The fixation on certain scary looking semi automatic rifles didn't start in 2009, it started with the Brady campaign. I know it's easy to blame racist sentiment related to the country's first black president (and I agree that such racism probably had some bearing on the sudden rush to buy and the subsequent ammunition shortage) but you're ignoring the long term political history of the AWB. The AWB expired during a Republican presidency (2004) and was never going to be renewed during a Republican presidency unless a veto-proof majority could be created. Of course people who oppose(d) the AWB are going to be worried when a Democrat comes into power, particularly when the administration is largely comprised of people from the Clinton years who supported and enacted the AWB in 1994.

One of the few successful state level gun control laws passed after the Sandy Hook shooting was where I live in Maryland, where, among other changes, the state banned the sale of a virtually identical list of those weapons prohibited under the federal AWB, all despite the fact that those weapons are almost never connected to murders and other gun violence in this state. I'd argue that the fixation is coming less from the NRA and more from people who don't know much about guns other than that they don't like them very much.

So it’s kinda odd to blame GCA for not trying to ban the one class of gun that’s the least politically possible. It’s like blaming a heat-stroke victim for not turning off the sun.

Whether or not it's odd I think depends on the goal of the particular GCA or group of GCAs. If the goal is to stop or lessen homicides committed with guns it does seem strange to go after those types of guns that are least often used in homicides, and which by their nature are tougher to use in homicides due to being difficult to conceal. If it's more of a cultural battle or the goal is to over time create a de facto prohibition on individual firearm ownership it might make some sense in that every firearm prohibited is arguably another step towards that goal, even if there isn't much logical consistency in what firearms are subject to the ban.

As someone who supports a broad right to individual firearm ownership (but is comfortable with certain restrictions, many of which already exist but are not always well enforced) I find this to be the most challenging part of discussing the issue with GCAs. It can be nearly impossible to tell which GCAs accept/support a right to private ownership of firearms but favor some type of (typically unspecified) reform versus those who don't think it should be a right at all and would be happy with the government trying to stamp it out. The nexus of the debate seems to usually be related to homicide but the argument I encounter most (anecdotal obviously) from GCAs, including the ones made by GCAs who hold elected office, appear to be about something much broader (i.e. no one really needs a gun and having one only creates more danger, the 2nd amendment does not protect an individual right).

This is actually pretty close to what I think British/Australian style laws would result in if we were to implement them here. Another excuse to incarcerate poor people, new and more interesting ways for the state to violate the 4th amendment, relative impunity for violations by the wealthy and well connected, resources thrown into the criminal justice system that would be better spent elsewhere...

You won't get any debate from me on conservatives ignoring and creating policies that exacerbate urban violence and generally not caring about the people impacted by it. Where you're wrong is on the mainstream left (I would agree that what might be called the hard Left that operates on the margins of our outside the Democratic party has been a more consistent critic). The war on drugs was embraced by inner-city politicians, many of them of color, during the crack epidemic, just as police militarization has been a bi-partisan sport (see the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act).

Sandy Hook was a tragedy but it was also an extremely unusual incident and extremely unrepresentative of gun violence in America. It wasn't even very representative of mass shootings (at least as the FBI counts them) which more typically involve an individual murdering his family then committing suicide. For those reasons I don't think it, or Columbine, or any of those similar incidents can be the basis of a policy discussion about what restrictions on firearms are appropriate, or if legal firearm ownership is even a significant cause of America's murder rate. If we want to trade anecdotal evidence the most deadly school massacre in American history was the Bath School Bombing which only tangentially involved a firearm.

Without getting into a more philosophical discussion about liberty and the state's monopoly on violence I think it's worth noting that Britain and Australia didn't see any meaningful changes in rates of homicide when they for all intents and purposes prohibited private firearm ownership. I see no reason to think it would be different here. There are other cultural and socio-economic factors at play.

I agree with you that certain strains within America's gun culture don't live in reality with regard to actual threat assessment but your post is proving Oscar's point. Gun control advocates are just as invested in putting the culture war part of this debate above any sort of rational policy discussion.

Getting anywhere starts with acknowledging that it is neither the buffoon with the don't tread on me shirt at a gun show, nor the ability to legally own a semi-automatic rifle that makes America an outlier (at least compared to other Western countries) for gun related murders. What makes America different is certain parts of cities like Baltimore, New Orleans, and Detroit where poverty and the war on drugs have created an incentive for violence among people without any other opportunities.

Sometimes I think that the reason progressives are so quick to abandon reason on this issue is because deep down they know it's the marginalized people they claim to stand for who are both most responsible for and most afflicted by gun violence in this country. Doing something about it means confronting the social and economic problems (often exacerbated if not created by bad government policy) that drive urban violence. It's a much tougher problem, and is a lot easier to blame the whole thing on paranoid Billy-Bob and his AR-15.

