A Targeted Gun Control

After the latest school shooting, there has been the usual round of pointless politicking by people who know perfectly well that there will be no global changes in our firearms regimen but who think they can profit from the tragedy. Likewise, there has been the usual pointing-out that the security systems knew about this threat perfectly well, and did nothing to stop it as is so often the case (the "known wolf" problem, which occurs both here and in the UK). 

What I haven't seen people discussing is that we have as a society arrived at, and indeed instituted, a novel form of gun control targeting these cases.

The father of Colt Gray, the teen suspect in the Apalachee High School shooting, was arrested, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced Thursday.

Colin Gray, 54, is being charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter, two counts of second-degree murder and eight counts of cruelty to children, the GBI said. The 14-year-old shooting suspect has been charged with four counts of felony murder.

GBI Director Chris Hosey said at a news conference Thursday night that the charges against Colin Gray stem from "knowingly allowing his son to possess a weapon." During a brief court hearing Friday morning, Judge Currie Mingledorff II told Colin Gray he faced up to 180 years in prison if he was convicted on all counts. The judge also advised him of his rights, and the father said, "Yes, sir," in response to some questions from the judge.

To my knowledge, this is only the second time this approach has been employed; to be effective, it will need to become a regular and expected thing. 

It's novel to charge people with murder when they never killed anyone nor tried to kill anyone. It may be pernicious to do so even if courts and juries agree to the approach.

However, it strikes me that it is a far more likely approach to achieve success at reducing the incidence of these shootings than the sort of global gun-control efforts that tend to be suggested. 

Statistically, AR-15s and similar rifles are used in almost no crime; the fact that the exceptions are spectacularly tragic doesn't change the fact that almost all such rifles are "in common use for lawful purposes." There are estimated to be around 20 million of them, but in 2022 rifles of all kinds accounted for only 541 of the ~8,000 firearm homicides. If we assumed for the sake of argument (without evidence, and as is in fact unlikely) that 500 of those were with ARs, and that each death used a separate AR, that would give you a rate of 0.0025%; that means that in a given year, 99.9975% of ARs are not used to murder anyone. Any attempt to solve the problem with global solutions is thus already way up against the point of diminishing returns. The effort required to reduce below 99.9975% is going to be huge and expensive. 

Raising the cost for parents who ought to know that their own particular kid is a risk, however, localizes the effort in places where there is a heightened risk. It addresses that 'known wolf' issue: the FBI and the local police knew this kid was a risk, and had in fact interviewed him and his father about it. The tool of holding the parent or guardian responsible gives them a tool they can use to encourage safer gun storage around dangerous youth, or even a decision by the parent to forgo having guns for a few years until the teenager moves on out to other things. 

I still have concerns about the morality of charging people for crimes they never even contemplated, let alone committed. Speaking merely about the effectiveness of the tactic, though, it seems like a better bet than other approaches people like to suggest. 

Congratulations to AVI

AVI notes his 10,000th post, and 10,001st. The latter is an ABBA tune, whose name reminds me of this classic from Bobby Bare.

It takes grit and good luck to stick to something that long. Good work.

WWII Unravelling

A remarkable interview -- I usually don't sit still for verbal talk and only read transcripts, but this guy caught my attention. What's really going on right now, he says, is that the order established by the Allied victory in WWII is unravelling. That's why all this is happening, and why it's all so strange.

"While You Cowered, We Studied the Blade"

Germany follows the UK in introducing a knife ban in response to terror attacks.

In the aftermath of a recent attack in which a Syrian Islamic extremist wielding a knife murdered three innocent festival goers and wounded eight others, authorities in Germany are pushing forward with a plan to ban knives.

According to a report at nbcnews.com, the Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack by Issa Al H in the western German city of Solingen, a city of about 160,000 residents where a celebration of the city’s anniversary was taking place.

It would be a tremendous irony for Solingen, "The City of Blades," whose steel and sword-making was legendary for centuries, to be the proximate cause of such a ban. Ironic, but they are a fallen people.

UPDATE: Meanwhile in Massachusetts, a ban on blades is struck down on 2nd Amendment grounds.

