What place guns should have in a functioning democracy

A week ago I wrote about Nyle DiMarco’s book Deaf Utopia. As part of that I noted he had become a movie producer. So for this week’s Sunday movies I took a look at a couple shows he produced. Both are on Netflix. The first I ventured into was the series Deaf U. The cameras follow several students at Gallaudet University as they do what students do when they’re not in class. I watched one episode and was glad it is only 20 minutes. There’s not a whole lot of story – which is true for most people’s lives. I’m not saying the series is bad. Without the structure of a story the lives of college students don’t interest me. The series is important in that it shows deaf students are like other students except in how they communicate. The movie Audible on Netflix was much more interesting. It is a 40 minute documentary of Amaree a senior on the football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf. Being on the team and playing hearing teams was a way for the players to show what they’re capable of doing. Though they had a winning streak of more than 40 games the story opens with a loss. In addition to dealing with the loss they’re also dealing with a teammate who had transferred to a hearing school, couldn’t handle the bullying, and committed suicide. The football coach said his guys are destined for discrimination. Amaree’s father left the family when Amaree lost his hearing to illness at age two. Dad is trying to reestablish a relationship and sees that his son and the team do not skimp on effort. This movie is a good one. I downloaded Michigan’s COVID data, updated yesterday. I haven’t done that in seven weeks. I also updated by graphing program to display only the last year. I can see recent peaks and valleys much more clearly. There is a rise in the number of new cases per day from mid October to about Christmas, where there is a peak of 2150. The numbers have dropped since then. Over the last few weeks the peaks have been 1563, 1060, 904, and 585. Deaths per day were 10 and under from early May until the beginning of December. During that month there were many days above 10, though the highest was 15. Since the end of December deaths per day has been back under 10. Steve Inskeep of NPR talked to Jill Lepore and David Blight, two of several historians who submitted a friend of the court brief in the case before the Supreme Court testing the 14th Amendment clause that says an insurrectionist should be banned from the ballot. A summary of what Lepore and Blight said: The originalist theory the conservative Supremes keep claiming as their way of working means the interpretation of the Constitution should be based on what people of the time thought of it. And when the 14th Amendment was debated and approved it was intended to be permanent, not just for the period after the Civil War to keep former Confederates out of government. Yes, the amendment does include the presidency. Yes, what the nasty guy did was insurrection. Arguing otherwise is nitpicking. And this: Inskeep: “Is it wise to disqualify someone that millions of people apparently want to vote for, rather than defeating him at the ballot box, which is the way that many people would think it ought to work?” Lepore: “He was defeated at the ballot box, and he incited an insurrection.” Blight: “We have representative democracy. Fine. But we also have laws. And I don't think in this case, a degree of popular will should be the only question in the enforcement of the Constitution, which is itself quite clear.” Mark Sumner of Daily Kos reported Texas is threatening civil war and the mainstream media doesn’t think it’s a story. Media (at least NPR) have been reporting Gov. Greg Abbott has put razor wire in the Rio Grande. Children got tangled in the wire and drowned. The border patrol sued to be able to remove the razor wire and save the children. The Supreme Court allowed them to do so. Abbott isn’t backing down. Sumner reported what else is going on. MAGA Republicans are celebrating Abbott’s standoff with the border patrol and are calling for secession or civil war. 25 other Republican governors issued a joint statement supporting Abbott. Putin’s chief deputy has been urging the civil war as a way to distract from Ukraine.

Despite all this, the story has generated exactly zero articles in The New York Times and scant attention anywhere else in the national media. The national press is allowing Republicans to stoke their fabricated border crisis—right down to threats of civil war—even while those same Republicans are doing everything they can to undermine a solution to issues at the border. How do you avoid reporting on the hypocrisy of the Republican position? Leaving off half the story is a good start.

8ackgr0und No15e of the Kos community asks an important question for those considering civil war or secession they seem to have overlooked: “What are you going to use for your new currency?” Some say the Texas economy is comparable to that of Russia. Have you looked at the ruble lately? How’s your infrastructure? The US is helping people blow up Russia’s stuff. You’ve got oil fields? The US government treats oil fields as military objectives. Mia Maldonado, in an article for the Idaho Capital Sun posted on Kos, reported on discussions with librarians across the state.

According to an informal survey conducted by the Idaho Library Association, more than half of Idaho librarians are considering leaving library work as a result of library-related legislation.

Part of it is being the target of legislator and public ire. Another part of it is perhaps having to deal with unworkable demands. Put the challenged book in an “adults only” section? What if the library is a single room? Yeah, the legislature is considering reducing the amounts parents could sue a library for noncompliance from $2500 to $250, but there are also legal fees likely above $1000. And that is a significant impact for a rural library. Add that to the increased stress and librarians are looking for jobs in other states or are considering changing professions. DebtorsPrison of the Kos community runs the online bookstore The Literate Lizard. They also write a weekly column of the latest nonfiction book releases. I don’t think I’ve read the column before, though I did this week. A couple of the book descriptions (I haven’t, of course, read the actual books) caught my attention.

One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy, by Dominic Erdozain. As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic-weapons bans, we fail to ask what place guns should have in a functioning democracy. Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings—the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the peaceful republic they hoped to build. They wrote these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet the twin scourges of racism and nationalism would combine to create a darker American vision—a rogue and reckless freedom based on birth and blood. It was this freedom, not the liberty promised by the Constitution, that generated our modern gun culture, with its mystic conceptions of good guys and bad guys, innocence and guilt. What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms, by Jonathan M. Metzl. Looking closely at the cycle in which mass shootings lead to shock, horror, calls for action, and, ultimately, political gridlock, he explores what happens to the soul of a nation—and the meanings of safety and community—when we normalize violence as an acceptable trade-off for freedom. Mass shootings and our inability to stop them have become more than horrific crimes: they are an American national autobiography.