We love our guns more than our children

The war reports for today say the same sorts of things they’ve been saying for a while, so I won’t repeat it. On to other stuff. April Siese of Daily Kos wrote that On March 29 wind turbines provided more electricity for the lower 48 states than coal and nuclear. Wind accounted for 19% of the electricity generated that day. Nuclear was a bit under that. Coal provided 17%. It happened because spring tends to be windy and nuclear and coal plants tend to get maintenance done while the overall power needs are lower. This ratio may not be repeated for a while (in the fall or next spring?), though it shows we’re heading in the right direction. Last week France had round one of their election for president. Incumbent Emanuel Macron got 28% of the vote in a large field. Far right candidate Marine Le Pen got 23%. The two are in a runoff that happens next week. Dartagnan of Kos reported that Le Pen is a more intelligent version of the nasty guy. She’s just as racist and campaigns on that. Climate issues are a low priority. And she wants to withdraw France from NATO and form an alliance with Putin. Which is about all one needs to know about her. Dartagnan summarizes her (and the nasty guy) with:

This brand of Putin-envy appears to be particularly common among more autocratic, fascist-leaning politicians who have traditionally applauded the Russian despot as exemplifying what they call “strength” and resolve. In reality, they admire and envy the lack of any real constraints on his power, which they all shamelessly covet. We now see the end product of that lack of constraints playing out in Ukraine.

Dartagnan discussed a few more similarities between the two. The he considered how the current war would be different if our own presidential election had a different outcome.

It’s impossible to know how much resolve to assist Ukraine would have existed among the remainder of NATO, but without a credible leader, it’s difficult to imagine how that response would have been effective. The world has never seen a nuclear-armed pathology like Putin invade a peaceful neighboring country for wholly irrational reasons, wielding his nuclear capability as a threat against any country that dares to oppose him, and even worse, vowing to continue his efforts until he is stopped. History suggests that such countries will not stop until they encounter an immutable opposing force. And Trump would not have delivered that force.

James Fallows, in his Breaking the News articles on Substack, discussed how the frame used for news will flatten it.

As a reminder: framing involves the assumptions that go into the who, what, where, why, how of a story—all of which generally make a bigger difference than obvious expressions of bias. What deserves coverage? Which stories should a news organization stick with week after week? Which ones, by contrast, become old news—“we’ve already covered that”—once they’re a few days in the past? What are the “sides” of a disagreement that deserve a platform and attention? Which can be dismissed? The endless stream of such decisions constitutes “news judgment.” As they mount up they shape the view of the world that journalism offers.

He offered a few examples. First, the Washington Post posted a job for a Texas based reporter to document life in a red state and how policies and politics are shaped by conservative ideology. Fallows’ complaint: Texas is much more diverse than simply being a red state. There are a whole bunch of internal contrasts from East Texas piney woods, to flatlands and winds of the panhandle, to farming of the Rio Grande, to the Hill Country west of Austin, even the differences between Fort Worth and Dallas. Houston is the most racially diverse city in the US. A region shaped by conservative ideology is only one aspect of Texas. Second, stop with the predictions of the 2022 election. NPR tweeted about the 10 seats in the Senate most likely to flip, tipping the balance of parties. Lots of people predict the next election and there is little accountability for guessing wrong. Seven months ago the big news story was the way Biden handled the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And of those 10 vulnerable seats, half are held by Republicans. So more on what is happening now, such as discussing the mechanics of democracy and how that is being threatened, and less on what might occur. Third, stop using a framing of “that’s just Trump.” That dismisses the damage being done. The current version is that’s just Clarence and Ginni Thomas. They are doing real damage to the country and readers need to know that. Fourth, there is a difference between rudeness and toughness. Many in the press want to sound tough and pose “challenging” questions. They’re vying for a spot on the evening news. They’re just being rude. As an example of tough, consider Jonathan Swan of Axios interviewing Moscow Mitch. Swan asked Mitch if there was anything the nasty guy could do or say to stop Mitch from supporting him. Mitch tried several tactics to get out of answering. Swan held firm. That should be a lesson to other reporters in how to conduct tough questioning. Katia Riddle of NPR reported on how the Mt. Scott neighborhood of Portland, OR reduced gun violence. Over the last year the violence got so bad residents felt they could no longer use their Mt. Scott Park. Pastor Joel Sommer of Access Covenant Church and other community leaders got together to work on non-violent solutions. Since they know the area they could generate better ideas than the city leaders. They looked to other cities – Philadelphia lowered violence by turning abandoned lots into green spaces. In the Mt. Scott area they installed traffic barrels to slow down traffic – which deters drive-by shootings. They increased lighting. They reclaimed community events. And they began to look out for each other. Small changes can make a big difference. We can create peace where we are. In a post from ten days ago Hunter of Kos discussed a study that showed Republican-led states have higher murder rates than Democratic-led states. Keeping in mind that correlation is not causation Hunter asks, so which causes which? So he looked at more details. We know what does predict violent crime: low average education, high rates of poverty, modest access to government assistance. Which describes much of the deeply conservative South. There’s still the riddle. Is the region violent because it is conservative or conservative because it is violent? Back to what we do know:

