Ladies, the NRA Is Not Your Friend

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I found this on Facebook this morning. I commented on the size of the magazine, that nobody has that many crazy ex-husbands. The people (all men, it appears) liking the image didn’t get the joke.

Conservatives are stomping around calling the Violence Against Women Act a waste of money, and then in the next breath they argue that women have to be armed with AR-15s because they never know when four or five hardened criminals are going to break into her house and attack her simultaneously. Seriously —

Women’s Forum’s Gayle Trotter said in her prepared testimony. An assault weapons ban, she said, would “harm women the most” because “guns are the great equalizer in a confrontation.” And that doesn’t just mean handguns. That means military-style rifles. When questioned, Trotter specifically singled out the AR-15 as an important weapon for women, essentially because it looks cool. Women like the AR-15 because “they’re light, they’re easy to hold, and most importantly, their appearance,” Trotter said. The rifle is intimidating, she said, and then appeared to riff on a hypothetical home invasion in which one would be necessary. “Three, four, five violent intruders in her home — with her children screaming in the background — the peace of mind that comes with a scary looking gun…gives her more courage when she’s fighting hardened, violent criminals.” Trotter said. “I speak on behalf of millions of american women who urge you to defend our Second Amendment right to choose to defend ourselves.”

I infer from this that conservatives really hate it when multiple strangers break into women’s homes to assault them, but if your husband or boyfriend, current or ex, roughs you up from time to time, that’s his right. It’s probably your fault, anyway.

And note that the above-mentioned Ms. Trotter is opposed to allowing women to serve in combat.

Anyway — the scenario in which multiple criminal strangers burst into a woman’s home must be rare, as I could find no examples of such a thing happening. Women are far more likely to be attacked by men they know. According to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Satistics, in 2007 only 10 percent of female homicide victims in the U.S. were killed by strangers. Historically, women have had most to fear from current and former husbands or lovers. However, in recent years rates of “intimate” violence have gone down quite a bit, possibly because of the Violence Against Women Act that righties think is a waste of time.

See also —

Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Emergency Medicine, Dr. Wiebe reported on a case-controlled study in which household were matched on a number of demographic factors, and then incidences of gun violence were compared. They found that people who keep a gun in their home are almost twice as likely to die in a gun-related homicide, and that the risk was especially greater for women: women living in a home where there is a gun are almost three times more likely to die in a gun-related homicide than men similarly situated. The risk of killing oneself using a gun was almost 17 times greater for persons who live in a home where there is a gun, compared to those in homes without guns. (Wiebe D. Annals of Emergency Medicine. 2003; 41:771-82).

How often does a woman successfully defend herself with a gun? We get a hint here —

In 2009, justifiable homicides involving women killing men with a firearm occurred in: Louisiana (1); Michigan (2); Mississippi (1); Oklahoma (2); Oregon (2); South Carolina (1); Tennessee (1); Texas (2); and, Virginia (1). Of these, handguns were used in: Louisiana (1); Michigan (2); Mississippi (1); Oklahoma (1); Oregon (2); South Carolina (1); Texas (1); and, Virginia (1).

I don’t have data for the number of women murdered by men in the U.S. in 2009, justified or otherwise, but I’m betting it’s a lot more than 23. Note that women get killed in gun-friendly Louisiana at higher rates than anywhere else in the U.S.

Now, I don’t blame a woman who has a crazy, angry ex out there somewhere for keeping a gun in her home. I might do the same thing, as well as installing alarms and adopting a very large dog. But what the data tell us clearly is that encouraging women to be armed is no replacement for the Violence Against Women Act, which really does seem to have made a difference.

First Amendment Primer (for Righties)

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Righties do love their First Amendment rights, but they don’t understand them very well. For example, on the Right it is commonly believed the right to freedom of speech includes a right to not be disagreed with. (This is something I’ve written about before, so for examples, see “This Is Rich,” and “America Has Lost Its Mind.”)

