Great comment from Stephen M. St. Onge:

Thinking about the never ending gun control arguments, I had a possibly original idea:
Carrying/not carrying a gun is controversial because of the message it sends, not because of the effects of the guns themselves.
Guns are tools for doing harm to people, but outside of video fantasies, someone carrying a firearm is highly unlikely to use it during any given day — or year. What makes the gun so controversial is that the gun carrier is sending a message: ‘I think we live in a violent world, where we might be attacked at any time, and if it happens, I’m going to deal out some violence too.‘
The principled non-carrier is also sending a message: ‘I think we may live in a society where violence could occur at any moment, but I refuse to be part of the culture of violence. By refusing in advance to prepare for violence, I will help stamp it out.‘
In short, one says “I’m dangerous, watch out for me,”, the other “Give peace a chance.” What’s really at stake is a question of how people ought to live.
No wonder the issue is so highly charged!

I wildly disagree with him, but believe that he has neatly encapsulated the gap between the sides.
I’ll characterize it differently. One side is dealing with the world as they wish it were, and the other with the world as they are afraid it is.
Look, I like to eat, and spend a decent amount of time in East and South-Central L.A. making my taste buds happy. Many of my Westside and beach-community friends are horrified at this idea. They are convinced that if they drive to The Pit or King Taco #1, they’ll be robbed or worse. The reality is that I’m at greater risk from the fat in the ribs and the lard in the beans than I am from being attacked while I’m there eating.
Having said that, I exercise and eat the good bad stuff in moderation, so that I can manage the risk.
Possessing some skills and tools to defend yourself is also a part of managing one’s risk.
I’d like to live in a world where I could eat burnt ends two meals a day without effect. I don’t…
Lots of other sensible and less-sensible comments; as time permits today, I’ll promote them and respond.
Oh, and I had a great trip, thanks for asking.

Dean Peters, of blogs4god comments:

Thanks for the link. And thanks for your discussion on a topic I’ve been agonizing over. For some time now, the thought of my wife and daughter at home without a reasonable means of defense was on the back of my mind from time to time.
Now it is an obsession. I think to myself, “what if the murder[s] need a house to hole up?” I mean he/they had to drive by MY HOUSE 2 to 3 TIMES to get to or away from a couple of the slaughters.
Yeah, I know, raging paranoia, but 40 years in a safe neighborhood instantly turned into shooting gallery makes me think … what if I saw the muzzle of a gun out of the back of a step-van … what could I do, throw my keys at his eyes across the parking lot?
Yeah, I know, we don’t want vigilantes. Trust me, I’m not one of them.
Its like a friend said to me when discussing whether or not to arm the pilots. “It’s a shame that the most well armed individual is someone who’s smuggled onto a plane a pair of nail clippers …” My friend also lives here in the middle of the danger zone.
Thanks for the link. And the discussion.
I’m putting in for my 7 days this afternoon.
— Dean Peters

Dean, not to focus unduly on you, but this is my chance to give a small (inflexible and hence Nazi-like) safety rant about gun ownership.
Simply put, simply owning a gun will not make you safe, but it will bring on a while new world of responsibilities. On the first point, Col. Cooper (not Professor Cooper) said: “Owning a handgun doesn’t make you armed any more than owning a guitar makes you a musician.” On the second point, you need to think carefully how you will deal with this new responsibility in the context of the responsibilities you apparently already have…your wife and children.
I cannot stress enough the importance of training…training for you in how to use the gun, and training for you, your wife, and children on how to be safe in the presence of guns.
I devote two weeks a year to firearms training, and probably spend another week a year with my sons and SO reviewing firearms safety issues.
I’ll suggest visiting the firearms links on the left, just to get a sense of the and two excellent books by Mas Ayoob as starting points: In the Gravest Extreme The Role of the Firearm in Personal Protection and The Truth About Self Protection, Mas is excellent at talking about the ‘context’ of the use of firearms by citizens.
Find a local instructor, or email me at the address at the upper left and I can help you find on in your area.
A gun is not a talisman that automatically banishes evil. It is a tool that can help good people defeat it, though.
I’m on the road. See everyone Monday. Try not to kill anyone or blow anything up while I’m gone.

