Commenter Archive

True. I meant they don't carry guns traditionally.

I stand corrected

Why do we want the police to be armed? I think the militarization of the police is a very disturbing trend.

I remember hearing sometime in 2012 that the German police only used 85 bullets in 2011. That is for the entire country. Why can't the US get to that level? Why should we cheer an instinct for police to shoot first and ask questions later?

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/global/2012/05/german-police-used-only-85-bullets-against-people-2011/52162/

British police have historically been unarmed. I think it would be interesting to see how Police change their tactics without easy access to military gear

If this is your attitude towards the site, why are you here? Why purposefully read stuff that makes you angry?

I don't know what your politics are but I know for me that I avoid stuff like Rush and townhall forums because it simply makes me angry and raises my blood pressure.

I like the idea of a gun license like we have a driver's license. Contrary to popular belief, Israel and Swistzerland are not heavily armed countries. People in those countries need to prove a reason to justify owning EACH gun and self-defense does not count. Also I think we should question whether we want to be surrounded by Hamas and Hezzbolah like Israel.

Gun Control seems to bring out the start and fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives like no other issue. These differences go right down to deeply different philosophical world-views .

My liberalism is deeply informed by my Judaism and Tikkun Olam. Tikkun Olam roughly translates as "to mend the world." This means I am very willing and prone to tinkering in order to make the world a better, safer, and more gentle place. I do believe that there are preventable tragedies and they are in the magnitude of Newton.

My more conservative-libertarian and often non-Jewish friends have a more fatalistic view of the world and human nature. They think events like Newton, the Dark Knight shooting, and others are always going to happen and impossible to prevent. Hence, they have a default stance of doing nothing because all action would be inherently useless. I strongly disagree with this and am offended by the pre-Destination of the idea. Then again, I reject Calvinism absolutely and Calvinism seems to be the starting point for modern American conservative politics.

This made me laugh

Probably but how do you get them to take their medicine? Does government/society have a right to get them to take their medicine? Or do we just let people be the random victims when a mentally ill person refuses to take their medicine?

Well said

The stuff listed on wikipedia does seem sane and reasonable. However, wikipedia is not without bias and editing wars.

The Southern Poverty Law Center does link the Oath Keepers to the far right militia movement and I would not be surprised if there were also elements of the troubling "sovereign citizen" movement. Sovereign Citizenship is a concept that many neo-Nazis and interestingly African-American gang members use to justify their actions and make court and government action illegitimate to them.

Again there's is not a world I want to live in. We simply have fundamentally different notions of what makes a government tyrannical or not. There is possibly some overlap on really easy things but I am no fan of a yeoman paradise and do not see a modern welfare state as being antithetical to freedom.

I am not sure if guns would deter burglars. Burglars seem to get caught when they enter a place at a wrong time.

My apartment was burgled during my first year of law school. I went to the library to study on a Saturday and when I got back my apartment looked fairly normal. No great mess. It took me a few minutes but then I realized "Hey, where is my laptop?" The criminals seemed to have waited until they noticed I was gone and then found a way in without causing much damage and simply walked out the front door. I imagine they got someone to naively buzz them in. The burglars simply took everything that was light and not bolted down. This included my laptop, ipod, digital camera, and interestingly my laundry quarters. They did not take my stereo, silverware, plates, CDs, DVDs, clothing, etc.

A few months later, there was another burglary in my apartment and it was on the same floor. This time the burglar jumped the back fence and climbed up to the apartment. However, someone in the apartment above heard him and called the police. They caught this guy. IIRC he had a long list of property crimes going back to the 1970s and was a middle-aged white guy. Also a junkie. If he was not caught, he would have gotten away with my neighbor's very expensive jewelry. After this, my landlord installed a steal door and the apartment has not been burgled since.

A lawyer I worked with used to be a public defender in San Francisco and he told me that a shocking amount of burglaries go uncaught in San Francisco. IIRC the number was 80 percent. I tried to find statistics on-line to verify but could not. Most burglars do what the guys who broke into my place did. They case until they know someone is not in and move in and out as quickly as possible. Burglars also seem to know which places to steal from. IIRC if a place is the victim of one successful burglary, the odds of it being stolen from again increase significantly.

I have not seen it as much recently but when I first moved to San Francisco, I remember noticing that a lot of cars parked in the street did have their windows broken into while parked overnight outside. So this kind of crime still happens. San Francisco also has an issue with thieves stealing copper wiring because it is easy to sell for scrap and an unregulated market.

http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/SF-man-provides-window-into-lucrative-copper-3605271.php

Ah McReynolds. He even refused to be part of the annual Supreme Court photograph because it would mean sitting next to Brandeis.

