Far from acknowledging this diagnosis, state-level Republican parties have decided instead to engage in classic projection. They’re telling youth and minorities “We want you to get better, we want you to come around to our way of thinking, but until you do, for your own safety, we don’t think it’s a good idea for you to vote.”

It has been called repugnant, vile, and of course stupid. Personally, even though I disagree with its anti-choice message, I think it’s a friggin’ brilliant piece of trolling from a conservative in a safe district. If I were in a similar position on the other side of the aisle and wanted to give my supporters an opportunity to snicker at opposition media going bananas, I’d probably go with “Support Mexican Muslim Faggots Taking Our Jobs: Vote Brad!”

Indeed, in the case of Brill-ish reformers, coming at the healthcare issue from the left, it’s almost impossible to separate their message from another message on the left that is, in fact, scary. And what idea is that? It’s the idea that we are spending too much on the sick and the elderly, that we should move toward a “rationalized” system that would measure “Quality Adjusted Life Years” (QALY)—as a prelude, we might note, to some polite form of euthanasia.

We should realize that these aren’t Palinesque fantasies; we should remember that Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, one of the White House architects of the Affordable Care Act, outlined his views on QALY–and also DALY, for Disability Adjusted Life Years–in a 2009 article in The Lancet. And thus it’s easy to see how Sarah Palin’s son Trig, born with Down’s Syndrome, would fare under such a system. Moreover, the rest of us are on notice as well: As Emanuel’s chart on page 428 of the article shows, the very young and the very old will have to prove themselves–that is, prove themselves worthy of our care.

Scaremongering over Ezekiel Emanuel’s paper on the ethics of organ and vaccine scarcity is nothing new. And yes, they ARE Palinesque fantasies. No sensible person could argue that scarce resources such as organs ought not to go to people who will get the most out of them. The patient who’s too old to get a heart transplant because he’s, well, old, is a staple of medical dramas, and every time we have the same reaction. We aren’t happy that the nice old man won’t get a new heart, we think it’s unfortunate, but we don’t think it’s wrong.

Ultimately the issue isn’t that one day some person might use a set of objective criteria to evaluate whether or not you should receive some form of health care. That already happens with some regularity. It’s called triage, and it sucks, but it’s necessary in a situation where you have limited caregivers and many people needing life-saving care. The issue is scarcity. If we allow health care to become increasingly scarce (and thus increasingly expensive), one of two things will happen; a) we will adopt a set of guidelines, driven by metrics like QALY, that allocate care on an impartial, objective basis out of a sense of fairness, or  b) only the well-off will be able to routinely afford health care.

Neither of those options have much appeal, so let’s do the smart thing instead and acknowledge the reality of the situation. As demand for health care increases, so will its cost. We are going to have to pay more for health care. That fact will not change regardless of whether or not the federal government is involved in providing health insurance to individual citizens. We know what happens when we don’t have social safety net programs like Medicare and Medicaid; emergency rooms get clogged with the uninsured, causing those of us who can afford insurance to foot the bill (in the least efficient manner possible) for those who can’t, and in the worst case scenario people die of treatable ailments simply because they’re poor.

Pinkerton’s right in that the government should be spending heavily on medical research for the betterment of all, but that needn’t come at the cost of the safety net. We can and should do both.

Professions with social respect and social capital, like doctors and lawyers, collaborate in the creation of their own standards. The assumption is that those standards are intrinsic to the profession’s goals, and that, therefore, professionals themselves are best equipped to establish and monitor them. Teachers’ standards, though, are imposed from outside — as if teachers are children, or as if teaching is a game.

…

Teachers, like journalists, should have a commitment to truth; like doctors, they have a duty of care. Translating those commitments and duties into a bureaucratized measure of cheating-or-not-cheating diminishes ethics; it turns it into a game. For teachers it is, literally, demoralizing. It severs the moral experience of teaching from the moral evaluation of teaching, which makes it almost impossible for good teachers (in all the senses of “good”) to stay in the system.

This comparison works on multiple levels. For instance, if you are a lifelong smoker and develop emphysema, and your doctor tells you to quit smoking or die within a year, nobody blames the doctor if you continue smoking and one day keel over. We know that many and varied factors, from parent involvement to nutrition, affect a child’s ability to learn. If a teacher tells a parent “You need to make sure that your kid gets breakfast and help him with his homework” and the parent cannot or will not, can we really blame the teacher when the student falls short?

Standardized test scores are certainly one metric by which teachers can be evaluated, but they can’t be the only or even the primary metric. Teachers ought to be evaluated by other teachers, in person, in a classroom, and in the context of the students they’re given to teach.

For the past three years, the Ortizes’ lives had unfolded in a series of exhausting, fractional decisions. Was it better to eat the string cheese now or to save it? To buy milk for $3.80 nearby or for $3.10 across town? Was it better to pay down the $600 they owed the landlord, or the $110 they owed for their cellphones, or the $75 they owed the tattoo parlor, or the $840 they owed the electric company?

His reaction (and mine), could be politely paraphrased “Wow, it is a really poor choice to be getting a tattoo when you’re on food stamps and owe almost a thousand dollars in electric bills.” (Mine had a lot more four letter words in it.)

The resulting comments on his wall featured two conflicting takes on the style the article was written in. One commenter thought that the author ought to have pointed out the poor choices that the couple made, such as getting pregnant right out of high school, getting a tattoo despite being destitute, or leasing a car at punitive interest rather than buying a beater or taking public transit. The other thought that the author was writing a report rather than an opinion piece, and thus was using an appropriately journalistic neutral viewpoint. As it happens, they’re both wrong.

If this article were really intended to be neutral, it’d be about four lines long. “States where all the food stamps come on the same day have economies with one month boom cycles, which is a bad idea. Also, SNAP doesn’t pay enough to sustain a family of four. By the way, we need to provide daycare so parents can take their time to shop and make sensible purchases. Don’t get a tattoo or lease a new car if you’re poor as hell.” Fin.

The reason the article isn’t four lines long is because it isn’t neutral, which you can determine by looking at the title. “Food stamps put Rhode Island town on monthly boom-and-bust cycle.” Not “poor management of food stamp programs”, just “Food stamps.” A bare minimum of journalistic integrity forces them to point out that other states run their programs differently, but there’s no recommendation for changes to SNAP administration in Rhode Island because that doesn’t help the picture they’re painting.

The author doesn’t bother to pass judgement on anything this young couple does because the Post’s target audience have already made that judgement, the judgement that is at the very center of conservative thought on programs to aid the less fortunate: poor people are poor because they made and continue to make bad decisions. Never mind that they might never have been taught how to make good ones. Their poverty is their fault, and clearly food stamps are not making their lives any better. In fact, they’re probably making them worse!

I really don’t know why this one thing has stuck in my craw so much lately, but I keep getting irritated at the Yahoo telework thing. Perhaps it’s because I have a one hour commute and am trying to start a family myself. Perhaps it’s because I hate what I perceive to be hypocritical behaviour in powerful people. Perhaps I’m a misogynist and I just hate female CEO’s! This is an adventure of self-discovery!

Let’s test that last theory real quick. Female CEO, female CEO, who else is a female CEO?

Meg Whitman! Do I hate Meg Whitman?

…yes, actually, yes I do. Crap.

At any rate. the Yahoo telework decision is a bad one, for two reasons. First, Silicon Valley is known for family friendliness. It’s hard enough for an aged player like Yahoo to attract talent in a world of startups and stock options, and now they’re going to try to recruit without any telework? At that point you may as well just admit that you’re not actually going to recruit anyone, just innovate through acquisition. This isn’t necessarily a bad idea in general, but historically Yahoo has been terrible at it regardless of who’s at the helm.

Second, it’s hypocritical, and it demonstrates poor leadership. There are ways to make this sort of policy change without pissing off your entire workforce. For example, you could simultaneously announce the construction of a new on-campus daycare center, and put former teleworkers with kids first in line. You could start a scholarship program for employees’ children to help put them through school.

Most importantly, you could show some solidarity with your workforce. You could say “I won’t ask my employees to do anything that I won’t do myself.” You could show your people that that yes, the company has fallen on tough times, and unpleasant decisions have to be made, but you are there in the trenches with them, and together you will pull through. You could, in short, leave your kid with a caretaker for eight hours while you go to work like everyone else, rather than build a nursery in your office while your employees scramble to re-arrange their lives by June.