Legendary

In spite of the fact that I spent a lot of my life around universities, I never had anything to do with "Greek life." My father had belonged to an agricultural fraternity at East Tennessee State, though, and always liked the movie Animal House, so I knew what it was supposedly about.

These boys at Chapel Hill put Animal House to shame. Can you imagine getting Lee Greenwood to play your frat party?

Festivities commenced with singing the national anthem, complete with a colorful prop-plane flyover by local pilots who only charged for gas. About 1,000 attendees turned out on Labor Day weekend to see a lineup that included John Ondrasik of Five for Fighting, Rome Ramirez of Sublime, Aaron Lewis, Cowboy Troy, and Lee Greenwood. 

These are the young men who saved an American flag from pro-Hamas protests at their college, to whom half a million dollars was donated for a party. I gather they used only part of it, and plan to donate the rest.

Journalists and other anti-freedom scolds pounced and seized on the specter of Flagstock, demanding answers to questions only they would ask: Should parties be fun? Should country music exist? Should celebrities be allowed to criticize Democrats in public? The New York Times, for example, reported on the handful of angsty UNC fraternity brothers who wished that "a significant portion" of the party funds would be donated to "relief efforts in Gaza." Some of the funds raised will eventually be dispersed to charities such as Back the Blue N.C., the Wounded Warrior Project, and organizations that combat anti-Semitism. The Free Beacon is still awaiting a response about how much money will be donated to Palestinian trans rights organizations.

Yeah, let us know as soon as you hear about that. 

Greens Defrauded Too

Jill Stein, once again the Green Party’s presidential candidate, explains at length the fraud and manipulation used by the Democrats to keep her party off the ballots. She says they infiltrated her campaign, like RFK’s, and used fraudulent members to get the Greens thrown off the ballot in the recent NC Senate race. 

Because he’s thought to draw votes from Trump, however, the Democrats who control NC’s ballot have refused RFK’s request to remove him from the ballot this year. He’s suing in a last ditch attempt to get off of the ballot. 

"Well, it hasn't happened"

Earlier this year, my sister kept trying to wind me up over the usual predictions of a busier Atlantic hurricane season than usual. Every year like clockwork, and she falls for it every time.

It's turned out a bit of a flop so far, leading this "climate expert" to explain why you should still totally believe us, you guys, the next time we try to rev you up. See, it didn't happen for us in the Atlantic because, ironically, the temperatures were too low. But they were high in the Pacific, and it's been pretty active out there! So we were in the ballpark, and besides, climate change can mean that it's colder, or hotter, or dryer, or wetter. Because science. Favorite line: "This is a good example of how climate change can change from place to place," a sentence construction that our Vice President might admire.

I Like His Attitude

The Education of a Free People

[O]f all the things which I have mentioned that which most contributes to the permanence of constitutions is the adaptation of education to the form of government, and yet in our own day this principle is universally neglected. The best laws, though sanctioned by every citizen of the state, will be of no avail unless the young are trained by habit and education in the spirit of the constitution, if the laws are democratical, democratically or oligarchically, if the laws are oligarchical....

Now, to have been educated in the spirit of the constitution is not to perform the actions in which oligarchs or democrats delight, but those by which the existence of an oligarchy or of a democracy is made possible. Whereas among ourselves the sons of the ruling class in an oligarchy live in luxury, but the sons of the poor are hardened by exercise and toil, and hence they are both more inclined and better able to make a revolution. And in democracies of the more extreme type there has arisen a false idea of freedom which is contradictory to the true interests of the state. For two principles are characteristic of democracy, the government of the majority and freedom. Men think that what is just is equal; and that equality is the supremacy of the popular will; and that freedom means the doing what a man likes. In such democracies every one lives as he pleases, or in the words of Euripides, 'according to his fancy.' But this is all wrong; men should not think it slavery to live according to the rule of the constitution; for it is their salvation.

-Aristotle, Politics V.9

In the comments to a post below, I remarked that Tex once said that they want to turn America into the security zone of an airport, but that public schools are run much the same way. 

