Ta-Nehisi Coates's Blog, page 73

In the Wake of Newtown, Tennessee Goes for Its Guns

In Tennessee, the state legislature is considering arming its teachers. It's worth giving some attention to those who are now putting for their plans. Here Evan McMorris-Santero talks to Tennessee state senator Frank Niceley:

State Sen. Frank Niceley (R) told TPM on Tuesday he believes it's time for that to change. He plans to introduce legislation in the next session, which begins Jan. 8, that will require all schools to have an armed staff member of some kind. The current language of the bill -- which is in its early form -- would allow for either a so-called "resource officer" (essentially an armed police officer, the kind which most Tennessee high schools have already) or an armed member of the faculty or staff in every school in the state. The choice would allow schools that can't afford a resource officer to fulfill the requirement without having to pay for anything beyond the cost of the training and, presumably, the weapon. But Niceley said schools should use the wiggle room to train and keep on hand armed staff not in uniform. That's the best way to protect students, he said.
"Say some madman comes in. The first person he would probably try to take out was the resource officer. But if he doesn't know which teacher has training, then he wouldn't know which one had [a gun]," Niceley said by phone. "These guys are obviously cowards anyway and if someone starts shooting back, they're going to take cover, maybe go ahead and commit suicide like most of them have..."
"Look at it this way, you never see one of these whacko shooters go to a gun show and start shooting. They don't go down to the police station and start shooting," he said. 

Yes they do:

The Southfield man killed by police after opening fire inside police headquarters Sunday was a veteran, described as a kind man who had lost the ability to speak. 
Harold J. Collins, 64, had been battling health problems for many years, including a tumor on his face, when he walked into the Southfield Police station on Sunday and without a word, tried to fire his gun on an officer behind protective glass. He was shot and killed by Southfield Police officers, but not before a Sergeant got shot in the left shoulder.

That was last month. And while you may not see "whacko shooters" down at the gun show, you do see scenes like this:

A chilling video shown in Hampden Superior Court today captured the moment an 8-year-old boy from Connecticut fatally shot himself with an Uzi submachine gun at a 2008 gun show in western Massachusetts.
The video, which showed the boy squeezing the trigger and the automatic weapon suddenly tilting upward and then backward in his small hands before he apparently shot himself, elicited shrieks from shocked spectators in the courtroom and the jury box.
Earlier Dr. Bizilj of Ashford, Conn., said he and his son Christopher, as well as Christopher's older brother, Colin, 11, had checked out the Oct. 26, 2008 show at the Westfield Sportsman's Cub and had a lunch of hamburgers and hot dogs before they decided they were interested in firing the submachine gun. 
Bizilj testified that his father-in-law, who was also along for the trip, shot the Uzi, then Bizilj shot the Uzi, and then Colin fired the Uzi. But the Uzi jammed for Colin and a "rangemaster" -- the person in charge of safety on the range -- switched the group to an even smaller "micro-Uzi" gun. Colin fired that weapon a little more. 
Then, Bizilj said, Christopher said, "Dad, can it be my turn now?" Bizilj said his youngest son fired 10 rounds, then the gun jammed. Bizilj said he was taking pictures and fiddling with his camera when he looked up to find his son was no longer in the viewfinder. 
He rushed over to find his son on the ground and put his hand behind him to pick him up only to find his head had been grievously wounded.
"I think you can imagine this has gone through my head a thousand times," Bizilj said, referring to his decision to bring his sons to the show.

When you see people using words like "coward" in a debate over arming elementary school teacher, you start to understand there is something more going on here besides the preservation of life. A man must have a code.

'Order at Universal Gunpoint'

The other day I tried to nail down what, specifically, bothered me about the "more guns" solution to American violence. Over at The American Conservative, Alan Jacobs makes the point with which I was struggling:

But what troubles me most about this suggestion -- and the general More Guns approach to social ills -- is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian "war of every man against every man" in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now -- but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly. 
Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.) 
Is this really the best we can do? It might be if we lived in, say, the world described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. But we don't. Our social order is flawed, but by no means bankrupt. Most of us live in peace and safety without the use of guns. It makes more sense to try to make that social order safer and safer, more and more genuinely peaceful, rather than descend voluntarily into a world governed by paranoia, in which one can only feel safe -- or, really, "safe" -- with cold steel strapped to one's ribcage.