Actions, as they say, speak louder than words, and what Marissa Mayer’s actions say is this: “I have determined that there is a great deal of dead wood in this company, and I am going to get rid of it. I could do so with a chisel and perhaps a small saw, but that would be tedious and time-consuming, so I’ve opted for a flamethrower instead. Apologies to the handful of hard-working, genuinely dedicated members of this team who are now tragically on fire, but I’ve been so wealthy for so long I’m now completely disconnected from the lives of ordinary people, and have come to regard you as an acceptable degree of collateral damage. Good luck in your future endeavours!”

He describes the enjoyment of shooting as though it were some sort of drug, as though the feeling that “You want to do it again, again—again!” is somehow unique to shooting rather than a function of the human mind’s response to doing something it enjoys. People who love running want to keep running. People who love playing squash want to keep playing squash. The statement “…this appetite, this desire for a small, acute struggle that you can win. Win consistently. Repeatedly.” could just as easily refer to someone playing Farmville all day. His description of the phenomenon is factually accurate, but the manner in which he describes it in the context of guns plays right into ignorant fears about them.

He continues the trend with his description of inculcation into the firearms culture, where he is closer to the mark in some ways. Gun enthusiasts are eager to bring new people into the fold, and they do see themselves as embattled and defensive. But, again, this is not unique to the firearms culture. Anyone in a community of people who enjoy something to which the larger community is either indifferent or outright hostile will behave in exactly the same way; they will be happy to see you, they will be highly motivated to help you join them in their activity of choice, and they will provide support “through a series of pats on the shoulder and other encouragements.” What person wouldn’t give the newbie a pat on the shoulder when he’s done well?

I could very nearly perform a simple find/replace on these portions of the article and render them perfectly adequate to describe my experience with fencing, or aikido, or Linux, or Magic: The Gathering, or any number of other hobbies into which I’ve been introduced, shepherded, and inculcated by a community of more experienced enthusiasts. So what is the point of bringing it up in this context? Is he playing to TNR’s audience, which probably already half-believes that guns are an addictive entree into a cult of toothless ammo-hoarding bunker-builders?

This lack of real-world context pervades the entire piece. Yes, owning a gun makes you think in ways that you didn’t previously, makes you consider options and scenarios that might not otherwise occur to you. So does owning a car. I never once considered driving cross-country, or taking up road rallying, or running over my asshole boss until I owned a car to do these things with. Yes, firing a gun can alter your reflexes and make you perceive things differently. So can dance lessons, which is why football players learn ballet to improve their grace. Or competitive debate, which has altered my thought processes so profoundly that I can’t not apply the concept of stock issues to almost every problem I encounter.

If Mr. Kirn’s objective in writing this article was, as the title would indicate, to help people understand gun owners, I would argue that he has mostly failed. He has relayed information about gun owners and gun culture, and he has described what it is like to a fire a gun and why people enjoy it, but he has failed to place any of it in context and make it relatable to the average person. One could argue that he shouldn’t have to, that a reasonable reader would recognize the similarities to their own hobbyist communities and think “Hey, gun people are just like us!” But as I’ve illustrated previously here and here, guns are different. People who don’t understand them are unlikely to think about them or their enthusiasts rationally, and Mr. Kirn knows that, or ought to.

A scant handful of strategically-placed similes could have made this a fantastic piece, one that I’d link to my non-gun friends with direct orders to read it immediately. Instead it just reads like another scare piece. Red meat for TNR’s usual demographic, perhaps, but almost devoid of value in advancing the gun control debate.

Here’s the thing: I do read The New Republic. And The Atlantic, and Salon, and Slate, and Talking Points Memo, every day. This means that every day for the last month I’ve had to choke down articles by writers that I admire and respect who believe that my thoughts on gun control make me some sort of foaming-at-the-mouth NRA asshole sockpuppet, and I’m just about at the end of my rope. So yeah, when we combine the president’s statement that he shoots skeet “all the time” at Camp David with the fact that the White House routinely releases photos of him doing everything short of going to the bathroom, the fact that there are no pictures of him shooting skeet and the White House refuses to release any kinda pisses me off.

I don’t actually care whether or not the president has ever fired a gun. I’m pretty sure that he hasn’t, and I’m pretty sure that if he tried it’d be the bowling fiasco all over again. What bugs me is this; if he does shoot skeet all the time, he ought not to be ashamed of it. There should be pictures. There should be amusing anecdotes about him meeting the editor of Field & Stream and having a conversation about chokes that made him late for a meeting. If I have to hear about the president’s NCAA bracket, I ought to also hear about how he shot 20/25 the other day and is pissed that he whiffed the last five.

The fact that I have neither seen nor heard anything about the president’s gun-related hobby before now means either a) it is a politically expedient fiction, and I am being lied to and, worse, patronized, or b) he genuinely does enjoy shooting sports but doesn’t have the courage to be up front about that fact. The first is infuriating. The second is just depressing, because I think Stewart couldn’t be more wrong about the reaction if President Obama came out as a sport shooter.

Update: Welp, he wasn’t lying!

Don’t get me wrong, Michael Savage is a whackjob. He’s an entertaining whackjob at times, but a whackjob nonetheless. But to derive from this excerpt the idea that he wants a Nazi Tea Party is, frankly, ridiculous.

The Nazi party wasn’t “The Nationalist Party”, it was “The National Socialist Party.” It was a nationalist party, small N, but so are lots of other political parties. In fact, pretty much any political party that appeals to the national identity of the electorate can be called a nationalist party. Anytime you hear someone talk about America as a big melting pot or a place where anyone can succeed, those are nationalist ideas!

Here’s an excerpt from the Democratic party platform:

As Americans, we are bound together by more than nationality or geography. We are bound by a shared set of ideals and values rooted in the notion that we are greater together; that our collective efforts produce something better than the sum of our individual actions; and that together, rather than divided, we can overcome the greatest challenges that come our way.

That is classic civic nationalism, the idea that a group of people from disparate backgrounds voluntarily join together as one nation and work for the collective good.

Dear Cenk: The Democratic Party is a nationalist party with a charismatic leader, reductio at hitlerum is a silly argument to make against Michael Savage when he’s provided you with so many other, more solid reasons to label him a nut, and you’re a toolbox. Do better.

…

Let me paraphrase this gentleman for you all. “When I was 21 and began drinking alcohol, I discovered that it made me feel pretty awesome. Over subsequent years I drank more and more alcohol and continued to feel awesomer and awesomer. As you can see by this chart, I’ve gone from drinking one beer a weekend at age 21 to eighteen beers in an evening at age 40, and my awesome-feeling-ness is off the scale! Why would any rational person ever want to slow or stop their consumption of alcohol?!”

Maybe because it’s turning your liver into a brillo pad?.

Yes, there is a direct correlation between use of fossil fuels and increased standard of living, particularly in the developing world, as anyone who’s seriously examined the issue of climate change can tell you. This is a big sticking point for some of us who believe in the dangers of pumping huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere but are reluctant to tell developing nations “Okay, we had our industrial revolution, but now that we’ve discovered that carbon is bad I’m afraid you can’t have yours. Sorry!” There isn’t an easy answer to this problem, and in my opinion it doesn’t get discussed enough, but that doesn’t mean we just tell the alcoholic how lovely his new yellow eyes look.

I took a hiatus from reading NRO back when Sarah Palin was first published there, and it was with great trepidation that I began reading it again a couple months ago. Now I see that my hesitance and overall sense of dread were well-justified.

Pictured: A man who has forfeited his right to keep and bear digits.

That’s Virginia Delegate Joe Morrissey. On Thursday January 17th he brought an AK-47 into the Virginia statehouse and waved it around as part of a diatribe on gun control, as you can see in the above image. You can also see that there is a magazine inserted, which may or may not contain ammunition. You can see that the action is closed, which means that there is no way to tell if there is a round in the chamber. And you can see that Delegate Morrissey has his thumb inside the trigger guard. In fact, his thumb is resting against the trigger.

This violates very nearly every rule of firearms safety. Delegate Morrissey assured his colleagues that the weapon was unloaded when he took it out, but a responsible firearms user never assumes or asks another to assume that a weapon is unloaded; he demonstrates it by leaving the action open and the magazine out so that it can easily be seen to be empty. He always points the weapon in a safe direction and in such a way that he can control it, and never at anything he doesn’t intend to shoot.

He never, ever, ever puts his finger on the trigger or even just inside the trigger guard until he is ready to fire.

Now, if you’re in a position where you’re arguing with a second amendment advocate about gun control, chances are good that you’re not going to be handling guns anyway. But if you should find yourself in a situation where, as part of a debate, you have to demonstrate something with a firearm, for God’s sake learn the basics of firearms safety before you do. Not only will you have a drastically lower chance of hurting anyone, you’ll also avoid looking like an ass to the people you’re trying to persuade.