Our public school system is terribly designed for educating a free people. All the rights of citizens are suspended while you are on school grounds. You have no freedom of speech, but may be punished for speaking without permission on any topic. You may certainly not publish and post flyers critical of the government authorities. You have no freedom of movement: you have assigned seats in assigned classes, and to skip school is punishable by law as well as administratively. You certainly have no right to keep and bear arms, nor even to self defense -- our local high school has the policy of having all parties to a fight arrested by the school resource officers, and charged with assault, even if the were clearly defending themselves from a bully with a record of harassing them. There is no freedom from unreasonable search and seizure -- just like at the airport, all bags are subject to search and seizure at any time. 

There is no right to a fair trial, or any trial; punishments are meted out by administrative fiat. There is no guarantee the punishment will not be cruel or unusual. Every right an American has by birth and the grace of God is suspended by the schools, and the children are educated that way for a dozen years and more. 

A free people needs a different education. Our system is unfit for our purposes. Aristotle said the same thing about his own, and it was in the next generation that democracy was swept away for almost two millennia. One of his students, indeed, was the author of that: someone who'd gotten the education Aristotle thought worthy of a prince rather than a democrat. 

It is a powerful thing, education. We allow its corruption at our peril.

Jacobin Not Impressed

As you will infer by the name if you aren't already familiar with the publication, Jacobin is a formally-left aligned magazine. They have reviewed Ms. Harris' economic plans, and the top flight ones are not impressive to them. 

1. A $25,000 subsidy for first-time homebuyers

This is a bad idea. It is unfair to people who, even with the subsidy, cannot afford to buy a home and those who prefer to rent. Because it is a demand subsidy without any corresponding price controls, some of the money will also just get captured as higher home prices, negating the affordability goals of the policy....

2. A tax credit for building starter homes

This is a bad idea. There is absolutely no reason to believe that the proximate barrier to building more housing is that it is not sufficiently profitable and that we need to therefore sweeten the pot with public subsidies. This is just a waste of money. Moreover, conditioning the receipt of the tax credit on whether the person who buys the home turns out to be a first-time homebuyer, as this proposal does, makes no sense. Home builders do not typically know in advance who they are going to sell it to....

3. A ban on price gouging for groceries and food

It is unclear what this even means. 

As noted, these haven't been getting good reviews anywhere. If even Jacobin is against them, it's hard to know who the audience is supposed to be. 

Rasmussen: Biden did not win Georgia in 2020

So they say, citing the ongoing refusal by Fulton County to comply with open records laws and lawsuits demanding the unsealed ballots. 

This is something that was obviously true for me as a longtime resident of Georgia who has been writing about its election fraud problem since 2018. Some would rather not continue to discuss this, but as they point out election security is an ongoing issue. It's not like any of the problems were fixed. Work is ongoing on several fronts, but it's also important that the truth gets out. People need to understand that the government isn't legitimate if the elections aren't legitimate: you owe no loyalty to a government that was imposed upon you by fraud or force.

UPDATE: Rasmussen wasn't done.

Let's Review: Georgia 2020 Trust Deficit

Forensic audit blocked

100 drop boxes lack surveillance videos

20K ballot images - vanished

13 election routers - vanished

10 Dominion tabulators - vanished

148,000 Fulton Cty Mail-ballot signatures unverified

Nor yet done:

Georgia: No records were created capturing 148,000 2020 mail-in ballot outer envelope signatures for matching to Fulton County records because their new electronic sig verification equipment - wasn't used.

Here the wording is actually "Nothing was scanned, your honor." Uh Oh 

Nor yet:

Georgia:

We have an electronic verification system, but we didn’t use it.

We have records of voter signatures, but we didn’t use them.

We could check our records for you, but it would take forever.

Aside from that, judge, is there anything else you’d like?

"...And It Has to Stop."

Also from the same fellow, a video clip of Kamala Harris calling for an end to free speech and freedom of the press, at least for social media. See if you read it differently.

"He has lost his privileges and it [X.com] should be taken down.... The same rule has to apply, which is that there has to be a responsibility that is placed on these social media sites to understand their power. They are directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight, or regulation, and that has to stop."

