Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 72

The NRA and the 'Positive Good' of Maximum Guns

In light of the NRA's call for even more guns, in even more places, friend of the room and historian Tony Horwitz (Confederates In The Attic, Midnight Rising) sends along this beautiful missive noting the haunting similarities between the aggressive expansionist tactics of The Slave Power and aggressive, expansionist tactics of "The Gun Power." I am tremendously excited, and privileged to offer this to you guys. Tony's is a beautiful mind. Watch him work.

In the 1840s and 50s, abolitionists often spoke of a menace they called "The Slave Power." This pejorative wasn't aimed at Southern slavery, per se. It referred to the vast reach of proslavery money and influence in Washington and beyond. If unchecked, abolitionists warned, the Slave Power would poison every corner of American life and territory. I'm wary of historical analogies. But in the wake of the Newtown massacre, I'm struck by parallels between the Slave Power and a force haunting us today: call it The Gun Power. 
For decades we've appeased and abetted this monster, as Americans once did slavery. Now, like then, we may have finally reached a breaking point. I don't mean to equate owning slaves with owning guns. But I do mean to equate the tactics and rhetoric of the NRA with those of proslavery "Fire-Eaters." The NRA casts itself as a champion of the Constitution. So did slaveholders, citing the safeguards accorded owners of human "property." Few Americans questioned slavery's legality, though they debated the Founders' intent, just as we do with the Second Amendment. 
But as the nation spread, slaveowners turned the defense of a right into an expansionist crusade. Slavery wasn't just a right that nonslaveholders had to recognize and uphold. It must extend wherever slaveholders traveled and settled. So, too, has the N.R.A. demanded the right to carry guns into every conceivable place, including schools, churches and hospitals. The N.R.A. does so in the name not only of rights but of "safety" and "self-defense." Guns, you see, aren't a danger to be regulated; they're a source of peace and security that everyone should enjoy. 
Proslavery zealots had their own version of this. While 18th century slaveowners like Jefferson had treated the institution as a necessary evil, John C. Calhoun lauded slavery as a "positive good," a source of freedom even, because it liberated whites from drudgery and class conflict and blacks from African "savagery." It followed that all should enjoy its benefits. "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth,' declared Mississippi Senator Albert Brown. 
This wasn't just bluster. Even after the U.S. had enlarged itself by a third at Mexico's expense in the 1840s, Brown and others urged the nation to conquer Central America to provide Southerners with more land to plant and enslave. In the 1850s, Americans invaded Cuba, Baja, and Nicaragua, where a proslavery partisan, William Walker, installed himself as leader and reinstated slavery. His dictatorship won recognition from the administration of President Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire. Northerners like Pierce were derided as "doughfaces"--half-baked and malleable in the hands of Southern leaders. 
The N.R.A. has its own such minions, many of them Democrats the organization has bought or bullied with its lobbying and war chest. A famous political cartoon from the 1850s, titled "Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler," shows a miniature Pierce and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois holding a bound man's hair while two Southern Congressman hoist a black man down the captive's throat. A similar cartoon could be drawn today, featuring the NRA's Wayne LaPierre and legislators with A ratings from the gun lobby, ramming concealed weapons and Stand Your Ground laws through state bodies too cowed to oppose them. 