I, [name], do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God.

On day one of my employment in federal service, the very first thing we did was take the oath, myself and about twenty other people. I didn’t go so far as to tear up, but it was an emotional moment for me. I work for the DoD on things that soldiers will actually use in defense of the country someday, so I take the whole thing pretty seriously, and am proud of my small contribution. (We also signed away our right to strike, incidentally, but that’s a topic for another day.)

I said the “So help me God.” part as well, despite not really believing that God was paying particular attention to me taking my oath. I believe in the existence of a God (albeit in a somewhat unconventional manner, as I’ve discussed previously) so the oath didn’t present any particular difficulty for me. But if I were an atheist or secular humanist or whatever, it still wouldn’t have been a problem. That “or affirm” part in the oath is there for people like Quakers whose beliefs forbid them swearing by God, or for atheists and similar who don’t believe God exists. You just say “I do solemnly affirm” instead of “I do solemnly swear”, then leave “So help me God” off at the end, and Robert’s your father’s brother.

I bring this up because I’ve just gotten word that some dudes in Arizona’s state legislature (the Keystone Kops of lawmaking) have proposed that teenagers be required to take a loyalty oath prior to receiving their high school diploma. (you know, that thing that drastically reduces their risk of ending up below the poverty line and starting a meth kitchen) It reads like this:

I do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose or evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; so help me God.

Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the only duty we’re asking of these kids is to grin and bear it when we make them wear a mortarboard and pose for a zillion pictures with their grandmother while wearing a polyester bed sheet, have you noticed what’s missing from that oath? Yep, it’s the “affirm” bit. And believe me, that is not by accident. That oath is taken almost word for word from the civil service oath, which includes the opt-out for atheists. So does the oath of enlistment sworn by every service member. And the oath sworn by members of Congress. And both of the oaths sworn by Supreme Court Justices. And the one sworn by the President. Pretty much anywhere these asshats might have looked to copy/paste, it’s there, including their own goddamn oath of office.

So no, this wasn’t an accident, an oversight, or an honest mistake made by some intern. Arizonan legislators want high schoolers to promise to be good God-fearin’ murricans before they can have the diploma they spent four years earning. Because, you know, teenagers are unfailingly honest and always do what they say they will. Totally.

For example, let’s say that your state has three congressional districts. 66% of the state’s population is registered with Party A, and 34% is registered with Party B. You’d imagine, then, that generally speaking two seats would go to Party A and one to Party B.

But if Party B happens to be in control of the state legislature, they may try to draw a single congressional district that contains most of the Party A voters. That leaves two districts with a slim majority in their favor. Suddenly the state’s congressional delegation is no longer representative of the actual political makeup of the state.

Depending on how shameless the party in power is willing to be, gerrymandering can get pretty ridiculous. Witness Maryland’s 3rd congressional district:

I wonder how they decided where to put the three?

Gerrymandering is one of the biggest reasons for the current stark difference in composition between the Senate and the House of Representatives. Each state only gets two senate seats that are filled by a statewide popular vote, thus making them impossible to gerrymander. As a result, the Senate is more representative of the actual political makeup of the individual states, and of the nation as a whole.

There are a handful of good reasons why congressional districts might need to be funkily-shaped. Certain demographics that genuinely represent an appropriate voting block are not always geographically unified. If all of a state’s arable land is adjacent to a particularly twisty river you may end up with a pretty twisty-looking congressional district, but that doesn’t mean that your state’s farmers shouldn’t have a dedicated voice in Congress.

Unfortunately we must balance that reasonable requirement against the increasingly flagrant abuses of the districting system. A couple of weeks back a writer at The National Review suggested that a Republican return to the presidency might be facilitated by awarding electoral votes based on gerrymandered congressional districts. When the balance of the Virginia state senate was momentarily compromised by one Democrat’s decision to attend President Obama’s second inauguration, Republican senators seized the opportunity to pass a districting plan that would tip the state legislature in their favor, on a 20-19 vote.

We can no longer trust our elected representatives to use their districting authority in a manner consistent with democracy. Any attempt to persuade them to behave selflessly in the cause of truly representative government will be met with blank stares and an attitude of “But then we might lose!”

How, then, do we achieve a representative congressional delegation? Simple geometric districts may unduly lessen the impact of important demographics, as with our farmers example, but letting elected officials draw districts clearly isn’t working either. Where is the happy medium?

Here’s my idea. First, we allow each party in the state to nominate a slate of candidates for the state’s congressional delegation. The number of candidates each party nominates may not exceed 75% of the total number of congressional seats allotted to the state, rounded down. Once the slates are nominated, the state holds an instant-runoff vote. Each voter ranks the pool of candidates in order of preference. The results are tabulated, and the most-preferred candidates fill the available congressional seats in rank order.

This is a bit complicated in the abstract, so let’s see how it would work with an example state. We’ll use New York. New York has 29 seats in Congress. Each party would be allotted 21 slots (75% of 29, rounded down) for their slate of congressional candidates. Each party would hold a primary to pick their 21 candidates and nominate them. On election day you end up with 42 candidates to rank in order of preference.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking “Brad, that’s retarded. I’m not going to stand there and rank 42 people that I barely know anything about. I’d be there for an hour, lines at polls would be ridiculous, etc.” You’re right! It would be ridiculous. Fortunately, the whole thing still works even if you only pick your top three or so and leave the rest blank.

If you’re a farmer, chances are you’re going to be familiar with the top three farm-friendly candidates because you’ll have heard about them from other farmers, or they’ll have done a couple events in your area. Ditto for business-friendly candidates, or LGBT-friendly candidates, or whatever. Your top three candidates are going to be people who are somehow in your social or business sphere, and that ensures that important demographics get representation without having to endure retarded congressional districting. And because no party can nominate an entire congressional delegation we ensure that the minority party is always represented to some degree.

If you have thoughts on or criticisms of this idea I’d love to hear them. As I’ve always said, no idea is worth a crap if it hasn’t been debated, and you can’t really have a proper debate with yourself unless you happen to be schizophrenic.

Edit: I had it in my head that a small number of states elected their senators by district, it turns out that this is only the case in state legislatures. At the national level all senators are elected by statewide vote. This article has been updated to reflect that.

This is a tough one. On the one hand, the AWD will give you improved traction in rain and snow, which could help you avoid an accident. On the other hand, FWD is also pretty good in crappy conditions, gets better mileage, and costs $3k less. After due consideration you decide on the FWD option, and save yourself $3k up front and around three miles per gallon on the highway.

The next day you and your family are out and about on a Sunday drive in your new SUV when a freak snowstorm blows in. Conditions are getting bad in a big hurry. You’re looking for a safe place to pull over when suddenly you lose control of the vehicle and swerve into the opposite lane, hitting a car coming the other way. The occupant of the oncoming car is killed instantly. Once you’ve recovered and been released from the hospital, you are visited by an attorney. He informs you that the other driver’s family is suing you for being a poor driver, the state for not sanding the highway soon enough, and Mazda for not putting AWD in your car.

At this point you are doubtless thinking “Why the hell would they sue Mazda?”, and quite likely “Why the hell are you telling me this story?” Allow me to explain.

A couple days ago Andrew Cohen at The Atlantic wrote about a conversation he had with Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA). The topic: The Protection of Legal Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from liability resulting from misuse of their products by others, i.e. if I buy a Glock and shoot someone with it, or use the gun improperly and shoot myself, nobody can turn around and sue Glock for making the gun that he was shot with.

Rep. Schiff believes that firearms manufacturers and dealers don’t need or merit any special protection, and that exposure to greater liability will incentivize them to make safer products. He’d like to see the PLCAA repealed. On its face that’s a basically reasonable argument, but in trying to explain his stance he ends up demonstrating why the law may actually be necessary.

Rep. SCHIFF: Two cases that are illustrative of the way PLCAA has protected companies from being sued for negligence are the Adames case in Illinois and the Kimcase in Alaska. In the Adames’ case, a young boy was accidently shot and killed by a friend who did not realize that his father’s handgun could fire a chambered round even after removing the ammunition clip. The boy’s parents sued Beretta, the maker of the gun, for negligently failing to install a one dollar safety device that keeps a gun from firing without a clip inserted. Were it not for PLCAA, the case would have proceeded to a jury and we could have seen reforms in the gun industry that would prevent other accidental shooting deaths at virtually no cost. Instead, the case was dismissed.

