A Roundup of Post-Orlando Links and Commentary

There are, of course, quite a few commentators talking about the Orlando Massacre--both of the "professional" and from the "armchair/amateur" variety--and not all of them are saying good or even intelligent things. Some on the Left are (rather predictably) attempting to blame the NRA and especially conservative Christians for this atrocity. The NRA, maybe, but then again if the FBI would enforce existing (mostly common sense) gun laws, a lot of these problems would go away.

The Ruger SR9 without extended grip.

Nor do I think that banning high-capacity semiautomatic weapons is necessarily "common sense," in part because I do not think there is a reasonable "common"definition for "high capacity." Is 7 round high capacity? I have a revolver which holds this many, so presumably not. Is it 10? There are handguns which can carry up to just fewer than 20 (the Ruger SR9, for example*), without being obviously overdone. Indeed, it is the magazine size and not necessarily the gun which fires the magazine which determines the ammunition capacity, and there exist "high-capacity" (more than 20 rounds) after-marker magazines for many common handguns.

For that matter, the (relatively lower-caliber, lower-power for a rifle/carbine) AR-15 could in principal accept a 10-round magazine. For that matter, there exist after-market limiters for the AR-15 which limit it to 10 rounds. Placing a ban on magazine capacity is virtually impossible in the US, shy of simply banning all semi-automatic guns (rifle, carbine, handgun, etc) for the simple reason that a semi-automatic gun need not use only the magazine made by the original manufacturer.

It could be argues that what is needed is not an absolute ban on magazine capacity, but rather ammunition sales in a given time frame. However, this does nothing to prevent a person from making (or even reloading) their own ammunition, nor from simply "saving" ammunition**. This is of course assuming that such an "ammunition limit" can be feasibly implemented in the first place. It also overlooks the fact that such a limit may prove detrimental to the ability of anyone who needs to buy ammunition for the purpose of practicing***. I suppose there could be a loophole for buying and then using ammo at the range, but then how would this actually be enforced?

Another alternative is to attempt to regulate neither magazine capacity nor bullet caliber, but some combination of both. The reasoning here is simple: different calibers will be more or less likely to be lethal, and thus more or less likely to be used for a mass shooting. Nobody is particularly worried about a mass shooter unloading 30 rounds of 0.22 caliber bullets into a crowded area, in the sense that while this would be very, very bad, and while is certainly could result in some death or serious injuries, the odd are that a shooter using this caliber of ammunition will not wrack up a high body count. Indeed, I would bet that said shooter would almost certainly wrack up a lower body count than a man using a 0.357 revolver in the same crowded area.

Of course, by limiting "high-caliber" rounds (and given that 0.223/5.56 NATO rounds prove quite lethal when fired from an AR-15) one may inadvertently encourage shooters to pack a combination of low-capacity, high caliber and low-caliber, high-capacity weapons (to say nothing about the aforementioned point about the difficulty of actually regulating magazine capacity). And as one observer has noted, "gun wounds are often preferable to the alternatives," and moreover,

"On guns, it is a little known fact that even in the Natted States Merica, where they seem rather more easily available than elsewhere, they do not account for the majority of murders. Convenient as guns may be for this purpose, if you are a Merican (according to the latest FBI statistics) you are six times more likely to be murdered with a knife; and with a rifle, only one chance in fifty. That the murder rate itself is higher than in some other countries, I will happily concede. What can we say? Mericans just like to kill each other. Banning guns won’t help."

I should note here that I am not in principle opposed to limiting magazine capacities--though I question whether there is a magic number to which they should be limited--nor to such things as expanded background checks, mandatory waiting periods, or (better still) randomly assigned waiting periods of arbitrary duration (not to exceed a month or so). In the past, I have favored what I would call the "national gun buyers identity" which would allow a person the ability to purchase as many or as few guns as he chooses without further background checks for a limited period of time, which is then renewable upon completing a thorough background check upon expiration.

I am, however, quite skeptical that any other these things will actually help. The US homicide rate in general--and also the homicide by firearms rate--has been decreasing for some time--the overall homicide rate in the US is at a 51 year low, according to the FBI. For that matter, so has the violent crimes rate, and our overall rate of violent crime is actually lower than that of Britain (though our homicide rate is higher).

