Joe Nocera in the New York Times continues to bring the reality of gun violence in America to light, especially the violence involving children.

For nearly two months, my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I have been publishing a daily blog in which we aggregate articles about shootings from the previous day. Of all the stories we link to, the ones I find hardest to read are those about young children who accidentally shoot themselves or another child. They just break my heart. Yet Jennifer and I find new examples almost every day.

Nocera goes on to wonder how anyone could be so stupid/careless as to leave a loaded firearm somewhere where a child can reach it. But the world is full of stupidity and carelessness. So how about childproofing guns?

And it turns out there is biometric technology available already that would render a gun unusable to anyone but it’s owner, by responding only when the gun “recognizes” the owners’ hand.

Why aren’t these lifesaving technologies in widespread use? No surprise here, either: The usual irrational opposition from the National Rifle Association and gun absolutists, who claim, absurdly, that a gun that only can be fired by its owner somehow violates the Second Amendment. Pro-gun bloggers were furious when they saw James Bond, in “Skyfall,” proudly showing off his new biometrically protected weapon. They were convinced it was a Hollywood plot to undermine their rights.

Nocera goes on to say that there are efforts to market and promote these technologies, but he is skeptical it will make much difference unless such safety features are legally mandatory. But the problem is, these efforts are mostly coming from do-gooder liberal gun control types. I agree with Steve M — “As far as I can tell, the gun community doesn’t want safety and doesn’t want to be responsible — not if we gun-grabbing liberals are the ones who seem to be defining safety and responsibility.”

So, yeah, if libruhls are fer it, they’re agin it. Having four-year-olds blow their heads off on a weekly basis is the price of freedom.

In other gun craziness news — earlier this week there was a New York Times story about the reluctance of courts to take guns away from those who have threatened to shoot current and ex intimate partners. The story includes a horrific example of a woman who got an order of protection against an ex-husband who had threatened to put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger.

The judge’s order prohibited Mr. Holten from going within two blocks of his former wife’s home and imposed a number of other restrictions. What it did not require him to do was surrender his guns.

About 12 hours after he was served with the order, Mr. Holten was lying in wait when his former wife returned home from a date with their two children in tow. Armed with a small semiautomatic rifle bought several months before, he stepped out of his car and thrust the muzzle into her chest. He directed her inside the house, yelling that he was going to kill her.

“I remember thinking, ‘Cops, I need the cops,’ ” she later wrote in a statement to the police. “He’s going to kill me in my own house. I’m going to die!”

Ms. Holten, however, managed to dial 911 on her cellphone and slip it under a blanket on the couch. The dispatcher heard Ms. Holten begging for her life and quickly directed officers to the scene. As they mounted the stairs with their guns drawn, Mr. Holten surrendered. They found Ms. Holten cowering, hysterical, on the floor.

You’ve got to be pretty twisted to think Mr. Holten’s right to own firearms trumps his ex-wife’s right to not be terrorized by Mr. Holten. Yes, the gun rights absolutists are sick and twisted. And armed.

See also:

The N.R.A.’s blind defense of individuals’ gun rights has left a catastrophic toll. Stricter laws could help stem killings in domestic-violence cases. But legislatures would have to place prudent safety measures over Second Amendment absolutism. There is evidence that it would work: a study in the journal Injury Prevention in 2010 examined so-called intimate-partner homicides in 46 of the country’s largest cities from 1979 to 2003 and found that where state laws restricted gun access to people under domestic-violence restraining orders, the risk of such killings was reduced by 19 percent.

I’m wondering if there are any statistics showing that domestic violence perps tend to be gun absolutists, and vice versa?

Two retrospectives on the start of the Iraq War, to read together — Behold the Hatred, Resentment, and Mockery Aimed at Anti-Iraq War Protesters and What Needless, Xenophobic Panic Looks Like. See also Freddie DeBoer.

Be sure to read “Private Sector Parasites” by Michael Lind at Salon. He writes that the real “takers” are not the poor receiving benefits, but “the rent-extracting, unproductive rich.”

The term “rent” in this context refers to more than payments to your landlords. As Mike Konczal and many others have argued, profits should be distinguished from rents. “Profits” from the sale of goods or services in a free market are different from “rents” extracted from the public by monopolists in various kinds. Unlike profits, rents tend to be based on recurrent fees rather than sales to ever-changing consumers. While productive capitalists — “industrialists,” to use the old-fashioned term — need to be active and entrepreneurial in order to keep ahead of the competition, “rentiers” (the term for people whose income comes from rents, rather than profits) can enjoy a perpetual stream of income even if they are completely passive.