Coors Beer Joins Harley Davidson

...and Tractor Supply, John Deere, and others, in giving in to pressure to abandon DEI and similar programs. This Starbuck guy is getting results. I'm sure they're trying to find ways to sneak the stuff in, but they're clearly responding to the public pressure. No doubt the Silver Bullet doesn't want to join the Blue Can beer in losing its place in the rankings.

The Dangerous Constitution

As an update to Saturday's post about the NYT asking whether the Constitution is "dangerous," ("And so am I, very dangerous," said Gandalf), a reader on Twitter points out that this has been a constant theme there lately.

Free speech and inquiry are important values, so I don't object to them publishing such things; but by the same token, one should pay attention and take note of it as well.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion

Used to be dangerous, before Willie

Labor Day Cookout

Chicken, if you’re curious.

"Spark" and School Reform

The headline reads, "With his 1776 Commission on patriotism, Trump helped spark a culture war." The very first paragraph gives the lie to the headline: he was responding, they note, to the 1619 Project. The theme continues throughout.

Trump ripped into “left-wing indoctrination in our schools,” slammed the 1619 Project and asserted that “propaganda” in schools was making students ashamed of their history.

To fix all this, he had a solution: a new 1776 Commission that would promote patriotic education.

A national curriculum is probably a bad idea, but so too are almost all existing state and local curricula. We really need to abolish the public school system and start over. In any case, the idea that this 'divisive' 'culture war' is his fault is silly. It was the earlier revisionism that he was reacting to, angrily because it was based on some outright lies. (The link is to a set of criticisms by no less than the World Socialist; the 1619 Project later admitted that it was "not a history" but a fight to "control the national narrative.")

Replacing public schools with private ones sounds radical to a lot of people, but the earlier schools were better than the ones we have now. Consider this very early school on what was at that time the frontier:

The first recorded school in Jackson County actually predates the formation of the county by 31 years, as a school was started in Cullowhee Township in 1820.... the East LaPorte school started by Professor A.M. Dawson was renowned for its rigor and quality. A summary written for the Historical Committee of Jackson County NCEA in 1954 recounted, “Prof. A.M. Dawson who with Prof. Hughes, Misses Amaria and Jardedie Dawson, and Misses Ida and Lula Rogers, as assistants, conducted a high school at East LaPorte. This school… was the most notable and efficient one ever taught in this county before 1881.

“Dawson had graduated from Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. He came to Jackson County from Tennessee. “With well-balanced scholarship, being equally at home in mathematics, history, science and the languages, and with established reputation, Professor Dawson auspiciously began his four-year remarkable career in Jackson County. Arithmetic, Latin, Greek, philosophy and English grammar were the principal subjects of the curriculum taught. Geography and reading were also taught… Mr. Dawson was a strict disciplinarian and exacted thoroughness from his students. Intolerant of laziness, negligence, disobedience or disorder, he was a stern, unrelenting schoolmaster… There were two Literary Societies. They were the Olympiam, which meant ‘lovers of games,’ and the Phylomathin, which meant ‘lovers of learning.’ These societies met on Friday evenings. Dawson was also the first to introduce baseball as a school sport.”

Emphasis added. 

This was not a public school but a private "subscription school," but its presence on the frontier showed that it was not limited to the elites of the day. Voucher programs that aim to replace public school with independent funding would begin to address the downfall our education has suffered by being brought under control of government. 

Switching to a model that provided parents with the means to subscribe to a 'subscription school' would not change the fact that we have a class of teachers who are miseducated themselves; finding the right people to instruct the children could be the chief problem. 

UPDATE: Dad29 sends an eighth-grade final exam from 1895. The arithmetic section's difficulty sometimes turns on the use of what are now unusual forms of measure (bushel, rod), but clearly students were expected to manage complex calculations for the exam. I'm curious what the measure for 'bushel' was myself; the exam treats it both as a measure of volume and a measure of weight. Question 2 expects you to calculate the number of bushels from a given volume; the third one asks you to calculate it from weight. That implies some specialized knowledge that most of us wouldn't have.

Still, pretty interesting to examine.

The New Yorker on Soldier of Fortune

If you never expected to see The New Yorker write a warm and positive piece about Soldier of Fortune magazine, today is a surprising day!