In the second case, a gun dealer in Alaska had a man come into his store carrying a garbage bag full of clothes and exhibiting strange and troubling behavior. When the man asked to see a rifle, the gun dealer left him alone with the weapon and came back later to find the gun gone and $200, the price of the gun, left on the counter. Shortly thereafter, the buyer shot and killed an innocent bystander named Simone Young Kim. Kim’s family sued the dealer for acting negligently in failing to secure his inventory and allowing the shooter, who was obviously disturbed, easy access to weapons. The district court dismissed the case, finding that PLCAA forbid the lawsuit from going forward. [Editor's note: The Atlantic's prior coverage of the Kim case can be found here. The case is currently on appeal to the Alaska Supreme Court.]

The key in both these cases is that if the product in question were anything other than a firearm, the plaintiff would be entitled to try to prove their case to a jury. They would be able to make motions for discovery of evidence relevant to their case. And ultimately whether anyone acted negligently would be decided by a jury of their peers. PLCAA denies the victims of gun violence and their families their day in court, and in doing so it protects the worst actors in the industry.

I am bang alongside Schiff on the second case. If you’re a firearms dealer and allow a weapon to walk out the door through your own inattentiveness, you’re at fault, no question. The first case, however, is more representative of the sort of lawsuit that the PLCAA is meant to prevent and is almost entirely without merit.

The case in question, Adames v. Beretta, is a sad story. A kid at home by himself finds some guns belonging to his father, who is a prison guard. One of these is a loaded Beretta 92FS. He’s never seen a gun, never used a gun, and doesn’t read the instruction manual. He manages to eject the magazine, puts it back in, cycles a couple rounds through the gun without firing it, ejects the magazine again and, because he doesn’t know anything about guns, assumes that it is now empty and therefore safe. When a friend comes over to play, the kid points the gun at his friend and pulls the trigger, discharging the still-chambered round that he doesn’t know is there and shooting his friend in the stomach. The friend dies and his family sues the local sheriff’s department, the father, and the manufacturer of the gun, Beretta.

The plaintiffs assert that the design of the gun was faulty, and that Beretta was negligent in not including:

• A better, more visible loaded-chamber indicator
• A warning that the gun could be fired with the magazine ejected.
• A magazine disconnect (the $1 safety device that Rep. Schiff refers to)

The first two complaints are prima facie bullshit. A more visible loaded-chamber indicator isn’t likely to have done anything to help someone who hadn’t first read the manual to learn what the indicator was and what it signified. That unread manual also included a warning to remove the magazine and clear the chamber to make the weapon safe.

Where the plaintiffs make a more compelling but still flawed argument is the magazine disconnect. A magazine disconnect is a feature that you find on some semi-automatic pistols. If no magazine is inserted the trigger is disconnected and will not fire the gun, thus preventing exactly this sort of accident; someone who doesn’t understand how semi-autos work and thinks that the magazine represents all the bullets in the gun accidentally fires it and hurts themselves or others. Schiff asserts that failure to include one in the design of the gun constitutes negligence. This is a great example of someone who apparently doesn’t know much about firearms or their users making a judgement about them anyway.

People who routinely carry guns for their defense demand one very specific feature from them, the most important feature any gun can have; when they pull the trigger, it goes bang. Doesn’t matter if it’s dusty, or hasn’t been cleaned in a while, or has been riding on their hip all day getting bumped into stuff when they get in and out of their car. Every time, 100% of the time, pull trigger: bang. After all, their life could very well depend on it. Consequently, they tend to pay a lot of attention to the balance of reliability versus safety. Safety features tend to add complexity, and complexity means more finicky, hard-to-maintain little parts, and thus more points of failure. (And while the individual safety features may not have a very high per-unit cost, getting them on a weapon from a manufacturer that you trust to implement them reliably means an overall higher cost per weapon for the user.) As Beretta’s witness testified at the time, magazine disconnects have never been popular with law enforcement. There’s a chance that if the magazine is just slightly dislodged, or seems to be fully inserted but isn’t, you end up with the nightmare scenario: you draw, take aim, and squeeze the trigger:

Click.

What I’m getting at here is that buying a firearm is a lot like buying anything else: You assess the available features and do a cost-benefit analysis for each, make your decision based on that analysis, and live with the consequences of that decision. If you decide that the added traction and control of AWD isn’t worth the increase in total cost of ownership, nobody gets to sue Mazda when you have a crash in a snowstorm. You chose the car, the results of that choice are your fault.

If you buy a gun without a magazine disconnect, it is incumbent on you to keep it away from people who don’t know how to use it properly. In fact, magazine disconnect or no, it’s always your responsibility to keep your guns away from people who don’t know how to use them properly, and if such a person gets a hold of your gun and hurts themselves or others with it, that’s your fault.

Looked at in a vacuum the PLCAA does seem stupid. It basically reads “You can’t sue gun manufacturers or dealers for stuff that isn’t their fault.” Why the hell do we need a law that states the obvious, or as Rep. Schiff would have it, extends certain protections to one industry above and beyond all others? But as we’ve discussed previously, society holds guns, their users, and their manufacturers to a different and arguably unfair standard. Say “I’m going to sue Mazda for offering the CX-5 in FWD, they should only offer it in AWD because it’s safer.” and people will give you a very odd look. Say “I’m going to sue Beretta for not putting a magazine disconnect in their pistols to make them safer.” and they will nod sagely and say something like “Yes, we must compel the gun manufacturers to make safer weapons. For too long they have profited from human misery without taking responsibility for etc etc.”

In that context the PLCAA makes more sense. There’s no good reason to protect gun manufacturers or dealers from the results of their own negligence, but there’s also no excusing society’s willingness to blame them for things that aren’t their fault.

Anyhoo, the topic of the day was feminism, which for me normally falls into “Yep” territory, or sometimes “Meh.” One of the clips was from the Media Matters Minute, and featured Dana Perino and Bill O’Reilly engaging in some rape victim-blaming. The narrator/commentator/whateverator concluded that “Some people do engage in high-risk behaviours, but only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime of sexual assault. Anyone asserting otherwise only serves to explain away murder and rape.”

It is of course reprehensible to blame rape victims, but the absolutist phrasing of the statement bugged me for some reason.

I enjoy scuba diving, which can be a risky hobby. If I go scuba diving, there is a non-zero chance that my equipment will malfunction or I will make some stupid mistake, and I will drown. In that scenario my death is entirely my fault. The ocean did not decide to drown me; its nature is that it is not breathable, and I chose to take a chance by immersing myself in it.

Some women enjoy jogging alone at night or going out to bars in minimal dress, which can be risky behaviours. If they are sexually assaulted, common sense tells us that the assault is not their fault, that someone decided to assault them and that person is to blame. All good so far.

But how does this argument stand up in the face of evidence that a person’s chances of becoming a criminal are heavily influenced by factors that are entirely out of their control? Anything from the lead content of their water to whether or not they were an unwanted child to abuse by their parents can dramatically increase their chances of eventually becoming a criminal.

Development of criminal tendencies seems to be deterministic, at least to some degree. If we believe that, then the rapist becomes more like the ocean. He didn’t necessarily decide to be a rapist, that decision could have been made for him before he was even born. In that context, the statement “only the perpetrator is responsible for the crime of sexual assault” seems unreasonable. It certainly isn’t the victim’s fault, but that doesn’t mean that the perpetrator is entirely to blame, nor that the victim’s actions aren’t causative in the same way that my decision to scuba dive is causative.

I don’t think I buy that argument, and even if it panned out I don’t think it would have any implications for treatment of victims or sentencing of perpetrators. If I were to drown tomorrow I don’t think anybody would show up to my funeral and say “Silly bastard, what’d he think was gonna happen when he tried to breathe underwater?” any more than I’d tell a rape victim “Well yeah, I mean look how you’re dressed!” Victims deserve our help and our sympathy. And even if a person’s criminal tendencies aren’t their own fault, those tendencies need to be corrected in him and discouraged in others via negative consequences.

The one way in which it might affect my thinking is in the area of sympathy for the perpetrator. Not to excuse his crime or to minimize the suffering of his victim, but simply to feel bad for a thing that doesn’t even know why it’s broken.

This was immediately misinterpreted in two ways. First, “I didn’t see any armed guards around the president when he made his announcement.” Not what I meant. Second, “So I guess all gun laws are bad?” Also really not what I meant, and a point which I thought I’d made pretty thoroughly. Apparently not. So I’m going to take a look at several new gun laws that have been proposed lately, and I’ll tell you what I think of them. If you disagree with my assessment by all means please comment.