These kinds of tactics can work for a time, a very long time, as they did in the case of slavery. Most mid-19th century Americans, after all, were white supremacists who had little or no care for the plight of blacks. What most Northerners hated and feared wasn't slavery in the South, but the prospect of competing with slave labor and slaveholders' wealth in new territories, putting white freedom and opportunity at risk. 
I suspect most Americans today who don't own guns have somewhat the same stance towards gun ownership. So long as guns stay on shooting ranges, or in the hands of hunters, or those who can make a good case that they need protection, few of us will make a stink, however much we disapprove. But forces like the Slave Power and Gun Power know no limits. 
Emboldened by success, and imbued with a fanatical and paranoid world-view, they see enemies everywhere and regard any hint of compromise as betrayal. As New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wrote in 1854, slavery "loves aggression, for when it ceases to be aggressive it stagnates and decays. It is the leper of modern civilization, but a leper whom no cry of 'unclean' will keep from intrusion into uninfected company." Much the same applies to the NRA and its insatiable appetite for new territory to allow arms in, and new ways to allow those guns to be used--such as putting armed guards in our elementary schools, as the NRA today suggested.
In the 1850s, slaveholders got their way in Congress (including a hardened Fugitive Slave Act), in the Supreme Court (the Dred Scott decision), and in the White House (occupied by a succession of doughfaces). But proslavery hardliners weren't satisfied. They sought the resumption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which the Constitution had banned as of 1808. They branded moderates like Abraham Lincoln--who pledged to leave slavery alone in the South--as members of a "Black Republican" conspiracy to overthrow slavery. And they banished former allies such as Stephen Douglas, who lost his A-Rating for straying from the ultra-orthodox line that there must not be any restriction on slavery. 
Rather than accede to Douglas's nomination as Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential election, which he might well have won, Southerners split the party and nominated one of their own, dividing the Democratic vote and paving Lincoln's path to the White House. At which point, the Fire-Eaters led Southern states out of the Union rather than accept a democratically-elected president they opposed. 
The NRA shows signs of similar derangement and over-reach. During the election, it demonized a president who had done nothing on gun control, claiming a "massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term." It has alienated staunch allies like Democrat John Dingell who resisted the NRA's mad-dog campaign to hold Eric Holder in contempt over "Fast and Furious." Other supporters who have deviated an inch from the NRA line have been targeted for electoral defeat. 
And now, as the NRA's crusade bears fruit in Aurora, in Newtown, in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the nation shows signs of finally rousing from its slumber and acquiescence to whatever the Gun Power demands. The freedom of gun-owners--as interpreted and enforced by the NRA--threatens the freedom and security of every American. This was, in essence, the argument of Northerners who conjured the Slave Power: unstopped, it will enslave us all. 
Here's one last link between the Slave Power and Gun Power, albeit ironic. The NRA was founded after the Civil War by Union veterans who felt Yankees had shown a lack of marksmanship in battling Rebels. 
The NRA's first president was General Ambrose Burnside, who led Union troops at Antietam, a battle that in turn led Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This early NRA appears to have regarded guns and marksmanship as necessary to the maintenance of a well-regulated militia. Today's NRA, of course, resists the "regulated" part of that equation. And militia, in its mind, means massively armed individuals ready to resist the "jack-booted government thugs" of the ATF and other agencies (including the United Nations). 
In short, the NRA has become a neo-Confederate movement that sees Federals as foes, and that stokes the paranoia of its followers by claiming, as LaPierre did this year, that Obama's re-election marks "the end of our freedom forever." That's more or less what Fire-Eaters said about Lincoln in 1860. 

The NRA And The 'Positive Good' Of Maximum Guns

In light of the NRA's call for even more guns, in even more places, friend of the room and historian Tony Horwitz (Confederates In The Attic, Midnight Rising) sends along this beautiful missive noting the haunting similarities between the aggressive expansionist tactics of The Slave Power and aggressive, expansionist tactics of "The Gun Power." I am tremendously excited, and privileged to offer this to you guys. Tony's is a beautiful mind. Watch him work.