What makes me more skeptical than anything against using regulations to lower gun death rates is that this is basically imposing a technical solution on a moral problem. And the moral problem here runs fairly deeply, and exists on several levels. For one thing, we as a society, indeed as a civilization (I am here including Europe as well) have become virtually incapable of naming our enemies, be they human or spiritual. I noted above (and before) that the immediate reaction in the wake of a killing perpetrated by a Mohammedan who may or may not have also been a homosexual but who did pledge allegiance to ISIS was to blame Christians in general and conservative one in particular.

When even moderate Muslims are willing to admit that Mohammedanism is at least in part behind this shooting, it seems clear to me that we who are not Mohammedans, and who have no vested interest in propping us Islam, should be able to do the same. Moreover, we have created an environment in which people are not allowed to turn others away for religious or moral reasons because of anti-discrimination laws. Now these anti-discrimination laws are to some extent good, but they fall prey to the very thing they try to prevent: namely, they do not allow discrimination in cases where discrimination is just.

Case in point: suppose a gun store owner decided to turn away a Muslim because the gun store owner had a suspicion that he was up to no good; what is this suspicion based upon? If the Muslim was acting in good faith, but merely had some social peculiarity, does anyone doubt that he might attempt to sue on anti-discrimination charges, thereby taking the gun shop owner to the kangaroo courts of the civil rights commissions? Yet, sometimes those hunches do prove to be right--as they did in the case of the gunshop owner who refused to sell a gun to Mateen "because he seemed odd." How many gun store owners are more afraid to be convicted of "hate crime" than of inadvertently selling a gun to a mass-shooter? Especially given that the former is more likely than the latter, since (we have all been assured) the vast majority of Muslims are perfectly harmless?

This is just picking on one sub-group of mass shooters and homicidal maniacs, the Muslims. This wasn't an isolated incident, as Mr. John C. Wright points out: during the Obama presidency, 115 people have been killed in the US in the name of Islam, whereas non have been documented to have been killed (or even brutally injured) for believing in Mohammed or Mohammed's God. And I am picking on this group in particular, because it is the one group which we cannot name as terrorists, the one group it has become politically incorrect to call out, and indeed one of the few groups which it has become politically expedient to actively help, and the one group which cannot be called intolerant, especially not of women or gays. It may not be the only group about which we must be dishonest, both publicly and privately, but it is the one group which we must continuously pretend to be "shocked" in learning that the latest terrorist--foreign or domestic--gives allegiance to.

I will add here that there is another sense of moral decline--they are myriad, too many to really discuss in detail here--which plays into all of this, and which regulation simply does not fix. That is the negligence of some--not a majority, but still far too many--actual gun owners. None of these proposed laws will prevent the negligent homicide of a child who finds the loaded gun and shoots himself (or his friend, sibling, or even parent). There is no reasonable law which can prevent this fully. Sure, there may be developed a technology of the sort which can help prevent this--for example, a gun which is bio metrically sensitive****.

There exists already a number of laws which are meant to "idiot-proof" firearms against accidental discharge and/or unauthorized use. But, as the saying goes, any time you idiot-proof something, somebody comes up with a better idiot (the skills of whom are then widely duplicated). The vast majority of these "accidental" firearms homicides (or even injuries) can be chalked up to lack of common sense and/or lack of caution/precaution, or simple negligence (which is another word for "lack of care"). These are, by and large, all moral defects, and cannot be simply legislated away. There are some who go so far as to question whether Americans are "moral" enough to merit the constitutional protections of the Second Amendment. This is perhaps a valid question, but it leads to another--do we merit any of our other rights, either? Such a line of reasoning may quickly lead us to conclusions which are more dangerous, indeed which are in general worse, than the "threat" of firearms from which they were meant to protect us.


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*This compact handgun has a manufacturer-included extended-grip magazine which allows 17+1 of 9 mm ammunition, for example; without the extended grip, it's 10+1 rounds. This is a compact pistol, which is meant for concealed carry.