Well, it’s definitely a king-hell weird day.
First, and foremost, the shootings in Maryland, well covered by a number of new sources and bloggers today. Check out Dean at ‘Blogs4God’, for local details. There’s a lot of discussion on whether this is terrorism, a spree killing, or something else, and obviously there isn’t enough information to have an opinion.
For now, I’ll call it a ‘mucking’ and suggest again that everyone go read ‘Stand on Zanzibar’. It looks like the bad guy used a rifle from the back of a panel van, possibly with another sick SOB driving. He most likely parked where the back of the van could cover a place where there were a number of pedestrians targets and waited.
I have a hard time imaging how you defend against this with a traditional LEO response; you can pull all the box vans in the area and hope to get lucky, or more likely, someone will get a glimpse of a plate or distinguishing feature, or someone will overhear a plan or remember seeing something odd, a gun store will be able to track the ammunition, and he’ll be tracked and, hopefully, captured. I hope the arresting officers are careful…
And here I’ll jump in with a pro-gun point, and compare two events, one indirectly mentioned by Susannah Cornett.
In 1984, in San Ysidro, CA (near San Diego), a nut whose name I won’t publicize walked into a McDonald’s with three guns, and killed 21 people.
In 2002, at Los Angeles International Airport, another nut whose name I won’t publicize walked into a terminal concourse with two guns and killed two people.
The difference?? At LAX, an armed, trained ticket supervisor (with the help of some others who declined the shooter’s offer to be victims) engaged, shot and killed the shooter as soon as he opened fire.
In the event of a ‘low-level’ (and believe me, to the families involved, this isn’t ‘minor’, or ‘low-level’ or anything except apocalyptic…) terrorism, or random acts like this, the police are here to investigate, cleanup the mess, investigate, and when they find the Bad Person, overwhelm and hopefully arrest. This is a good thing. It’s just not too useful to the 3rd through 19th people who die, if you know what I mean.
Look, this is an old and tired set of arguments. Lots of folks don’t like guns, are horrified that anyone would own one, and firmly believe that incrementally ratcheting down the number of people who own guns is the best way to avoid these kind of tragedies.
In an ideal world, they’re right.
In this world, they’re wrong, as Australia and the U.K. suggest:

I’m not going to weigh in with moral arguments right now. It’s been a bad day, and I need to take the weekend and get out of town.
But let’s look at this instrumentally.
We have two ‘success’ stories in dealing with terrorism this go-round. Flight 93 and LAX. I’m not suggesting that we arm passengers with handguns (although I do think we’re crazy not to have immediately allowed pilots to have them). I am suggesting that the only form of defense that is likely to work while there the bodies are still breathing is to involve every one of us as an thoughtful, active observer of our environment, and someone who is willing to act appropriately when it is called for.
In some cases, that will involve larger numbers of people with guns.
They can be officers, standing on streetcorners, costing us tax dollars, and nosing deeper and deeper into our lives, or they can be citizens. Our pilot. The ticket agent. Our neighbors.
Some of then will screw up. Some of them will do bad things.
But the reality is that they screw up and do bad things right now. And as far as I can tell from other folks’ experience, it doesn’t get better as you try and take the guns away.
And it doesn’t get worse as you let people have them, either.
Think about it. Think about San Ysidro, and think about LAX. Think about how hard it will be to have a policeman catch the Maryland shooter at just the right time in just the right place.
For those of you repelled by firearms ownership outside the agents of the state think about this: Even if you don’t agree with John Lott that crime has gone down in must-issue states (where average citizens who pass background and training requirements can get permits to carry guns), I have seen no evidence that remotely and reasonably suggests that it has gone up.
So if it doesn’t effect crime, and it could effect terrorism or ‘mucking’, what’s the issue?
Think about the 19 lives difference, and wonder whether they could have been saved before you answer.