If you want to reduce violent crime, you fix up the schools to raise education levels, you institute programs to lift people out of poverty, and you provide government assistance to make sure people are at least getting food and a roof over their heads. Since all of these are things that Republicanism is absolutely bug-eyed dead-set against in any form, in any venue, we're hardly going out on a limb by saying A leads to B leads to C. Republican governance leads to lower education and higher poverty rates; lower education and higher poverty leads to violent crime; therefore voting for Republicans causes higher murder rates. There ya go, there's your bumper sticker pitch. Stop voting for Republicanism if you want to not be murdered, America. Hmm. And yet, that's not something you really hear on not-conservative television shows.

And you won’t hear it at all on Fox News.

Anyhoo, this study is not likely to convince any of the people that need convincing; conservatives have long insisted that we need to gut social programs, including our schools, because regardless of the actual outcomes of doing that it is simply not "fair" for Americans to pay taxes for those things. It is better, in conservatism, to increase poverty and cause higher rates of violence than it is to decrease poverty through government action; the resulting high crime rates can then be dealt with by convincing Americans to buy guns to protect themselves from the new criminals. Then when those Americans commit violent crimes themselves, as they attempt to police their towns, a new set of Americans must be recruited who are willing to buy more and better weapons than the previous group. ... It's only going to get worse as places like Texas get it into their heads that they can privatize laws by putting them into the hands of "bounty" hunters, or private citizens willing to go farther than the Constitution-bound government is allowed to. It takes no great expertise to imagine how Americans both given guns and told to hunt down lawbreakers will react to these new powers, and in the wake of Jan. 6 and after many years of Fox News painting targets on American backs, it seems vanishingly unlikely that the conservative writers of the law don't "intend" for those escalations to take place.

If my mathematical friend and debate partner finds fault with this logic I’ll let you know. In a post from two months ago (yeah, it has been in my browser tabs from two days before the war started), Aldous Pennyfarthing of Kos wrote:

Of course, stand your ground legislation has always felt like an incitement for society to get far more shoot-y, and now it looks like there’s evidence to support our hunches. According to a new study published in the journal JAMA Network Open, the proliferation of stand-your-ground laws in recent years has been associated with an “abrupt and sustained” increase in gun-related homicides.

One little quote from the article:

Analyzing applications of stand-your-ground in 2013, the Tampa Bay Times reported that defendants were more likely to cite the law successfully when the person they killed was Black.

Also from two months ago Aysha Qamar of Kos reported a pair of bills were introduced to the Tennessee state Assembly and Senate that allow the holder of an enhanced handgun carry permit to carry it anywhere police can carry a gun and also act as a law enforcement officer. I checked one of Qamar’s links and saw little action has been taken on either bill. Those in opposition to these bills include police. Citizens are not trained in law, defense tactics, and a lot of other things taught to a police cadet. These bills will only increase the “self defense” excuses used by racists after assaulting people of color. Also two months ago and on the fourth anniversary of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida Hunter discussed that we love our guns more than our children. Since the purpose of guns is to enforce a person’s position in the social hierarchy it follows that people love their high position in the hierarchy more than they love their children.

Perhaps community volunteers could shoulder assault rifles and patrol school perimeters, went one proposition. Perhaps teachers themselves should be forced to carry guns in their classrooms, went another. Again, though, the central premise remains: Whenever Americans face a conflict between their "right" to be armed and the "rights" of their children, they have chosen their guns. Every. Single. Time. ... It is not that America can't keep its children from dying in schools. America has gone to extraordinary lengths to make sure children keep dying in schools at whatever rate will best support adult hobbies, pleasures, and culture wars. If there comes a day when some high-profile blowhard decides that fire extinguishers in schools are socialism, parents across the country will begin demanding that they be stripped out and sold for scrap metal. American schools will be kill zones, places where our children are taught what sorts of furniture are the best for hiding behind, places where children have drills to teach them how to hide quietly even in crisis situations where their every instinct is to cry out, places with secured perimeters and regular lockdowns when gunshots are heard nearby, until our society values the "right" to kill our neighbors as of less consequence than the "right" of neighbors not to be killed. ... What a rotten anniversary. What a sad and broken culture.