Do read the whole post.

Update: Kinda related, if you think about it — Charles Pierce, “The Silent Majorities“

As there’s still a lot of discussion about the appropriateness of feeling sorry for the boys recently convicted in Steubenville, I want to call your attention to On Rape, Cages, and the Steubenville Verdict by Mia McKenzie. McKenzie is in about the same place I am. I’m sorry that we have a culture in which young men are capable of such behavior. I’m sorry they were enabled and not guided. I’m sorry the criminal justice system will probably turn them into worse brutes than they already are. It’s all a terrible shame.

We’ve passed the 10th anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. I have little to add to what Paul Krugman wrote already. For example:

The really striking thing, during the run-up to the war, was the illusion of consensus. To this day, pundits who got it wrong excuse themselves on the grounds that “everyone” thought that there was a solid case for war. Of course, they acknowledge, there were war opponents — but they were out of the mainstream.

The trouble with this argument is that it was and is circular: support for the war became part of the definition of what it meant to hold a mainstream opinion. Anyone who dissented, no matter how qualified, was ipso facto labeled as unworthy of consideration. This was true in political circles; it was equally true of much of the press, which effectively took sides and joined the war party.

A lot of us saw clearly that the nation was being bamboozled into a stupid, unnecessary war. There were massive protests on the streets of New York that got no press coverage. One March just before the war jammed the streets from Times Square to Washington Square, and all along the route people were waving and hanging anti-war signs from their windows. Those New Yorkers understood that the stampede to war was not really about 9/11, an event still raw and smoldering in New Yorkers’ hearts. Why didn’t the press see it?

Krugman points out that we are still living with a false consensus, this time about economic policy. Eric Boehlert asks if Twitter could have stopped the war; I doubt it, any more than it’s stopping the phony idea about a “debt crisis.”

That there were, in fact, educated and knowledgeable people who opposed the invasion of Iraq for good and well-informed reasons, and not because of a lack of patriotism or a forgetting of 9/11, amounted to what Mark Twain called the “silent assertion lie.” This was first published in the New York World in 1899 —

For instance. It would not be possible for a humane and intelligent person to invent a rational excuse for slavery; yet you will remember that in the early days of the emancipation agitation in the North the agitators got but small help or countenance from any one. Argue and plead and pray as they might, they could not break the universal stillness that reigned, from pulpit and press all the way down to the bottom of society–the clammy stillness created and maintained by the lie of silent assertion–the silent assertion that there wasn’t anything going on in which humane and intelligent people were interested.

From the beginning of the Dreyfus case to the end of it all France, except a couple of dozen moral paladins, lay under the smother of the silent-assertion lie that no wrong was being done to a persecuted and unoffending man. The like smother was over England lately, a good half of the population silently letting on that they were not aware that Mr. Chamberlain was trying to manufacture a war in South Africa and was willing to pay fancy prices for the materials.

That last bit was about Joseph Chamberlain, father of Neville Chamberlain, who was an important figure in the 2nd Anglo-Boer War, which was about control of South African gold mines. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

It is a bit heartening to see what has changed since then. Rachel Maddow on MSNBC would have been unimaginable ten years ago, for example. The once-invincible Vast Right-Wing-Conspiracy is in chaos. But there’s room for improvement.

By now you’ve heard there have been convictions in the Steubenville case, and that a Grand Jury will investigate whether others should be charged with taking part in the assaults or, at least, failing to stop them.

My understanding is that most of the evidence presented at trial was in the form of texts and videos of the incident, and were it not for social media the assaults possibly would not have come to light at all. Further, it’s widely believed that local authorities were dragging their feet about charging anyone until the hacker group Anonymous got involved, drawing the attention of national media.

Naturally, there are some who are angry about this. For example: Although they don’t come straight out and say the two defendants should not have been convicted. Robert Stacey McCain and Lee Stranahan of Breitbart, for example, both are outraged at the “lynch mob” and “media malpractice” surrounding the case.