In the 1840s and 50s, abolitionists often spoke of a menace they called "The Slave Power." This pejorative wasn't aimed at Southern slavery, per se. It referred to the vast reach of proslavery money and influence in Washington and beyond. If unchecked, abolitionists warned, the Slave Power would poison every corner of American life and territory. I'm wary of historical analogies. But in the wake of the Newtown massacre, I'm struck by parallels between the Slave Power and a force haunting us today: call it The Gun Power. 
For decades we've appeased and abetted this monster, as Americans once did slavery. Now, like then, we may have finally reached a breaking point. I don't mean to equate owning slaves with owning guns. But I do mean to equate the tactics and rhetoric of the NRA with those of proslavery "Fire-Eaters." The NRA casts itself as a champion of the Constitution. So did slaveholders, citing the safeguards accorded owners of human "property." Few Americans questioned slavery's legality, though they debated the Founders' intent, just as we do with the Second Amendment. 
But as the nation spread, slaveowners turned the defense of a right into an expansionist crusade. Slavery wasn't just a right that nonslaveholders had to recognize and uphold. It must extend wherever slaveholders traveled and settled. So, too, has the N.R.A. demanded the right to carry guns into every conceivable place, including schools, churches and hospitals. The N.R.A. does so in the name not only of rights but of "safety" and "self-defense." Guns, you see, aren't a danger to be regulated; they're a source of peace and security that everyone should enjoy. 
Proslavery zealots had their own version of this. While 18th century slaveowners like Jefferson had treated the institution as a necessary evil, John C. Calhoun lauded slavery as a "positive good," a source of freedom even, because it liberated whites from drudgery and class conflict and blacks from African "savagery." It followed that all should enjoy its benefits. "I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth,' declared Mississippi Senator Albert Brown. 
This wasn't just bluster. Even after the U.S. had enlarged itself by a third at Mexico's expense in the 1840s, Brown and others urged the nation to conquer Central America to provide Southerners with more land to plant and enslave. In the 1850s, Americans invaded Cuba, Baja, and Nicaragua, where a proslavery partisan, William Walker, installed himself as leader and reinstated slavery. His dictatorship won recognition from the administration of President Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire. Northerners like Pierce were derided as "doughfaces"--half-baked and malleable in the hands of Southern leaders. 
The N.R.A. has its own such minions, many of them Democrats the organization has bought or bullied with its lobbying and war chest. A famous political cartoon from the 1850s, titled "Forcing Slavery Down the Throat of a Freesoiler," shows a miniature Pierce and Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois holding a bound man's hair while two Southern Congressman hoist a black man down the captive's throat. A similar cartoon could be drawn today, featuring the NRA's Wayne LaPierre and legislators with A ratings from the gun lobby, ramming concealed weapons and Stand Your Ground laws through state bodies too cowed to oppose them. 



These kinds of tactics can work for a time, a very long time, as they did in the case of slavery. Most mid-19th century Americans, after all, were white supremacists who had little or no care for the plight of blacks. What most Northerners hated and feared wasn't slavery in the South, but the prospect of competing with slave labor and slaveholders' wealth in new territories, putting white freedom and opportunity at risk. 
I suspect most Americans today who don't own guns have somewhat the same stance towards gun ownership. So long as guns stay on shooting ranges, or in the hands of hunters, or those who can make a good case that they need protection, few of us will make a stink, however much we disapprove. But forces like the Slave Power and Gun Power know no limits. 
Emboldened by success, and imbued with a fanatical and paranoid world-view, they see enemies everywhere and regard any hint of compromise as betrayal. As New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley wrote in 1854, slavery "loves aggression, for when it ceases to be aggressive it stagnates and decays. It is the leper of modern civilization, but a leper whom no cry of 'unclean' will keep from intrusion into uninfected company." Much the same applies to the NRA and its insatiable appetite for new territory to allow arms in, and new ways to allow those guns to be used--such as putting arming guards in our elementary schools, as the NRA today suggested.
In the 1850s, slaveholders got their way in Congress (including a hardened Fugitive Slave Act), in the Supreme Court (the Dred Scott decision), and in the White House (occupied by a succession of doughfaces). But proslavery hardliners weren't satisfied. They sought the resumption of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which the Constitution had banned as of 1808. They branded moderates like Abraham Lincoln--who pledged to leave slavery alone in the South--as members of a "Black Republican" conspiracy to overthrow slavery. And they banished former allies such as Stephen Douglas, who lost his A-Rating for straying from the ultra-orthodox line that there must not be any restriction on slavery. 
Rather than accede to Douglas's nomination as Democratic candidate in the 1860 presidential election, which he might well have won, Southerners split the party and nominated one of their own, dividing the Democratic vote and paving Lincoln's path to the White House. At which point, the Fire-Eaters led Southern states out of the Union rather than accept a democratically-elected president they opposed. 
The NRA shows signs of similar derangement and over-reach. During the election, it demonized a president who had done nothing on gun control, claiming a "massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term." It has alienated staunch allies like Democrat John Dingell who resisted the NRA's mad-dog campaign to hold Eric Holder in contempt over "Fast and Furious." Other supporters who have deviated an inch from the NRA line have been targeted for electoral defeat. 
And now, as the NRA's crusade bears fruit in Aurora, in Newtown, in the shooting of Trayvon Martin, the nation shows signs of finally rousing from its slumber and acquiescence to whatever the Gun Power demands. The freedom of gun-owners--as interpreted and enforced by the NRA--threatens the freedom and security of every American. This was, in essence, the argument of Northerners who conjured the Slave Power: unstopped, it will enslave us all. 
Here's one last link between the Slave Power and Gun Power, albeit ironic. The NRA was founded after the Civil War by Union veterans who felt Yankees had shown a lack of marksmanship in battling Rebels. 
The NRA's first president was General Ambrose Burnside, who led Union troops at Antietam, a battle that in turn led Lincoln to issue the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. This early NRA appears to have regarded guns and marksmanship as necessary to the maintenance of a well-regulated militia. Today's NRA, of course, resists the "regulated" part of that equation. And militia, in its mind, means massively armed individuals ready to resist the "jack-booted government thugs" of the ATF and other agencies (including the United Nations). 
In short, the NRA has become a neo-Confederate movement that sees Federals as foes, and that stokes the paranoia of its followers by claiming, as LaPierre did this year, that Obama's re-election marks "the end of our freedom forever." That's more or less what Fire-Eaters said about Lincoln in 1860. 