[S3] was really a wonderful meditation... and an awesome description of why I've found it so difficult to completely kick cigarettes (I've gone fron a regular to an occasional social smoker, not that my heart and lungs care). It's the perfect activity for stepping away for a few minutes. Truly it's a shame about the health effects.

Haha yea I sort of figured that part of the comment was of the facetious variety. Nevertheless, despite my sympathies towards a certain strain of libertarianism I know that glib arguments made under the libertarian banner aren't exactly unheard of on the internet...

I think if you looked you'd find plenty of libertarians who advocate reforms in IP law. The court's decision here was the principled stance; if the government is going to offer protection of this nature I don't see how it can constitutionally discriminate against what it will and won't protect based on content. I don't agree with the 'commercial speech' decisions that might allow, for example, restrictions on tobacco advertising in some instances but I think this can easily be distinguished by the fact that trademarks protect the right to all manner of artistic speech as well as commercial.

Of course the government could at any time decide it will no longer protect trademarks generally and there is nothing saying it has to.

I will also cop to being a lifelong Redskins fan (with ambivalent feelings about the name issue) but I do think there are bigger and more important legal issues raised by the idea that the government can arbitrarily pick and chose what it will and won't protect with a privilege it has created. I felt the same way about SSM prior to the issue becoming moot.

I miss the agitator dearly, even if his new platform is for the greater good.

I don't and never will understand these paternalistic crusades. At some point people need to be allowed to make unhealthy decisions for themselves. I have yet to see a war on this or that vice that doesn't have some pretty ugly class-based hypocrisy underlying it. To be clear I'm all for efforts to help people who want to quit smoking do so. Hell if the landlord wants to ban cigarettes inside their premises then thats their prerogative but its wrong to attach it in any manner to the administration of public benefits.

It's hard to say whether it's a trend (I guess it depends on how we define the term) but this stuff does leave the academy. Look into the debates over cyber harassment or 'revenge porn' laws and you'll find proponents making similar arguments about broad laws being necessary to protect victims regardless of troubling implications for free speech.

Now I'd bet your opinion further down is mostly accurate for most college students (that being that they're more interested in booz and sexual escapades than being the red vanguard) but there is a broader philosophy here that college activists are embracing. I encountered similar arguments in a victims rights class I took in law school which was well before the term 'sjw' was coined or we heard about things like safe spaces or erasing experiences or mental anguish over day to day rudeness and political disagreement.

@Saul Degraw I see your point but I'd hope (maybe naively) that both those with romantic and more mercenary visions of the university could agree that education requires at least some degree of challenging students. Taking them out of their safe spaces if you will. This stuff seems more like indoctrination and/or an extreme version of the 'customer is always right' neither of which serves a legitimate pedological purpose.

@LeeEsq you're grossly understating the liberal position here. Old fashioned liberalism has a historical record of serving the oppressed much better than the the brand of illiberal leftism that is apparently popular in some circles of campus activists. As an attorney you know that those rights and precedents that protect the freedom to express ugly ideas have just as often been used to advance the liberty of the marginalized.

The problem isnt students advocating silly ideas. It's their right to advocate for silly ideas. The problem is professors and administrators catering to those silly ideas that are counter to the educational mission of the university. Many of these are public institutions and we all have an interest in how they're run and what kind of norms the people who run them are shaping.

No one here is questioning whether or not the child should have obeyed her teacher. Of course she should have. What people are questioning is why the school's answer to a disobedient teenager is a beating by a law enforcement officer.

I would dispute that money has much to do with this. It's a cultural attitude about authority and how order should be maintained. What this situation required was an adult in the room. I think JayBird is right, that all money would have bought was another deputy.

Everything becomes much clearer if you view police as bureaucrats (highly unaccountable bureaucrats who carry firearms and have powerful unions) whose job it is to arrest people. For some reason popular culture insists that the police are there to help but that's really not where their incentives are. This is an extremely rare instance of accountability but I'd bet my paycheck he'll be hired as a police officer in another jurisdiction in the next year.

The first and (to a lesser degree) second Hellraiser movies are awesome. All the best horror movies find a way to work subversive and even adult themes into the cruder thrills of the genre. Also I would submit that Clare Higgins is the best evil step mother in the history of film.

I don't disagree (and I actually deleted a caveat to my post that made a similar point). The question is how long it takes for people to consider voting Republican when they have memories of particularly adverse stances (women regarding abortion, Latinos and blacks on voting rights issues, young people on gay marriage). It isn't that tribal loyalties carved from those types of debates can't be reshuffled but I'd bet it takes more than a few election cycles.