California SB 108, California State Senator Leland Yee (D-San Mateo): Not Bad

In brief, this bill would require you to secure your firearms in one of a handful of approved ways before leaving them unattended in your home, in order to prevent children or other unauthorized persons from using them. Punishment is a series of increasing fines followed by jail time for repeat offenders, though it’s genuinely hard to imagine how you could offend more than twice.

The Good: You ought to be doing this anyway, nobody wants their kid to hurt or kill themselves with an unattended weapon. Plus, the law doesn’t apply so long as you’re in your home, which means that self-defense impacts will be minimal.

The Bad: There’s a bunch of other crap tacked on like raising the minimum age to own a firearm to 21, which is asinine when any 18 year old can join the Army and be issued a weapon. Also, there may be an economic impact for some gun owners, as gun safes really are not cheap.

The WTF: The law applies to flare guns, which seems a bit odd.

HR 142, Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY): Really Not Good

This bill would require that all ammunition purchases be made face to face, that ammunition vendors be licensed, and that bulk ammunition purchases be reported to the federal government.

The Good: I can’t find any. No, seriously, I can’t.

The Bad: First of all (and this is my big problem with various schemes to make ammunition trackable) you never want to do anything to increase the cost or decrease the availability of ammo if you can possibly avoid it. If a person is going to own a firearm they should practice with it regularly. Good practice involves a fair amount of ammo. Make ammo more expensive, average gun owners are incentivized to practice less. End result: less skilled shooters who are less familiar with their weapons and more likely to have an accident and injure themselves or others. Second, the reporting threshold (1000 rounds over five consecutive days) is high enough that the reporting is basically useless. Even a quarter of that amount is enough to kill a great many people. And finally, the bill apparently makes no distinction between calibers, which is really stupid. I can drive to a sporting goods store right now and buy a thousand rounds of .22LR for less than thirty dollars. In fact, there’s an excellent chance that I’ll do exactly that in the near future! This is not because my wacko militia leadership told me to stockpile in case of zombies. It’s for the same reason that I shop at BJ’s; .22LR is cheap in bulk and I like saving money.

Assault Weapon Bans (various), Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), President Barack Obama, et al: Horrible

The Good: Some of the policy proposals that these bans are attached to are quite good, particularly the president’s proposals to lift the de facto moratorium on gun violence research and increase access to mental health care.
The Bad: The bans themselves are crap, as I’ve explained previously. Pistol grips and collapsible stocks don’t increase lethality, just convenience. Smaller magazines are no impediment to a shooter who has practiced rapid reloading. Broadly-written “military characteristics” make for ridiculous outcomes, like Senator Feinstein wanting to outlaw my little .22 pop-gun.There is a reason why gun owners overwhelmingly support increased background checks and oppose assault weapon bans: we’ve got a pretty good idea what will work and what won’t, and an assault weapons ban won’t accomplish squat apart from inconveniencing those of us that actually obey the law.

There is such a thing as good gun control. There is a distinction between good gun law and bad gun law. Not all gun owners are opposed to all gun laws, just the ones that needlessly curtail our rights, or give a false sense of accomplishment without providing any real benefit apart from auto-backslapping.

First: the criticism that the CDC study I linked to for firearms-related deaths also had a section on alcohol-related deaths, which numbered only 25K or so. That CDC study explicitly states that the 25k figure does not include alcohol-related homicides such as deaths caused by drunk drivers, nor does it include deaths from fetal alcohol syndrome or other “indirect” causes of death. Part of my argument that I should have made more explicitly is that alcohol and firearms are both things that are not inherently evil, but evil things happen when they are abused. Alcohol poisoning, death as a result of drunk driving, babies that die due to fetal alcohol syndrome, and other indirect results of alcohol abuse are nonetheless results, which is why I used a total that included them. I cited that particular article because I couldn’t find the original HHS study that it cited, though numbers from 75K to 85k are referenced by a variety of substance abuse prevention groups. I’ll keep looking, though, because good data is important.

Second: the criticism that alcohol and guns is not an apples to apples comparison. True enough, they’re not exactly the same, but I thought it worthwhile to point out the ways in which they are similar and yet are treated differently by society. Again, they are both things some of us enjoy that are generally fine when used responsibly, but potentially deadly otherwise. There are other analogies that I could have used (cars spring immediately to mind), but I chose alcohol in particular because, as I stressed in the article, it is a thing that we cherish despite it being a) prima facie harmful and b) without practical value.

One commenter asserted that alcohol is not routinely the proximate cause of another person’s death, and that may be the case. I haven’t been able to find good national data on alcohol-related vehicular homicides and similar deaths. But that argument assumes that only direct harms matter, and that death is the only significant harm. There are innumerable direct and indirect ways in which one person’s alcohol abuse harms others. Alcohol abuse contributes to health care costs, to the tune of $224 billion in 2011. Alcoholism destroys families and leaves children with mental health issues that follow them into adulthood. Further, if we are to assume that only a person’s effect on another person is worth arguing and what a man does to himself is his own business, why do gun control advocates bother mentioning the number of gun suicides, which account for about 30% of all gun-related deaths?

Propose to a group of people that we ban all guns and at least a few of them will agree with you. Propose to that same group that we ban all alcohol and you’re likely to get the “what planet are you from?” look. Even if you take a less absolutist stance along the lines of “everyone who wants to buy a gun should have a license” and “everyone who wants to buy whiskey should have a license”, you’ll get the same reaction. Despite the fact that alcohol directly and indirectly kills twice as many people a year as firearms and causes a host of other social ills besides, the notion of regulating it in the same manner strikes people as very odd. This bias, this sense that guns are somehow different from other things that’ll kill us if we abuse them or let the wrong people have them means that gun enthusiasts are constantly operating at an unjustified disadvantage.

This leads into the third criticism, the “I know you support mandatory registration and training for firearms, so that means you must support it for alcohol too.” This is a fair point, so let me clarify my position.

One way in which alcohol and guns are very different is that alcohol is a part of everyday life for the vast and overwhelming majority of people in this country. Everyone drinks, and most people have been really drunk at least once or twice in their lives. This means that pretty much everyone over the age of thirty or so is enough of a booze-veteran that they can help shepherd less experienced people into responsible drinking habits, or at least intervene before anyone does anything too stupid. Additionally, we routinely educate young people on the hazards of binge drinking and driving drunk at home, at school, and in media.

The same cannot be said for guns. It’s difficult to get a precise number, but reasonable estimates put the percentage of American homes with a firearm at around thirty to forty percent. In the majority of those households the firearm is not likely to be a part of everyday life to nearly the same extent as alcohol. My father owned multiple shotguns and a rifle when I was a kid, but because I never displayed any interest in hunting he never brought them up. I didn’t actually learn how many weapons he owned until I developed an interest in my late twenties.

We also don’t teach responsible use of firearms in schools in the same way that we teach the dangers of alcohol, and realistically there isn’t any reason to. “Don’t drink and drive” is a far more valuable lesson for the average young person than “Finger off the trigger until you’re ready to fire” or “Always treat a gun as through it’s loaded even when you know it isn’t.”

For me this fundamental difference goes a long way towards justifying reactive control of alcohol versus proactive control of firearms. A license to buy alcohol strikes me as silly, whereas a license to buy a gun, though I’m not really in love with the idea, makes more sense, and seems like the least harmful sop we could offer to those demanding additional gun control measures rather than addressing root causes of violence, like poverty. What I remain resolutely opposed to, however, is a blanket ban on particular types of guns. I just don’t think that it’s justified, nor do I think that it will be particularly effective. If the civilian market demands a particular degree of lethality then manufacturers will find a way to provide it, or individuals will innovate their way to it using the spectrum of permitted weapons, and to hell with any ban.

I think a more justifiable and effective measure would be to license people to own classes of weapons, in much the same way that we license people to fly classes of aircraft. You can’t get certified in your Cessna and immediately hop into a 747 cockpit; there’s an excellent chance you’d crash into the terminal or something and God knows how many people you’d kill. Generally speaking a gun is a gun is a gun, but a standardized certification process for each class of weapon would help us ensure that the people who purchase guns know how to use and maintain them properly. More importantly, it would give us a chance to thoroughly inculcate them into a culture of responsible firearms ownership, with an emphasis on safety and defensive use.

