Missing the target

In an op-ed piece by Frank Bruni in the New York Times, an exasperated commenter wrote:

When will our President and Congress stand up to the NRA?

I've read some variant of this sentiment a lot in the last four days, and so have you.

The thing is, it's kind of misdirected.

We citizens have a bad habit of ascribing villainy to powerful interest groups with lots of money who bend our lawmakers to their will. The NRA is today's highlighted villain. The banking industry has filled this role fairly often in the past five years. Name the interest group, and millions of your fellow citizens have vilified it as corrupting our electoral and legislative processes.

Yet all these groups represent the interests of some of us.

Granted, a lot of these groups don't represent a large number of people: lobbyists for various industries (banking, energy, pharmaceuticals, etc.) can only be said to represent those who work in those industries (in general). But what about other lobbyists, like those representing religious or environmental organizations? Those lobbyists are potentially acting on behalf of millions of us who support those organizations with our contributions.

Now, there are groups that appear to represent the interests of a lot of people, but in reality act on behalf of only a handful. The National Rifle Association, though, is not one of them. Although its critics accuse it of advancing the interests of gun manufacturers rather than gun owners, there's no denying that millions of people are paid-up members, and that millions more agree with its positions.

It's easy, though, to forget all those millions of supporters, and to imagine that groups like the NRA are malevolent creatures with their own lives. "Standing up" to those groups thus conjures the image of St. George fighting the dragon. The reality, though, is that the NRA isn't a malevolent creature: it's a megaphone for millions of people. If elected officials hesitate to resist it it's because those officials know that a lot of their constituents agree with the NRA. Those officials can argue that they're just being responsive to those who voted for them.

If you don't like the positions the NRA advocates, stop trying to fight it directly. Instead, work on those you know who agree with it. The NRA will cease to be a political force in this country only when this country's culture changes.

The biggest misconception about guns

In an article about the resistance to gun regulation in Newtown, CT, a man named Scott Ostrosky said:

“Guns are why we’re free in this country, and people lose sight of that when tragedies like this happen.”

I think that's a terrible misconception.

In our society we rely on the free exchange of ideas to push our society in a given direction. When is it legitimate to conclude, "Talking is getting us nowhere. Time to fall back on my AR-15"? Is it ever legitimate?

Is it even true that the right to possess firearms is the source of freedom? I suppose it is, if you mean the freedom to live without restriction of any kind. Yet living in civil society implies accepting some restrictions. If anyone can throw off any restrictions he doesn't like, what kind of society is that?

That's not a totally strawman question, by the way. If the government were to knock on everyone's door to demand a DNA sample, I think most of us would feel it was totally appropriate to resist. We'd like to think we wouldn't let things get to that point, but who knows?

Yet the principle that resistance to injustice is sometimes acceptable doesn't mean that we need to accept unrestricted license to possess and to bear weapons. How many of us would feel comfortable, for instance, living next door to a group that possessed large numbers of automatic weapons and large quantities of explosives? I don't care if you're talking about a drug gang or an extremist cult (I'm thinking David Koresh), I want my government to be able to protect me from that group. After all, the right to possess weapons doesn't imply that the possessors are moral or well-meaning.

You say you don't want the ATF or the police doing the job, because the government can't be trusted? Well then, who can be? You? If you were to acquire the weapons and followers sufficient to defend against an outlaw gang, that would make you as potentially dangerous to the rest of us as the gang.

The government is the only entity that has even a semblance of institutional legitimacy baked into it. Institutional legitimacy, granted by the electorate, is what makes the police the police rather than a large and well-armed bunch of thugs. We rely on police officers to comply with the law themselves so they can act as guardians of our civil society. And for the most part, they do. We hear a lot about corrupt cops, but we forget that the overwhelming number of officers and departments are law-abiding themselves.

If you don't trust the police, if you don't believe that government has any institutional legitimacy, then you don't think our civil society works. At that point, the only "freedom" that is possible is the freedom to live apart from civil society. That's at least a rhetorically defensible stance, though to make it physically true you're going to have to work hard.

We don't enjoy our freedoms today because a little more than half of us have a gun in the house. We're free because the vast majority of us are committed to a shared set of ideals, and to living together in peace. That shared commitment, not pistols and rifles, is what keeps us free.

The Newtown massacre

The last three entries weren't about the shooting itself so much as some of the reactions to it (the really appalling/dumb reactions). In part that was because everybody, and I mean everybody, has been reacting to the story — online, on TV, in restaurants and bars and coffee shops, everywhere. I didn't see the point in adding to the noise, especially since I largely agreed with what everyone was saying.

