James’s Comments

James’s comments from the History is Not Boring group.

Note: James is not currently a member of this group.

That does sound like a good system, Susanna, both for diversity of choice to fit different students' personalities (and create a community with more breadth) and because it's good psychology - like a parent giving a much younger child a choice of which vegetable to eat; the child gets some say and doesn't feel completely dictated to, but still eats some vegetables either way.

Elizabeth, I was watching a DVD documentary on Tolkien yesterday ("J.R.R. Tolkien: Master of the Rings - New Perspectives on a Modern Masterpiece"; if anyone's interested, it's excellent, and it includes a CD of music by Rick Wakeman based on the trilogy). Some of the commentators discussed the way that Tolkien is more popular with boys than with girls, and attributed it to the elements of the saga (the fighting, mainly) that are usually emphasized when people talk about Tolkien. It went into the roots and connections of the story in both classic literature and Tolkien's own life, including his devastating experience in World War I; I thought it was very moving in places.

Well, when McDonald's has a flag, it would be a surprise if those companies didn't.

I saw a flag I want to get for our house; it had the figures of Winnie the Pooh and Piglet, on a plain field of a sunny shade of yellow.

Would you consider an extensive tattoo a personal flag?

It had been about ten years - yes, a lot of people probably hadn't had occasion to get new flags during that time.

I'm picturing the courage it would take to bring the flag down and run it back up reversed to send that signal, if the ship had been captured by pirates. A very gutsy act.

No doubt it's all part of a sinister plan to make our currencies worthless so they can be replaced with magnetic chips embedded in our noses...

The US flag is also a distress signal if flown upside down, Barbarossa - I didn't know the UK did the same thing; sounds as if, in a way, that tradition in the Philippines is similar, Marco.

On the gun thing, I give up. All I have to offer is Constitutional law, tradition (with the exception of Prohibition, which was repealed, every time we've amended the Constitution it's been to expand personal rights, not encroach on them), the dictionary, a career of experience in social services and corrections, and statistics showing no correlation between restrictive gun laws and gun crimes. Obviously, those are trumped by the unsupported gut feelings of a minority of people who haven't studied the issue but are willing to yell louder and longer than anyone else.

I try to debate this with people based on facts; if the data showed that laws against semiautomatic firearms or concealed carry by non-criminals reduced crime and made the community safer, I would have to reluctantly concede that point. The data show no such thing - the only arguments people muster are based on their own assumptions and emotions, which are not a basis for legislating restrictions on what other people can do.

Intellectual honesty calls for being willing to change one's mind when the facts show that an assumption has been mistaken. For example, I used to support capital punishment; but when I was presented with data showing that it had no deterrent effect and cost the taxpayers more due to the legal process than a sentence of life without parole, and that a significant number of people get death sentences after being inadequately represented and probably wrongfully convicted, I changed my mind. I used to oppose the legalization of drugs that are against the law, but when someone presented data that showed that it would benefit society more than the way we run things now, I changed my mind.

There's no point in discussing a controversy with someone whose mind is closed, who is too lazy or narcissistic to look in a mirror and honestly consider someone else's perspective and the relevant facts. They're not analyzing or debating - they're fundamentalists of a different kind, and it's a waste of time and mental energy to keep talking with someone who won't address any of the factual points you make.

Bye, all.

The designs of the Alaska and Arizona flags are striking, too.

The definition of disingenuous from Dictionary.com - "lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically ingenuous; insincere."
To accuse someone of being disingenuous but say you didn't call them dishonest, is in itself dishonest, or disingenuous, take your pick of synonyms. I'm not "interpreting your remarks as I wish", I'm interpreting them according to the English language.

To say that guns are easy to acquire by any standards is also self-evidently not true; that's the logical fallacy of begging the question, i.e. presenting something as a given that isn't. Again, an indication of either poor critical thinking or disingenuousness. It's not true by the standards of a lot of people, including myself.