Media malpractice? Both bloggers accuse media of getting facts wrong, although what facts they got wrong are not explained. Media did report on accusations of foot-dragging because of small-town “jock” culture. Whether the fact the boys were stars of the football team is central to the foot-dragging I do not know. I do know that there is a nearly universal tendency to exonerate well-liked boys and blame the victim for what was done to her. People want to believe that rapists are sinister sorts with the word EVIL carved into their foreheads, not popular guys who everyone in town knows and who are perfectly “normal” fellows in most contexts. Faced with the reality of a victim, and evidence, however, there is a nearly universal tendency to want to believe the victim is at fault.

There’s been a lot of criticism aimed at CNN, and Candy Crowley in particular, for expressing sorrow that the convicted young men will have those convictions hanging over their heads for the rest of their lives. I agree with Steve M that CNN wanted to use its dramatic video of remorse theater, and Crowley was merely creating a context. But I also think sympathy with the convicted boys is based on the fact that neither appear to be the personification of evil that a rapist is supposed to be, at least in the public’s imagination.

Because most real-world rapes don’t fit people’s ideas of what rape is supposed to be, the number of arrests, much less convictions, remains shockingly small. What made the Steubenville case unusual was that so much evidence was uploaded to social media for all to see, which got Anonymous involved.

Breitbart’s Stranahan reports that many people in Steubenville were terrorized by people in Guy Fawkes masks. If that did happen it was unfortunate. There’s no question that Anonymous executed a public shaming of Steubenville and the accused rapists, and that’s a dangerous thing to do.

On the other hand, McCain and Stranahan both are in denial about the enabling culture that protects rapists. The convicted boys did what they did in the belief they would get away with it Text messages sent by one said that one of his coaches would “take care of” any blame for the incident. There were witnesses who could have stopped the assaults, but did not. And there’s been plenty of victim shaming. Which is, apparently, OK with some people. It’s just the perpetrator shaming that’s not allowed.

Of course, if the victim had been armed as Wayne LaPierre says she should be, and she had shot and killed the assailants — she’d be facing murder charges now. And the poor unfortunate boys would be dead. There are worse things than shaming.

I want to add a little more to the post from a couple of days ago, about Zerlina Maxwell getting slammed for trying to explain that arming women is not rape prevention. What would a rape prevention program look like?

It probably is true that men with a propensity to rape cannot be educated out of it. But one of the things that set sexual assault apart from other kinds of assault is that there are a lot of people who are outraged by it in theory, but not in practice. In other words, they exhibit all manner of outrage about rape until confronted with an actual rape victim. And then they decide it was her fault, or she is lying.

And then there’s the common phenomenon of witnesses who do nothing. Right now two teenage boys are on trial in Steubenville, Ohio, for multiple assaults on a drunken 16-year-old girl last summer. A number of other teenage boys witnessed the acts and are testifying. But they didn’t try to stop it while it was going on.

There are videos of the incident showing the girl was barely conscious. The defense attorneys are arguing that she didn’t say no, and anyway, she went out partying with a group of boys, so she was asking for it. Certainly, her attackers were not mentally incapacitated; they were capable of making an informed decision. Why does the responsibility for what they did fall on a semi-conscious girl?

In what other kind of crime does that happen? When is a mugging victim “asking for it” because he was carrying a wallet?

Years ago, it was commonly said the only time a rapist was convicted is if the victim was a dead nun. Second wave feminism inspired legal reforms to protect victims from being turned into sluts at trial. So I understand it’s not quite so bad now, but it still seems to me there’s way too much enabling going on, as well as an attitude that it wasn’t rape unless she fought back, or if she knew the attackers, or if she’d been drinking.

Sometimes institutions enable. American Zen has had a few sex scandals already. The worst of which involve two teachers who came here from Japan decades ago (one wonders if their superiors shipped them out of Japan to get rid of them) and who have a long-standing pattern of sexual predation. But for years their senior students, mostly men, made excuses and ignored the complaints. One woman has said that when she complained he had groped her, senior students laughed about it. That Roshi! What a guy!

Irin Carmon writes of the Steubenville trial,

According to the prosecutor’s opening statement Wednesday, these witnesses saw one of the defendants, Trent Mays, try to force oral sex on the girl, but her mouth wouldn’t open. They saw the other defendant, Ma’lik Richmond, digitally penetrate the girl while she was passed out on a couch. Though the girls’ friends apparently tried to prevent her from continuing on with the boys, so far there’s been no indication the witnesses intervened with the boys who no one has disputed were capable of decision-making. And preliminary research shows that the intervention of such bystanders could make the difference in preventing rape.