In the last few hours, though, I've realized something: I am less viscerally troubled by this incident than I thought I would be.

When I saw the headline Friday morning, right after I had woken up, I was aghast. My stomach fell and my heart pounded furiously in shock. It wasn't just a mass shooting: it was a mass shooting of children. As time passed, it became clear that these were young children, too — all of them six or seven years old, as we now know.

It's customary for some people to wonder out loud how such an "evil" act could occur. Strange as it might seem, I didn't think of this as an evil act. It's not that I thought, or think, that it was in any way "good" or "not evil". No: rather, I couldn't fit this incident into my comparatively limited notion of "evil". The enormity of the tragedy transcended my idea of what constitutes evil.

I don't entirely understand why I should feel this way. I am well aware of the butchery of the Nazi regime, and of Stalin's purges. I don't know how many of those who died in those bloody episodes were children, but obviously it was a lot more than the twenty killed in Newtown, CT on Friday.

Yet those twenty weigh far more heavily on my mind than the millions who perished unnecessarily during the twentieth century.

Is it because I watched the terrible story unfold as "news" rather than "history"?

Is it because the shooting was an isolated incident in a country whose soil hasn't known the carnage of war since the nineteenth century? In other words, would it have had the same impact if it had happened during a war being fought on our shores?

Is it because my images of the bloodshed are in vivid color rather than black and white?

Is it because so few grieving relatives of the earlier massacres survived to tell their stories?

All these reasons no doubt play into my feeling that this shooting somehow is more than evil. I think that repeated exposure to documentaries and histories of the terrible slaughters of the twentieth century forced my mind to squeeze them into a mental box marked "evil". The trouble is that this had the effect of making butchery on an unimaginable scale imaginable. Rather than leaving me with a proper understanding of the true scope of those tragedies, I was left with what you might think of as scale representations that would fit neatly into that mental box.

The Newport massacre is life-sized — it doesn't fit into that box. It's not an historical abstraction. It's a warm, bloody, pulsing, raw wound in my psyche.

So how does this conception of the massacre as "more than evil" square with my previous assertion that I'm not as troubled by it as I thought I would be?

Well, I can already feel the story fading into abstraction.

The pictures of the victims are becoming disturbingly similar to the ones I've seen in World War II documentaries. I even understand why. All victims, you see, eventually are reduced to flat and static images in the minds of spectators. Only those who actually knew the victims have a genuine emotional connection to them that keeps them vivid. And the more the victims become flat and static images, the more the incident resembles the "scale representations" that fit into my mental boxes. As it can be mentally filed and pigeonholed, it becomes more distant and less viscerally real.

What I just described, though, is a normal and unavoidable mental process. Someone once said our memories are scars — and like physical scars, they become less vivid over time. We can take some comfort in knowing that the fading is not of our own volition.

My concern, though, is that not that the shooting is fading into memory. No, my concern is that I'm all but completely resigned to the idea that nothing will change as a result of it. I am sorrowful, but not truly angry.

You might be surprised that I'm not angry. After all, the last three entries were fairly bitter in their denunciation of fanatical gun rights advocates and holier-than-thou scolds. (In fairness to Mike Huckabee, by the way, I must admit that on reflection, my insistence that further gun-control laws are obviously the only responsible reaction to this incident is no less strident, and possibly no less irresponsibly opportunistic, than his insistence that not proselytizing the Christian God in schools was a proximate cause of this tragedy.)

My bitterness and anger, though, were and are directed at The Usual Idiots who advocate what I consider to be borderline insane positions. I'm angry at egregious stupidity and arrogance.

Where, you might ask, is my anger at the shooter, Adam Lanza?

I've certainly been asking myself that.

We know so little about Lanza, and so much of it is frankly of dubious reliability. All of it comes from people who claim to have known him, yet all of them acknowledge that he was difficult to know. How much can we trust their recollections and impressions, especially after the information has been filtered through the warped glass of the media? (I would like to know, for instance, whether the New York Times' frequent assertion that Lanza had a "flat affect" is a direct quotation of someone claiming to know Lanza, or an interpretation made by a reporter or editor. I consider "flat affect" to be a clinical description that is trustworthy only if provided by a mental health professional.)

Was Lanza a conscienceless monster? Was he a deluded madman? We will probably never know.

