the next day or so; I take on board the injunction that general expressions of sorrow and disgust have their place — but are no substitute for specifics.

I’ll have some thoughts about actual measures to be advanced (more invitations to the community to continue to think together).  But here I’d like to start off making an obvious point:

An armed society may be a polite one.  But it’s not one that is free. It is not one in which a civic life in any meaningful sense of the term can take place.

Guns kill liberty.

That’s what philosopher Firman Debrander argued in this morning’s New York Times, and he is in my ever-humble opinion spot on.  It’s worth the time to read the whole thing, but here’s the core of his case:

…guns pose a monumental challenge to freedom, and particular, the liberty that is the hallmark of any democracy worthy of the name — that is, freedom of speech. Guns do communicate, after all, but in a way that is contrary to free speech aspirations: for, guns chasten speech.

This becomes clear if only you pry a little more deeply into the N.R.A.’s logic behind an armed society. An armed society is polite, by their thinking, precisely because guns would compel everyone to tamp down eccentric behavior, and refrain from actions that might seem threatening. The suggestion is that guns liberally interspersed throughout society would cause us all to walk gingerly — not make any sudden, unexpected moves — and watch what we say, how we act, whom we might offend.

As our Constitution provides, however, liberty entails precisely the freedom to be reckless, within limits, also the freedom to insult and offend as the case may be. The Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld our right to experiment in offensive language and ideas, and in some cases, offensive action and speech. Such experimentation is inherent to our freedom as such. But guns by their nature do not mix with this experiment — they don’t mix with taking offense. They are combustible ingredients in assembly and speech.

Exactly so.

Obviously so.

“Smile when you say that, mister,” is great fun from the back row of the movie theater; much less so at arms length, bellied up to the bar.

Gun nuts, the NRA’s official core and all their acolytes and enablers are the enemies of American freedom, of the liberty you and I and everyone should take as our right.  That would be the liberty to walk where we choose, wearing what we want (an “I Reserve The Right To Arm Bears” t-shirt included), to assemble peaceably in protest or at the doors of our kids’ schools every weekday morning.  As Debrander discusses, the openly armed asshole at one of the town meetings during the summer of Obamacare, did not shoot anyone — but no one challenged him; his views echoed in the silence; actual debate was suffocated because no one wanted to piss off a guy who could kill you.  If you can’t have such civil debate, if you can’t even comfortably, free of fear, assemble for politics, or shopping, or a night at the movies, or in kindergarten, you don’t have a democracy in any real sense of the term.  And in that context, tyranny wins.  Debrander again:

After all, a population of privately armed citizens is one that is increasingly fragmented, and vulnerable as a result. Private gun ownership invites retreat into extreme individualism — I heard numerous calls for homeschooling in the wake of the Newtown shootings — and nourishes the illusion that I can be my own police, or military, as the case may be….

As Michel Foucault pointed out in his detailed study of the mechanisms of power, nothing suits power so well as extreme individualism. In fact, he explains, political and corporate interests aim at nothing less than “individualization,” since it is far easier to manipulate a collection of discrete and increasingly independent individuals than a community. Guns undermine just that — community. Their pervasive, open presence would sow apprehension, suspicion, mistrust and fear, all emotions that are corrosive of community and civic cooperation. To that extent, then, guns give license to autocratic government.

Our gun culture promotes a fatal slide into extreme individualism. It fosters a society of atomistic individuals, isolated before power — and one another — and in the aftermath of shootings such as at Newtown, paralyzed with fear. That is not freedom, but quite its opposite. And as the Occupy movement makes clear, also the demonstrators that precipitated regime change in Egypt and Myanmar last year, assembled masses don’t require guns to exercise and secure their freedom, and wield world-changing political force. Arendt and Foucault reveal that power does not lie in armed individuals, but in assembly — and everything conducive to that.

One last thought:  What does such philosophical high mindedness (Foucalt, forsooth!)  have to do with actual change in the way America understands and regulated guns?

Obviously, words don’t stop bullets.  We do need a new, powerful legal framework in which the nitty-gritty of guns and American life are reshaped.  There’s all the stuff we have and will talk about, from regulating the registration of firearms and the licensing of their owners, to restrictions on types of weapons, to insurance and its role in internalizing the social costs of civilian gun ownership and so on.  Others here have already started those lines of thought, and I promise I’ll do so as well.

But one of the biggest challenges we face is that over the last two decades or so, the NRA and its gun nut allies have captured much of the language of liberty as it applies to guns.  Framing regulation of guns as an infringement of gun rights has seen a drop in support for gun regulation from close to 80% to below 45% in Gallup’s polling of the question.  The ability to assert the “guns everywhere” position as a test of freedom has given the NRA and its running dogs* a huge rhetorical advantage.  We need to take it back.  Arguments like the one Debrander makes can help us do so.  We can amplify that one voice with our own…as in this small way, I hope to do here.

*you can take the China hand out of the business, but you can’t take the China out of the hand.

Image: Édouard Manet, Mister Pertuiset, The Lion Hunter, 1881