The gun debate

Two more terrible mass shootings in the last week, one racially motivated  in Buffalo, New York, the other a suicidal youth in Uvalde, Texas, have brought the debate over guns back to the fore. 

As usual Democrats have called for banning assault rifles and more gun control generally, and the GOP has blamed mental health, lack of armed teachers and the rest of its regular litany of alternative explanations that might divert the conversation away from gun control.  So no surprises there.

What is becoming clear is that the argument is not about guns at all, but about identity. It has morphed into a debate about individualism versus collectivism.  The individualists want the right to bear arms in part because they do not trust the state to provide protection; indeed many do not trust the state at all and think their guns are their last line of defense against what they perceive as state oppression.  The collectivists believe that some curtailing of individual rights (gun control) is needed to reduce the number of gun-related deaths, at the same time trusting, indeed expecting, the state to protect its citizens.  This dichotomization of identity happens to line up with the rural vs. urban divide and the right/left divide.    

On the vertical axis is the rate of gun related homicides, on the horizontal a function of the ratio of democratic to republican votes in the 2020 general election, for all fifty states. There is a clear relationship between high rates of gun related homicides and right-leaning states.  What is so tragic is that in the twenty years since the Sandy Hook shooting, not to mention Columbine and all those since, almost no action has been taken by either party; the Democrats are stymied by the filibuster in Congress and an increasingly right-leaning Supreme Court.  

The GOP on the other hand has no excuse for inaction, and anyone interested in curbing the rate of gun related homicides in America should be asking the GOP two questions. First, from the list of possible causes (mental health, for example) what actions have been taken? Then two follow-up questions; if the answer is nothing, then "why not"? and if the actions have been taken then "to what extent have the worked"? My guess is that in those states favoring solutions other than gun-control, little if anything has been done. But if things have, we need to know if anything worked so that the same measures might be applied elsewhere. 

The Rittenhouse Verdict

The jury's verdict in the Rittenhouse case has, unsurprisingly, been controversial. Much stems from the confluence of two issues; the use of deadly force and inequitable treatment based on race. As has been pointed out, had Rittenhouse been black instead of white, is it almost inconceivable that he would not have been arrested on the spot (or even shot by the police) rather than allowed to return home to turn himself in later. That (among other things) is one aspect of the racial component. Another might be his becoming a cause célèbre for Fox, which again would be unlikely to have happened were he a black teenager. That afforded him an expensive, high profile and well prepared legal defense team instead of an over-worked public defender.

However, those were not the questions the jury had to consider; it was asked rather to determine the very narrow question of whether someone carrying a weapon has the right to use deadly force to defend him or herself in the particular circumstances of the case. There were three different instances; in the first, Rittenhouse was chased by an unarmed man; in the second he was attacked by a man wielding a skateboard; and in the third he was threatened with a hand gun. In the first two, Rittenhouse shot and killed his assailants; the third was seriously injured. 

Rittenhouse was acquitted in all three instances. His defense was that even when being threatened or attacked by someone who was either unarmed or armed with an everyday object (a skateboard) he was  justified in fearing for his life and hence justified in using deadly force.  While it seems a stretch that he would be in fear of his life when set upon on by someone who was unarmed, the defense suggested that had Rittenhouse been overpowered, his assailant would have taken his gun and used it to shoot him.  Although to the man on the London omnibus, that seems highly unlikely, it cannot be unequivocally ruled out, which may explain the jury's verdict.  The jury also did not consider (or were not asked to consider) whether putting oneself needlessly into harm's way in a somewhat provocative manner made the claim of self-defense less robust. 

Ultimately, the verdict seems to pave the way for anyone carrying a gun to claim that the person they shot might have taken their gun and used it against them, making their killing justified based on that hypothetical scenario. A similar case concerning the killing of Ahmaud Arbery is currently underway and the same defense will almost certainly be used. Gun rights activists assert that the "Only Thing That Stops A Bad Guy With A Gun Is A Good Guy With A Gun". The problem with that philosophy is that who the good and bad guys are is in the eye of the beholder. The trajectory we appear to be on leads almost inexorably to everyone needing to carry a gun. That's not what I think of a civil society and is certainly one I don't particularity want to live in. 