But no, dear ones, it does not. The free speech part of the First Amendment protects you from government interference of your speech. For example, if you own a newspaper, and a government agent drops by every day to decide what stories and editorials you can or cannot print, that would be infringing on your rights. However, if the mayor of your town publicly complains about your news coverage, but doesn’t try to stop you from covering news as you see fit, that is not an infringement on your rights.

By the same token, government cannot tell you what to say. If a government agent came to you with propaganda and demanded you print it in your newspaper, you would be within your rights to say no, I won’t. But this is another point often lost on righties. For example, for years conservatives in several states have been passing laws that determine what a physician must say to a woman seeking an abortion, even if the physician thinks the speech is garbage and doesn’t want to say it. This, my lovelies, is an obvious infringement on the physicians’ right to free speech, but so far several red states have gotten away with it.

U.S. case law has long recognized that “speech” is sometimes non-verbal, so that opinions expressed in gestures or art, for example, enjoy the same protection as editorials and speeches. For this reason, courts have long recognized that burning a U.S. flag in protest of some federal government policy, as offensive as that might be, is protected speech. Even so, conservatives have wanted to make flag burning illegal or unconstitutional for years. By the same token, you can count on conservatives to be first in line to stop the display of art they don’t like. Conservatives have issues with academic freedom, also, and want to control what is said in classrooms. (Note to rightie readers: forcing children to recite prayers in a public school classroom is an infringement of their right to their own free exercise of religion, never mind an infringement of the establishment clause.)

Freedom of speech is not absolute. You cannot drive around in your neighborhood at 2 a.m. blasting your political opinions through a megaphone, for example. There are limitations on the display of pornography. Graffiti and naughty words may get you fined. But on the whole, speech is pretty much a free-for-all here in the U.S., as it should be. Expect to take what you dish out.

I bring this up because of a couple of recent episodes involving free speech rights.

Paul Guaschino was driving with an “impeach Obama” bumper sticker on his car, when another driver flipped him the bird. We assume that the other driver was objecting to the bumper sticker, which is not necessarily true, but that’s how Guaschino took it. Guaschino followed the other driver to a traffic light, and while both vehicles were stopped, Guaschino got out of his car and began to pound the other vehicle with a baseball bat. The other motorist, recognizing unhinged craziness when he saw it, fled. Police apprehended Guaschino and filed criminal charges against him.

As Digby said,

But you have to love the irony of somebody exercising his freedom of speech, as he has every right to do, but gets enraged and violent when someone exercises theirs in response. I suppose it’s just intense frustration that, after all they’ve been told, the majority of the country doesn’t agree with them and actually thinks they’re jerks.

But of course, the usual righties are cheering for Guaschino, whereas if a leftie so much as looks at a conservative cross-eyed, all lefties are goons and thugs.

But this brings me back to my original point, which is that conservatives believe freedom of speech includes protection from being disagreed with (sorry about the dangling participle). I ran into this post the other day (featuring a shout out to our own c u n d gulag!) written by a rightie blogger who believes criticism of Faux Snooze amounts to an infringement of Faux’s right to free speech, i.e., pretending to be a news organization while really being a mouthpiece for whatever agenda Rupert Murdoch is pushing this week. And the blogger thinks it is just OUTRAGEOUS that people — including President Obama — trample on Faux’s First Amendment rights by saying such things as I just said, because it’s the truth. But as gulag pointed out in the comments,

that he continues to allow FUX Noise the use of the PUBLIC AIRWAVES, to spread their stupid, ignorant, racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, and/or homophobic, propaganda!

Just like Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, and Saddam Hussein, did in their Totalitarian states!

Snark. It’s a beautiful thing. And protected by the First Amendment!

Your Title Here

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Sometimes something just clicks:

He bought his first gun a week before the debut of TheTruthAboutGuns.com. He took a firearms class. He filled out the paperwork and went through the background check to get a permit to carry a gun. He now owns 18 guns.

“Once you put a gun on, you gain situational awareness,” he says. After he bought his first gun, he says, “I felt grown up. It was like a coming-of-age thing. I felt like an adult.”