Should that matter to me? After all, he slaughtered innocent women and children. It could scarcely harm anyone to hate him, even if he was not in his right mind: he's dead and can't be hurt.

Yet I don't hate him. He's dead and gone. What good would it do me to hate him? He's not around to feel my wrath, and that's the only satisfaction I could take from getting mad at him. I would want him to feel my anger and sorrow.

Anyway, I'm still baffled: what on earth was going through his head to make him do this? My extreme puzzlement trumps my righteous anger, at least for now.

If I'm not angry at Lanza, shouldn't I be angry at those who have lobbied so hard for our permissive gun ownership regime? Shouldn't it have been a hell of a lot harder for Lanza to get his hands on so many weapons of such great lethality?

I can't muster up such anger.

Right now, my feeling is, "This is the way people want it, apparently." A majority seems to want the broadest possible right to own and to bear weapons. A tragedy like this shooting is, as far as I'm concerned, a foreseeable and inevitable byproduct of a society that esteems the Second Amendment as all but sacred. A pox on the gun-rights zealots, is my feeling. Let them bleed in the house they made for all of us.

It is probably true that I would feel differently if I had kids, or if I were younger. Since neither of those conditions holds true, I'm a lot less concerned about gun violence than most. If I fall victim to it, it will affect no one but me, and I'm not all that fussed about dying.

The arguments on both sides of the gun debate are so stale, and the possibility gun-rights advocates will experience an epiphany is so remote, it's impossible to imagine any sensible change coming out of even this atrocity. Just as I can feel this shooting starting to fit into my mental boxes, losing its ability to fill me with consuming shock and sorrow and anger, so I can feel the shooting being digested by the body politic and turning into mere fuel for the gun debate. The Newtown shooting all too soon will be no more than another data point in people's mental spreadsheets, and we have so many such data points already that even this one won't make a difference to anyone's mental calculus.

So I don't care for myself and I doubt society will care enough to do anything constructive, even though we're talking about the most primal of dichotomies: life versus death.

That's a troubling resignation to terrible circumstances. And yet, I'm not that troubled.

I suppose it's a good thing I'm but one passing stranger in this world.

Huckabee on Newtown shooting

On his Daily Show appearances, Mike Huckabee has seemed a nice enough fellow.

Remarks like the following have done a lot to destroy that reputation.

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools," Huckabee said on Fox News, discussing the murder spree that took the lives of 20 children and 6 adults in Newtown, CT that morning. "Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?"

Fear of God, after all, did so much to stop the violence of the Crusades, and the Inquisition, and the witch burnings in Salem, and the massacres of nonbelieving peoples in South America by the conquistadores.

If, as early reports have suggested (and I hasten to add that early reports are so often incomplete, misleading, or flat-out wrong), shooter Adam Lanza was mentally disturbed, pray tell us, Gov. Huckabee, how would talking about the Christian God in school have helped?

For that matter, mightn't it have been just as or even more helpful to have taught Adam Lanza meditation techniques used in non-Christian religions like Taoism or Sufism? By teaching students ways to calm their minds and achieve a sense of peace, these techniques might have prevented Lanza's attack. That's at least as plausible an idea as Gov. Huckabee's unproven assertion. Would such religious teachings have the governor's equally full-throated (and ill-timed) support?

Nobody yet knows why Adam Lanza committed this atrocity. It is therefore grotesquely opportunistic for Gov. Huckabee to be pushing his pro-Christian agenda in the wake of these killings, as if pushing Christianity into the public schools would have been a panacea. Shame on you, Governor. Your hucksterism is repugnant.

Firmin DeBrabander, "The Freedom of an Armed Society"

DeBrabander wrote a thoughtful essay in the New York Times about the kind of "freedom" that is embodied in the ideal of an armed society.

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.

The gun rights advocates who call for arming ourselves to an even greater degree, like Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX), however, are immune to such arguments. They simply don't accept that there is any justifiable restriction on gun ownership.

Would blowhards like Gohmert be so arrogant if their children had been massacred? For that matter, would they be the ones to preempt such killings, heroically (and accurately) taking out the would-be killer without harming others?

More to the point, do we want to live in a society where everyone is packing? Do we, in other words, want to return to the Old West, where might (and only might) made right?

This is why we can't let libertarians run things

In an article on Talking Points Memo about the Newtown, CT, school shooting, the comments raged — and I use the term advisedly.