A Vigilante Society

Two stories in the news this week illustrate the United States' decent into a vigilante society; the first is the trail of Kyle Rittenhouse, accused of murder for shooting dead two people and wounding a third, allegedly in self defense.  Rittenhouse, who was not from Kenosha, Wisconsin, had traveled across state lines claiming to want to protect Kenosha property owners from having their stores looted or destroyed by demonstrators protesting the shooting of Jacob Blake, who is Black, by a White Police office (who has not been charged int the shooting). The other is the case of Ahmed Arbery, who was chased down and shot by three self-appointed vigilantes. In both cases, self-defense is being cited as justification for the killings. Yet in both, untrained civilians with no, or in the Arbery case highly dubious, legal authority took it upon themselves to mete out their own personal version of "justice".  We are in danger of substituting the rule of law for the rule of the most heavily armed. 

Provenance

This image appeared in a Breitbart post on the Antifa movement's participation in the events at Charottesville last Saturday. In the Breitbart post, it it attributed to Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.

I looked up Chip Somodevilla on the Getty Image website and could find no reference to the image.

Next I did a Google search on the image and got a hit. It was this link in Yahoo news. The Yahoo news post is actually a re-posting of this Time Magazine article of Aug 14, 2017 by Katy Steinmetz. Yet the  original article does not carry this image.  

That raises the question as to the provenance of the image. The photograph doesn't appear in the Getty catalog. It is not in the original Time article. So who took it, when and where was it actually taken, and how did it get associated on Yahoo with Katy Steinmetz' article?

Paris - a watershed moment?

Is tonight’s horrific, appalling, reprehensible act of terrorism in Paris a watershed moment?

Wall Street Journal

We have dichotomized the threat of terrorism from Islamic extremists into two categories; those (older-style) well planned, centrally coordinated attacks like 911 and those carried out by the 'lone wolf'. Doing so has has created a false sense of security; the conventional wisdom is that the large attack will be detected and prevented because their  'footprint' is large and detectable by  current surveillance, and the lone wolf, though harder to catch, won't do that much damage (little enough that we accept that there's little we can do but live with the threat).

Tonight's attack, coming somewhere between these two suggests that we can't be that complacent; a pack of self-organising, locally coordinated lone-wolves can do enormous damage. 

It's hard to predict what might happen at these points of discontinuity; responses are seldom linear. The long term, however, is perhasp easier to predict that the short term. Europe is in turmoil from the migration crisis. This will only add to calls for tighter border control, and fuel anti-immigrant sentiment. Borders will close; countries will become more xenophobic and nationalist; immigration will be curtailed and immigrants subject to increasingly close and unequal scrutiny. Surveillance will increase; Edward Snowden will come top be regarded not as a defender of civil liberties but as a naive fool; "Big Brother" will be watching us all and we will simply have to get used to it. In hindsight, the last 50 years of relative calm and increasing openness will come to be seen as a temporary aberration.

Nature or nurture? Reflections on 'American Sniper'

After watching "American Sniper" this morning, Judith asked me what I thought. That was a difficult question partly because I know from experience she wouldn't agree with my views, but partly because I had a variety of reactions to the film. In what follows, I'm not going to deal with the errors and deceptions at the very top that took the US and a few of its allies into Iraq, nor with the blunders, political and strategic, made while the campaign was being conducted, but focus more narrowly on the portrayal of Chris Kyle and the implications of the way Clint Eastwood chose to represent him, both in Iraq and back in the US, in his film.

First, I felt it was poorly made. It didn't tell a particularly coherent story, nor was the character development convincing. Too much time was devoted Kyle's work in Iraq, and too little to the disconnect he and other veterans feel when getting back to the US. One scene that did work was was late in the film, after his last tour; he is seen sitting in a bar shortly after a fierce battle, and behind him the television news is reporting on basket ball. Another were the scenes, all too brief, of his interaction with wounded veterans. 

The scene in which Kyle kills the Iraqi sniper stuck me a almost comically fanciful; there was nothing for him to shoot at, yet miraculously, he hits this unseen target over a mile away. There are two things wrong here - either Kyle had a better view of his target than the film showed so while he was an exceptional at his job he wasn't supernatural; or he took a shot in the dark, and while lucky, put all his fellow marines and SEALs in danger.