I've talked a lot about the presumption of goodness in our society. For instance, there needs to be some sense that the mere act of arming oneself might invest you with a particular hubris, that there will be side-effects from arming educators, that placing weaponry in our elementary schools affects our broader conception of ourselves as a society. 
One of the points of a democratic society is to put brakes on our animal impulses -- impulses which are universal across humankind. I think much of our recent firearm legislation -- Stand Your Ground, for instance -- runs in the exact opposite direction. I wonder if Michael Dunn would have said one word to those kids had he not been armed.
It assumes, as Jacobs puts it, an "absolute trust" in ourselves. Jacobs cautions against making law out of white elephant events, and I think that's generally correct. But I can not escape the fact that Nancy Lanza was, as far as we know, a responsible gun owner. She was following the theory of "more guns." Those guns were then used to kill her.
UPDATE: Cleaning up the McArdle comments, which are all off-topic. I don't think it's smart to teach people to rush a guy armed to the teeth in body-armor. But I also don't want half the comments in the section wondering at Megan McArdle's prospects. Please do that somewhere else. 

'Order At Universal Gunpoint'

The other day I tried to nail down what, specifically, bothered me about the "more guns" solution to American violence. Over at The American Conservative, Alan Jacobs makes the point with which I was struggling:

But what troubles me most about this suggestion -- and the general More Guns approach to social ills -- is the absolute abandonment of civil society it represents. It gives up on the rule of law in favor of a Hobbesian "war of every man against every man" in which we no longer have genuine neighbors, only potential enemies. You may trust your neighbor for now -- but you have high-powered recourse if he ever acts wrongly. 
Whatever lack of open violence may be procured by this method is not peace or civil order, but rather a standoff, a Cold War maintained by the threat of mutually assured destruction. Moreover, the person who wishes to live this way, to maintain order at universal gunpoint, has an absolute trust in his own ability to use weapons wisely and well: he never for a moment asks whether he can be trusted with a gun. Of course he can! (But in literature we call this hubris.) 
Is this really the best we can do? It might be if we lived in, say, the world described by Cormac McCarthy in The Road. But we don't. Our social order is flawed, but by no means bankrupt. Most of us live in peace and safety without the use of guns. It makes more sense to try to make that social order safer and safer, more and more genuinely peaceful, rather than descend voluntarily into a world governed by paranoia, in which one can only feel safe -- or, really, "safe" -- with cold steel strapped to one's ribcage.

I've talked a lot about the presumption of goodness in our society. For instance, there needs to be some sense that the mere act of arming oneself might invest you with a particular hubris, that there will be side-effects from arming educators, that placing weaponry in our elementary schools affects our broader conception of ourselves as a society. 
One of the points of a democratic society is to put brakes on our most animal impulses--impulses which are universal across humankind. I think much of our recent firearm legislation -Stand Your Ground for instance--runs in the exact opposite direction. I wonder if Michael Dunn would have said one word to those kids had he not been armed.
It assumes, as Jacobs puts it, an "absolute trust" in ourselves. Jacobs cautions against making law out of white elephant events, and I think that's generally correct. But I can not escape the fact that Nancy Lanza was, as far as we know, a responsible gun owner. She was following the theory of "more guns." Those guns were then used to kill her.

