Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 62

My Words Are Bigger Than Yours

Last year, my friend Neil Drumming blogged here about the making of his movie "Big Words." That movie is now a fact and will be on display at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on this Friday. 
The backdrop for the movie is election night 2008--though Obama is really beside the point. The plot is nominally about four dudes from a golden age hip-hop group stumbling into reunion. But they don't make any music. 
I've seen the movie, and I love it. I love it mostly because it features black people as actual black people--which is to say not standing around discussing how blacketyblack they are. I'll be in the house on Friday. I hope you will too.

The Life and Death of Great Virtual Cities

There have been a lot of conversations, over the past few days, about the health of this blog's community. We've held one of them online here, another on Facebook and another internally here at the Atlantic. I'm a little talked out so forgive me for not offering much of a preamble.
Here is what you need to know: We will, from now on, have two community moderators to help me manage the inflow of comments. The moderators will be Sandy Young and Kathleen Bachynski. Sandy and Kathleen (who comments under Michigan_Reader) were selected because I found them to be the most reserve and level-headed commenters among those who visit regularly. I've corresponded with both offline, and have found them both to be trustworthy. So we've given them the keys. 
Please be respectful. Please be decent. I don't know what else to say. I don't feel like much of a Khan anymore. 

The Life And Death Of Great Virtual Cities

There have been a lot of conversations, over the past few days, about the health of this blog's community. We've held one of them online here, another on Facebook and another internally here at the Atlantic. I'm a little talked out so forgive me for not offering much of a preamble.
Here is what you need to know: We will, from now on, have two community moderators to help me manage the inflow of comments. The moderators will be Sandy Young and Kathleen Bachynski. Sandy and Kathleen (who comments under Michigan_Reader) were selected because I found them to be the most reserve and level-headed commenters among those who visit regularly. I've corresponded with both offline, and have found them both to be trustworthy. So we've given them the keys. 
Please be respectful. Please be decent. I don't know what else to say. I don't feel like much of a Khan anymore. 

Toward a Black Jesse James

Monica Quan and Keith Lawrence (Facebook)
In my twitter (and maybe in yours) and around the web, I keep hearing what I can only call an attempt to redeem Christopher Dorner's murderous rampage. These redemption narratives, from what I can tell, are a mish-mash of cynicism, anger and left-wing populism. Heaped on top of that is LAPD's incredibly ugly history of corruption, racism and mayhem. If you've forgotten what a mess that was, go here. Finally, there's the fact that Dorner himself claimed that he was motivated by racism within the department, and that he'd been fired after blowing the whistle on an instance of police brutality. It would not surprise me if both charges were true.
The urge to make myth, to try and redeem humans who commit immoral acts under the flag of moral causes, is understandable. It's understandable in those who look at Jesse James and see not the straight white supremacist, but the scourge of greedy bankers and acquisitive industrialists against whom, it seemed, none could stand. And it's more understandable among a people disproportionately brutalized by the police who look at Christopher Dorner, and see not a murderer but a plague on a police force that is, itself, above the law.
But those who would form hard arguments based on myth need to confront something -- Christopher Dorner was a murderer:

Four days before her death, Monica Quan had news for her team. Quan, an assistant coach at Cal State Fullerton, held up her hand to show off an engagement ring. The players screamed and huddled around her for a closer look, head coach Marcia Foster recalled. Quan was as happy as her basketball players, and later said she wished she had recorded the moment. She loved to have pictures taken with her friends. She wanted a big wedding, and her fiance, Keith Lawrence, a public safety officer at USC, was trying to work extra hours to make it possible.... 

The couple was talking about who would be in the wedding party. They had yet to pick a date and a location when they were found Feb. 3, shortly after the Super Bowl, shot to death in their car in the parking structure of their Irvine condominium complex. They had multiple gunshot wounds. There were no signs of a robbery, and investigators ruled out a murder-suicide. 

