So, I caught this clip of Lawrence O’Donnell arguing with Rep. Trent Franks about gun control. Franks looks really, really stupid in this clip. It’s hard to pull out the stupidest thing he says, but one particular item jumped out at me as something I could see taking off with the wingnutteria, and so I thought I’d deal with it right now. Franks opposes even the teeniest measure of gun control proposed after this shooting, which is to limit the number of bullets you can put in a magazine, because the NRA has determined this is like lopping inches off your symbolic cock instead taking the whole thing, and that’s almost as bad. And Republicans are just as owned by the NRA as by big business, though I suppose it’s worth pointing out that gun manufacturing is big business, and the NRA basically stands in for the financial well-being of the gun industry. (For the gun industry, mass shootings are good business. Glock sales shot up after the shooting, and the cynic in me has to point out that an incident where a man hit 19 people with 31 bullets is a good advertisement for the gun’s accuracy. Sad, but I’m not the one running out to buy a Glock after hearing this story.) Anyway, O’Donnell shouted Franks down, but it’s not like Franks had an argument. Letting the ban on 30 round magazines die, as per the NRA’s wishes, meant the death toll is probably twice what it would have been. Them’s just the facts. It’s truly pathetic seeing people who only shoot guns at the range kick their heels like wee infants at the possibility that they may have to waste precious calories reloading more often so that future mass murders have fewer victims. We’re not even talking about stopping mass murders at this point. We’re just talking about minimizing the casualties. And yet, whining.
Franks says that requiring a limit on magazine sizes like this is like trying to stop drunk driving by limiting the size of fuel tanks. I realize this asinine analogy makes emotional sense to his intended audience—-big trucks, like big guns, being penis substitutes that are clung to like infants clinging to well-worn teddy bears—-but it’s a crappy analogy. As O’Donnell makes clear, this is about limiting the damage that can be done once the horrible thing has happened. So, really, the proper analogy is safety features and both cars and roads. If someone gets behind the wheel drunk, the fact that we have seat belts, airbags, cars that are designed to crumple in the safest way they can, glass that shatters instead of breaks, speed limits, wide lanes, clearly marked roads, cars that drift right instead of left if someone passes out at the wheel, rails on bridges, medians, and traffic lights are all things that can reduce the chance that the drunk driver is going to kill someone, even if he gets into an accident. It dramatically reduces the chance he’ll kill someone else. These things are technically impositions on our freedom. They mean we can’t just drive around like wildcats, figuring out how to manage each other without any set rules. But the benefit of safety far outweighs any theoretical gains from having no rules of the road and no safety features on cars. Same with this high capacity magazine ban that’s being proposed. There’s just no reasonable argument for why having to reload a little more often is an imposition that’s worth multiple human lives every year.
Update: For a more direct take on this whole issue of gun control, check out my latest at the Guardian’s Comment Is Free. But that isn’t to say there isn’t humor. Wingnuts and their gun obsession always have a darkly comic value.
Every time there’s some horrible gun violence that catches the nation’s attention, there’s an inevitable call for gun control, and then the inevitable hysterical reaction from wingnuts who think that their penises will be taken away the second a mentally disturbed child molester on a terrorist watch list is prevented from buying a machine gun at a gun show. And in these hysterics, there’s one word that’s used more than any other: “jackboot”. Jackboots are, according to 99.9% of hysterical gun nuts, the most terrifying item humans have ever produced. Jackboots are the weapons of choice of thugs kicking down your doors, looking to take your guns. Liberals are usually portrayed as pacifist wimps by the right, but on this issue, suddenly we’re an army of fascists wielding this most terrifying of weapons, sturdy footwear.
Of course, the reason that wingnuts like to reference jackboots is that these were the preferred boots of the German military, before and during the Nazi era. And wingnuts love nothing more than comparing criticisms of them and reasonable safety policy to the genocidal policies of Nazis. Seriously, this “blood libel” and “pogrom” thing is just the next step after decades of “jackbooted thug” being second only to “welfare queen” in the wingnut cliche handbook. This tendency is offensive to liberals, people with commonsense, Jews, anyone who was targeted by actual Nazis, the victims of gun crime, the soldiers who won WWII, and rationality itself, but it’s also really unfair to boots. After all, the difference between the evil weapon of war called the “jackboot” and other, sturdy footwear suitable for heavy duty work, such as fighting in the military, is paper thin to non-existent.