In other news, Dwight Meredith has one of the most sensible decision trees on Iraq that I’ve seen to date. Why the hell aren’t any of the national figures taking with that kind of thoughtful determination?? DWIGHT FOR SPEAKER!!
And in an issue I’ll have to address Monday, Ross at The Bloviator takes on Reynolds on the issue of “is violence a public health issue”. I have some thoughts…

If you go to the url for the New Times: http://www.newtimesla.com/, you’ll wind up at the site for the L.A. Weekly.
It appears that the parent corporations of each have pulled a swap; The Voice/Weekly group gets L.A., and the New Times group gets Cleveland. Unbelievably sleazy.
The redirect is a new low, though, even for a left-liberal paper that fights unions among its own staff and also can’t stand competiton.
Matt Welch, Ken Layne, and their L.A. Examiner have a lot more.
More tomorrow.

Here’s the key text from today’s N.J. Supreme Court decision regarding replacing Torricelli on the November ballot(emphasis mine):

And the Court having concluded that the central question before it is whether the dual interests of full voter choice and the orderly administration of an election can be effectuated if the relief requested by plaintiffs were to be granted; And the Court being of the view that

[it] is in the public interest and the general intent of the election laws to preserve the two-party system and to submit to the electorate a ballot bearing the names of candidates of both major political parties as well as of all other qualifying parties and groups.
Kilmurray v. Gilfert, 10 N.J. 435, 441 (1952);

And the Court remaining of the view that the election statutes should be liberally construed

to allow the greatest scope for public participation in the electoral process, to allow candidates to get on the ballot, to allow parties to put their candidates on the ballot, and most importantly, to allow the voters a choice on Election Day.
Catania v. Haberle, 123 N.J. 438, 448;

Yeah, right. It infuriates me to see the Democrats crowing and the republicans throwing fits, as though the sanctity of the electoral process meant anything to any one of their SkyBox-sitting asses.
If the law of the land is that we should have a choice on Election Day, why do the courts tolerate the outrageous gerrymandering that creates essentially one-party seats?
It’s important to have two parties on the ballot, you see, but it doesn’t really matter whether there’s an election or not.
Here are two great articles on the subject. First, from this Sunday’s L.A. Times (actually, a good damn issue…): In California, Politicians Choose–and Voters Lose. Here’s a quote:

What if the World Series had been played during spring training, the commissioner of baseball having picked the competing teams? Baseball fans would be outraged. Yet something similar has happened to California elections. In the vast majority of legislative and congressional districts, we have no general election contests this fall because the races were decided in the spring primaries. The political stadium is dark.
How many competitive races for the House of Representatives are there in the Southland? None. How many competitive races for the state Senate? None. How many for the Assembly? Two–at most.
…
That’s what a politician likes–the fewer voters, the better, and especially if they are the most partisan ones. Candidates beat their breasts about what hard-core partisans they are, and the tiny number of people who go to the polls respond by electing the most hard-core partisans in both parties.
The result is a largely dysfunctional Legislature. Members chosen in a closed primary, with a minimum of voters participating, come to Sacramento intent on representing the narrow partisan positions that got them there.
Is it any wonder they cannot negotiate a state budget? Passing the budget–it was two months late this year–is the most important and most difficult thing a legislator does because it requires compromise and negotiation. The current system encourages exactly the opposite.
One Republican who might have broken the budget impasse this summer privately told friends, “Look, I can’t afford to cross my primary voters; they demand that I hang tough.” The sentiment was the same on the Democratic side. A look at the shadow Legislature elected in March shows future members will be even more ideologically rigid.
Californians might remember this when they cast their meaningless votes in November for their preordained members of the Legislature–if they bother to vote at all.