**Incidentally, it might still work to reduce "mass shootings" in the sense of serving as a deterrent to mass shootings committed by a person who is willing to plan for days, weeks, or months. On the other hand, given that a typical "box" of ammunition will have 20-50 rounds in it, and that it's generally recommended that one put hundreds of rounds downrange for practice to keep up marksmanship (to say nothing of competition shooters), it would seem to me that this kind of law will have very little effect on preventing mass shootings.

***Typical advice says practice live-firing your gun once per month, 50 rounds each time, minimum. That is 600 rounds per year, minimum!

****While we are at it, why not insist on a second law which disables the gun when outside of the user's house/property/hunting area/competition area/gun range? There are, of course, a variety of problems with this, not least of which is the obvious infringement on freedoms inherent in using, for example, a gps tracker to locate said gun. In a country with a history of mistrust of the government in general, and with respect to gun confiscation in particular, such a law is a non-starter, arguably worse even than gun registration. Perhaps the technology exists to do this without a gps, e.g. the gun has a receiver only and no transmitter, the transmitters can be bought and placed in the home--but then, what is to prevent one from being transported along with the gun?

Six Californias

Apparently, the proposal to split California into six states is heading for the ballots in 2016. As if having one California isn't bad enough. Actually, though, I generally favor this split, and to be fair it appears that the state is split into one obviously conservative part (Jefferson in the far north),two moderate states (South and Central California), and three far left ones (based around San Fransisco, LA, and Sacramento).

I've long been a supporter of the State of Jefferson, though I'd like it to annex southern Oregon. If it did, I would probably actively pursue a means of moving there. However, I predict that if this does go on the ballot and remain there, it will likely fail--not to mention that it would probably require some approval beyond just the State's say-so.

There is an interesting alternative option, however: the idea of super-states, states, and then a federal government. Under such a system, California, Texas (with perhaps some of its surrounding states), the New England/Northeast Ara, the Heartland/Midwest Area, the Great Lakes Region, etc would be sort of superstates, consisting of a number of states which are geographically, culturally, and economically connected. Texas and California and New York and Florida would all likely need to split into a few (2 or more each) smaller states to make this really make sense, with the superstates taking on much of the power and many of the responsibilities that the federal government has taken over the years, and states being more-or less restored to a greater amount of autonomy.

The problems here are that we would need at least one amendment to the constitution to make this happen, and then the federal government would need to be shrunk again (a good thing for sure), taking on a much more limited role.Such may be an unwieldy solution, but then again, our present situation in the US is not exactly great,with too much power concentrated in the federal government, and increasingly in the hands of the courts and the President. This could help alleviate at least one of those problems.

If it isn't a fully thought-out plan, nor one likely to be implemented in reality: then it would at least make for an interesting bit of speculative fiction.

How Compromises Work

The ideal model of a compromise would have both parties working together to find a mutually agreeable solution to a disagreement or a problem. In a more typical compromise, both parties at least have some input or consultation--both have some say in the final outcome--and the process might involve some give-and-take.

I write this, largely because it seems to me that this concept has been lost on President Obama. This is a general statement, that is, it is a summary of a consistent pattern I have observed. His "compromises" with the bishops, for example, will continue to be rejected (and hopefully vigorously fought) so long as he does not make any serious attempts to address their objections to his HHS policy.

The impression I have of the situation is that he simply doesn't grasp these objections--which I suppose is understandable, given that a large portion of our population apparently fails to grasp the objections or their import. His base may or may not grasp the objections to the HHS mandate--the more spiteful members of it grasp the objections reasonably clearly and cite those as reasons to force this on people of good faith--and therein lies a part of the problem. He steadfastly refuses to actually act in consultation with the people who have the strongest objections to this policy. Perhaps if he actually listened to their complaints--or sent an adviser to do so--a viable compromise could be reached.

Instead, each so-called compromise only looks like he is under the mistaken idea that the objections are merely financial in nature. To be fair, most of the objections to nationalized/socialized healthcare are primarily economic (though there are other good objections beyond these); but the bishops at least are not really arguing against the economics of Obamacare. Rather, it's the moral particulars, those parts of the law which present a problem of conscience (and a fairly obvious one at that) which are the hang-up. This is especially true of the little add-ons like the HHS contraceptive/sterilization/abortifacient mandate which are irrelevant to the law as a whole but which President Obama has decided to tack on and stick with come hell or high water.