I looked up the term “jackboot” online, and after wading through a bunch of right wing propaganda and historical wankery that is so specific that it’s not enlightening, I finally concluded that jackboots are basically just a really sturdy knee-high boot, probably one that is somewhat weather-proof so that you can march through mud and whatnot. Steel-toes are probably involved in many of these kinds of boots, which do make them good for kicking the shit out of people. Still, I find jackboots as weapons less terrifying than semiautomatic assault guns with extended magazines, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers.
But, in the spirit of compromise and Jon Stewart’s metaphor of everyone taking turns getting on the freeway, I’m willing to consider a compromise where, in exchange for controlling what we liberals find terrifying (high tech weaponry that can kill a lot of people in short periods of time), we will allow the control of boots that could be used to kick you in the head really hard. Of course, just like with guns, an all-out ban of the entire boot family is and should be off the table. Seriously, since moving to a place that has for real winter and where you have to walk everywhere, you would have to pry my boots out of dead, cold hands. Plus, a lot of boots are really far away from “jack” on the scale of boots-that-look-scary. So, I thought I’d go through the collection of boots in my house (which, because of aforementioned cold and walking weenie-ness, is a large collection) and rate them on the “jackboot” scale, to get a better picture of what kind of boot control would be necessary to stave off tyranny.
Also, it gives me a chance to play with Instagram, which is not yet implicated as a threat to liberty from liberal fascists.
Boot #1: My rain boots
Jackboot qualities: Tall, ugly, weatherproof, worn for practical reasons.
Freedom-loving qualities: Kind of unwieldy, made of rubber and not leather, associated mostly with girls wearing skinny jeans or leggings in an effort to make these look more fashionable than they are.
Media Matters has put together an interesting report on how the right wing-driven gun bubble has burst. Basically, there was a feeding frenzy after Obama was elected, and paranoid white men around the country had to buy some bigger and louder phallic symbols to stave off anxieties caused by the scary new President. Now that they realize he was elected President and isn’t actually breaking into their houses, they’re chilling out and buying fewer guns. That, or they have finally hit saturation.
Just kidding. You can never have too many steel objects of phallic reassurance around. It’s either that or grabbing your crotch every two seconds to make sure it’s still there.
What was especially interesting in the post was how the gun manufacturers were completely upfront in their reports on diminished sales on what their main sales tactic is, which is to gin up irrational fears to sell guns. Take this quote from Smith and Wesson’s report:
The consumer environment with the fire arms industry appears to have returned to levels no longer driven by fear of increased gun control or political uncertainty. This is supported by our recent research which shows that consumer purchasing today is driven primarily by personal protection and shooting sports. Political concerns are now a distant fourth. This is reflected in our current sales in most firearms categories, which are lower than the record sales last year for both the industry and our company.
“Political concerns” might be the best euphemism of the day. But it’s good to know that paranoia as a sales technique may have built-in limits. What is interesting is that the gun industry is, like the fast food industry, basically working under the assumption that they have tapped out the potential customer base and now have to increase sales per customer. In other words, they aren’t getting new customers, so they have to get the existing ones to buy more. Simply staying at your current sales level instead of always growing is not acceptable in capitalism, which is always its fatal flaw. Once expansion isn’t possible by honest means, dishonest ones have to come in to play. That’s why bubbles are created, basically—-that’s one major reason the housing bubble happened, because the “always growing” mandate put finance people in this situation where they had to start cutting corners. For fast food, it’s a matter of getting people to eat more and more. And with guns, it’s about stoking paranoia so their already existing customer base thinks that owning, say, two dozen guns is simply not enough but they must have more.