You say that you don't see me "advocating any sort of restriction on their acquisition" and ask me to point out what you missed. All right; as I have repeatedly written here:
1. I advocate enforcing existing laws against letting minors, criminals, or people adjudged as dangerous get guns;
2. I advocate strengthening and improving the existing background check system to keep people like the Virginia Tech shooter, who had a history of dangerous mental illness, from being able to buy guns;
3. I advocate stronger penalties for anyone who provides a gun to someone who can't get it legally, or allows it to fall into their hands through negligence; and
4. Beyond the above measures to limit access to guns, I advocate stricter penalties for gun crimes.
If you don't consider that "advocating any sort of restriction on their acquisition", again, we're speaking different languages - I'm using English.

One of the things that frustrates me about this issue, like trying to talk about "homeland security" with a neocon or spirituality with a fundamentalist, is the self-righteousness, logical fallacies (straw man arguments, begging the question, etc.), and narcissistic determination of many people to limit the rights of others so as to make everyone conform with whatever rules they favor. Don't like guns? Fine! Don't own one. If I misuse mine, by all means take it away and hold me accountable. But unless I do, the problem is in someone else's thinking, not in my gun.

Regarding the government's responsibility to see to people's wellbeing, I'm willing to pay higher taxes under a more progressive tax system to help pay for free universal health care (if we put more emphasis on proactive prevention and removed the insurance companies from the process, we could cut health care costs quite a bit anyway) and free access to college education up to the bachelor's level. From what I've seen working in the health department and the corrections department, every dollar we invested in addiction and mental illness prevention and treatment programs would pay for itself several times over in reduced costs for law enforcement, prisons, and probation and parole - not to mention reduced costs to victims of crimes and increased tax revenues by having more people working and paying into the system instead of living on the street or in cells. Those things would expand the middle class, too, which is one of the best ways to make society more safe and stable. Another step would be to invest government funds, rather than bailing out the executives and stockholders of incompetently run corporations, would be to put them into infrastructure repair and expansion. We need to fix highways and bridges, power nets, communications nets; we should be building renewable energy systems as fast as we can - solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and biofuels not based on food crops, such as switchgrass, which grows where food crops won't - without irrigation - and yields more energy per acre than corn or soy anyway. We need to build public transportation systems. We need to clean up Superfund sites. We need to plant lots and lots of trees.
I don't believe that whether or not someone has a TV is a social issue. If anything, I'd rather pay for everyone to have a PC than a TV!

George, when you say that I am intentionally introducing a distraction, you're accusing me of arguing dishonestly. That is a slander on my integrity, as well as an assertion that you can read my mind, and it's out of place in this forum and this discussion. I have given you credit for sincerity and good intentions, and argued on the merits of the issue rather than impugning the character of those who disagree with me; would you please reciprocate in that basic civility? If this is going to descend into abuse, I will leave the discussion.

It is not intended as a distraction to point out that it's a basic part of human nature, at least for many humans, to want to be able to defend oneself (and for a minority, to be able to aggress against others.)

The current gun laws don't "make it especially easy and common place" to buy guns. For me to buy a gun, I have to be of legal age, have a clean criminal record, never have been adjudged a danger to self or others, and pass a background check to confirm those facts. Every time I buy a gun, the government is notified that I am doing so. I have already gone on record in this discussion as being in favor of strengthening that background check system and of putting more teeth in the penalties for gun crimes and other violent crimes. I have also gone on record explaining the lengths to which my wife and I go to make sure our guns don't get into the wrong hands, and voicing my support for enforcing strong penalties on people who allow children, criminals, or people whose mental illness makes them dangerous, to obtain guns through either carelessness or connivance. I don't think any reasonable reader could say I've advocated "making it especially easy and common place" for anyone to get a gun who can't be trusted with it.