The Magic Johnson Rule Of French

In my long effort to learn French there days when I am painfully aware of my 37-year old brain. I had such an instance about a week ago. I was working with my instructor to answer a series of questions. The questions required negotiating a few basic tenses which in turn required the conjugation of few basic verbs--avoir, aller and être. This is really basic stuff, that a dude with a year and a half of French under his belt should be able to do with some ease. Imagine a point guard on the varsity basketball team who still has to work on his dribbling, or a shooting guard who still has to work on his jumper.
But that's the point. Athletics is all about "practice" and a significant portion of "practice" is repetition of basic skills. When I used to watch football as a younger man, I would  wonder why the starting quarterback would get all the "reps" in the week before a bug game. Isn't it the backup quarterback who needs the most practice? But the quarterback's success is based on his ability to repeatedly execute the playbook as though it were second nature.
People often will say that you've become fluent when you can stop translating. When i say the phrase ça va for instance, I am not thinking "Hmm I need to greet someone in French. How do I do that? Oh right..." I've said the phrase ça va so much that it now corresponds to a thought, or a feeling, in the same way that "Hello" does. To be fluent in a language is to experience a good portion of the vocabulary and its essential rules on that level of thought and feeling. Tom Brady can't really "think" as the blitz is coming at him. He has to be fluent.






Among African-Americans, there are certain forms in which we have achieved disproportionate fluency. There's often the sense (especially in dance) that this fluency is achieved through some innate connection with the jungle. In fact it's achieved in the same rote way that anything else is achieved:

"I practiced all day," [Magic] Johnson told USA Weekend. "I dribbled to the store with my right hand and back with my left. Then I slept with my basketball.

When you see the basics of language broken down in their component parts, the first impuls is a kind of wonder.A sentence as simple as "When I woke today I was hungry, so I went to the diner and ordered my favorite meal--blueberry pancakes and sausage" is actually incredible. It's not enough to know the vocabulary, you have to know whether it's in the future or the past, and then which future or which pat, and then the difference in degrees between something that is your "favorite" and something that you just "like."  And this sentence is executed in seconds. The language has been repeated by the speaker so much that the calculation happens somewhere beyond the conscious brain, in a place where there isn't any conscious language at all. A neurologist could do better here. 
In much the same way Magic Johnson's passing could look more like instinct, than any kind of conscious choice. And in some sense it was instinct--a practiced one. The long goal is to make French my instinct. I feel the impulse sometimes. Somewhere in my brain there is a switch and when the switch is on, my impulse is speak in French--even if I do not know the words. The feeling is if a you suddenly turned off the freeway and into the woods, fully expecting an exit ramp. 
Building that exit ramp, that highway, has very little to do with my age. And at this point, age is irrelevant. I can not go back. Nothing means anything except practice.