This morning, I was putting the finishing touches on a post about Sharron Angle at XX when Marc messaged me to tell me that there was a shooter at the Perry-Castañeda Library. It took me a second to register what he was saying. The PCL is the library that is across the street from my old office at UT Austin, when I worked in the business school there. My routine at lunch was often to go to the library to drop off/pick up books, go to Jester to grab a salad from the cafeteria for lunch, and then go back to the business school to eat at my desk while reading blogs before getting back to work. The very picture of everyday, peaceful living. The specter of a gunman turning loose in a crowded area is such a frequent occurrence nowadays, but picturing it actually happening in my old stomping grounds was almost unimaginable. Some guy, reportedly in a ski mask, shooting off an AK-47 at the library. Surreal.
Thankfully, no one was hurt but the shooter, who killed himself on the 6th floor of the library.
So I did what people do nowadays and opened up Facebook to see a stream of updates from friends back home, most of whom actually were on campus when it happened. One friend in particular was in the shit—-he’d been trying to get breakfast and was outside at the corner where the library is, and was hustled by law enforcement inside the business school. He frequently updated about being shuffled around. The picture above is from another person inside the business school, and I’m using it because it’s so surreal to me since I used to walk down that hallway basically every day. Being a classic smartass, said friend was cracking jokes about not being able to eat in peace, but over time, even his updates were more spooked than joking after awhile. The entire building was being swarmed by cops and dogs. They were looking for a potential second shooter because they had differing descriptions from people who saw the guy walking down the street with an AK-47, but luckily there wasn’t one.
My thoughts right now are scattershot. I’m glad everyone’s okay, and that the shooter’s wild shooting off of his gun didn’t result in any injuries.
This all happened within a stone’s throw of the first school shooting in the nation, when Charles Whitman climbed the UT tower in 1966 and started firing. Many of the people who died were not but a block away from this incident. People still claim that you can find some of Whitman’s bullet holes on campus; now there are more scars from gun violence added to the landscape. I’m not comparing the two incidents in magnitude, by any stretch, but just to note that there’s a cultural context that makes this whole thing even scarier than it already was.
Darkly funny observation that I picked up from Twitter: Conservative groups on campus were supposed to have a speaker come tonight who wrote a book called “More Guns, Less Crime”. Even though they no doubt flew the writer John Lott in already, I imagine his speech about how we can stop gun violence by having even more guns available will be canceled. Not that it will stop any of the people who invited him from bullshitting today that it would have been just great if there had been civilians carrying guns around when this maniac showed up on campus, because what you really need right then is more bullets flying around.
Like I said, I’m just mostly so relieved that no one else got hurt. Now we’ll just wait and see what the police find out about this shooter.
Libertarian Mustache is, against all odds, moving to Fox News. He’s also looking for ideas for the setup of his new show:
I’m grateful to ABC News for allowing me to do stories that challenged conventional wisdom, and occasionally enraged many of its viewers. But it’s said that everyone should change jobs every 7 years. I’ve been at ABC for 28 years ...
In my new job, I want to dig into the meaning of the words “liberty” and “limited government”. ABC enabled me to do some of that, but Fox offers me more airtime and a new challenge.
I’m still considering what I will do with my own show, one hour each week. Economics certainly. Exercises in understanding libertarianism. My “take” on the issues of the day. Kind of like this blog. In fact, maybe we’ll call it, Stossel’s Take?
I ask you for your ideas. A studio audience? Should I wander around Congress?
I’m thinking a show where John Stossel wanders around, telling people what he believes. An amused economist then explains the actual impact of everything John Stossel believes. John Stossel then gets banned from restaurants, movie theaters and daycares based on the demonstrably crazy shit he spreads. Repeat around the country. We could call it Stosseled!
I’m Dr. Ignatius Piazza, Founder and Director of Front Sight Firearms Training Institute. You are on a secure page.
My hundreds of thousands of students call me the “Millionaire Patriot” because for the last 12 years I have continually provided millions of dollars in amazing benefits to encourage every law abiding citizen in America to secure the Comfort of Skill at Arms for the protection of themselves, their families, and their communities.