I have not stocked up on bars of soap because there are much more effective means of self-defense available to me. Of course. I don't keep a flint hand axe around, either, because I have more efficient ways to cut up groceries. If I was limited to things on that level (bars of soap or flint blades), then yes, I would make sure I always had something like that handy.

There's a psychologist named Dave Grossman. He's also a retired special forces colonel, and he's the author of books titled On Killing, On Combat, and Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill. He is a strong critic of our society's culture of promoting violence, and the farthest thing from an advocate of letting unqualified people get guns. However, he offers an analogy - he has concluded that on the issue of violence, people tend to separate into three types. There are a minority who are predators on those around them - he compares them to wolves. The majority are not comfortable or familiar with violence and are, reasonably, afraid of it and of predators - they're sheep. And the third category, made up of people like soldiers and cops, he compares to sheepdogs. Sheepdogs are just as capable of violence as predators, but they turn that capacity or inclination to protecting those around them from the predators, rather than running with the wolves.
Sheep tend to be afraid of sheepdogs - they see the teeth, and the sheepdogs look too much like wolves themselves for the sheep to be comfortable with them. But they're necessary. And when people who choose not to prepare to defend themselves are confronted by predators without the police nearby, they must hope that there's someone like me around. If I'm faced with violence against myself or someone else and there are police there, I will very gladly turn to them to stop it, but if not, my options are to stop it myself, or watch it happen - and the police are open about the fact that there aren't enough of them to be everywhere they're needed, to be able to protect people from criminals. They can usually investigate, arrest, and prosecute the offenders, but they can't keep the crime from happening.

I suspect it is in many families. In my family people differ widely on other questions - one of my brothers is a far-right-wing Republican, anti-social-services, homophobic, pro-death-penalty, screw-the-environment fundamentalist; my other brother is a conservative, independent, agnostic biker who rides with the Patriot Guard to protect mourners at military funerals from the psycho picketers from that hate church in Kansas; I'm a liberal independent, close to socialist in my views on social services, pro-equal-rights-for-everyone, agnostic, anti-death-penalty environmentalist; my wife's views are similar to mine except that she's Jewish. Of my two adult children, both are pretty liberal but don't have much else in common. All of us are pro-2nd-Amendment, though. On the other hand, our parents were both viscerally anti-gun, though my stepfather had served in World War II in the Navy in both oceans as gunnery officer on a sub-chaser. All of us have always been respectful of each other's views, though, except for my fundamentalist brother who has no respect for anyone who disagrees with him in any way (he'd mock you for choosing different pizza toppings from him, I think. He's the one who's been paraplegic since he was 18 and he's a bitter guy. I know there's some kind of higher power around, though I think it's presumptuous of anyone to claim knowledge of the details, so I pray for him and leave him alone.)

If it was a simple question, it wouldn't be an issue, but it's about the tradeoff between personal freedom and self-sufficiency on the one hand, and a collective feeling of safety and the government's desire to be able to control social problems on the other. I believe that the majority of people on both sides of the argument mean well. The position I take is based on a combination of life experience, analysis of the data on the question, and personality. I suppose that if I'd led a more sheltered life, had studied the issue in less depth, or was a different kind of personality, I might look at it differently.

Hey, Will, I don't know about anyone else here, but I'm not a Democrat. I'm certainly not a Republican - in online surveys I always ID myself as independent, although if asked whether the Ds or the Rs are closer to my views, I have to say it's the Ds. I think I may go ahead and join the Modern Whigs if they live up to the potential they're showing at this point.

George, I took the example of a bar of soap in a sock from my experience working in the prison system, where that's a very popular weapon indeed (instead of the soap, they will also often use a combination lock.) If I was not allowed to carry a weapon per se when I went out in public, you can bet I'd have something like that in my jacket pocket. And if you put some vigor into the swing, it is nearly guaranteed to fracture a skull - it's basically the equivalent of a set of nunchucks. If I had to go up against an inmate with a knife, I'd rather have the soap in the sock than a blade of my own, actually; it would give me an extra foot or so of reach. If I had to, I'd let him get the blade into my left forearm to give myself an opening to nail him with the soap/lock sock with my right. It's a weird job when you have to think through things like that...