In the 1940s and 1950s Joseph Campbell was writing stuff about myths and rituals and arguing that modern society suffered by the lack of them. He pointed out that a nearly universal feature of tribal societies was the rite of passage. For boys, this ritual often involved all the men of a tribe or village physically kidnapping a boy away from his mother and taking him off to some “men’s ground,” and the boy would be put through some kind of ritual that would be frightening or even painful. The ritualism often included obvious phallic symbols, such as snakes. But from that point forward, his status as a man was secure.

The corresponding rites of passage for girls are marriage and childbirth, which is pretty much still the case. But in modern western culture males seem to drift along as boy-men for a prolonged time. Campbell wrote in Hero With a Thousand Faces,

“It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid. We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood.”

So, hypothetically, there are a lot of men drifting through their lives never completely certain of their status as men. Add to that the feedback loop of popular entertainment, which (seems to me) often portrays males as perpetual juveniles. What you’ve got now is a big chunk of U.S. society sucked into an infantile caricature of manhood, and using guns as their phallic symbols to act it out. And men who display their firearms at seemingly inappropriate times, like these two, are really, unconsciously, showing off their mighty weenies.

Discuss. I’ll be back later.

Remembering Yoshihiro Hattori

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Earlier this week, an Atlanta homeowner shot and killed a young man who had pulled into his driveway by mistake. Something very similar happened in Baton Rouge more than 20 years ago. Some of you may remember this.

Yoshihiro Hattori was a 16-year-old Japanese exchange student who came to live with a Baton Rouge family in 1992. He and a young man from his host family were going to a Halloween party and mistook another house for the party house.

The boys went to the door and rang the doorbell, and when they got no response they turned to walk back to their car. But then the homeowner, Rodney Peairs, stormed out of his house with a .44-magnum revolver and yelled, “freeze!” Yoshihiro, probably not recognizing he was in danger, turned toward Pearis and said, “We’re here for the party.” Pearis fired his gun into Yoshihiro’s chest and ran back into his house.

Webb Haymaker, the boy with Yoshihiro, ran to a neighbor house and asked for help. The Pearis family did nothing, but remained in their house. An ambulance came, but Yoshihiro died before reaching the hospital.

At first, the Baton Rouge police declined to press charges against Pearis. Possibly only because of widespread outrage in Japan and pressure from higher officials was Pearis finally charged with manslaughter. At the trial, the defense portrayed Yoshihiro Hattori as scary and Rodney Peairs as just a regular guy defending his family. The defense pointed out that Yoshihiro was a 130-pound boy (dressed as John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever) who had just rung the doorbell — not exactly the usual behavior of a home invader. But naturally, Peairs was acquitted.

Now, as I remember it, the story got a lot of attention, and a lot of people thought it was outrageous, although many others defended Pearis and thought he was justified to shoot Yoshihiro. But there also was a widespread resignation about the acquittal — that’s just the way things are in America, especially in the South. It stinks, but nothing can be done.

This week’s shooting in Atlanta isn’t getting nearly as much attention, but the shooter was charged with murder pretty quickly. So far I haven’t heard anyone say the shooter, Phillip Walker Sailors, was justified in shooting a young man for the crime of pulling into his driveway. Perhaps someone has, and I’ve missed it. It will be interesting to see how and whether justice is served. I would also like to gauge if public reaction to this week’s shooting is different in any way from the reaction to the shooting in 1992. Have we progressed at all?

Related — here’s a gun control ad made to air during the Super Bowl.

CNS Strikes Again

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Conservative News Service has released a “news story” with the hysterical headline “IRS: Cheapest Obamacare Plan Will Be $20,000 Per Family.” Let’s take a look.

In a final regulation issued Wednesday, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) assumed that under Obamacare the cheapest health insurance plan available in 2016 for a family will cost $20,000 for the year.