Thomas Jefferson, Tadeusz Kosciusko, and Slavery: Annette Gordon-Reed Responds

Last week I took a look at some of Annette Gordon-Reed's writings on Thomas Jefferson and his old friend Tadeusz Kosciuszko. When Kosciuszko left the country, he asked Jefferson to use his American estate, upon his death, to free as many slaves as the money would allow. On Kosciuszko's death, Jefferson declined to do so citing his age. I was (and am) critical of that decision.  Professor Gordon-Reed was kind enough (and concerned enough) to write me and further detail her thoughts. They are offered below, with her permission, in their entirety. 
One final note before I cede the floor: This whole conversation has the potential to get ugly. I am not one who believes in decorum for decorum's sake. But my hope is that we can talk about this with great passion, but without undue rancor. 
First, Ta-Nehisi, thanks so much for giving me space to present my views on Jefferson and the Kosciusko will. Your posts on this matter suggest that you think it obvious that TJ made an immoral choice when he refused to remain as the will's executor. As you indicated, I have a different take. In addressing this issue, I write not as a defender of Jefferson. I would never, as a scholar, take the roles of either "defender" or "prosecutor" as they are both antithetical to my conception of the scholarly enterprise. Others may take a different view. 
I have known about the Kosciusko will for many years.  I've yet to discuss it in my works on TJ, because I think it more appropriately handled in the two-volume biography of TJ that I am going to write and in the intellectual biography that I am currently working on with historian, Peter S. Onuf.  I, too, was inclined to be very critical of TJ about Kosciusko until I began to read the documents related to the matter --the multiple wills, letters, Supreme Court opinions, and the briefs in the cases-- and relate them to what I knew of TJ's circumstances and the actions he took when he was deciding what to do about the will.   To briefly recount the relevant facts, in 1798 TJ helped Kosciusko draft a will that provided funds to educate and emancipate enslaved people. TJ agreed to be the will's executor.  Kosciusko returned to Europe and, over the years, wrote three more wills (1806, 1816, and 1817) that put his 1798 bequest in jeopardy. In fact, the will he wrote in his own hand in 1816 contained a clause that explicitly revoked all previous wills, and was the basis of the 1852 Supreme Court case that finally killed the 1798 bequest.  In an 1817 letter to TJ, Kosciusko referenced the 1798 bequest as if it were still operational.  His 1817 will covered his European property, but contained a provision that the will's beneficiaries apparently believed gave them the right to the funds in the 1798 will.  When TJ learned of Kosciusko's death, he voiced reservations about remaining as executor, citing his age--he was approaching 75--saying that seeing to the provisions of the will, "would take a longer course of time than I have left of life." He then learned of Kosciusko's 1806 and 1817 wills when the beneficiaries and representatives wrote to him claiming all or part of the funds covered by the 1798 will. At this point, TJ was sure he did not want to be the executor, adding the prospect of litigation to his list of reasons for bowing out. Although he would not be the executor, TJ then took steps to insure that Kosciusko's intent would be honored, and TJ repeatedly indicated in his correspondence that this is what he wanted.  He asked John Hartwell Cocke (39), a well-respected Virginian who also had anti-slavery sentiments, to take his place. Cocke, amenable at first, declined formal appointment when it became clear the will's education requirement would be difficult, if not impossible, to implement.  No white schools wanted to admit blacks, and white communities were hostile to the idea of setting up a school for them.  Acting on the advice of U.S. Attorney General, William Wirt, TJ formally placed the will with the Orphan's Court, which appointed Benjamin Lear as the administrator. 
   


Some observations. First, being the executor of a will is a serious role that mixes power with responsibility and risk. Critics of TJ focus only on the power that he gave up, and do not consider the responsibilities and risks.  Upon becoming the administrator, Lear, as did the man who succeeded him, posted a bond, and provided multiple sureties to his worth.  Executors/administrators who make the wrong kind of mistakes can put themselves personally on the hook.  TJ was broke in 1818. Could he really have afforded to be involved in this?  This may not explain why he bowed out, but his precarious financial position should be considered. 
Second, the heart tugging language often employed about TJ's duty to his "friend" stacks the deck. Your friend asks you to perform a task that seems simple enough at first. Then he/she proceeds to do things, without telling you, that substantially increase the difficulty of carrying out the task, indeed the friend's actions may involve you in long-running litigation.  Friends don't implicate friends in litigation.  Kosciusko put TJ-- and the enslaved people who could have benefited from the bequest--in a terrible position.  Simply repeating, in his final will, the terms of the 1798 bequest would have avoided a lot of problems. 
Third, the stages of life matter. Why does it shock that the 75-year old TJ might not want prime responsibility for such a huge endeavor and would not want to be involved in litigation? This is particularly so when he was already deep into another serious project: founding UVA. We might choose to fight over Kosciusko's will rather than setting up UVA. But doing both of these things might have been too much for someone who had only seven more years to live.  He sought a younger person to replace him, and talked with him about ways to accomplish the task. We are fixated on TJ, but there were other well-regarded people in Virginia who got things done, and Cocke was one of them. The freed slaves would have benefited just as much if Cocke had accomplished this as if TJ had. 
This matter is far more complicated-- and vastly more interesting--than has been portrayed. And yes, it is fun. Finding fun in our work is what provides scholars with the necessary fuel to do what it takes to get things as close to right as possible.   One more point:  Edward Coles always gets mentioned in discussions of TJ and slavery. Coles deserves lavish praise for his anti-slavery work, but consider his toast of July 4th 1827: to "Liberia--Destined to rid America of Negroes and to give Africa civilization and Christianity, it claims the support of every patriot, philanthropist and Christian." In 1831 Coles wrote to TJ's grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph, calling blacks an "ignorant, immoral & degraded race." Many today do not want to face the fact that white supremacy was as much a part of the founding ideology as republicanism. Beating up on TJ, as if he were some singular case, is part of the denial

A Farewell to Arms

While we are having this discussion over Newtown, political scientist Patrick Egan asks us to remember that, overall, this is a much less violent country than it was a few decades ago, and it is also a country in which people own fewer guns.