But the bigger point I sought to make was that people who want or believe they need weapons will get them, in some way, no matter how other people try to prevent it. It works that way for prison staff, too - we couldn't carry any kind of weapons, for fear that an inmate would get a weapon away from a staff person (the correctional officers have pepper spray, at least, and are required to wear body armor; they also get to retire with full benefits with five years less service than other state employees due to the risks. As a therapist, I had no pepper spray, no vest, and no early retirement, and I spent a lot more time one-on-one with inmates in a closed room than any officer ever did, which didn't make me feel very highly valued.) So, with the guys on my caseload I considered risky, I always made sure I had something on my desktop heavy enough to brain them with if I had to defend myself. Never happened to me, but some colleagues were less fortunate. I had one unit manager who never left his office without an uncapped ballpoint pen in icepick mode in one hand.

Anyway... re uses for ARs, AKs, and other semiauto civilian versions of military rifles, a lot of people do use them for hunting, shooting predators or pest animals on farms, and so on. Target shooting, competitive or otherwise, is also popular, and this type of rifle is made in calibers ranging from .17, basically not much bigger than a BB, up to .50 caliber. At this point in the U.S., ARs are the most popular kind of rifle around, and very few of their owners are criminals.

Some can be converted to full auto, as Will noted, but that's a heavy duty felony - anyone doing that is looking at ten years in federal prison even if they never even pull the trigger on the modified weapon. Stupid. I've seen books advertised on making the conversion, but not kits, and I gather that it takes tools and skills most people don't have, so it's a stretch to say they're easily converted. If someone is skilled enough to do it and dumb enough to do it, they're still looking at burning through ammunition at a rate upward of a couple of hundred bucks a minute.

Barbarossa, the rates of gun ownership in the U.S. and Canada are similar, but Canada is much more restrictive about handguns, and I think semiautomatics too. The figure I saw most recently indicated that somewhere between a third and 40% of American households have at least one gun.

As for why the U.S. has higher rates of crime in general including gun crimes, I think Michael Moore made a pretty good case in his film Bowling For Columbine that the biggest reason is the media culture in this country, which glamorizes violence and feeds into generalized paranoia, ironically including an exaggerated impression of how much violent crime there is!

The right to bear arms was seen as a safeguard against suppression of other liberties, or as the suppressors would interpret it, suppression of revolt. The Founders were hypervigilant about kings and dictators, having just fought a war to get out from under George III. They were idealists but were also pessimists, and knew that they could not give government power and trust that it wouldn't abuse that power at some point.

Actually, the 'shot heard round the world' at the beginning of that war, the running battle at Lexington and Concord between British regulars and colonial militiamen, took place because the Brits had gone out to seize stockpiles of guns and ammunition (both small arms and cannon), which the colonists considered an act of oppression.

I think that reasoning is still valid in the world in general. Although people often say that small arms - rifles, pistols, etc. - are no longer militarily relevant in this day of satellite-guided smart bombs and other high-tech weapons, the fact is that those small arms are seeing as much use in 4th generation warfare as they ever did - if you look at the wars we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as most of the other wars taking place now, you'll see that when one side has an overwhelming advantage in technology, the other side turns to guerrilla warfare in settings that diminish or eliminate the usefulness of high tech and high firepower, most commonly in cities.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, a militia type, or a survivalist, and I don't anticipate our own government going all 1984 on us, but I do realize that there are a number of possible scenarios under which our government would not be able to protect its citizens. There have been a number of situations in America in my lifetime where law and order broke down in various communities for days at a time, and people had to protect themselves against criminals if they were to be protected at all. There are also several other situations that are quite possible in which people would have to take care of themselves for a while (as the Homeland Security people spent a lot of time reminding us via radio ads for the last seven years!) These could be natural disasters or terrorist attacks.