It's the Great Effing Gatsby, Dude

Baz Luhrman's latest trailer is out. Probably not much more for me to say here, beyond noting the fact that that Gatsby dude totally kicks ass. I feel like I'm watching Blueshammer.

Violence and the Social Compact

Just six hours after being released from jail on charges that he kidnapped his ex-girlfriend, Beatriz Cintora-Silva, Sanchez arrived at the the young woman's home bearing a gun:

Authorities said Beatriz Cintora-Silva called 911 shortly after 4 a.m. to report shots fired. The 911 dispatcher heard her cry, "No, no, no," followed by a gunshot. Sanchez took the phone, told the dispatcher he had killed three people and that he was going to kill himself, authorities said. The dispatcher then heard a single shot followed by silence. 
Cook said Sanchez had been arrested Saturday in Longmont on charges of domestic violence, kidnapping and false arrest for allegedly holding Maria Cintora-Silva against her will after their relationship ended. Sanchez was released on bail from the Boulder County jail at 10 p.m. Monday and drove to the home where Cintora-Silva had taken refuge with her sister and brother-in-law, Cook said. "He shot out the back door," Cook said. "He shot that out then gained entry into the house." 
The bodies of Ojeda and his wife were found in one bedroom. His sister-in-law and Sanchez were found in another, Cook said. Authorities found a .45-caliber Glock handgun near Sanchez's body and 16 spent shell casings around the house, Cook said, adding that investigators were still examining the house and might find more. 
Cook said Sanchez had two magazines for the gun, and each held 13 rounds of ammunition. Sanchez had been living in another house in the same neighborhood of tidy modular homes, winding walkways and parks. 
Investigators searching that home found the original box the handgun had been sold in, but they did not find a receipt, and it was unclear when he bought it, Cook said.