Last week, an inexcusable torrent of abuse was hurled at commentator Zerlina Maxwell after she appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and sensibly pointed out that arming women is not effective rape prevention tactics, for multiple reasons. (“If firearms are the answer, then the military would be the safest place for women,” she said.) It was her message of “tell men not to rape” that seemed to most inflame the trolls. Hannity found it self-evidently ridiculous: “You think you can tell a rapist to stop doing what he’s doing? He’s going to listen to an ad campaign to stop?” He also said, “Knowing there are evil people, I want women protected, and they’ve got to protect themselves.”

It was a clash of ideas of who commits crimes in the world. For Hannity and his ilk, rape is committed by “evil people,” an immutable fact that can’t be educated away, that isn’t about social norms. For feminists who are weary of victim-blaming — including blaming women for not just shooting their rapists in the moment — and who have for decades been pushing against the idea that rape is only committed by strangers lurking in the bushes, this is tantamount to giving up the fight. Or, as Jessica Valenti recently put it, you’re “saying that rape is natural for men. That this is just something men do. Well I’m sorry, but I think more highly of men than that.”

As I wrote in the earlier post, nearly 80 percent of the time the rapist is someone the woman knows, not a stranger who jumps out of the bushes. He may not be someone she had perceived as “evil.” He probably doesn’t think of himself as “evil.” He may not consider what he did “rape,” but just “taking advantage of an opportunity.” And it’s probably true you can’t educate such a person.

But it’s also the case that if their intended victims started shooting these guys in self-defense, most of these women would find themselves facing charges, and convictions, for it. Too many people simply wouldn’t believe her story.

So, while I don’t expect that rapists can be educated, it would be nice if we could educate society at large to stop enabling.

Gun rights absolutists in Oregon are physically intimidating legislators who support gun regulation. Joe Nocera writes that pro-gun control legislators are being stalked and harassed, and some are calling off town hall meetings because they are literally afraid of being shot.

Burdick began receiving, as she puts it, “the usual threatening e-mails” — as did a fellow gun control advocate in the Legislature, Mitch Greenlick. He told The Oregonian that the e-mail he received from gun extremists was often abusive, obscene and anti-Semitic. He predicted that gun legislation would go nowhere because legislators were too frightened to act. “Politics by intimidation,” he called it.

And then there was Burdick. She was scheduled to hold a town-hall meeting on March 4. But at an earlier town hall held by several other legislators, gun advocates badgered them with angry questions. One of the questioners admitted he was carrying a concealed weapon. Fearing that someone might show up with a gun at her town hall, Burdick decided to postpone it. Not wanting to inflame the situation, she said she had a scheduling conflict.

On the evening of March 4, two men sat in a car across from her home and videotaped her. They showed her driving into her garage and taking out her garbage. Having “proved” that Burdick did not have a scheduling conflict, they then put together a short video of Burdick at home. Jeff Reynolds, the chairman of the Multnomah County Republican Party, who also claims to be a citizen journalist, posted the video on a Web site he runs.

See also the most recent gun report.

Paul Ryan has come out with another Underpants Gnomes budget; short on specifics, long on assumptions. Ezra Klein writes,

Here is Paul Ryan’s path to a balanced budget in three sentences: He cuts deep into spending on health care for the poor and some combination of education, infrastructure, research, public-safety, and low-income programs. The Affordable Care Act’s Medicare cuts remain, but the military is spared, as is Social Security. There’s a vague individual tax reform plan that leaves only two tax brackets — 10 percent and 25 percent — and will require either huge, deficit-busting tax cuts or increasing taxes on poor and middle-class households, as well as a vague corporate tax reform plan that lowers the rate from 35 percent to 25 percent.

But the real point of Ryan’s budget is its ambitious reforms, not its savings. It turns Medicare into a voucher program, turns Medicaid, food stamps, and a host of other programs for the poor into block grants managed by the states, shrinks the federal role on priorities like infrastructure and education to a tiny fraction of its current level, and envisions an entirely new tax code that will do much less to encourage home buying and health insurance.

Ryan’s budget is intended to do nothing less than fundamentally transform the relationship between Americans and their government. That, and not deficit reduction, is its real point, as it has been Ryan’s real point throughout his career.

Same old, same old.

See also Ed Kilgore “Ryan’s Latest Bait-and-Switch“; Eugene Robinson, “Paul Ryan’s Make-Believe Budget.”

See Breitbarted.