My wife and I have, without being nuts about it, set aside some 'what-if' materials - we have some water storage barrels, a water purifying system, canned food (and a can opener!), medical supplies, blankets, tools, radios, and so on. In the even unlikelier event that something happened to disrupt normal food supplies indefinitely, we bought a basic stock of vegetable seed.

From my perspective of having a military background, and equally from my wife's perspective of having lived in very isolated rural places where an earthquake or similar event could cut them off from the rest of the world for some time, these kinds of preparations just makes sense. We'll probably never need them; I certainly hope we don't. But failing to do so would make no more sense than failing to buy insurance. It would be irresponsible.

To make those preparations, but not to include means for self-defense or hunting, strikes me as a weird idea, like insuring your house but not your car or something like that.

I am a 'show me the data' person - my wife is even more so (she's a statistician as well as a social worker). If the results of laws restricting gun ownership, the data, showed that they make people safer, those laws would make sense. But they don't - they're based on emotion and assumptions, things that seem intuitive - but reality is often counterintuitive. When they passed the 'assault weapon' ban, they thought it would lower crime rates; it didn't. When it was allowed to expire ten years later, some people predicted dire consequences, an upsurge in gun crimes. That didn't happen either. Likewise, when one state after another started passing laws allowing people who met training and background check requirements to get concealed handgun permits, the anti-gun lobby predicted that shootings in those states would increase. They didn't. People with concealed carry permits, like me, are actually only about half as likely as the population overall to commit any kind of crime, violent or not.

No honest government has a valid reason to want to disarm responsible citizens. If they really want to make us safer, they should be doing things like improving the background check system so people who shouldn't be able to get guns - mental incompetents like the Virginia Tech killer, kids like the sociopathic teenagers at Columbine, thugs like the gangbangers that carry out driveby shootings - are stopped from buying them. They should be funding serious research on a large scale on what actually works to reduce violence, just as we should be doing to reduce the problems of addiction and illiteracy.

I just spent eight years lobbying, blogging, arguing against the various ways the Republicans tried to take away our rights under the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments; I don't want to have to just switch over to seeing the Second Amendment under attack instead. If the new administration differs from the old one only in which freedoms it wants to take away, all those of us who thought we were voting for a real change in spirit have been had.

Guns, knives... give someone who is intent on violence a bar of soap and a sock to drop it into and he can cave your head in if he wants. I've seen people wrecked with anything from a shoe to a rock to a guitar string to a pair of scissors to a #2 pencil to - the list goes on. The answer is not to try to render people harmless. Can't be done - if we're all strapped into straitjackets, who'll feed us?

As for uses for guns, I make holes in paper with mine, and unless I'm attacked, that's the extent of the harm anyone will see from me.

Well, I appreciate your open-mindedness, Manuel.

I've been on both sides of this issue. At one point I got rid of the guns I owned, although I left it up to other people to make their own decisions on that as long as they weren't being predatory or reckless. But in the last decade I've worked in social service programs with teenagers in gangs and as a therapist in a couple of prisons - I've gotten too well acquainted with too many predators, and I've also seen the ineptitude and inability to protect ordinary people of the local law enforcement agencies, so I've lost some naivete I had even after twenty years in the military.

The devil, as usual, is in the details. What does 'ban' mean - are we talking no new sales, or confiscation of firearms people already own? Or do we mean some people could still have them and some couldn't? If so, who?
What does 'assault weapon' mean to you? The kind of weapons you're talking about in Mexico are military weapons. Those are not the same as what we're talking about here. Those are an order of magnitude different, fully automatic, i.e. machine guns.

I would point out, too, that as you noted, although those weapons are illegal in Mexico, they are widespread and common. What does that say about how effective restrictive gun laws are at curbing crime?