The next day, Quan's father got a call from a close friend of the family. Randal Quan, a former captain with the Los Angeles Police Department, and Wayne Caffey, a detective with the Southeast Division, had known one another for almost 25 years. Caffey recalled their conversation. 
"We lost her," Quan said. "She's gone." The two men were overwhelmed by the senselessness of the slayings. We don't know anything, Quan said; we don't know what happened. He would later learn that his daughter and her fiance were probably killed by a former LAPD officer who had been fired in 2009; Randal Quan had represented Christopher Jordan Dorner at his termination hearing. 
 What was once incomprehensible -- the deaths of these two young people -- was now considered a revenge killing. The reasons were spelled out in an 11,000-word post police found on a Facebook page that they believe belonged to Dorner, 33, who is now a fugitive. 
 "I never had the opportunity to have a family of my own," Dorner supposedly wrote. "I'm terminating yours."

I don't really know how anyone, with any sort of coherence, adopts Christopher Dorner as a symbol in the fight against police brutality, given how he brutalized those two human beings. I cannot understand, except to say that sometimes our own anger, our pain, becomes so blinding that we fail to see the pain of others. This is the seed of inhumanity, and inhumanity is the seed of the very police brutality which we all deplore.
In my time here I have blogged relentlessly about police brutality. It's an important and legit issue. When cops brutalize innocent black people, they erode the contract between citizen and country. But the case against police brutality enjoys more eloquent, and more moral, voices than a coward who ambushes innocent people in a parking garage. We don't need a Jesse James. No one needs a Jesse James.

The Art of Infinite War

I am sitting in Baltimore Washington Airport. I am waiting on my flight to back to Boston. While going through security I refused to go through the full body scanner, and asked for the pat-down. I generally do that as a rule these days. The wait was longer than usual, about 20 minutes or so. This did not worry me. My flight was delayed an hour anyway. But standing there watching people go through, and thinking back on our conversations around drones, and our current war against Al Qaeda and its affiliates, something came to me -- I can't see how this war ends.
We have set as our goal the destruction of Al Qaeda and its affiliates, and the safe-guarding of every single American life against murder at their hands. That strikes me as a reasonable undertaking, and one that any state acting in its interests might undertake. One problem with this is that America prides itself on a kind of moral exceptionalism. We do not, in fact, view ourselves as merely acting in our own interests, but as a force for good in the world. But the more vexing problem is that it means a kind of perpetual war. 
Do we really have it in our power to guarantee that no group of young men ever again organize themselves under the banner of Islamism and set the destruction of America as their goal? And why should we restrict our concerns to Islamism? Surely there will be (and are) other protean fighters who claim no country and who will swear themselves to our destruction. Why should we not also war against them? 
Consider what this means. The president is anti-torture -- which is to say he thinks the water-boarding of actual confirmed terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was wrong. He thinks it was wrong, no matter the goal -- which is to say the president would not countenance the torture of an actual terrorist to foil a plot against the country he's sworn to protect. But the president would countenance the collateral killing of innocent men, women and children by drone in pursuit of an actual terrorist. What is the morality that holds the body of a captured enemy inviolable, but not the body of those who happen to be in the way?
I thought about this when MSNBC's progressive pundit Krystal Ball made the following critique recently:

There is something about this drone debate, though, that is driving me nuts. And that is the charge, mostly by Republicans, that if you feel any different about the drone program under President Obama than you would have under President George W. Bush, you are an utter, hopeless hypocrite. Let me ask you a question. How would you feel about a Madeleine Albright panel on women and body image? Okay, now how do you feel about a Larry Flynt panel on women and body image? How do you feel about your kid in Dr. Ruth's sex-ed class versus Todd Akin's? Do you feel different about Warren Buffett setting standards for financial ethics versus Bernie Madoff? Of course you do, because you're normal. But according to the Republican logic used during this drone debate, if you feel any different about the Madeleine Albright and Larry Flynt panels, you are a hypocrite. 

My label-mate Conor Friedersdorf sees progressive hypocrisy in this comment. I see it as a statement from someone who was likely less bothered by the fact of war than the fact of George Bush. If this is the case, if we -- liberals and conservatives -- are not so much bothered by war, as we are by incompetent war, what is the motive for war to ever end? The motive for not seeing American soldier shot is clear. But war no longer requires this. 
Here is what I would like to know: Can any of us imagine a time when we are not firing weapons into foreign countries; when we are not stripping down to our socks for travel; when we are not sending agents into mosques to foment plots; when we are not spying on Muslim students? What reason is there to view this moment when we do not torture as anything more than a brief interlude? Is this just who we are, now? Or is it, in fact, who we have always been? Can any of us actually imagine the end?