The best part is that once the initial outrage dies out, I’ll bet that licensing for classes of firearms will, over time, become wildly popular with the majority of gun enthusiasts. Getting qualified for a particular weapon will become a source of pride even if you never actually buy the weapon in question. We could issue photo IDs akin to driver’s licenses, with your info and the classes of firearms that you’re qualified for, and I’ll bet people would eat it up. Most importantly, every time they come in to recertify or to get qualified on a new weapon is another opportunity to hammer the message of safe and responsible gun ownership into them, and make that message as reflexive as “don’t drink and drive.”

So to sum up, the point I was trying to make is that we should try to regulate dangerous things in a consistent and logical way while doing our best to step on people’s civil liberties as little as possible. Society has looked at the harms that alcohol brings and decided “Yep, worth it.”, but guns are somehow different despite being arguably less harmful, and that’s bullshit.

Hopefully this is a clearer version of the idea I was trying to get across.

People who don’t like firearms like to point out that their only purpose is to kill things. That’s pretty much true, and I’d take it a step further and say that that’s okay. It’s okay that an implement exists solely to kill things, because the world is such that sometimes things need to die. Settlers needed to put food on the table, the Axis powers needed to be driven out of Europe, police have to stop dangerous criminals, etc. We are an imperfect race in an imperfect world, and so long as that is the case there will be a need for instruments of death. If you believe otherwise then you are probably a much nicer person than I, albeit remarkably and dangerously naive.

Firearm-related deaths in the US average around 30K per year.

So firearms have a purpose, one that is useful albeit distasteful to some. Some things serve no purpose apart from our entertainment, like alcohol. An argument can be made for its religious and cultural significance, but apart from those intangibles alcohol is our species’  least constructive hobby. It may have once served as a safe alternative to water since boiling is often one step in its production, but apart from that we’ve kept it around just for giggles. We intentionally drink a toxin that impairs our judgment, trashes our livers, and reduces our lifespans (sometimes quite abruptly) for fun, and that’s okay too. In fact it’s so okay that when a group of people tried to save us from ourselves and outlawed alcohol entirely, we as a nation willingly chose to support the greatest surge in violent crime in our nation’s history and create organized crime as we know it today rather than do the rational thing and just stop drinking. I’m glad we did, too, because few things in this world make me happier than a gin and tonic on a nice summer evening, preferably on the deck of a very large boat.

Alcohol-related deaths average more than twice those of firearms at around 75K per year.

Here’s the favor I’d like to ask of all of you. The next time you hear someone suggest a new piece of gun control legislation, do a quick sanity check and give it the alcohol test. Replace “gun” in the sentence with something that you really like, but which is less than half as useful and kills more than twice as many people every year.

“Would you support background checks for alcohol purchases?”

“Do you believe that there should be more stringent requirements for the purchase of more powerful forms of alcohol, such as Scotch?”

“Some forms of alcohol serve no purpose other than to get you drunk really quickly. Do ordinary people really need those types of alcohol? Would it really be so bad if we outlawed them?”

And my personal favorite, “If only we could outlaw alcohol there’d be no more alcohol-related deaths!” Poignant, that one.

Yes, I’m aware that this is not an apples to apples comparison. Not only am I aware of it, my argument hinges on it. Let me remind you once more, alcohol serves no useful purpose. Zip, zero, nada. If you can’t even justify a background check for the more powerful variants of everyone’s favorite useless party toxin, how do you justify outlawing more effective variants of the tool that enables me to defend myself? If you consider yourself even somewhat rational or reasonable, I don’t think you can.

RAR!

When depicted to scale, however, it is clearly quite wee.

This one’s mine. Isn’t it cute?

The P22 is a training weapon, meant to familiarize users with Walther’s full-size offerings like the P99 (a perennial Bond gun since the Brosnan era, and one of my favourite handguns). It is also very popular as a recreational/practice gun, what we call a “plinker.”

As the name might lead you to guess, it fires the .22LR round, the itty-bittiest of the common handgun calibers.

This one.

I bought myself a P22 a couple weeks ago for a bit more than $300. I’d been thinking about getting one for some time for the same reasons that most gun people sooner or later get themselves a plinker in .22. Going to the range is fun, practice is important, and ammo is expensive. But .22 ammo is cheap and easily bought in bulk, and a short-barrel plinker like the P22 is a challenge to fire accurately, making for good practice. In short, it’s an ideal gun for someone who enjoys pistol marksmanship but doesn’t want to blow all his disposable income on ammunition.

Just one problem: Dianne Feinstein considers it an assault weapon.

The P22 comes with a threaded barrel, which means that you can attach things to the end of it. You could attach a compensator, which would reduce the gun’s tendency to kick upwards. You could attach a muzzle booster, which captures some of the explosive force of the gunpowder in order to make the gun operate more reliably. Alas, this also means that you can attach a suppressor, which is where we run into trouble.

Crap.

A leaked draft of Senator Feinstein’s new assault weapons ban includes a clause that would categorize any handgun with a threaded barrel as an assault weapon and cause it to fall under the National Firearms Act. That would mean that it has to be registered with the ATF, and requires a $200 tax stamp from the IRS. This requirement is enforced regardless of whether the owner also owns a suppressor.

Funny thing about suppressors; they’re a real pain in the ass to own. They’re expensive to buy, plus they’re regulated under the National Firearms Act. This means that they have to be registered with the ATF, and require a $200 tax stamp…from the…hey, wait a minute!

That’s right, suppressors are already heavily regulated. You have to obtain permission to purchase them, both from local law enforcement and the ATF, submit to a background check, and provide passport photos and fingerprints. Then, assuming your application isn’t denied (which is a real possibility) you pay your $200 transfer tax and are allowed to take possession of your suppressor, which in the case of the P22 will allow you to shoot tin cans and paper targets somewhat more quietly than you had done previously.

If Senator Feinstein gets her way I will be given the opportunity to undergo all the aforementioned permission-asking and background-checking, plus paying 66% of the purchase price in taxes, just to retain possession of a firearm I already legally own. Or I suppose I could just surrender it to the government.

And the best part? My Colt 1911 in .45ACP, which is huge and menacing, made in America of solid steel, shoots a bullet the size of a grape that makes a wound channel the size of a pumpkin, and practically has “Yippee-Ki-Yay Motherfucker!” etched into the slide? No change, near as I can tell. None whatsoever.

See the last sentence of that paragraph? Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Kind of out of place, kind of odd and pointless. The people of Latinia (Latinoria? Latinland? Wherever it is they speak Latin) have a term for this sort of thing. They call it a non sequitur, or “it does not follow.” It is about non sequiturs that I wish to speak to you today, particularly in the context of a term that didn’t originate in Latinistan; the filibuster.

We all know what a filibuster is, right? Once upon a time it meant that a senator would slow or stop the progress of a bill by standing at the podium and talking non-stop for as long as he could manage. (insert reference to Strom “I’ll Fuck ‘Em But I Won’t Let ‘Em Use My Water Fountain” Thurmond’s famous filibuster here.) Lately it just means that a senator signals his intent to filibuster and all progress on a bill stops until sixty or more of his colleagues decide that he’s a schmuck and vote to continue.

Lately filibusters by the Republican minority have become common, so common in fact that in early December Minority Leader Mitch McConnell opened his mouth and actually said “Matters of this level of controversy always require 60 votes.”, as though it were somehow codified. (The fact that he said this while filibustering his own bill just makes it worse.)

Trust me, that is not the case. Defenders of the filibuster insist that the Senate was meant to be the slower, more deliberate half of the legislature, and that may very well be the case, but there’s a difference between “deliberate” and “gridlocked.” If the Founders had intended for matters of importance to require a 60 vote threshold they could have said so in the Constitution. In fact, I can think of two places off the top of my head where they did specify such a threshold; amendments to the Constitution require a two-thirds majority, as does the ejection of a sitting member of Congress. Everything else can be decided by a simple majority, and were it not for the filibuster that would routinely be the case.

To deal with this new not-actually-a-standard requirement of 60 votes to figure out where to go for lunch on Tuesday, some Senate Democrats have proposed some minor changes to the filibuster, namely a) senators will be unable to filibuster to prevent the opening of debate on a bill, and b) senators wishing to filibuster will once again have to actually stand at the podium and talk. This does not, on its face, sound unreasonable, but Republicans are predictably opposed to the idea.

They claim, as summarized here by Hans von Spakovsky, that they’ve been forced into all these filibusters by the tyranny of Harry Reid. He is using a procedure known as “filling the tree” to prevent them from offering amendments to the bills the Senate is considering, and thus debate and even the democratic process itself are subverted. Truly, how can we call ourselves a representative democracy if we don’t permit our representatives to offer their input?