In the context of the domestic debate in America, we're talking about a different category of firearms, ones that have been around for generations and that ordinary Americans have always been able to own, i.e. semiautomatic firearms, emphasis on semi. That simply means it's not a single-shot, double-barrel, bolt action, pump action, or lever action.

As far as taking away your liberty or rights, if you have the right to do something - anything - today and you no longer have that right tomorrow, you've had a right taken away. And as much as some people roll their eyes at the idea, if past experience is a guide, this really is a slippery-slope issue. We can look at the example of Britain. In the name of public safety, they started by banning some kinds of guns, in some places, and over time, as criminals have stubbornly kept committing crimes, they've kept tightening it until private ownership of guns is for all practical purposes gone. It didn't make the public safer - violent crime has actually gone up, because - surprise, surprise - just like in Mexico, the only ones left with guns are the criminals. So what are they doing now? Wait for it... they've decided the answer is to start restricting ownership of knives!

Want one closer to home? In California, the legislature decided in the late 1990s that a particular type of semi-automatic rifle, the SKS, was especially dangerous. It fires a mediocre medium-powered cartridge (same one as the AK47, actually; limited range, limited accuracy - it's a dog), and the SKS is an obsolescent design that only holds a max of ten rounds. If guns were cars, the SKS would be a Pinto. But it can be modified to hold more. So the California legislature passed a law requiring people who owned SKS rifles to register them, with a promise that they would never ask the owners to turn them in - just wanted to keep track of them. Then they changed their minds and on 1/1/2000, all owners of SKS rifles were required to surrender them to the state government. Last I heard, it hadn't apparently made California any safer.

Gun crimes are seldom committed with semiautomatic rifles, the ones they want to ban. Criminals more often either use cheap, badly made, easily hidden handguns, or if they are using long guns, are using machine guns - which are NOT the same as semiautomatic rifles, alias assault weapons - and are illegal anyway unless they've undergone a thorough FBI background investigation and paid tens of thousands of dollars for them. On top of which, gun crimes are typically committed by people who can't legally possess guns of any kind anyway.

During the decade of the Clinton ban, the divisions between what was legal and what was not were arbitrary and cosmetic rather than functional. Why should it have mattered whether a rifle's stock was plastic or wood, or what shape its grip was? Those were the kinds of things they based the ban on. With the legislation they want to pass now, they'd be banning many more types of firearms than before, including many of the most popular and widely owned. Much of what's being said in Congress to support this idea is not true, whether that's due to ignorance or deliberate deception. You'll frequently hear people say that 'assault weapons' can fire 600 or 700 rounds in a minute. Nonsense - the barrel would melt, and if anyone tried making a magazine that size, it would be too heavy to aim. To offer a parallel, a good sprinter can run at about 20-25 mph for about 100 yards; would you consider it misleading for Senator So-and-so to say in a speech that a human can run from San Diego to the Bay Area in a day? That's the equivalent of what they're doing, and there are too many people who don't know enough about the terminology to see through it, or even what the term 'assault weapon' actually means. Did you realize that 'assault weapons' are the most popular category of guns in the U.S., and have been for the last several years? People have been buying more semi-automatic rifles than other kinds, in all calibers, for all kinds of shooting.

Another push is to require all ammunition to be made with bullets that have serial numbers stamped into them, after which it would be illegal to have any non-serialized ammunition and all ammo would be tracked by purchaser (I suppose for shotgun shells, each tiny pellet would have a tiny serial number). It just happens that the only legislators pushing it got big contributions from the company that patented that process. Another initiative calls for all guns to be required to be 'child-proofed'. How is that supposed to be done? They aren't offering any thoughts, and are fairly blunt about the fact that in practical terms it would actually mean all guns would be banned.

I have to wonder, just as with the religious right, if they really believe that what they're doing is justified or would meet with the approval of most people, why are they being so devious about it? I don't trust sneaky people, and they're being very sneaky in this area.