I'd also assume that Democrats will at least also try to make adaptations of their own if they saw the Republican brand becoming less toxic among cretain strategic groups.

I see your point but I still think it over simplifies in that it takes demographics out of the equation. Democrats have (and will probably continue for the foreseeable future to have) a substantial advantage among women, racial minorities, and, to the extent they vote, the young. Meanwhile older, white people who trend republican are becoming a smaller part of the voting population. As the baby boomer generation starts retiring and moving and/or dying it could make a large number of red districts purple. I also think that as people move out to suburbia and exurbia to have kids or are pushed out by gentrificaton they will take their political preferences with them. A good example is Virginia's DC suburbs combining with a large black population in certain areas to turn a historically red state purple.

Maybe based on the geographic/districting analysis Democrats are likely to have a couple down elections (still a big maybe) but they aren't doomed and they have some major trends in their favor. Maybe they will never have total victory but thats a feature of the system.

I agree with you that gerrymandering plays a role in this but the bigger reason that articles like Yglesias' are nonsense is because they fail to acknowledge that the entire American system of government is designed to frustrate consolidation of power. I remember reading similar articles by right leaning pundits in the early 2000s when the federal government was completely dominated by the GOP wondering why the country was not transformed into a conservative paradise.

This isn't to say that the Democratic party, just like any party, shouldn't continue to re-evaluate itself nor is this to say that I think it's priorities are sound. It just means that any change in America will always be very slow and grinding. I don't think there's any evidence the Democrats are about to go the way of the Whigs.

I don't read the OP as calling for military intervention to prevent the carrying out of the sentence or corporal punishment in Saudi Arabia more generally. I think it's more of a question about when criticism of a foreign country or culture is appropriate.

It's reasonable to believe caning is wrong and to criticize governments that do it. It's also reasonable to call out the hypocrisy of those who selectively criticize brutal criminal justice systems (i.e. focusing on the middle east while ignoring America's own morally dubious policies). I would argue that our harshest scrutiny should always be of our own government.

Nevertheless neither cultural sensitivity nor even a broader understanding that different cultures will always perceive justice differently should prevent us from calling a spade a spade.

I don't disagree with this post but I think it might be worth distinguishing "the internet" from "how discourse is conducted on the internet." I don't think online discourse was ever or will ever be the same as discourse in person. We're evolved to communicate through physical cues and all manner of non-verbal signals that can't translate into text (at least with current technology). However, what I believe has made discourse on the internet even worse than it otherwise might be, is the incentives set up by social media. The psychological satisfaction of getting a like or a re-tweet is small but real. In an environment of strangers or loosely connected people the speech that ends up getting the most likes (or whatever) isn't the speech that's most thoughtful or nuanced, it's the speech that affirms biases in the most aggressive language possible. This isn't to say you couldn't see some out there stuff on Web 1.0 but now we've found a way to reward people for bad or stupid speech.
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I think that probably nails it. If not for those other issues I have a feeling it would never be discussed outside of some dull college faculty meetings that half the attendees couldn't even recall if asked. I suspect your prediction is correct.

I think I answered these points above (but if there's a point I missed I'm happy to look again). My opinion is that it shouldn't be the professor's responsibility for the reasons stated in the previous comment.

It isn't a tool, it's a burdensome responsibility placed on someone else. It requires a third party to have intimate knowledge of a complete stranger's psychological condition in a manner that will never be possible. This is why it must be the sufferer's own responsibility to be wary based on their own diagnosis and where they are in their treatment, something that that no professor is ever going to be able to know for certain. Contra your point about a history professor, I don't think it's at all reasonable to expect professors to have expertise outside of their own discipline.

Take an individual with a certain type of learning disability. Our response to that isn't to, say, eliminate timed tests for everyone just in case someone in the class has a disability. It's to require the individual with the disability to provide documentation evidencing its existence and to work with the institution to make an accommodation, to the extent possible and/or legally required.

I think a similar approach is much more reasonable than requiring professors to divine what might set off any given adult student at any given time. That means if you've got severe ptsd from a few tours in Iraq it's probably a good idea to avoid a class called war in modern cinema. If it's ptsd from being a victim of a crime then it's probably a good idea to avoid courses in the criminology department.

This is where I might get a bit harsh (and back to Thucidides). If a person's ptsd is such that a translation of an ancient text causes such a severe emotional reaction then I submit that college just isn't right for that person at that point in time. It doesn't mean it never will be, but that individual clearly has some things to work through first, and it isn't the faculty or anyone else's responsibility to navigate that for them.