I think it's easy to fall into a conversation about "America's gun culture," but we should keep in mind that we are talking about a shrinking group of people who collectively own a shocking number of guns:

A decreasing number of American gun owners own two-thirds of the nation's guns and as many as one-third of the guns on the planet -- even though they account for less than 1% of the world's population, according to a CNN analysis of gun ownership data.

To state the obvious, there is something more than self-defense at work here.

On Parenting a Mentally Ill Son

While we're all talking about what might done about gun safety, it's also worth talking about what might be done in the realm of mental health. This piece, provocatively entitled "I Am Adam Lanza's Mother," is really worth a read.

Liza Long recounts her long fight to help her young mentally ill son, and the great fear that he will someday harm her, her two younger children, or someone else:

I live with a son who is mentally ill. I love my son. But he terrifies me. A few weeks ago, Michael pulled a knife and threatened to kill me and then himself after I asked him to return his overdue library books. His 7- and 9-year-old siblings knew the safety plan--they ran to the car and locked the doors before I even asked them to. I managed to get the knife from Michael, then methodically collected all the sharp objects in the house into a single Tupperware container that now travels with me.

Through it all, he continued to scream insults at me and threaten to kill or hurt me.

That conflict ended with three burly police officers and a paramedic wrestling my son onto a gurney for an expensive ambulance ride to the local emergency room. The mental hospital didn't have any beds that day, and Michael calmed down nicely in the ER, so they sent us home with a prescription for Zyprexa and a follow-up visit with a local pediatric psychiatrist.

We still don't know what's wrong with Michael. Autism spectrum, ADHD, Oppositional Defiant or Intermittent Explosive Disorder have all been tossed around at various meetings with probation officers and social workers and counselors and teachers and school administrators. He's been on a slew of antipsychotic and mood-altering pharmaceuticals, a Russian novel of behavioral plans. Nothing seems to work.

This piece is a gripping read. I think, as parents, we think of our influence as all-powerful. When a kid succeeds, we like to point to the home; when he doesn't, we do the same. And yet here is an illness that has no respect for the old words of "discipline" and "toughness."

With that said, I didn't hear any mention of a father in this piece. I don't want to overstate the value of fathers, and some fathers (chronically abusive ones, for instance) can contribute the most by exiting the scene. Yet, on some level, parenting is work, and when all hands are called to deck (as must be the case when your son is threatening murder and suicide), a set of hands here is missing.

These spree shooting are almost wholly perpetrated by men. Perhaps this is just a matter of genes. But I also wonder about what we (as fathers) are communicating to our boys about what the world owes, and the methods they may use to secure it.

A World of Maximum Guns, Cont.

Gawker flags this quote from Larry Pratt, executive director of the Gun Owners of America:

Gun control supporters have the blood of little children on their hands. Federal and state laws combined to insure that no teacher, no administrator, no adult had a gun at the Newtown school where the children were murdered. This tragedy underscores the urgency of getting rid of gun bans in school zones. The only thing accomplished by gun free zones is to insure that mass murderers can slay more before they are finally confronted by someone with a gun.

There is an interesting psychology at work here. Nancy Lanza, the mother of mass murderer Adam Lanza, was a gun collector who kept arms so that she might be "prepared for the worst." But Nancy Lanza's weapons did not prepare her to defend against the worst, they prepared her to be destroyed by the worst -- along with her neighbors and several small children. Pratt's answer is not to question the preparation which killed Nancy Lanza, but to duplicate it ad infinitum. 
Meanwhile Gawker alerts us to a gentleman in Indiana, who threatened to set his wife on fire, then enter the local elementary school and "kill as many people as he could." Police searching the man's apartment found 47 guns and ammunition hidden throughout the home -- doubtlessly assembled so that he too might be "prepared for the worst."