The Excellent Age of No-Fuss Drones and Remarkable War

I wanted to make sure everyone saw Dexter Filkins' response to this weeks news regarding Obama's justification for the killing of American citizens, as well as the hearings to confirm John Brennan. Filkins describes an earlier visit to meet with villagers in Yemen. The villagers were survivors of an attack by their own government against an alleged Al Qaeda training camp. 
Except it later came out that the attack was not launched by the Yemenese government at all, but by Americans lobbing tomahawk missiles into the town of Al-Majalah. To be clear there were Al-Qaeda fighters in the village but the ultimate numbers are chilling--14 Al Qaeda dead, 41 civilians, 23 of whom were children:

Later, when I spoke to American officials, they seemed genuinely perplexed. They didn't deny that a large number of civilians had been killed. They felt bad about it. But the aerial surveillance, they said, had clearly showed that a training camp for militants was operating there. "It was a terrible outcome," an American official told me. "Nobody wanted that."
None of the above is intended as an attack on Brennan, who has spent the past four years as President Obama's counterterrorism advisor. He has a hard job. He is almost always forced to act on the basis of incomplete information. His job is to keep Americans safe, and he's done that. Al Qaeda's leadership, particularly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, has been decimated. Operating in Yemen, where vast tracts of the country lie beyond anyone's control, cannot be easy.

But, as the details from the Al Majalah show, even the best-intentioned public servants operating with what appears to be decent intelligence can get things horribly wrong. Maybe Al Majalah was indeed an Al Qaeda training camp--maybe those aerial surveillance images were spot on. But, in retrospect, we know that the cameras missed the women and children.
Indeed, if there is one overriding factor in America's secret wars--especially in its drone campaign--it's that the U.S. is operating in an information black hole. Our ignorance is not total, but our information is nowhere near adequate. When an employee of the C.I.A. fires a missile from an unmanned drone into a compound along the Afghan-Pakistani border, he almost certainly doesn't know for sure whom he's shooting at. 
Most drone strikes in Pakistan, as an American official explained to me during my visit there in 2011, are what are known as "signature strikes." That is, the C.I.A. is shooting at a target that matches a pattern of behavior that they've deemed suspicious. Often, they get it right and they kill the bad guys. Sometimes, they get it wrong. When Brennan claimed, as he did in 2011--clearly referring to the drone campaign--that "there hasn't been a single collateral death," he was most certainly wrong.

In some ways, I think the white paper obscures the issue. I certainly am concerned with the when and why of killing treachorous American citizens. But much more haunting to me is what Filkins highlights here--the lobbing of missiles into the homes of people, and compounding it by claiming to have done no such thing. 
Again it one thing to say, "We understand that there will be innocent children who will die because of this kind of warfare, but we must employ all available means to secure American lives and interests." And all another to say as Brennan speaking for the Obama  administration did, "there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we've been able to develop." In fact, there have been many "collateral deaths," but they are of the sort that most Americans will never see and,most of us suspect, don't much care about.
But if that's really true, then there is no need to dissemble. There's no need for words like "imminent" when you really mean "when I feel like it" or claiming that you're acting with a country's permission when you're pledged to acting regardless. Americans need not feel ashamed for doing what states always do--act in their best interests. I think it's highly debatable whether drones are in our best interests. In fact I suspect we're seeding future wars. 
But our real problem is that we somehow think we're above our own interests, that our virtue is divine. Our problem is we think we're better than we actually are. We've gotten so good at telling ourselves this.