You see, I believe that we can positively change the image of gun ownership in our lifetimes and protect our great country from all enemies—foreign and domestic—by training our law abiding citizens to levels that far exceed law enforcement and military standards and we can do it without any boot camp mentality or drill instructor attitudes.
I believe this so much that I created Front Sight Firearms Training Institute for this sole purpose. I want YOU armed and trained, and I’ll back up my words with my wallet.
In other words, a rich private citizen is paying to train a private army to his specifications to fight off his perceived enemies. This, however, is not scary, because he’s taken the time to grow out such well-maintained facial hair. It’s a proven fact.
You would think that a dude who’s building a paramilitary force using millions of dollars of his own money and is associated with a cult would, perhaps, be more threatening than a handsome black man who signed a petition. You would be fucking wrong, because people don’t kill people - bald black men in bureaucracies kill people.
OMFG. People thought this guy was just a joke; no one’s laughing now. Via Crooks & Liars:
So it turns out that Contessa Brewer had good reason to see a connection between the rabidly hateful rhetoric spewed by the likes of Pastor Steven Anderson and the angry, gun-toting protesters turning out for presidential events: One of the most prominent of these, an African-American man named “Chris”, is in fact a member of Pastor Anderson’s congregation.
“Chris” was on Alex Jones’ “Prison Planet” radio show late last week and discussed how “my pastor was beaten up” at a Border Patrol checkpoint.
Yes, that pastor is indeed Steven Anderson, who was arrested in April by the Border Patrol for being uncooperative at a patrol checkpoint. Anderson attempted to make himself something of a national martyr to the conspiracists out there by posting a video to YouTube about it that quickly went viral.
Jones took note of the Anderson connection:
Jones: Now I’m starting to get a clearer picture. You go to Pastor Anderson’s church, I see.
Chris: Yeah, yes I do. Proudly. I think it’s the best church in the world.
Thankfully Wells Fargo, the employer of leading Idaho tea-bagger Charles McAffee, doesn’t train its representatives to document loan-delinquent homeowners in this manner. Via Raw Story:
The Republican Party chairman of Boise County in Idaho was arrested Thursday for aggravated assault after he pulled a gun on a man whose house he was photographing.
Charles McAffee, 33, was among Idaho’s anti-tax tea-party activists, and is a member of the Idaho Republican Party Central Committee. He was arrested after pulling a handgun on a homeowner whose mortgage his employer sought to photograph for being delinquent
Do you see a trend here? Gun-brandishing teabaggers, right-wing preachers calling for the execution of gays and the President...in all of the years the left was out in the political cold, did we see any of this completely unhinged behavior? At some point the GOP and religious right leaders need to condemn these extremists and eliminationists or we can safely assume that they agree wholeheartedly with a class of people who encourage - or partake - in violence as a protest or act of intimidation. The AP:
According to police in the Boise suburb of Meridian, resident Robert Lutes called officers just before 5:30 p.m. Tuesday to report McAffee had pointed a .357 Magnum handgun at him during a verbal confrontation. McAffee acknowledged he pointed the gun at Lutes, according to the police account.
“I’m unarmed, I’m an old man,” Lutes, 51, told The Associated Press on Thursday. “I’m trying to find out why he’s taking pictures of my house. I said, ‘Knock on my door, let me know what you want.’ Then, I think he’s reaching for his business card and he pulls out a concealed weapon and I think he’s going to blow my head off.”
Keep in mind that during the Virginia Tech shootings, the first shootings happened in a dorm. The shooter then went to an academic building, chained the exits, and proceeded to go on his rampage.
The problem with concealed carry isn’t the concealed carriers. It’s all the bullets they would fire at the unknown shooter, or at the kid who was carrying a stapler and dressed in dark clothes. You know, whatever. It’s highly unlikely that concealed carry would make mass shootings more likely - it is, however, highly likely that when someone is insane enough to decide they want to kill a few dozen people, a disorganized, untrained armed response is likely to make the situation far more dangerous to all involved.