Some years ago now Susan Katz Keating, the editor of Soldier of Fortune, at that time an independent journalist, interviewed me at length for a book she was writing about a project with which I was involved. The book she was writing didn't come off, which in a way is a shame because it would have exposed some serious problems with US intelligence in Afghanistan. Given how Afghanistan ultimately turned out, it might have been nice to know sooner. I asked her about it a year or so ago, and she told me that the laptop she had her notes on had crashed and burned, and she was left with nothing useful.

All the same, I found her to be an insightful and committed independent journalist of the old fashion. It's nice to see her considered opinion on the potential for violence in our current moment:

Not long after their meeting, Donald Trump was wounded on the ear in an assassination attempt. Keating provided an update on her violence forecast: she had become surprisingly sanguine.

“There have not been any follow-on attacks or counterattacks, which I think would have happened by now if this had been an Archduke Ferdinand moment,” she said. “I see the hit on Trump as another iteration of the school-shooter, mall-shooter phenomenon, and not as a political flash point. We are not headed for a civil war.” 

“Of course," she added, "I could be wrong.”

Interesting Political Videos

From Nicole Shanahan (RFK Jr's VP choice):

From the American Independent Party (whom I'd never heard of before):

They seem to be saying the military industrial complex assassinated both Kennedys. It's well-produced and the TH White quotes are a nice touch. The AIP claims to be the "fastest growing political party in California."

Here's one from the RFK Jr campaign, posted 2 days before he endorsed Trump:

The references to civil war and unity are interesting, but I wonder how he thought he could achieve unity. Or was it just campaign blather?

Is the Constitution Dangerous?

The New York Times publishes a book review that asks the question.

The Constitution Is Sacred. Is It Also Dangerous?

One of the biggest threats to America’s politics might be the country’s founding document.

The content here is not going to surprise you; it turns out that the Constitution is uncomfortably difficult to amend (if you want to change things fundamentally, especially so). It tends to empower courts to resolve questions that the political branches find difficult (it doesn't, actually; that was a seizure of power during and following Marbury v. Madison). It has a lot of "compromises" that the NYT would like to track to slavery, especially the Electoral College, which is really not about slavery so much as the desire of the Founders not to concentrate power in the cities just as they sought the separation of powers elsewhere. (They were, after all, scholars of Greek and Roman history, and worried about exactly the transformations warned about by Aristotle and witnessed at the end of the Roman Republic.) 

The weirdness about these sorts of articles is how they don't seem to grasp that a very similar set of compromises would be necessary even if you were to renegotiate the terms today. You couldn't get the rural parts of America to give up the Electoral College, or the equal representation of states in the Senate (another regular bugaboo by those who resent that Wyoming gets equal representation with California or New York). You couldn't get them to give away the Second Amendment. If you sat down in a Convention of the States and asked the people to work out a deal they could agree to accept, it would look very similar to the deal that you have now. These so-called historical reviews just lament that compromise with the non-urbane and non-urban is a necessary feature of peace and stability. 

You could try to force the issue, just as the urban elites might have in 1787. Wise men and educated, though deeply divided on certain issues they elected to compromise rather than fight among themselves. 

Well, for a while.

You might think that such disputes would have been laid to rest by a bloody Civil War and the Reconstruction amendments, which outlawed slavery and granted all men the right to vote, regardless of race. Not to mention that the Constitution continued to change in the century after: Senators were to be directly elected; women were granted the right to vote.

You might well think so, since none of those items is in dispute. I would prefer to reverse the unmentioned 16th and the mentioned 17th Amendment, and the 18th we've already disposed of, but as far as I know there is no contest from anywhere to the 13th, 15th, or 19th. The 14th is argued about over its interpretation; very few ever suggest its repeal.

The clear tone of the article, though, is that the sweeping away by violent victory in the Civil War is the preferred mode; the continued compromises by courts interested in considering Originalism is as bad as having ever compromised at all. Victory and not peace is the desideratum. 

Sadly easy to find, the end of peace by those who seek violent victory over their opponents. Victory itself may prove to be more elusive.