I’ll come back to the word “assumed” in a minute. But if you read the article a little further, you find that the “cheapest” is not really the cheapest, but an average of the level of coverage required by the individual mandate in order to avoid a penalty.

And then if you read the IRS document, it becomes clear that the $20,000 is a round number being used to show how the penalty will be calculated. that’s where “assumed” comes in. The IRS isn’t saying that’s what it will cost.

But on top of that, the fact is that $20,000 for a family of four or five, which is what the article says is being “assumed,” is probably in the ball park of what a comprehensive private health insurance plan costs now. It’s a lot higher in New York, actually. I went to the Empire Blue Cross page to get a quote for private family health insurance for a family of five, with parents in their 40s and three school-age children, living in Westchester County. The monthly premium for an HMO plan is $4,754.66. Yes, the monthly premium. I took a screen shot of the result page (also note all the stuff the cheaper indemnity plan does not cover). The monthly premium for a point-of-service plan is $5,940.60. $20,000 per year is a bargain in comparison.

You can get way cheaper insurance plans in other states, of course, mostly because in those states insurance companies can still refuse to accept you if you have a pre-existing condition (which they can’t in New York, and they won’t be able to do after this year) and can also sell you coverage with big gaping holes that leave you with ruinous out-of-pocket costs (not allowed in New York, and not allowed anywhere else after this year).

So yeah, sweetums, that’s what real private health insurance costs in these parts. And if you don’t have insurance, and someone in your family needs major medical care, you could end up living in your station wagon. But then maybe you’ll qualify for Medicaid, in some states, so the taxpayers will pay the bills.

Single payer starting to look a little better now?

Update: American Thinker takes the CNS article at face value and posts an article called “Working poor families to be big losers under Obamacare.” Actually, working poor families will be somewhat better off than they are now. If they aren’t getting health insurance through their jobs, which many aren’t, there will be subsidies and other assistance made available to them, and the exchanges are supposed to offer plans at group plan rates they can buy into. And more of them will qualify for Medicaid, although several Republican governors are refusing to expand Medicaid, which will leave a few million people out.

American Thinker and other righties refuse to look at the stark reality of what life is like in America if you have no health care coverage at all. If you want to see losing, that’s losing.

Update: Reading comments at American Thinker and other rightie sites, it’s clear the righties are not making the distinction between private plans, group plans, and employee benefit plans. They think everybody is going to have to pay $20,000 a year for insurance, and are worked up into a frenzy about it. (Sigh)

Update: Kevin Drum —

Apparently conservatives are outraged by this, but I have one question for them: just how much do you think healthcare coverage costs? Do you have any clue at all? …

… The average cost of healthcare coverage for a family is currently about $16,000, and by 2015 (the base year for the IRS examples) that will probably be around $18,000 or so. And that’s for employer-sponsored plans. Individual plans are generally steeper, so $20,000 isn’t a bad guess. It might be a little high, but not by much. And the family in question will, of course, be eligible for generous subsidies that bring this cost down substantially, thanks to the Affordable Care Act. They won’t actually pay $20,000 per year.

So is this outrageous? An example of Obamacare run amok? Hardly. It’s just an example of how damn much healthcare coverage costs in America and why we needed Obamacare in the first place. Apparently a lot of conservatives are shocked when they find this out

Responsibility Begins at Home

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Another day, another school shooting, this time in an Atlanta middle school. Not many details yet.

The video is a segment from last night’s Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell, and the speaker is David Wheeler, father of Ben Wheeler, a 6-year-old who died in the Sandy Hook massacre. This was testimony in front of the Connecticut legislature.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Although I’m not sure all of his suggestions would be helpful, one thing he said that I want to second is that it’s not enough to stop the sale of firearms to mentally unstable people. Because at the point that such a person begins a shooting spree, it doesn’t matter if the gun was purchased legally, or illegally, or stolen, or borrowed, or found laying around somewhere. What’s needed is not just to stop sales to someone who might pose a risk to the public, but to block his access to guns, period.