My wish on this issue, as with all issues, is that people would (1) educate themselves so they know what they're talking about, (2) be honest about their agendas, and (3) base arguments on facts and logic rather than on emotionally loaded language, misleading exceptions, or fallacious logic.

It'll never happen, though. Too many people would rather enote than think.

Four exclamation points? Wow. And why does the word protection get quotation marks? Hmm.

Well, first, it isn't a matter of need. No one needs to own a sports car either. This isn't a society where unless a person can show a need to do something, it isn't allowed; it's a society where the state can show a need to deny a person consent to do something, it should be allowed. Excuse me if I sound huffy, but that way lies tyranny.

Who says that what someone else 'has the slightest interest in' or 'understands' is a legitimate basis for decisions about my rights? Do you want to run a list of everything you do past me to see what I have an interest in or understand, or did it not occur to you that that street would have to go both ways? If we were only allowed to do things that everyone liked, no one would ever do anything. I spent twenty years in uniform in large part protecting your rights to do all kinds of things I might not like, but which don't infringe on my life.

Personally, I would never drive a Hummer, I see no reason for them to exist, and they do a lot more harm to the world than a semiautomatic rifle, but nobody's trying to ban them.

And, as I noted above, the label 'assault weapon' is arbitrary and misleading. No military organization in the world today uses semiautomatic rifles - they all use much heavier firepower, like the fully automatic weapons I used when I was in the Marine Corps. What typically gets called an 'assault weapon' is just a semiautomatic rifle, meaning that each time I pull the trigger, it fires one shot. Here are my reasons for owning a semiautomatic rifle, not that I need to provide reasons, being a sane citizen with no criminal record who behaves responsibly:

a. In the community where I live, there are criminal gangs who routinely carry out violent home invasion robberies to get money and property to in turn get methamphetamines. They have a history of killing whoever is home, and there are usually several of them. So, although it's a pain to have to go to the extra trouble, our house has bars on the windows and a steel front door, and we have enough firepower to protect ourselves if they get past the physical barriers.

b. I like to go target shooting (at legal, supervised shooting ranges); I like to spend as much of my time as I can shooting rather than reloading, and having a semiautomatic firearm with several magazines I can preload lets me do that.

c. I think they're fun, I earned the money I spent on them honestly, and it's good for the economy for me to spend my money on products that generate jobs.

In addition, although I'm not a hunter, I have friends who use semiautomatic shotguns for hunting ducks and other wild birds. Other people use semiautomatic rifles with smaller magazines for hunting deer, elk, and so on. As currently defined by the Democratic party - I voted for Obama anyway, given the horrifying prospect of four more years like the last eight, but this makes me unhappy - those hunting shotguns and rifles would be considered assault weapons too, as would the .45 semi-automatic pistol I carry where I can legally do so.

The Democrats' assault weapon hysteria is about keeping us safe exactly as much as the Republicans' homeland security hysteria is, which is to say not at all. In both cases, what they're really doing is exploiting people's lack of familiarity with a situation as a wedge issue and a cheap way to paint the opposition as evil.

I accept that when I carry a gun (legally - I jumped through the hoops and paid the fees to get my concealed carry permit, after a couple of inmates who belonged to one of the nastier gangs enthusiastically offered to arrange for bad things to happen to me) I am morally and legally obligated to find a less drastic way to avoid harm if possible - run, talk, hide, don't go somewhere dicey in the first place - and if all that fails, to protect any innocent bystanders if I ever have to use it. If I didn't have a clear shot and/or couldn't be sure of where the bullet will go until it runs out of momentum, I would have no right to pull the trigger. And yes, Jim, you're right about it being much harder than TV and movies usually make it look - there are countless documented accounts of trained professionals, police and military, getting into gunfights at not much more than arm's length with most or all of the shots fired missing. And bullets can carry much farther than people realize - miles for a lot of rifles, hundreds of yards even for handguns. Typical house walls and car bodies don't stop them, either. Most people have no idea how much energy is released when a gun is fired.