I would argue that the big sea change from Miller to Heller was largely because Miller was either unenforced or selectively enforced. This would require more research but I imagine that the Miller decision only came up in connection to criminal trials. Basically, if they caught some bankrobbers on the way or from the crime.

By Heller and McDonald's time, the culture had shifted. The NRA was another organization that went through a right-wing takeover in the 1970s, etc.

My view of human nature is that people are complicated and messy. We will all do good things and bad things in our lives. Sometimes to the same person. I am not a Calvinist in any form. I despise Calivinism and the doctrine of original sin. I do believe that almost all people are capable of a great range of actions given the right stresses and imputs though. There is more to learn about human nature from psychology and various experiments than economics, religion, or many other fields.

The issue here is one of liberty. More specifically what does liberty mean. There are very few people in the United States who would say that they are opposed to liberty and freedom. This is what happens when you live in a stable Democratic Republic. I doubt an open skeptic on democracy and voting could get elected. The only people who talk about limiting democracy tend to be a certain breed of precocious high school student and they usually grow out of it once they get a girlfriend. The result is that all political ideologies and parties (left, right, and center, libertarian) claim to be the true representative of liberty. Hence our debates are about what does a free and liberty-filled society entail.

People on the right seem to think that a welfare state and social safety net are impossible contradictions with freedom and liberty. As a liberal, I do not share this view. Conservatives also seem very concerned about the 2nd Amendment being a protector against tyranny. But not the first, fourth, fifth, sixth Amendments.

A true utopia would have no need for guns (beyond hunting) because there would be no violence, cause for violence, or need for self-defense. Everyone would have his or her needs and wants met in a Utopia. There would be no want.

Some more thoughts:

1. This really does seem to be a highly divided issue between red and blue states or more specifically rural and urban. Most gun owners seem to be located in rural areas and they often speak about how long it takes for police to get to them because of their far-out location. Living in a city or inner-ring suburb, emergency response time is much lower. Again one of the many ways in which urban living consumes fewer resources.

There are always exceptions but I know very few people in urban areas who own guns or want to.

2. There is an image issue. A lot of people even many gun-control friendly liberals think that there is something sexy about owning a gun. And they imagine themselves in a highly correographed bullet ballet out of an action movie. I have seen a lot of my liberal friends post of facebook stuff like "I don't like guns but I think I would look damn cool/sexy/badass if I had one on me in a holster." This goes for men and women.

3. The elephant in the room is mental health. More specifically does society have a right to institutionalize mentally ill people before they do something really violent. This is another thing that city dwellers see on a regular basis but many suburban or urban dwellers do not. I see it more in San Francisco than in New York but you are almost guaranteed to run into a paranoid schizophrenic on the buses in SF. There is one guy on my route. Sometimes they are fine and then lash out all the sudden in very loud ways and this puts everyone on edge. Another man in NYC was pushed to his death recently and the suspect seems to have a long history of violent acts committed while under mental delusions. She also seems to have spent many years going into and out of mental hospitals and local housing. There were not enough resources to make sure she took her medicine.

Does liberty require that we wait until the mentally ill commit a violent crime before sending them away for good? Are we comfortable with a society that uses prison to deal with mental illness? If we can do it with humanity and comfort is it okay to just institutionalize the permanently paranoid-schizophrenic before they commit a crime? These are tough questions without simple answers and I am not sure I have any answers either.

Those ads are one of the reasons I try to avoid mainstream multiplexes as much as possible. Luckily living in San Francisco, there is a theatre that sells tickets for mainstream movies at a higher rate but the benefit is no ads like that. There are only tasteful still ads for local restaurants and real estate agents and the pricing is not that much higher.

I think your sum up of the add is accurate. This is going to be controversial but I think there are a lot of people out there for whom "American fuck yeah!" is a real and living attitude. That is largely why the South Park slogan works. It is funny (and tragic) because it is true.

This opens up a whole socio-economic can of worms of course and is largely connected to the huge culture wars of America that never seem to end.

Great post.

I am also a lawyer though my only experience with criminal law stuff was in my classes and on the Bar. But as an urban-dweller I concur with your observations.

I have never been to Chicago but in every city I have lived in, the nice and seedy parts can blend very easily together. This seems especially true in San Francisco and New York where you can have a big income divide on the same block or within a few blocks of each other. So I have walked by drive-by shootings on the way to the movies and they allegedly were fairly common in my neighborhood right before I moved in.