This also sounds reasonable on its face. Democracy (or at least our flavor of it) is about rule by the majority with consideration for the minority. We can’t just tune out everything the minority party is saying simply because we disagree with it, that’s not (in theory) how we roll.

But what sort of amendments are the Republicans offering up, only to be crushed by Harry Reid, Liberal Tyrant? Let’s take the transportation bill from early 2012 as an example. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) offered an amendment to deny aid to Egypt until they released nineteen American citizens that were being detained. Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO) attempted to offer an amendment that would reverse President Obama’s rule requiring contraceptive services as part of employer-provided health insurance.What, precisely, do either of these amendments have to do with transportation? About as much as duck thumbs have to do with Doctor Who.
 
How is it that tacking non-sequiturs that you know are unacceptable to the majority and the President onto important legialation is “a critical element of legislative procedure”, while preventing frivolous amendments and expediting passage of vital legislation is “tyranny of the majority”, as von Spakovsky would have it? It isn’t. It’s a waste of time. Introducing “poison pill” amendments purely to derail legislation and score points with one’s base is nothing new, and both parties have done it while in the minority. The difference now is twofold:

First, Republican recalcitrance has been greater under President Obama than any Democratic president in history. Prior to the second Bush administration Obama could have run as a centrist Republican and won, but for some reason he is noxious to the current party, and they will seize upon any opportunity they can find to thwart him.

Second, and more importantly, the world is speeding up. We are in the information age, and information is a blindingly, terrifyingly fast-moving thing. We can no longer afford for half of our legislature to be quite so slow and deliberate. The Senate should and must remain our upper, more intellectual house, but it must also be quicker on its feet lest our government find itself paralyzed relative to the pace of events.
I think we can all agree that the democratic process is vital and must be preserved, but we can also agree that it needs speeding up. Asking personalities like Rand Paul and Roy Blunt to pretty please stop offering dilatory amendments for the good of the nation is pretty much guaranteed not to work. A rules change is in order, though if anyone has a better idea I’m certainly open to suggestions.

Now, I’m certainly not about to start holding Ubuntu up as some sort of paragon of security, but pretty much any Linux distro is inherently more secure than either Windows or OS X, and you’d expect a couple of old hands like Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson to understand that. Apparently my confidence is misplaced, because at no point did either of them mention any of the security benefits that come from open source development.

Open source software is, in general, developed more cleanly with fewer bugs and vulnerabilities, and what vulnerabilities do exist are discovered and patched more quickly than proprietary software. That is a security benefit that is inherent to that development model. Yes, all operating systems have “porous surfaces” as Steve points out, but neither Windows nor OS X have the sort of turnaround time for patches to those surfaces that we see in OSS, and so long as they remain closed they never will. That this didn’t occur to Leo or Steve, or that it occurred to them but they didn’t feel it worth mentioning, really bugs the shit out of me.

Additionally, nobody in their right mind ever, ever, ever thought that OS X was especially secure. It was widely understood that the primary benefit of using OS X from a security standpoint was that it wasn’t targeted, and that as soon as the platform became more popular that would change pretty quickly. In fact, I can remember complaints about patch turnaround on OS as early as 2002, just a year or so after release.

So, anyone want to recommend a new security podcast? I suspect that I could still enjoy listening to Security Now, but I very much doubt I’ll be able to trust any of the information I get from it at this point.

First was the Alternative Minimum Tax patch. If this hadn’t been dealt with then two Bad Things would have happened. First Bad Thing would have been the IRS being thrown into disarray, having to rework their systems to account for the sudden retroactive application of AMT to millions of households, delaying the processing of income tax returns by months and incurring significant costs of their own along the way. Second (and much worse) Bad Thing would have been that a large chunk of the middle class would have ended up with a 2012 tax bill significantly higher than they expected, on the order of thousands of dollars depending on income. That’s a pretty rude shock coming off of holiday spending, and potentially a budget-breaking one for many households.

Second was the income tax changes. It was speculated that President Obama, confident that a deal would be done to avert middle-class tax hikes, would order the IRS not to release tax withholding tables that reflected the new rates until after a deal was cut. That would mean that Average Joe Employee wouldn’t see any drastic changes on his pay stub after the first of the year, sales wouldn’t tank, and the market wouldn’t panic. But he didn’t do that, and the IRS released 2013 withholding tables reflecting the new higher rates. That made it pretty important (in my admittedly uninformed opinion) to make sure that those rates came back down quickly so the IRS could release another new set of tables before people’s first paychecks of 2013 came out. It was always pretty much a given that taxes weren’t going to stay high for the middle and lower classes, but the decision not to hold off on new withholding tables gave it a greater degree of urgency than it’d had previously.

The deal is far from perfect. I’d have liked a lower threshold for the new rates (even $350k would have been fine), I’d have liked the payroll tax holiday to continue, since that’s nearly $1K out of the average family’s annual budget. I’d have liked more granular, more nuanced solutions to the estate and capital gains taxes. But I think this is probably the best deal we could reasonably hope for given the current makeup of the House. The left is bitter that Obama caved on the tax rate threshold (which, funnily enough, he predicted in private), and the right is furious that their voices in Congress let taxes go up without extracting serious spending cuts. As the saying goes, if everyone is mad at you, you must be doing something right.

The worst part of the deal is the decision to push the sequester issue back two months, which means it’ll rear its head around the same time as the debt ceiling and budget fights. Also funny is that pundits on both sides are depressed about it. Liberals feel like the President has lost all his leverage now that the tax rate issue is settled. Conservatives feel like they had an opportunity to get serious cuts in spending under bipartisan cover, but now the debt ceiling fight will just be another opportunity for Democrats to paint Republicans as heartless when they propose all sorts of cuts to Medicare and Social Security while leaving Defense untouched. Either way it’s going to be nasty, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we had another government shutdown.

“But if I had to fault President Obama, I would say that sometimes he governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.

“He comes in here, and he will not — he’ll  talk with [House Speaker John] Boehner, [but] he won’t talk with the other Republicans. He hasn’t built the trust.”

Brooks said Boehner made a significant concession by offering $800 billion in revenues, but “the trust wasn’t there to get that done.” And, he said, the president will have to address that going forward.

“It’s got to be a lot more than making the intellectual concessions,” Brooks said. “It’s got to get to the place where Republicans say ‘OK, we’ll take a risk; this guy won’t screw us.’ They do not feel that way.”

Since President Obama has a visible and friendly relationship with a number of Senate Republicans, I’m going to charitably assume that Brooks is referring primarily to the House GOP, members of which have:

• Accused him of colluding with terrorist organizations.
• Accused him of being secretly born in Kenya
• Accused him of using Soviet propaganda in his 2012 campaign
• Called him a liar during his State of The Union Address

Pictured: a lying Kenyan Soviet Muslim socialist Manchurian candidate from outer space.

I could go on, but I think I’ve made my point.

There is precisely zero evidence to indicate that it would be productive for President Obama to spend any amount of time trying to schmooze the House GOP. In fact, the “Obama doesn’t like people” story is such a right-wing favorite that any outreach would just result in a bunch of conservative press about how cynical he is for pretending to be friendly.

The Mini-14 is a gas-operated semi-automatic rifle popular with small game hunters and target shooters, just like the AR-15. It fires the .223 Remington or 5.56 NATO cartridge, just like the AR-15. It weighs about six pounds and has a 16″ to 20″ barrel, just like the AR-15. In fact, the biggest difference between the two is that you can get the Mini-14 in “less scary” trim, like so:

Awwww.

You can also buy it with several of Senator Feinstein’s “military features”, or as we in the facts-based community like to call them, “cosmetics.”

AAAHHHH!!!

What are the differences between these two firearms that make one of them acceptable and the other an implement of mass slaughter or something? An adjustable stock (which means that more than one person can use the same weapon comfortably, which is nice if you’re on a budget) and a pistol grip (more ergonomic, more comfortable, and provides better control). That’s it. They have the same dimensions, operating mechanism, and rate of fire. That rare of fire, incidentally, is pretty quick, as demonstrated by this gentleman using a technique called “bump-firing.” Please note as well that he is using the woody, unscary version:

They both fire the same bullet, which you can see here being fired into a block of gelatin calibrated to the same density as living tissue:

What’s the difference in lethality between these two weapons? None. Zip, zilch, nada. Not a goddamned thing. So what will Senator Feinstein’s bill accomplish, apart from giving people a false sense of accomplishment and letting them feel that the problem of gun violence is somehow dealt with while the root causes remain unaddressed? Not a goddamned thing.