One of the commenters, "John Pidaras", is a strong advocate of gun ownership as the only cure for shooting rampages. To another poster asking whether teachers should be armed (itself an exasperated response to multiple back-and-forths with Pidaras), Pidaras replied:

To answer your question, one for every teacher should suffice. Make it a requirement for teaching. The same standards that you want to impose on gun owners should be imposed on teachers, rigorous background and psychological tests as well as firearms competency and safety training. That is, only if we are interested in preventing school shootings, which of course is not the goal here. The goal here is to ban guns, not make schools safer. If it was to make schools safer then you would overwhelmingly support my idea.

Elsewhere Pidaras claims to oppose "pretty much all wars including the drug war and all forms of corporatism", so I'd say that puts him in the libertarian camp. There's something appealing about libertarianism to a nation weaned on the romance of the Western; even I, who dislike Westerns thoroughly and am convinced this country could stand a lot more consideration for the community in its politics, have been seduced on occasion by the individualist's siren song.

The thing is, libertarianism allows only the barest outline of a civil society to exist. Libertarianism requires the greatest self-sufficiency of any philosophy of governing, and a populace accustomed to fending for itself for the most part isn't going to be easy to unify, or to keep unified. Libertarians insist that no government should dictate how they should live their lives, and that's admirable in principle, but what if a group of like-minded folks decides to impose its views on a smaller group? What is the smaller group's recourse?

In a society in which "individual defense" was the watchword — a society in which, for instance, teachers were armed to protect their students (and in some places, I'm sure, to protect themselves from their students) — what would civil society be like? Could you even call it civil society? Wouldn't it simply be an atomized aggregation of millions of mutually suspicious people, or a collection of fiefdoms created by local strongmen who aggregated power by opportunistically creating the biggest gang first?

A libertarian society, it seems to me, could only survive if the populace was extraordinarily moral. Otherwise, the inclination to dominate would eventually leave everyone under the thumb of the most aggressive.

In such a society it might be the norm for teachers to be armed, as much in their own interest as in the putative interest of their students' safety. However, this is not a norm I want to see. It comes from a gun enthusiast who cannot understand that some restrictions on gun ownership and gun capability are rational and not the first stumbling steps down a slippery slope. It comes, in other words, from a raging ideologue who doesn't live in the real world. Kind of like a lot of libertarians, really.

Pranks r us

A lot of people seem pretty stirred up about the death of a nurse that seems to be connected to her very recent public humiliation at the hands of a pair of DJs in Sydney, Australia. The nurse, Jacintha Saldanha, accepted a prank call by the DJs, who were pretending to be Queen Elizabeth and Prince Charles, and connected them to the duty nurse attending the pregnant Duchess of Cambridge. The call became a minor sensation around the world, presumably because no one could believe how easily Saldanha had been taken in: even the DJs were surprised their stunt succeeded.

Saldanha was found dead on Friday by what the New York Times is calling "an apparent suicide". Suddenly no one is all that amused by the prank any more.

Yet be honest: how many of you laughed when you first heard the story, before Saldanha was found dead?

Not to be holier than thou, but I've never found prank calls funny. Not even a little. I've never understood where the humor is to be found in making someone else look, sound, or feel foolish.

I'm evidently very much in the minority, though. From Candid Camera onward, the audience seems to have rewarded producers who have figured out how to make ordinary folks look ridiculous.

Even two of my favorite TV shows, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, do this on a regular basis. I hate those bits. It's one thing to deflate the hypocrisy of politicians. It's quite another to humiliate ordinary people just going about their business.

At least in the DS and CR bits, people know they're on camera: they are willing (if seemingly oblivious) conspirators. What seems to make prank calling so appealing to so many in the audience is that the victims don't realize anything is amiss.

Apparently nobody stops to wonder how he or she would feel if the tables were turned. Nobody stops to wonder if there might be consequences to these little pranks, either.

What the hell is wrong with you people? And by "you people", I mean not just the producers and (using the term loosely) talent, but the audience, too. Are you totally incapable of empathy? Does it take a death to wake you up to the cruelty that has always been at the very heart of your insipid "comedy"?

You say all comedy is cruel? Maybe so. But the cruelty of a stand-up tends to be aimed at groups, or at people who have willingly placed themselves in the public eye. Prank calls aim right at one person, someone who is just trying to live his or her life. When you focus the cruelty so tightly and make it public, you have stopped being funny. You've become merely the sorriest of assholes.

If you reward such assholes by listening to them and laughing along, you're a sorry asshole too.