And from UPI (via Eugene Volokh), this interview with Dan Polsby:

The 2002 elections for Congressional Representatives will be the first conducted under the new districts drawn following the 2002 Census. Although important issues are at stake in November, most of the districts’ borders have been gerrymandered so skillfully that the typical race’s outcome is predetermined. Time Magazine estimates that 394 House seats are “safe,” 29 are “almost safe,” and eleven are “toss-ups.” That’s eleven toss-ups out of 435 separate elections.
In contrast, 8 of 34 Senate seats are said to be toss-ups. The Senate is more than ten times more competitive than the House, in large part because Senate races are fought over entire states, which can’t be gerrymandered. With districts, however, by carefully redrawing boundaries, parties can ensure that that most of their incumbents enjoy a comfortable majority.
This is the opposite of what the Framers of the Constitution intended for the House of Representatives. They wanted the House to represent the views of the public by allowing voters to make wholesale changes in their Representatives every two years. The Senate, in contrast, with its staggered six-year terms, was supposed to provide a brake on popular passions.

Explain why we have elections now??
Both parties are guilty as hell in this.
My own Congressional district…once one of the few competitive districts in Los Angeles…was ‘readjusted’ with the conservative areas of Palos Verdes given to the next district south to make it a safe Republican seat, and the more liberal areas of Santa Monica added to make it a safe Democratic seat.
Why not just let the party staff and donors pick the Congressmembers directly? Why do they even bother filling my mailbox with inane crap?
Can you tell I’m more than a little put out by this??
You should be too.

The normally eminently sensible Andrew Edwards steps in it with this comment:

(NOTE: I still favour war on Iraq, for what it’s worth. But I’d be willing to put that off for a couple years to see GWB handed his ass on a plate in the next two elections)

C’mon Andrew, you don’t mean that, do you?? If you really believe war in Iraq is in the national interest, screw electoral politics. I’m tired as hell of both sides playing this as a wedge they can use come this November or November 04. I’d like it, just once, if one of them…one public-voiced Senator, one Congressmember…took a position that wasn’t nakedly and obviously clasping for partisan advantage.
Have they no shame? I’d imagine not…

Looking over at Blogcritics, I found this review of Coyote vs. Acme, one of the funniest things ever written, if you think Chuck Jones sits at the Right Hand of God, as I do. That reminded me of a lesser-known but equally brilliant piece by Frazer (who is up there in the People I’d Like To Have Dinner With list), his Lamentations of the Father

On Screaming

Do not scream; for it is as if you scream all the time. If you are given a plate on which two foods you do not wish to touch each other are touching each other, your voice rises up even to the ceiling, while you point to the offense with the finger of your right hand; but I say to you, scream not, only remonstrate gently with the server, that the server may correct the fault. Likewise if you receive a portion of fish from which every piece of herbal seasoning has not been scraped off, and the herbal seasoning is loathsome to you, and steeped in vileness, again I say, refrain from screaming. Though the vileness overwhelm you, and cause you a faint unto death, make not that sound from within your throat, neither cover your face, nor press your fingers to your nose. For even now I have made the fish as it should be; behold, I eat of it myself, yet do not die.

This guy obviously has kids.