This firefight at a Burger King is getting cheered by many on the pro-gun right as the awesomest thing that’s ever happened.
The robber entered wearing a ski mask. He approached a clerk, showed his gun and demanded money, said Miami police spokesman Jeff Giordano.
A customer eyed him and the two started arguing. The customer had a concealed-weapons permit and his gun—and the two exchanged gunfire.
The robber crumpled to the floor and was pronounced dead at the scene.
The customer, with several gunshot wounds, was in serious but stable condition at Jackson Memorial Hospital’s Ryder Trauma Center.
There are two ways of looking at this. The first is with the tacit approval of this brave man taking justice into his own hands and using his Constitutional rights to stop a robber in his tracks, saving a fast-food restaurant literally hundreds of dollars.
The second is that this guy got into a firefight in a public place, endangering himself, the employees and other customers and passers-by, is in serious condition in a hospital and probably could have died if a bullet had been a half-inch off, all to save a fast-food restaurant literally hundreds of dollars.
Let’s talk about why the second way is correct. Simply put, you have the right to defend yourself and others - this, I cannot and will not disagree with. However, there’s a reason that we train people to do this for the community at large, rather than trusting a group of residential commandos to lay down suppression fire every time someone wants to hold up a 7-11. Guns are dangerous. Very dangerous. They are designed to kill living things. Regardless of your position on the right to bear arms, a man nearly lost his life to protect the till at a Burger King. In terms of social cost, a law-abiding citizen’s life is not worth ten hours’ take of Tendercrisp sandwiches and shitty (but improved!) fries.
And just to make clear: law enforcement officials are in a far better place to handle situations like this without endangering others, providing they do their job correctly. Your average armed person, with no real training and prone to misread a situation, often becomes as much of a danger to the others as the criminal, if not more so.
Back in July of last year, Jim Adkisson, 58, opened fire with a shotgun during an event at the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, where more than 200 people were attending a performance of “Annie”). It was also later learned that the Knoxville congregation had also recently put up a sign to publicly welcome LGBTs to worship.
When law enforcement officials searched Adkisson’s home, they found “Liberalism is a Mental Health Disorder” by radio talk show host Michael Savage, “Let Freedom Ring” by talk show host Sean Hannity, and “The O’Reilly Factor,” by television talk show host Bill O’Reilly.
Fast forward to Feb. 8, 2009—Adkisson has been sentenced to life behind bars for the deaths of Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger. As many speculated at the time, the influence of the right-wing bile surely had to influence Adkisson. His four-page manifesto not only made clear that he wanted to kill liberals—it called for the right-wing to rise up and commit violence. Sara Robinson at Orcinus:
But yesterday, Adkisson told us himself—in his own words—just how central right-wing eliminationism was in driving him to his shooting spree. Shortly after he was sentenced yesterday, he released a four-page handwritten “manifesto”—which he’d intended to be his suicide note—to the Knoxville News (the full .pdf can be downloaded here). In it, he unleashes the full measure of his hatred for liberals—and encourages other would-be right-wing warriors to take up arms and follow him into battle.
Some choice excerpts:
“Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them….
“This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg’s book. I’d like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn’t get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It’s the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence.”
“I thought I’d do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me….Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I’d like to encourage other like minded people to do what I’ve done. If life aint worth living anymore don’t just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.
Wow. I wonder how Bernie Goldberg feels about being immortalized by a member of the right-wing Base. As Sara noted later in her post, Adkisson has years to spread his raging hate from a prison cell to his brothers-in-arms.
No doubt this manifesto is being blogged, mailed, twittered, and otherwise littered across the far-right infosphere today, and Adkisson will likely emerge from this as a new hero of the extreme right wing. (He’s obviously articulate and literate, which means we may expect more of these bilious rants coming out of his cell in the years ahead.) It also seems likely that, probably sooner rather than later, other victims of our curdled economy will accept his charge, pick up their guns, and attempt to follow him into battle.
Nicely done, Messrs. Hannity, Goldberg, Limbaugh, Savage and O’Reilly—and all your lesser brethren who keep the hate speech spewing 24/7/365 across every field and into every shop in the country.