I read this story yesterday. And then this morning I went back through the comments section for yesterday's post on the killing of Kasandra Belcher. Here are a few samples of what I saw:

My ex-husband tried to kill me after months of working himself up to it. The day of the event he was at my house, and spent a good half hour following me around, badgering me about things, working himself up into a frenzy about nothing, until he totally lost it and started beating the crap out of me. 
The only thing that stopped him from grabbing a knife and finishing the job was that someone walked in on him. Amazingly then the first thing he said was 'oh my god what have I done, please don't have me arrested'. In retrospect I see it as a long brewing, calculated step into madness, then an attempt afterwards to blame me for it. 15 years later he still takes no responsibility.
To think that a person who is consciously capable of that kind of act, or a person so lacking in relationship skills that he can't manage to get out of a situation without killing the other person is going to possess the skills to know when it's time to give up his gun is not realistic. These guys are deep in the depths of denial.

More:

After our first date, my future wife's stalker, a truly pathological man she had briefly dated months earlier, revealed himself by physically attacking her in a grocery store parking lot. This started a three month reign of terror, which included an attempt to choke her to death in the unattached garage where the laundry room was. He was finally jailed after beating another woman he was stalking at the same time into a coma. The harassment didn't stop until I beat the sh*t out of a friend of his he had stalking her further, when he tried to break into her house while I was dog-sitting. 
There are truly ill people in this world. I'm sure my wife's stalker is out of jail now. I contemplate what I shall do should he ever appear again. I am ashamed to say that my guilt over not being able to protect her -- a bullshit male response if there ever was one -- were it not for the fact that we now have children, might well result in his death should he approach her again. It remains the only time in my life I have coldly reasoned how much violence I wish to mete out, and how I could get away with it.

More:

Someone I dated briefly in high school showed up at my house one night shortly after I stopped going out with him drunk and with a pistol, threatening to shoot me. A mutual friend was also there and restrained him. I never even told my parents, who were upstairs asleep at the time, let alone called the police. He verbally terrorized me for months afterward, making life in my small high school pretty ugly for awhile. 
I marvel now, more than 35 years later, that I was so accepting of the idea of my own powerlessness in the situation that it never occurred to me to defend myself or to prosecute the guy in any way. Nor did it occur to any of my classmates who knew about the incident to discuss it with any authority figure. Profoundly fncked.

More:

My ex-wife's second husband during the dissolution of their marriage shot a rifle in her vicinity inside their house, in a room where my second daughter and granddaughter by my first daughter, no more than an infant at the time, were also. He was not a hunter; I had never known him to shoot or discuss self defense. He was not a collector. This was Texas, where guns and rifles in the home are as common as cups and saucers. 
For a month afterwords, my daughter stayed in the same bed as her mother (I did not find out till all this was over or I would have been very upset) to protect her. He was never arrested, albeit there was a restraining order put on him to stay away from my ex-wife, though not my daughter or granddaughter, after a hearing in which my daughter, who had had an excellent relationship with him for years, had to testify to assure the petition's success. She told me later it was, up to that point, the most terrible day of her life, and I believe it was the event that triggered her bi-polar condition in ensuing years. The rifle was legal and registered. 
He has denied the incident ever occurred for over a decade, so convincingly so that one must infer that his memory has erased the event and replaced it with an entirely different narrative he has supplied for himself and repeated to himself. He has never once since demonstrated any violent behavior toward anyone, let alone gun use. If he had hit either my granddaughter or daughter it would have been an accident, a slip or trip, perhaps a ricochet: he was not, according to my daughter, aiming in their direction.