This was not the only point in the film where artistic license may have painted an unfortunate picture of US activities in Iraq. The decision to go door to door routing out Kyle's nemesis seemed to be based more on emption than strategy. I was left with the sense that dedication and commitment of a lot of brave men and women was being squandered through poor decision making, tactical and organizational miss-steps, and a lack of a clear strategy. I was left wondering whether the film was accurate, which reflects poorly on the running of the campaign, or whether the story was embellished and hammed-up for dramatic effect, which reflects poorly on its iconic director. Of course it may be a bit of both, but I hope that while the top level political decision making was deeply flawed, the mid-level tactical decision making was, in reality, better than was portrayed in the film.

Another powerful scene was the footage at the very end, I assume real, of the crowds who turned out to watch Kyle's funeral procession. No question that he was exceptionally effective at what he did; but would there have been this kind of turnout for the battlefield medic who had saved the most lives? I doubt it. And that speaks to a disturbing trait, the celebration of violence against "the other", a manifestation of intolerance and a lack of empathy and understanding. This has broader implications than the demonetization of Arabs or Muslims; it is also manifest in hate crimes at home against gays or blacks or Latinos. Ironically, despite the heroic portrayal of a patriotic cowboy turned military super-star, what fuels the hatred and violence is usually fear. It also underscores the sentiment that problems can be resolved by the use of force, which we have seen recently see in the militarized police response to numerous situations of unrest and protest.

That's not to say that there aren't a lot of people who hate what America stands for (not, incidentally, a simple construct) and who are hell bent on killing Americans and destroying what they consider evil. But we seem unable or unwilling even to see the conflict through the eyes of impartial bystanders, let alone our adversaries.

While watching film I was struck by recollections of WWII movies I'd seen growing up that recounted, indeed glorified, the heroism of resistance fighters in Norway ("633 Squadron") and France. Those portrayed in American Sniper, a little clumsily, as the villains of the piece could easily be seen in the same light as the WWII heroes of the resistance by those who consider themselves under occupation. And if the argument is made that the US is not an occupying force in Iraq because Iraq has its own government, think of the Vichy government. Some Americans feel contempt for the French for collaborating with the Germans; but do they think the same way about the Iraqi government and those willing to support it?

Is this widespread xenophobia, fear, hostility, aggression and an infatuation with projection of power through force a universal human trait or is it something country specific? Ultimately, I am left only with questions, not answers, and the sense that the world is complex and often rather depressing.

Charleston, SC

I wonder what it will take to stop political ideology, partisan gridlock and lobby groups like the NRA from preventing us taking any meaningful steps to reduce the seemingly unending stream of senseless gun violence and all too pervasive racial hatred that still persists in our so-called post-racial society. Jon Stewart hopes that this doesn't become the new normal. I think it's too late: it's completely normal. The ritual expressions of horror and surprise("how could this have happened?" "we don't know what he was thinking but he must have been mentally ill" "now isn't a time to make political points") followed by... nothing. Again and again and again.

Columbine, Sandy Hook elementary school, Fort Hood, Virginia Tech, Aurora Theatre, The Sikh temple shooting... those are the ones I can remember. But there are many many more. The last time in which a full calendar year passed without a mass shooting was 2002; and before that 1985. And as tragic as this is (on average 34 people killed every year) it pales by comparison to the number of homicides by gun which were averaging over 26 EVERY DAY (data for 2006 to 2011). The majority (72%) involved handguns and almost 80% were obtained legally.

Several hand-ringing journalist asked whether this was about guns, or race or mental illness (and Fox disingenuously suggested it was an attack on Christianity). It doesn’t have to be about one or the other; in fact here' it's probably all three. Picking one to avoid talking about the others as one are trying to do is just kicking the can further down the road - yet again. We are Douglas Adams' proverbial bowl of petunias in free fall towards the earth.

Gun ownerhip unrelated to gun homicides

In an idle moment recently, I regressed homicide rates against rates of gun ownership and the World Bank's Gini index for 62 countries. Gun ownership was not statistically significant (p = 0.58) while the Gini index was (p < 0.001) It appears, oddly, that the NRA is right when it says that guns aren't the underlying cause of gun-involved homicides: income inequality is.

Role reversal

Britain, the country of the village bobby, where policemen carried truncheons not firearms, and relied on social capital to maintain order, is turning to Bill Bratton, an American, who hails from a society in which there is often a hostile relationship between the public and law enforcement, to provide advice on community policing. What an ironic reversal of roles.
In the same vein, perhaps the Brits might return the favor by offering some suggestions for reforming the American political system?