The Excellent Age Of No-Fuss Drones And Remarkable War

I wanted to make sure everyone saw Dexter Filkins' response to this weeks news regarding Obama's justification for the killing of American citizens, as well as the hearings to confirm John Brennan. Filkins describes an earlier visit to meet with villagers in Yemen. The villagers were survivors of an attack by their own government against an alleged Al Qaeda training camp. 
Except it later came out that the attack was not launched by the Yemenese government at all, but by Americans lobbing tomahawk missiles into the town of Al-Majalah. To be clear there were Al-Qaeda fighters in the village but the ultimate numbers are chilling--14 Al Qaeda dead, 41 civilians, 23 of whom were children:

Later, when I spoke to American officials, they seemed genuinely perplexed. They didn't deny that a large number of civilians had been killed. They felt bad about it. But the aerial surveillance, they said, had clearly showed that a training camp for militants was operating there. "It was a terrible outcome," an American official told me. "Nobody wanted that."
None of the above is intended as an attack on Brennan, who has spent the past four years as President Obama's counterterrorism advisor. He has a hard job. He is almost always forced to act on the basis of incomplete information. His job is to keep Americans safe, and he's done that. Al Qaeda's leadership, particularly in the tribal areas of Pakistan, has been decimated. Operating in Yemen, where vast tracts of the country lie beyond anyone's control, cannot be easy.

But, as the details from the Al Majalah show, even the best-intentioned public servants operating with what appears to be decent intelligence can get things horribly wrong. Maybe Al Majalah was indeed an Al Qaeda training camp--maybe those aerial surveillance images were spot on. But, in retrospect, we know that the cameras missed the women and children.
Indeed, if there is one overriding factor in America's secret wars--especially in its drone campaign--it's that the U.S. is operating in an information black hole. Our ignorance is not total, but our information is nowhere near adequate. When an employee of the C.I.A. fires a missile from an unmanned drone into a compound along the Afghan-Pakistani border, he almost certainly doesn't know for sure whom he's shooting at. 
Most drone strikes in Pakistan, as an American official explained to me during my visit there in 2011, are what are known as "signature strikes." That is, the C.I.A. is shooting at a target that matches a pattern of behavior that they've deemed suspicious. Often, they get it right and they kill the bad guys. Sometimes, they get it wrong. When Brennan claimed, as he did in 2011--clearly referring to the drone campaign--that "there hasn't been a single collateral death," he was most certainly wrong.

In some ways, I think the white paper obscures the issue. I certainly am concerned with the when and why of killing treachorous American citizens. But much more haunting to me is what Filkins highlights here--the lobbing of missiles into the homes of people, and compounding it by claiming to have done no such thing. 
Again it one thing to say, "We understand that there will be innocent children who will die because of this kind of warfare, but we must employ all available means to secure American lives and interests." And all another to say as Brennan speaking for the Obama  administration did, "there hasn't been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we've been able to develop." In fact, there have been many "collateral deaths," but they are of the sort that most Americans will never see and,most of us suspect, don't much care about.
But if that's really true, then there is no need to dissemble. There's no need for words like "imminent" when you really mean "when I feel like it" or claiming that you're acting with a country's permission when you're pledged to acting regardless. Americans need not feel ashamed for doing what states always do--act in their best interests. I think it's highly debatable whether drones are in our best interests. In fact I suspect we're seeding future wars. 
But our real problem is that we somehow think we're above our own interests, that our virtue is divine. Our problem is we think we're better than we actually are. We've gotten so good at telling ourselves this.

Western Thought for Class Clowns and Erstwhile Nationalists

Leviathan (Introduction)
Having gotten my head handed to me the last time we discussed Hobbes' introduction, I think I should play the back this time. With that said, I do want to highlight one comment from last week. I think it says a lot about Hobbes' approach, which he lays out in his Introduction:

Hobbes is trying to make an argument about statecraft, and is arguing (implicitly, at least) that you cannot learn from historical example. Instead of studying great leaders and great nations of the past or in the present - such as Machiavelli for instance constantly does - one should look inward, and try to deduct the nature of man from a reflection upon one's own nature. He is, one could say, an anti-historical thinker, and this is him articulating why he is so. 
And this is more or less what Hobbes does in Leviathan. Instead of studying former, stable states, he makes an argument about the nature of man, the nature of passions and the nature of language - and from that basis, he constructs an argument regarding the kind of political organization which is necessary to create a politically stable state.