I detest the way violence in general and gunfire in particular are portrayed in a lot of our entertainment. They make it look tidy, simple, and about as psychologically troublesome to the "hero" who pulls the trigger as taking an aspirin for a headache. In reality, anyone who can engage in that kind of violence against another person without being badly shaken by it is not normal. I've often been struck by the frequent juxtaposition of guns and sexual imagery; it doesn't take a genius to see the phallic symbolism, but it's still perverted.

What we need here, I think, is a seismic shift in culture so that aggression is not seen as acceptable. I think that shift will have to be made from the top down and from the grass roots up at the same time. That's not the kind of shift we can make by passing laws and preventing people from defending themselves from predators who ignore the laws, though. There will always be a certain small percentage of people who are predators, so the problem will never be eliminated, I fear - but the solution is not to tell the predators we won't let people protect themselves.

Again, I have no problem with barring ownership or use of guns by people who abuse the right. My problem is with the people, like those who put the plank in the 2008 Democratic platform about restoring, expanding, and making permanent the 1994-2004 'assault weapon' ban, who want to take that right away from everyone.

Cars can also be dangerous if mishandled, as you point out, and I support protecting the public from people who drive recklessly, drink and drive, or otherwise endanger the rest of us with their cars too. But I see some substantive differences:
First, there's nothing in the Bill of Rights about the right to keep and bear cars - the law makes the distinction that driving is a privilege, not a right, whereas the 2nd Amendment puts the right to own guns in the Bill of Rights along with freedom of speech and assembly;
Second, even when used as intended, cars pollute the environment, and guns don't (except in the case of lead-based ammunition, and they're making lead-free ammunition now for hunters);
Third, I can't use my car to defend my family and myself from violent criminals, the way I can use a firearm; and
Fourth, no one anywhere near the political mainstream is advocating banning cars, or high-performance cars (which I suppose could be considered the equivalent of semi-automatic firearms). If there was an organized movement to ban and confiscate cars, you can bet people would resist being required to register them, too.

I've never been hurt by anyone with a gun, but I've been injured twice by reckless drivers. On the other hand, one of my brothers has been paraplegic since he was 18 because he and one of his friends were playing with a pistol and his friend accidentally shot him.

Will, I'm very sorry about your son. Like Jim, I have adult children, and that's a hard thing to even think about.

I believe the reason history is so often drained of meaning and reduced to 'trivial pursuit' with dates and names is a combination of laziness and butt-covering on the part of both some teachers and many curriculum publishers.

I say that as an admirer of teachers - my mother and one of my grandmothers were teachers, and I planned on making teaching my second career after the military and did a degree in it before I decided to go the psychotherapist route instead.

A teacher can teach from a text that way almost in his or her sleep - no background knowledge or critical thinking needed, no concerns about students asking questions the teacher can't answer, or questions that are controversial and just don't have easy answers.

Tests based on regurgitating that kind of data are much easier to create and grade - by comparison, essay questions, for example, are a lot more work - also, you can use Scantron-type sheets and computers to grade the first type of test, but no one's come up with a computerized grading system for essay questions yet. Again, those kinds of questions are simple - the answer is right or wrong, no debates, so the teacher/publisher doesn't have to defend the way the test was written or graded - no debates. If you take a look at any widely used history textbook, you'll find it sold with a teacher's edition and canned tests.

Finally, the fixation of college admissions offices and the government on evaluating teachers and schools based on their students' test scores feeds into it. There has been a power struggle over the direction of public education in America since there has been public education, between big business, who want schools to train useful employees who don't argue with authority, and those of us who believe education should include preparation for competent citizenship, and therefore should emphasize critical thinking skills and understanding of social issues along with a rounding-out of sciences, math, literature, and other arts. Over the last few decades, business has won that fight, and today's graduates are well prepared to run a cash register or a deep fat fryer but not to vote intelligently or make sense of their finances.