I have often said that I grew up around a good deal of violence. It really was just in the air. It's one of the reasons why I am always skeptical of the notion that violence is simply something that "those people over there" do. On the contrary, the desire to dominate other people lurks under the surface of all humanity. I think this extends across all class boundaries. The project of a civil society is to curb this desire for violent domination. It is to recognize that there is an animal in us, and that, if we are left to our own devices, the animal will rule.
I've been with my spouse for almost 15 years. In those years, I've never been with anyone but the mother of my son. But that's not because I am an especially good and true person. In fact, I am wholly in possession of an unimaginably filthy and mongrel mind. But I am also a dude who believes in guard-rails, as a buddy of mine once put it. I don't believe in getting "in the moment" and then exercising will-power. I believe in avoiding "the moment." I believe in being absolutely clear with myself about why I am having a second drink, and why I am not; why I am going to a party, and why I am not. I believe that the battle is lost at Happy Hour, not at the hotel. I am not a "good man." But I am prepared to be an honorable one.
This is not just true of infidelity, it's true of virtually anything I've ever done in my life. I did not lose 70 pounds through strength of character, goodness or willpower. My character and will angles toward cheesecake, fried chicken and beer -- in no particular order. I lost that weight by not fighting the battle on desire's terms, but fighting before desire can take effect.
These are compacts I have made with myself and with my family. There are other compact we make with our country and society. I tend to think those compacts work best when we do not flatter ourselves, when we are fully aware of the animal in us. 
Power changes people. People yell things from behind the shielding of their automobiles which they would never yell if walking down a sidewalk. This does not mean that power should be shunned; it means that we should be aware of its effects. I believe very much in self-defense, and totally understand why someone would keep a gun in the home. If I lived somewhere else, I might keep one too. 
But I would not insist that I was the same person armed, with the power to take a life, that I was without it. I would insist on guard-rails.

Talk to Me Like I Am Stupid: Understanding International Gun Ownership Rates

Yesterday I was having a discussion in comments about how American gun ownership rates compare to the rest of the world. Someone mentioned Canada and suggested it has higher gun ownership rates, but much less violence. I've heard something like that before. But when I went to look it up, I found that it isn't true at all. 
In 2007, America had 88 guns per hundred residents, nearly triple the Canadian rate of 30 guns per hundred residents. It's true that Canada is on the higher end of these countries, but it seems like Canada's natural peer is France, Denmark and Norway--all of whom have more, but are in the low 30s--not the United States.
Am I missing something in the data? Am I using the wrong metric? What do people mean when they cite Canada as a place with a lot of guns but low gun violence? Am I not citing the argument correctly? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
As with any TTMLIS please don't comment if your answer is just polemical, or if you just want to let us know about a cool book you read. I do like books, but let's keep on track.

Talk To Me Like I Am Stupid: Understanding International Gun Ownership Rates

Yesterday I was having a discussion in comments about how American gun ownership rates compare to the rest of the world. Someone mentioned Canada and suggested it has higher gun ownership rates, but much less violence. I've heard something like that before. But when I went to look it up, I found that it isn't true at all. 
In 2007, America had 88 guns per hundred residents, nearly triple the Canadian rate of 30 guns per hundred residents. It's true that Canada is on the higher end of these countries, but it seems like Canada's natural peer is France, Denmark and Norway--all of whom have more, but are in the low 30s--not the United States.
Am I missing something in the data? Am I using the wrong metric? What do people mean when they cite Canada as a place with a lot of guns but low gun violence? Am I not citing the argument correctly? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
As with any TTMLIS please don't comment if your answer is just polemical, or if you just want to let us know about a cool book you read. I do like books, but let's keep on track.

The Benghazi Fall-Out

The investigation into the terrorist attack in Benghazi has arrived:

The investigation into the attack on the diplomatic mission and the C.I.A. annex in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans also faulted State Department officials in Washington for ignoring requests from the American Embassy in Tripoli for more guards for the mission and for failing to make sufficient safety upgrades. 
The panel also said American intelligence officials had relied too much on specific warnings of imminent attacks, which they did not have in the case of Benghazi, rather than basing assessments more broadly on a deteriorating security environment. By this spring, Benghazi, a hotbed of militant activity in eastern Libya, had experienced a string of assassinations, an attack on a British envoy's motorcade and the explosion of a bomb outside the American Mission. 
Finally, the report blamed two major State Department bureaus -- Diplomatic Security and Near Eastern Affairs -- for failing to coordinate and plan adequate security. The panel also determined that a number of officials had shown poor leadership, but they were not identified in the unclassified version of the report that was released.