The word that springs to mind for me is "theorycraft," though perhaps of the highest order. I hope this conversation continues into the weekend. I will promote at the end of each day to keep it going.
OK. On y va...

Liberals With Guns

Most of us know Horde centurion Erik Vanderhoff for his enthusiasm for guns. His feelings regarding guns are not very common around these parts. Which is why I wanted to hear more from him. Below are some of his thoughts. The hope is that a productive conversation will follow. 
I suppose, first off, I should point out that "gun nut" is a bit of a pejorative. And, despite some claims to the contrary, I have a pretty minor case of the obsessive-compulsive collecting that gun addiction can spark; but addiction it is - once you become serious about guns and shooting, you do start to think a lot about them. I don't know of any major research into the phenomenon, but my clinical training leads me to think that the adrenaline and the focus required in shooting, even just at a simple range, are physiologically and psychologically powerful forces. I've never been one for yoga or meditation, but I imagine the mindset required similar to going to the range: Shooting a gun requires intense focus on your task for safety's sake, and shooting well requires the imposition of calm over both body and mind. I am, oddly enough, never more at mental peace than when I go to the range. 
In discussing gun ownership with my family, some friends, and many the Internet liberal, I often get the urge to be defensive, as though I need to justify my hobby to them, lest I be dismissed as a lunatic. Your average liberals, for all our vaunted curiosity and stereo-typical claim to ownership of "reality-based" thinking, don't really know all that much about guns or gun ownership. This makes for a real problem in crafting effective laws for firearm regulation and for selling those laws to the people whose exercise of rights and property they will affect. Occasionally such laws actually end up being accepted and successful; for example, the California "drop-safety" law has made handguns much safer should you drop a loaded one. But they can also work counter-intuitively: California, again, with its "magazine disconnect" law added moving parts to semi-automatic handguns so that a loaded chamber could not fire with the magazine removed. The addition of this part makes the gun more prone to jamming and misfire, and thus less safe.
The bottom line, for me, is that guns are fun. Yes, there's a thrill to the bang, to the power you know you're holding in your hand even when it's just using my little Ruger Mark III 22/45 .22-caliber rimfire ("Just makes a small hole!" as Robin Williams once said). But for me, the most fun is the painstaking care you have to take - I don't usually function in my day-to-day life with the kind of precision a gun requires - and that utter focus the act of shooting requires. Learning how different types of guns function, how different calibers interact with weight, size, barrel-length, and so on to become different functioning wholes and how small movements of the body radically effect their precision and function... Amazing. Do you or a friend collect cars or motorcycles? Or even computers or stereos? It's the same deal. You want to buy the latest GeForce visual card or Suzuki SV650, I drool over a custom Nighthawk TRP 1911 in .45 ACP.
I had a very interesting conversation with my wife's father this Christmas over guns; he has ever been very supportive of my interest in shooting, and himself owns several firearms. I learned, for the first time, that he used to have an older sister. They were visiting his uncle, who accidentally dropped a loaded revolver while moving it from his underwear drawer. The revolver went off, the bullet passed through the wall of the bedroom into the living room, and killed my father-in-law's sister, instantly. She was nine. Despite a very personal connection to gun violence and death, my father-in-law has never stopped owning guns; what he has been is incredibly committed to safety, keeping them locked in safes and teaching his children from a very early age to respect the danger they pose.
There is no denying the seriousness of owning a gun over any other sports addiction that requires you to spend insane amounts of money and time in participating, like say golf. Guns are tools, yes, as many gun advocates state repeatedly, but they are tools primarily of killing, even when, as with myself, they are used for sport. While I have a serious philosophical and physical commitment to self-defense as the bedrock for all of the political and social rights we assert, when it comes to guns the reality of having small children makes using guns for defense more theoretical than practical in my life. Now that my son is of the "What's this thing I'm not supposed to touch?" phase of development, the guns remain disassembled, individually locked in their cases, and no ammunition is kept in the home. I've done the math, looked at the crime statistics in my city and my neighborhood, and know that they do not justify the slightest chance that my young children will find a loaded gun and be able to get into where it is stored for access. Neither of them will become a statistic because of my erroneous calculations.
2012 was a particularly bad year in the United States for mass shootings, hosting the most deaths from such events since 1982. This has led to a wholly appropriate public outcry against politics as normal with respect to the Second Amendment, pitting, on its face, ideologically-rigid gun owners against an unarmed and fearful majority clamoring for relief from what is seen as the constant threat of a fusillade of bullets. Faced with a gun culture awash in the mythology of lone gunmen warring against a vicious and capricious world on one extreme with the loathing and distrust of my political peers, I find myself - a California liberal with a fondness for firearms - in the uncomfortable position of being distrusted by both sides of the gun control debate, viewed as a quisling by gun rights advocates and as party to a foreign culture to the gun control advocates. Where I would hope people such as myself could be the connections that allow for increased, pragmatic regulation of firearms that respects their history and part in American culture, I find instead only distrust from all sides. It is my hope that fear and hostility can give way when confronted with mutual respect and information.