I’ve already said that I think a National Registry of Crazy People is a terrible idea. And as this article points out, most of the time the perpetrators do not fit any profile of a deranged killer until they start killing.

My idea is that if you own a firearm, and you keep it loaded where someone beside yourself has access to it, you are criminally responsible for whatever is done with that gun. Including homicide. Accidents with guns ought to also incur criminal charges. We keep hearing stories about people who shoot themselves, or their children, accidentally because they didn’t know there was a bullet in the chamber — well, you should have known. It is your responsibility to know that.

And I’m talking stiff penalties, I’m talking jail time, I’m talking ruinous fines. Make examples of a few people, and maybe some of these meatheads will learn to check for bullets in the chamber, or stop keeping firearms where their angry adolescent sons can easily get them. And don’t get me started on what should be done with someone who leaves a loaded gun where a small child can reach it.

WaPo Still Running from the “L” Word

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Political commentary that makes me wonder if anyone at WaPo has a measurable IQ (from about five days ago, but I’m just now noticing it) — Zachary A. Goldfarb writes,

If there was one word that was used most often to describe President Obama’s second inaugural address Monday, it was “liberal.” Obama supposedly tossed away the post-partisan efforts of his first term and embraced big government, fully committing himself to the cause of gay rights and showing a Gore-like dedication to the climate-change fight.

Yet the next day, the White House expressed surprise at the notion that the president’s speech amounted to an affirmation of liberalism. Press secretary Jay Carney told reporters that he rejected “the idea that this was an ‘ism’ speech.” He added, “It’s on behalf of ideas that represent who we are as Americans.”

In a narrow sense, Carney was right. Opinion polls show that on almost all of the major positions Obama espoused in his speech — entitlements, immigration, climate change and same-sex marriage — a majority of Americans agree with him.

By that measure, Obama did not advance a liberal agenda.

Or maybe, dimwit, by that measure we see that Americans are coming back around to embracing liberalism, the way they used to. Let us consider the words of President John F. Kennedy —

President John F. Kennedy on being a liberal (via)…

“I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, in human liberty as the source of national action, in the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas. It is, I believe, the faith in our fellow citizens as individuals and as people that lies at the heart of the liberal faith. For liberalism is not so much a party creed or set of fixed platform promises as it is an attitude of mind and heart, a faith in man’s ability through the experiences of his reason and judgment to increase for himself and his fellow men the amount of justice and freedom and brotherhood which all human life deserves

I believe also in the United States of America, in the promise that it contains and has contained throughout our history of producing a society so abundant and creative and so free and responsible that it cannot only fulfill the aspirations of its citizens, but serve equally well as a beacon for all mankind. I do not believe in a superstate. I see no magic in tax dollars which are sent to Washington and then returned. I abhor the waste and incompetence of large-scale federal bureaucracies in this administration as well as in others. I do not favor state compulsion when voluntary individual effort can do the job and do it well. But I believe in a government which acts, which exercises its full powers and full responsibilities. Government is an art and a precious obligation; and when it has a job to do, I believe it should do it. And this requires not only great ends but that we propose concrete means of achieving them.

Our responsibility is not discharged by announcement of virtuous ends. Our responsibility is to achieve these objectives with social invention, with political skill, and executive vigor. I believe for these reasons that liberalism is our best and only hope in the world today. For the liberal society is a free society, and it is at the same time and for that reason a strong society. Its strength is drawn from the will of free people committed to great ends and peacefully striving to meet them. Only liberalism, in short, can repair our national power, restore our national purpose, and liberate our national energies.

What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “Liberal?” If by “Liberal” they mean, as they want people to believe, someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer’s dollar, then the record of this party and its members demonstrate that we are not that kind of “Liberal.” But if by a “Liberal” they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a “Liberal,” then I’m proud to say I’m a “Liberal.”

Deal with it, Goldfarb.

BTW, here’s my new roomie, Sadie, courtesy of Bill Bush. Someday maybe I’ll get a photo of her when one of us is no t moving.