A World of Maximum Guns

This is probably as good a time as any to link to my colleague Jeff Goldberg's piece which argues for more gun safety measures along with a larger portion of the citizenry bearing firearms. You can read Jeff's update to his article here. Among his points:

People should have the ability to defend themselves. Mass shootings take many lives in part because no one is firing back at the shooters. The shooters in recent massacres have had many minutes to complete their evil work, while their victims cower under desks or in closets. One response to the tragic reality that we are a gun-saturated country is to understand that law-abiding, well-trained, non-criminal, wholly sane citizens who are screened by the government have a role to play in their own self-defense, and in the defense of others (read The Atlantic article to see how one armed school administrator stopped a mass shooting in Pearl Mississippi). I don't know anything more than anyone else about the shooting in Connecticut at the moment, but it seems fairly obvious that there was no one at or near the school who could have tried to fight back.

As I've said before I really don't have anything against self-defense. (My Pops is veteran of both the Vietnam War and the Black Panther party.) But I'm not sure that, in America, people lack the capacity to defend themselves. As Jeff's own reporting shows, the country is awash in guns. What the country is not awash in is people who have the desire to carry guns on their person. With that in mind, it's worth gaming this out and not simply asking whether we should encourage more people to carry guns, but what such a world would look like. 
It is human to wish that Dawn Hochsprung, the principal of Sandy Hook Elementary, who died heroically yesterday, enjoyed some weaponry beyond her body. But are we then asking for a world in which the educators of small children are strapped? Do we want our hospital workers, our librarians, our baby-sitters, and little league coaches all armed? What is the message that such a society sends to itself and its children? What does it say about its government's ability to perform the most essential of services--protection? And is it enough to simply be wholly sane? What do we say to the ghost of Jordan Davis, shot down over an argument of loud music, by a man who was quite sane? And where does it end? If more mass killers don body-armor, should we then start fitting ourselves in kevlar too?
This is not my area of expertise, so I am open to your thoughts. But I would hope to not live in a country where it is easier for a kid to access a gun, than it is for an adult to access the vote. 

The Cory Booker Show

The Times compares Newark's superstar mayor's national profile with his local profile:

Last spring, Ellen DeGeneres presented Mr. Booker with a superhero costume after he rushed into a burning building to save a neighbor. But Newark had eliminated three fire companies after the mayor's plan to plug a budget hole failed. 
In recent days, Mr. Booker has made the rounds of the national media with his pledge to live on food stamps for a week. But his constituents do not need to be reminded that six years after the mayor came into office vowing to make Newark a "model of urban transformation," their city remains an emblem of poverty. Cory Booker's promise -- captured in two books, two documentaries and frequent television appearances -- was to save a city that had been hemorrhaging residents, industry and hope since the riots that ripped it apart 45 years ago. 
But a growing number of Newarkers complain that he has proved to be a better marketer than mayor, who shines in the spotlight but shows little interest in the less-glamorous work of what it takes to run a city.

I met Cory Booker once, and immediately understood why he would appeal to an Oprah. He is really likable, really smart, and generally impressive. But its never been clear to me that his success nationally was matched by success at home. The ending for The Times' article is rather damning:

Asked about complaints from residents and business owners that garbage is not picked up, abandoned buildings are not boarded up and public spaces are in disrepair, the mayor talked about a new system that allows him to track which streets need snowplows and which departments are paying for too much overtime -- even when he is out of town. 
He invited a reporter to see the system in action. He then called to apologize that he could not be there: "I'm in and out of New York all day." Instead, his staff demonstrated the system. 
Mr. Booker was on his way to host a reading at a bookstore on the Upper West Side, filmed by CNN. He then spoke at a benefit at Cipriani and attended a movie premiere at Google's New York headquarters. Afterward, he announced on Twitter, "I sat on a panel with Richard Branson."