The simple fact of the matter is that while per household ownership of firearms is declining in the United States, the overall number of firearms owned - ranging from antique and replica flintlocks to custom handguns and assault rifles and everything in between -- is at an all-time high. I would argue that the former figure renders the latter one less meaningful; the popular .89 (1) guns per capita figure is more histrionic than actually clarifying: What types of firearms? In what concentrations? Where? By whom? A big number is just a big number without breaking it down into useful chunks.
The number of individuals licensed for concealed carry of a handgun is estimated to be at an all-time high of over 8 million people nationwide (2). 
And yet, despite these figures, overall and firearm crimes are at a twenty-year low. Between 2005 and 2011, firearm murders dropped from 10,150 to 8,583 according to the FBI. Only one in every 33,000 firearms is used in a firearm murder in 2011; this means .00317% -- 3.17 per 100,000 - was used to intentionally kill someone. It is equally undeniable, with an estimation of 270 million firearms in the country, that this ratio still represents a lot of deaths from one source: guns. While media focus inevitably centers on high profile, high drama mass shootings, it typically fails to note that most such shootings - and most firearm deaths in the country, especially murders - result from handguns, not assault rifles. Indeed, in 2011, firearm murders by rifles - semi-automatic assault rifles or otherwise - accounted for only 2.5% of the total number of such deaths; this is in keeping with the historical tally. (3,4)
Since 1980, the United States has not had more than 125 deaths per year in mass shootings - though it has never had few than 50 - and never more than 25 mass shootings per year. There have been fewer mass shootings from 2000 through 2012 than in the 1990s. (5) The numbers clearly indicate that while there is no triviality to needing to address mass shootings and the use of assault rifles, doing so will only affect the margins of firearms deaths in this country. This is one reason why so many gun owners act with fear and suspicion of proposed regulations on their rifles. (I, for one, am just as fascinated as any red-blooded American man by the "tacti-cool" weaponry available, but feel no need to own one and see no compelling reason to, not being a fan of the maximalist "I need to resist military tyranny" interpretation of the Second Amendment.)
Most mass shootings have involved the use of handguns instead of assault rifles; 49% of all murders in 2011 were with handguns, making them the most commonly used weapon for murder, followed in distant second by knives. They are also commonly used in suicides. Whereas the United States is found to be no more violent or suicidal than any other nation when you look at the numbers (6), what we are is awash in handguns and, when we decide to get mad at someone else or ourselves, a distressing propensity in using them to often fatal results. This says nothing about accidental discharges (which are far more likely to be at the hands of and inflicted upon adults than children). 
None of these figures are meant to diminish the important need of reducing them, but to offer perspective. This is a problem that gun owners need to be honest about. It requires the kind of courage to confront a problem that concealed carry advocates hope they possess in their ability to calmly and decisively confront personal harm. However, it is likewise important that gun control advocates understand the scale of what they are discussing: 32,999 firearms will not be used in a murder for every one that is. Gun control advocates rightly see far too many deaths by firearm. Gun rights advocates rightly see that for every criminal, suicidal, or negligent user, there are thousands who are not.
It is important for both sides to see the other for who they are: Real people, with real, relevant, and above all legitimate concerns. Calling one side tiny-dicked brutes with masturbatory fetishes for penis substitutes and the other national socialist tyrants begging to kneel under the jackboots of government dogs doesn't get us anywhere. There are good, solid, possible regulations to implement or strengthen that do not mark the first step on the slope to universal confiscation. Both sides need to understand that Jeffrey Goldberg was right (7): There are too many guns and no will to confiscate them all. And confiscation of all guns - or at least all handguns - is the only maximally effective way of seriously reducing deaths by firearm. 
Part of the problem is that for its entire history, the United States has tried to have it both ways on the competing legal interpretations of the Second Amendment: Is it a collective right, as stated by the Supreme Court of Arkansas back in the 1840s, thus making it subject to close regulation by the state? Or is it an individual right, as stated by the Supreme Court of Kentucky back in the 1820s, meaning that whether carrying openly or concealed, the individual's right to bear arms was universal and absolute? In the Heller decision of 2008, the Supreme Court of the United States tried to split the difference, asserting the Second Amendment as an individual right - something President Obama did as well in his press conference regarding gun control - while still leaving states the ability to craft regulations that do not impinge on that right. (8) This is, historically, how the Second Amendment was practiced as the country expanded: With the rule of law a tenuous thing, the individual need for a firearm was not questioned; but, at the same time, municipalities practiced strict regulations. The famous Western lawman Wyatt Earp, for example, made his reputation in enforcing bans against carrying guns within town limits. 
As the nature of American settlement has changed, living in physically closer environments brings their own challenges to firearms regulation. Sixty-seven percent of gun murders, according to Richard Florida at The Atlantic's "Cities" site, occur in metropolitan centers (9). The police are far more able to respond quickly to crime, but until Tom Cruise invents precognition, there is no way for them to actively prevent crimes; policing remains primarily reactive, rather than proactive, and thus cannot protect the citizenry in the moment of risk. Different concentrations of people, in different cultures, have varying degrees of commitment to armed self-defense or to community protection from firearms. 
Federal law is a broad brush most often used to set minimum standards; that is how it should be used for firearms regulation. There are some things that the Federal government can, and should, do, that will protect communities better while still respecting individual gun rights: Closing the gun show loophole and mandating all sales use someone with a Federal Firearms License who conducts a background check (such as California does); requiring all states to comply with submitting records to federal databases for those checks; requiring sellers in separate states to comply with firearms limits within the buyers' state of residence; limiting magazine capacities; enhancing punishments for criminal and negligent usage of firearms; and so on. Some of these require legislation and some can be done with changes to policies and priorities at the state and federal level. All still respect the rights of gun owners to collect firearms and enjoy their hobby while improving public safety, and that, I think, is where gun control and gun rights advocates can make agreement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_o...