My Central Valley bud Devra points out Ampersand’s comments about conflating anti-semitism with criticism of Israel.
She tags a few good points…although I think Goodwin’s Law applies, and that the term “Nazi” is most usually used as a meaningful-conversation-stopper; I think there has to be a distinction between some uses of the term…for example, some of my motorcycling and climbing friends have called me ‘the Safety Nazi’ with mixed levels of warmth, which I don’t find terribly insulting because I am inflexible about safety, and the use of the terms feminazi or econazi, which I’ve heard used to apply to folks who are equally inflexible about feminism or ecology. Both have an element of the dismissive about them, and could, in some light be seen as insulting.
But to call Jews ‘Nazis’ is a different level of the game, in no small part because it is a targeted and intentional insult aimed at the heart of their cultural and racial history. It isn’t an indirect or general insult, it is a intentional slap in the face no less than the other “N” word.
And because I usually use anecdote to make my points, here’s a personal one.
As a teenager, my brother went through a phase of his life when he was simply convinced he was black. He dated black girls, hung out with the black kids at school, spoke in that soft middle-class West Los Angeles version of a black drawl with traces of black urban grammar. I never quite figured out where it came from; both of us has been in part raised by strong black men who were close friends to our checked-out parents, but I’d simply acknowledged my status as a mutt and always been comfortable with it. Maybe it connected with him in some deeper way, I really don’t know.
Later in life, he would fall into his ‘wigro’ role among black friends or co-workers.
Until one day, he got fired because in the heat of an argument at work, he’d called a black co-worker by the ‘n-word’. He called me in tears and rage.
He’d used the same word, collegially, a dozen times, he told me. He couldn’t understand why, now, his colleague had called management and management had summarily fired him.
I told him that I understood, and that if he’d worked for me, I’d probably have fired him, too.
The issue is that insult derives from context and intention.
To call me a ‘Nazi’ because I’m obsessed with and rigid about safety, or a women a ‘Nazi’ because she is obsessed with or rigid about feminism, or an ecologist a ‘Nazi’ because they are obsessed with or rigid about ecology is a different thing than to call someone by the name of the enemy who specifically targeted them out and attempted to exterminate them.
And to wave that off is simply as morally indefensible as what my brother did. At least he learned his lesson.
I’ll add a ‘geopolitical’ point as well. The issue in criticizing Israel’s sometimes misguided policies is to distinguish one key fact: do you support Israel’s right to exist? As a Western and predominantly Jewish state? Because while I have been and will continue to be critical of many of their loonier policies, their right to exist trumps a whole range of other issues for me, and their opponents refusal to meaningfully agree to their right to exist and to take concrete steps to back up that agreement devalue their claims almost to zero.

Had lunch today with a youthful colleague from the Netherlands, and we had occasion to discuss our various vehicular indiscretions, and the response of the local constables.
I was ticketed last year on my motorcycle by a local policeman with a laser speed detector; I saw him at a distance, but I assumed he was using radar. Motorcycles have a small cross-section, so we have to be relatively close to the radar gun to register. Sadly, that isn’t the case with a laser.
I slowed down with what I thought was plenty of distance, and was shocked, really just shocked to be pulled over. I was cooperative, the officer was polite, and instead of writing my ticket for the actual speed he’d measured, reduced my speed, raised the noted speed limit, and so meaningfully reduced the severity of the ticket (and fine).
My Dutch friend and I discussed the pros and cons of fighting tickets (I almost never fight them; I have been lucky enough never to have received a ticket I didn’t deserve, and I view it as a kind of tax on speeding). But I have a number of friends who do and have successfully fought tickets in court.
My friend was somewhat shocked. In the Netherlands, tickets are given by teams of police officers, who collect the fines on the spot. There is no appealing to a court. There is no discretion on the part of the officer. If you are pulled over, you are guilty, you pay your fine, and you go on. Unless they impound your car on the spot, which they do for various moving violations.
Somehow, this difference typifies the American attitude toward government. Personal, messy, possibly forgiving (or possibly the opposite, if you are less practiced at dealing with police officers than I may be). My rights equal those of the officer in front of the court (in theory, anyway). In the Netherlands, the officer is the state.
Now there are arguably advantages to that system. Minorities get tickets at the behest of an objective radar gun, not a possibly prejudiced officer. The powerful have a harder time getting off by simply being who they are.
But something is lost, as well. Some call it the difference between being a citizen and a subject; I’m not completely sure how to express it. But it’s an important difference. The imperfections of our system aren’t something to necessarily be rationalized out of existence. In some ways, the imperfections are the system.
I need to think about that some more.