A Portland man says he was tackled, pushed off his bike, and then tasered repeatedly by a Portland Police officer in Southeast Portland last night.
The Portland Police Bureau, in a written statement about the incident, say that Phil Sano (a.k.a. “Rev Phil”) did not have a front light on his bicycle and that he refused to stop when officers requested.
The police officer was dressed all in black with, allegedly, no insignias or other identifying marks, a claim which seems more likely given the not guilty verdict. A good followup read is the paraphrasement of the [A?]DA’s summation:
Officers had no good options. Chose Taser…
Officer is justified when using force when officer believes it’s necessary in making an arrest. Not just when threatened.
Obviously this is subject to transcription error, and the [A?]DA may not be a huge jackass. But this idea of “Taser as option” rather than “Taser as a weapon of second-to-last resort” is pernicious, and thankfully the jury saw past it.
Whenever I read about the fringe wack job survivalists, skin heads and other organized hate groups over at Dave Neiwart’s Orcinus, it gives me the chills. There’s nothing funny about these folks. In his latest piece, Dave covers the increased anxiety among the gun-crazed loons afraid of Barack Obama taking away their guns are gearing up…for something. In November of last year the number of background checks was 42 percent greater than in November 2007.
These fears are becoming widespread on the ground, particularly in the rural areas where gun rights have been a favorite bugaboo since the days of gas-station attendants and Beaver Cleaver. I know about this somewhat from personal experience; the fear that “Obama is gonna take our guns away” is certainly commonplace when I spend time in the rural West.
...On those fringes, what we’re seeing is a reformation of the militia movement of the 1990s, which organized in large part over hysteria ratcheted up by Bill Clinton’s gun-control measures, particularly the assault-weapons ban that passed in 1994. But there are a couple of twists this time around—Barack Obama does not appear eager to push any gun-control measures through Congress for the time being, so the fear and paranoia required are even more ephemeral in their basis than in the ‘90s; and more importantly, the new militia is being constituted of a different base—younger, more militant, more paranoid, and more likely to have an actual military background.
A lot of this organizing is happening quietly, and the Internet is playing a key role. Among the more common places you’ll find militiamen networking is at Web social-networking platforms like MySpace.
Much of the networking is going on at private pages that you need permission to access, but others are public. For instance, there’s this site, run evidently by an ex-Marine from Colorado, which features discussion of such subjects as “Training a Survival of Militia Group, Part 1.”
The purpose of this thread is to help Freepers and lurkers decide upon what the best mode of self defense would be in the case of the breakdown in social order such as happened with the Rodney King riots.
Joe Brower owns one of the RKBA (Right to Keep and Bear Arms) ping lists. I tried to convince him to open this vanity because he and his friends are more knowledgeable about guns. He says, “there have already been threads on the subject you mention right here on FR, although I can’t locate them now. Tell you what—you start the thread and then ping me, and I’ll then flag my RKBA list for comments. I’m sure some folks in that group would be able to provide links, as well as plenty of timely advice. “
This scenario is called the SHTF scenario, where the acronym stands for $#|+ Hits The Fan. So this will be the SHTF gun thread for November 2008… Of course, gun ownership isn’t for everyone. But it is the most accessible safety measure under our constitution, which is as our founding fathers intended. Recall where the police were when the Rodney King riots started: they left the scene for their own safety. If that were to happen in your neighborhood, what is your plan?
And what were the comments like on this thread? View some below the fold.
Update: For a more direct take on this whole issue of gun control, 
This morning, I was putting the finishing touches on 
Libertarian Mustache is, against all odds, 
Next up, Crazy Fucking Mustache is 
So it turns out that Contessa Brewer had good reason to see a connection between the rabidly hateful rhetoric spewed by the likes of Pastor Steven Anderson and the angry, gun-toting protesters turning out for presidential events: One of the most prominent of these, an African-American man named “Chris”, is in fact a member of Pastor Anderson’s congregation.
This 
Back in July of last year, Jim Adkisson, 58,