Some Perspective on the NFL and the Concussion Debate

I think I've been fairly clear about my feelings on the NFL, concussions, and CTE. But I think it's important to keep tabs on the perspectives of those who are, in some form, a part of the game. Here is the perspective of Deion Sanders, for instance:

"The game is a safe game, the equipment is better. I don't buy all these guys coming back with these concussions. I'm not buying all that. Half these guys are trying to make money off the deal. That's real talk. That's really how it is. I wish they'd be honest and tell the truth because it's keeping kids away from our game."

Below is a clip of ESPN's First Take responding to these comments. To be clear on the facts, please feel free to consult our handy time-line. I post all of this because I think, more than the fact of brain injury, it was the conversation around brain injury that drove me away. I keep going back to Orwell. To paraphrase, profiting from a violent game in which brain injury is a possibility can be defended, but mostly by arguments that we are unwilling to face. 
It may, for instance, be true that we actually need the structured violence of football to satiate something inside us. But this raises the question of what we owe those who give of their brains and body to satiate that need. Perhaps nothing more than the adulation and salaries they receive. I don't agree with that, but it's an argument in a way that "Why aren't you suing college football?" isn't. (It's changing the subject, as well as an attack on motives.) Or "Half these guys are trying to make money" isn't. (That's just ad hominem.) 
I find the need to deflect and dissemble much more disturbing than the actual violence. I think violence can be defended in a way that dissembling about violence can not.