This is probably why many city-dwellers tend to favor gun control more often.

Hence why we have antitrust laws :)

I appreciate Salmon in raw and cooked ways.

Morat20 is pretty much spot on. The terms socialism and communism have been used as scare words by the right-wing since the 19th century and are now basically void of meaning in the United States. They roughly mean any kind of liberal, large-scale, government-centered program now. It is basically a Pavelonian reaction now on the right. Does a Democratic politician propose a policy? Answer: Yes. Reaction: SOCIALISM!!!!!!!!!!

This could be something to an Anglo-American character. Though the UK has or had a strong labor movement, the labor movement in the United States was largely Anglo-Saxon free. Most heavy hitters and members of American labor units were various "white ethnics": Germans, Jews, Italians, the Irish, etc. With the exception of Eugene Victor Debs and Norman Thomas, the most important American Socialists tended to be German and/or Jewish by this I mean those who ran for office and got elected.

Keep in mind that I think this story below is what many on the Faux News right think of when they think of liberals even though she is an exception and not the rule. We are still seen as being a combo of spoiled rich kids who dabble in bomb-throwing anarchy.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/12/west-village-bombmaker-morgan-gliedman/60456/

Castro likes baseball

Nob,

I agree. I think Planck said the same thing about scientific theories in a famous quote. They became accepted when the old scientists died, not because the theory proved itself on its own merits. What this says about The Scientific Method and Human Nature is not necessarily great though.

Patrick,

I am also not talking about picking between the lessor of two evils.

I am choosing between a politician that I agree with 70-90 percent of the time on policy and issues as compared to a politician who I agree with 0-30 percent of the time. No one (except Libertarians it seems) is ever going to find a politician or party that they agree with 100 percent of the time.

Patrick,

Your last paragraph sounds like someone who is still heartbroken over a break-up and incomprehensible than anyone can still like or even the ex that jilted you.

To say that the Democratic Party failed every test of leadership between 2000-2008 is extremely subjective and impossible to prove or disprove. Yes there are a lot of people out there that are upset that the Democratic Party is not as far to the left as the Republican Party is to the right but the Democratic Party is and always has been a much broader coalition especially now that we are getting a lot of people who were essentially kicked out the Republican Party.

A lot of the Democratic Senators and congress people who voted the way you wanted (and you seem to disacknowledge them as if they were invisible) have been elected since 1998. There are a whole crop of new Senators who are more liberal than their predecessors in either party. But Democratic politicians in states like North Dakota, Montana, and Alaska going to be very different than Democratic politicians from Washington, Oregon, Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii. California is large and diverse enough to ensure a broad Democratic party and Feinstein was always known as a more centrist Democratic politician. This is from her time as a member of the Board of Supervisors onward.

Patrick,

I did vote for Feinstein but I am also a multi-issue* voter and a pragmatic. I don't believe in symbolic sacrifices of third party votes. There are many issues on which Feinstein's view is similar to mine. This is not one of them. When she retires from the Senate, my guess is that she will be replaced with someone more liberal considering the trajectory of California politics but this is only a guess.

The same thing goes for Kohole's comment above when he told liberals to lie in it for reelecting Obama instead of voting for Gary Johnson. How about all the other issues on which liberal-Democrats agree with Obama's position like gay marriage, healthcare, labor rights, environmental regulation, taxes on the wealthy, social safety net programs. How about the simple fact that Gary Johnson had a snowball's chance in hell of winning and a Romney Presidency would probably result in Supreme Court (and other judges) who make Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalialook like a bleeding hearts?

*As far as I can tell, single issue voters seem to exist more on the right than the left. Guns and Taxes being prime examples.

Jesse,

I think there is a lot more Donderoooo in the average libertarian than he would like to admit.

Jesse also brings about a good point about Constitutional Interpretation. Plenty of legislators do vote against laws that they consider unconstitutional and there are changes made when politicians bring up points of constitutionality.

However, it is still the job of the judiciary to determine whether a law is constitutional or not and law is still more of an art than a science. We have been arguing about this for over 200 years. One person's constitutional law is another person's end of liberty as we know it. Look at the arguments made by both sides during the Obamacare debate. Look at how many Supreme Court cases end in 5-4 decisions.
If law was a science, then they should be a lot more 9-0 decisions.

There are also many voters in the party who are further to the right than me on civil liberties and national security issues. Many of these people use to be called Rockefeller Republicans but were chased out of the Republican party. This is going to change the nature and composition of the Democratic Party.