Three officials have already resigned. Curiously Susan Rice still has a job. (I am being sarcastic.) Nevertheless, I think the issue of securing American diplomats is one of actual  substance, whether the GOP is grandstanding or not. The fact that Lindsey Graham wanted some good publicity from the right shouldn't distract from that point.
A bit more:

Ambassador Stevens had e-mailed his superiors in Washington in August alerting them to "a security vacuum" in the city. But the report found that in planning his trip there in September, he did not foresee that the compound could come under such a sustained attack, which included mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, despite the worsening security situation. 
"His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments," it said. 
Mr. Stevens was making his first visit to Benghazi in 10 months. But his plans for taking only two American security agents "were not shared thoroughly with the embassy's country team, who were not fully aware of the planned movements off the compound," the report determined.

The Benghazi Fall-out

The investigation into the terrorist attack into Benghazi has arrived:

The investigation into the attack on the diplomatic mission and the C.I.A. annex in Benghazi that resulted in the deaths of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans also faulted State Department officials in Washington for ignoring requests from the American Embassy in Tripoli for more guards for the mission and for failing to make sufficient safety upgrades. 
The panel also said American intelligence officials had relied too much on specific warnings of imminent attacks, which they did not have in the case of Benghazi, rather than basing assessments more broadly on a deteriorating security environment. By this spring, Benghazi, a hotbed of militant activity in eastern Libya, had experienced a string of assassinations, an attack on a British envoy's motorcade and the explosion of a bomb outside the American Mission. 
Finally, the report blamed two major State Department bureaus -- Diplomatic Security and Near Eastern Affairs -- for failing to coordinate and plan adequate security. The panel also determined that a number of officials had shown poor leadership, but they were not identified in the unclassified version of the report that was released.

Three officials have already resigned. Curiously Susan Rice still has a job. Nevertheless, I think the issue of securing American diplomats is one of actual  substance, whether the GOP is grandstanding or not. The fact that Lindsey Graham wanted some good publicity from the right shouldn't distract from that point.
A bit more:

Ambassador Stevens had e-mailed his superiors in Washington in August alerting them to "a security vacuum" in the city. But the report found that in planning his trip there in September, he did not foresee that the compound could come under such a sustained attack, which included mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, despite the worsening security situation. 
"His status as the leading U.S. government advocate on Libya policy, and his expertise on Benghazi in particular, caused Washington to give unusual deference to his judgments," it said. 
Mr. Stevens was making his first visit to Benghazi in 10 months. But his plans for taking only two American security agents "were not shared thoroughly with the embassy's country team, who were not fully aware of the planned movements off the compound," the report determined.

The Lost Battalion

It's yours...

The Killing of Kasandra Perkins

It would be soothing (for some of us) to consider Jovan Belcher a man who simply snapped and murdered his ex-girlfriend. I guess in some way, he did. In another, more honest way, he did not:

Less than two months ago, Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher sent a foreboding text message to a secret girlfriend, expressing turmoil and frustration with his longtime girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins. In the message, Belcher said he "would shoot" Perkins "if she didn't leave him alone," according to police reports obtained by The Star. 
At the time, the secret girlfriend thought Belcher was joking.

Belcher claimed that his wife "threatened to take all his money and his child if they split up" and that she "knew exactly how to press his buttons and make him angry." This is the "look what you made me do" defense -- made to a woman with whom Belcher was having an affair, no less. 
It would seem to me that part of responsible gun ownership would not simply involve a knowledge of guns, but a knowledge of oneself. It's not enough to keep your piece on safety and under lock, if you are not employing such protections for yourself. If I have ceded control over my anger to my significant other, and have had thoughts of shooting her, perhaps I should not have guns in my house. Here are the possible results:

Police found a bullet hole in the bathroom floor under Perkins' body that went through to the basement, possibly indicating she was on the floor when Belcher fired that round. Shepherd said she heard a "thump" before the gunshots. Police found eight spent shell casings and three bullet fragments in the bathroom and one spent bullet in the basement. Police observed 10 apparent gunshot wounds on the front of Perkins body, including to her neck, shoulder and chest, and five wounds on her backside. The medical examiner said four bullets remained in her body.