So why write a bill like this at all? Because flashy, highly-visible legislation that doesn’t actually accomplish anything is easy, and seriously wonky and complicated legislation to tackle thorny and costly issues like mental health and poverty is hard.

Despite its lack of cliffiness, we are going over the fiscal cliff. It’s going to happen, for the simple reason that none of the relevant actors are incentivized to avoid it. This eleventh-hour White House meeting is not about finding a last-ditch solution; it’s about what the political class irritatingly refers to as “optics” (because “appearances” is too many syllables, I suppose). Everyone wants to appear as though they’re acting in good faith, even though one half of the equation is unable or unwilling to act at all.

Boehner and Cantor have demonstrated that they cannot wrangle a sufficient majority of their membership into voting for anything that even resembles a compromise, not even a compromise that they know perfectly well has no chance in hell of become law. A sufficient minority of the House GOP has concluded that they’d rather flirt with a new recession than face a primary challenge in two years, and Boehner is afraid that if he makes a deal with House Democrats he’ll lose his Speakership come January 3rd. Ironically, their refusal to deal now will only tilt the final outcome further out of their favor.

President Obama and congressional Democrats, conversely, are happy to go over the cliff. Public polling indicates that a majority of Americans will (quite correctly) blame the House GOP for the tax increase. In a worst case scenario wherein no compromise is reached and rates stay high across the board, Democrats will have gotten the additional revenue they wanted without any cuts to entitlement spending, a scenario which some would regard as a win-win despite the risk of a new recession. If it looks like Republicans are ready to deal after the 1st of the year, the President can just instruct the IRS to hold off on changing the income tax withholding tables until the new rates are set, thereby avoiding the immediate visible impact for the majority of taxpayers.

Each and every single factor at work here would make a reasonable, rational person say “Yep, time for the GOP to press for the best possible deal before the 1st of the year and take whatever they can get.” That they are taking the exact opposite stance should, however, surprise exactly nobody. Remember outgoing Senator Jim DeMint’s “Waterloo” line from the Obamacare fight? Yeah, that didn’t happen, and when David Frum pointed out (again, quite correctly) that the GOP had squandered an opportunity to negotiate on what they felt were the worst parts of Obamacare, he was kicked out of the tribe.

Those who don’t remember history, are, as we know, doomed to repeat it. Reasonable voices in the conservative establishment are calling on the GOP to cut a deal before the scales get tipped further in the Democrats’ favor, and are being ignored. Those who point this out afterwards will once against be branded as RINOs, squishes, etc, and the GOP will continue what’s starting to look like an irreversible slide into irrelevance.

There’s something about this Bushmaster AR-15: Both Adam Lanza and William Spangler, the two gunmen in the Newtown and firefighter shootings, respectively, got their hands on the same make of semi-automatic, the .223 caliber rifle, pictured right. … What is it about this Bushmaster that makes it so available and desirable for these gunmen?

Nothing. No really, I’m serious, there’s nothing there, honestly.

Much like Kleenex or Jell-O, some brand names or categories are so widely used that they become generic rather than specific terms (the technical term for which is “proprietary eponym”). The AR-15 is yet another example, one that is being relentlessly and pointlessly hammered into our brains by coverage of the two recent tragedies it was a part of.

“AR-15″ is a trademark owned by weapons manufacturer Colt. You can’t officially brand a weapon an AR-15 without paying Colt a licensing fee, which most manufacturers don’t bother with, so there are a lot of very nearly identical weapons out there with varying names. In much the same way that you generally refer to any gelatin-based fruit-flavored dessert food item as “Jell-O”, the firearms community refers to these weapons as AR-15′s or AR’s because it’s easier than saying “gas-operated direct-impingement semi-automatic rifles.”

The AR-15 and its clones are what we refer to as a “platform”, which is a basic mechanism around which you build a full weapon. Think of it like a car engine. If I tell you that my car is a V-8, then you know it has 8 pistons, four on each side, in a “V” formation. That doesn’t tell you if it’s carbureted, fuel injected, or direct injected. It doesn’t tell you if it’s naturally aspirated or turbocharged. All it tells you is how many pistons there are and how they’re arranged.

All the term “AR-15″ tells you is that it’s a semi-automatic (one shot per trigger squeeze) rifle that is gas-operated (expanding gasses from the gunpowder are used to re-cock the weapon and prepare the next round to be fired) with a rotating bolt (beyond the scope of this article) that operates on the principle of direct impingement (ditto). AR-15′s are usually but not always chambered (designed to fire a bullet of a particular size) in .223 Remington or 5.56 NATO (two very similar types of ammunition).

Beyond those specifics, only a couple of which are written in stone, one AR-15 can vary wildly from the others. It can have iron sights or a variety of scopes. It can have a collapsible stock, a fixed stock, or even a wooden stock if you like. The platform is highly modular in order to allow people to build the weapon that suits them best, regardless of what the finished product looks like.

Seriously, regardless.

The reason I’m explaining all this is because people have started to say silly things like “We need to outlaw all those Bushmaster guns” or “We need to get rid of all the AR-15′s”. To go back to the (highly useful, as it turns out) car analogy, if three gruesome multi-victim car accidents happened in a row that all involved the 2013 Nissan Sentra SL, would it make sense to relentlessly focus on the deadliness of that particular car? Would Rebecca Greenfield be writing things like “There’s something about this 2013 Nissan Sentra SL. All three drivers got their hands on the same make of reliable and reasonably priced car. What is it about this Nissan that makes it so available and desirable for these drivers?”

Bushmaster is just one manufacturer of the AR-15 platform, and the AR-15 is just one platform for building a rifle. Bushmaster’s version is well-made and reasonably priced, and that’s it, mystery solved. There are dozens of other manufacturers and dozens of other platforms. Zeroing in on this particular weapon needlessly narrows the debate and makes effective, comprehensive gun control measures less likely to come about.

To that end, I’ll be writing a series of guides for people who feel strongly about gun control, but don’t actually know anything about guns or the people who use them. Working for the Army over the last several years has taught me many valuable lessons, and one of the most important is that language matters. Soldiers have a particular dialect that they speak, and being even partially fluent in it increases your ability to work with them a hundredfold. But try too hard and screw up and the result is exactly the same as a tourist with a phrasebook trying to order dinner in Paris; the waiter rolls his eyes and asks for your order in English that is as good as or better than your own. The effort is appreciated on some level, but you sound silly, and are mentally categorized as such. Gun people are much the same way.

Serious firearms enthusiasts value precise language, because imprecise language can indicate an idiot who will get someone killed. If you want to have a productive conversation about gun control, you will make your job a million times easier if you signal your seriousness to them by using the correct terminology.

I’ll begin with the number one shibboleth of the person who has learned everything they know about guns from the entertainment industry; “Clip.” It’s not a clip. You’ve probably never seen a clip. In fact, the only time you’ve ever seen a gun that uses a clip is in WWII movies (see the aforementioned M1 Garand). It’s a magazine. A magazine is a container that you put ammunition into that then feeds that ammunition back out one round at a time. A clip is a band or strip of metal that holds several rounds of ammunition together to make it easy to feed them into a magazine. Here’s a helpful graphic:

Some of these things are not like the others…

Now you have seen some clips.

Additionally, please don’t make things worse by saying “ammunition clip” or “magazine clip.” More words are not necessarily better words. “Ammunition magazine” is correct, but unnecessary. It’s just a magazine. If magazine is too many syllables, “mag” is a perfectly acceptable contraction, but please, please, please don’t say “clip.”

YOUR POLITICAL rival has miscalculated and left town with his tail tucked between his legs. What do you do?

The normal Washington response: exult while pretending not to, tut-tut at your rival’s irresponsibility and press your advantage as much as you can.

What if President Obama chose a different way? Having beaten the Republicans in the election and thrashed them in the post-election, what if he were to use his political advantage to serve the national interest? What might that look like?

It’d look a lot like him sending a bill to the House with tax cuts for the lower 98%, extension of the payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits, and that’s about it. That would be in the national interest. Cuts to Medicare are not in any sense in the national interest, and neither is chained CPI, except insofar as they were necessary to get GOP votes to avoid a middle-class tax hike. Now that the Republicans have established that they can’t get a majority together to pass any sort of revenue increase, wooing them is no longer a priority. Like, at all. If I’m President Obama, I’m not thinking “Well, now that the opposition has demonstrated that they can barely tie their shoes, time to give them some concessions to help them save face at the expense of the poor and elderly!” What kind of sense does that make?

Seriously, who writes this shit? Is Rich Lowry secretly on their payroll or something?