Quote of the Day: On Justice and Mercy

Father Dwight Longenecker has a interesting post-combo (for lack of a better term) about "Peace and Justice" Catholics and "Purity and Piety Catholics." I think the point of the post is to be irenic, to reconcile both the "conservative" and the "liberal" Catholics. It's practically a work of mercy to do this, and I think he gets some things right and some things wrong:

The left is wrong and the right is wrong and the left is right and the right is right.

Peace and justice Catholics are right to take a prophetic stance against corporate greed, governments that engage in unjust war, the destruction of the environment, racism and any form of injustice. They are right to stand up for the poor, the marginalized and those on the margins of society. They are wrong, however, when they foster dissent in the church and turn a blind eye to the moral teachings and the authority of the Catholic church. 

Too often when the Peace and Justice Catholics demand peace they really mean the appeasement of evil. Too often they mistake pacifism for peace. Similarly, they too often they call for justice for some oppressed group, but never think that justice would also judge their moral laxity. Why don’t the Peace and Justice Catholics demand justice for the millions of unborn babies that have been slaughtered? 

On the other side, the Piety and Purity conservatives are all for “family values”. They are opposed to same sex marriage, contraception, abortion and divorce. However they are too often silent about the injustice in our society. I’m shocked at the anti-semitism and subtle racism I sometimes hear within their ranks. I’m worried when their conservative family values are equated with a jingoistic, uncritical American patriotism and militarism. Why are the silent about the assault on the environment, the plight of immigrants and the widening wealth disparity in the developed world? Why do we hear so little about their involvement in the fight against hunger and solidarity with the poor? Why are they so often dismissive and hateful of everyone not like themselves?

He then goes on to say that we should all strive to be "Justice and Mercy" Catholics, a point I agree with. But. It seems like in the hurry to try and appeal to both sides, these kinds of posts often alienate a lot of people. My main beef is that while he picks on two sides which do exist, one of these two sides has a lot more representatives than the other.

His "silly caricature" of the liberal Catholics actually does describe many of the liberal Catholics I know. They say that it's important to care about the poor and downtrodden, and place primary concern on "social justice," then decide that social justice is best applied to calling for open borders and in-state tuition for "undocumented immigrants" and greater government social spending (a few of the better ones do, to their credit, volunteer in food pantries and soup kitchens and the like). And perhaps just as often, while they call of the government to spend more and more to accomplish less and less in the name of their faith, they openly oppose any attempts to regulate abortions, and (even more commonly) actively support the so-called "gay agenda" up to and including spending their time calling those of us who support traditional marriage bigots (I once was called this by a liberal Catholic friend for saying that I thought the sacrament of Holy Matrimony could only be received by a man and a woman regardless of what society as a whole does).

On the other hand, I find that his "silly caricature" of the "Piety and Purity" (conservative) Catholics really is mostly a caricature. I know one or two Catholics who are like this, but most of the conservative Catholics I know still do care about (and even volunteer to help) the poor and downtrodden, even if we exclude the poorest and most downtrodden of all (the unborn, and for that matter women in "crisis pregnancies"). Perhaps it is because I don't frequent the Latin Mass.

It seems to me that there is a second problem, related to the first. Suppose we grant the caricatures (e.g. that the "Purity and Piety" crowd is surly and grumpy and looks down on others, that the "Peace and Justice" crowd openly undermines Church authority, gleefully subverts the Church's doctrines, and actively flaunts the Church's moral teachings). Which is worse? The former is bad, I'll grant, in that it turns people off to the Church. But the latter is worse, in that it turns people off to the Church while saying that the Church is not something which is worth heeding even in principle. It muddies the waters, so that those who want to figure out what the Church really does teach are left confused.

I agree with Fr Longenecker, though, that both camps have room for improvement, and I like the "Justice and Mercy" idea, though I think that a better summary would be to say that the conservatives want justice without mercy, and the liberals want mercy without justice.