Category Archives: Life

Meanwhile, In Gun News

Posted on by

It’s been reported recently that the US government doesn’t keep track of how many people are killed by the police. The FBI relies on individual police departments to report “justifiable homicides” they commit, but a study by The Wall Street Journal found that “hundreds of police killings are uncounted in federal stats”.

That’s why The Guardian created “The Counted”. It’s an attempt to document everyone killed by America’s police departments during 2015. The database includes people shot to death, as well as those who died under other circumstances, such as the 15 people hit by police cars. As of today, the database contains 506 deaths, 442 by gunshot. You can look at the database and see brief accounts of each incident here.

In a related Guardian article, it’s pointed out that:

… police in the US often contend with much more violent situations and more heavily armed individuals than police in other developed democratic societies. Still, looking at our data for the US against admittedly less reliable information on police killings elsewhere paints a dramatic portrait … : the US is not just some outlier in terms of police violence when compared with countries of similar economic and political standing. America is the outlier … [my emphasis].

One way to reduce both the number of violent situations the police confront and the number of people they kill would be to reduce the number of firearms in circulation. (If you want to get shot by a police officer, the most efficient way is to acquire a gun and then point it at a cop, like David Schwalm did last month.)

And one way to reduce the number of firearms in circulation would be to enforce something like Connecticut’s “permit to purchase” law. From Salon:

Connecticut’s “permit to purchase” law, in effect for two decades, requires residents to undergo background checks, complete a safety course and apply in-person for a permit before they can buy a handgun. The law applies to both private sellers and licensed gun dealers.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins reviewed the homicide rate in the 10 years before the law was implemented and compared it to longitudinal estimates of what the rate would have been had the law not be enacted. The study found a 40 percent reduction in gun-related homicides….there was no similar drop in non-firearm homicides.

The relationship between tighter regulations around handguns and fewer gun-related homicides is in keeping with previous research out of Johns Hopkins on what happened after Missouri repealed its own permit law.

When Missouri repealed its permit law, the number of homicides went up, which shouldn’t have been a surprise. The John Hopkins researchers found a 23% increase in gun-related homicides in the five years after the law was repealed.

Filling in the February Gap

Posted on by

One thing leads to another, especially in the Age of the Internet, so I recently learned a few things about America’s official national holidays.

First: Even though some states celebrate Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, it’s never been an official national holiday (blame the South). I thought it was, because when I was growing up in California, we got the day off from school. Now, unfortunately, it’s only a holiday in four states. California isn’t one of them.

Second: The lame national holiday widely known as Presidents Day, which I thought commemorated Presidents Washington and Lincoln, isn’t actually called “Presidents Day”. As far as the federal government is concerned, it’s Washington’s Birthday. Even though it never falls on the day Washington was born.

Third: This means we only have four national holidays devoted to individuals: George Washington, Christopher Columbus, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jesus of Nazareth.

I’ve always been especially good at remembering Washington’s birthday and Lincoln’s birthday because they both come along in the middle of February. That’s when my father was born. It’s also when there’s another family anniversary that’s best kept private. 

So here’s the mid-February lineup:

February 12th is Lincoln’s birthday, the 16th was my father’s, the 18th is that other important anniversary, and the 22nd is Washington’s. And of course the 14th is (Saint) Valentine’s Day. That’s the 12th, 14th, 16th, 18th and 22nd.

But, as you can see, I’ve got nothing for February 20th!

Until now?

Further research revealed that all of this happened on the 20th of February:

1673 – The first recorded wine auction in London
1792 – The United States Postal Service was created
1872 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened in New York City
1927 – Golfers were arrested in South Carolina for violating the Sabbath (the South again!)
1962 – John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth
1974 – Cher filed for separation from her husband Sonny Bono
1975 – Margaret Thatcher was elected leader of the Conservative Party

Rather slim pickings, as we used to say. I’ve never been a fan of Sonny or Cher, and I always preferred Alan Shepherd (the first American in space) to John Glenn. And Margaret Thatcher is simply out of the question. Sadly, the past has let me down.

But there’s always the future.

A Trip to a Very, Very Sandy Beach

Posted on by

If you were a pigeon and you lived at Grand Central Station in New York City, you’d only have to fly 20 miles south to get to a great New Jersey beach. Most of your flight would be over Brooklyn, but the last 5 miles would be over water. When you got to the beach, you’d be at the Sandy Hook Unit of the Gateway National Recreation Area. Pretty cool, right?

pigeon

Sandy Hook has been through some changes over the years. It was “discovered” by Henry Hudson in 1609. A lighthouse was constructed in 1764, which the British tried but failed to destroy in 1776. It’s the oldest working lighthouse in the United States. The army used the Sandy Hook Proving Ground to test weapons and munitions between 1876 and 1919. Now, the fort that sits at the tip of the peninsula belongs to the National Park Service and is mostly abandoned. But there are several nice beaches open to the public, including one that’s clothing-optional (obviously, the Republicans in Congress haven’t heard about it).

Anyway, the only reason I’m writing about this is that a friend and I visited Sandy Hook last week, before the summer crowds showed up. When we parked the car and made our way to the beach, I was amazed. It was the widest beach I’ve ever seen. We could hardly see the water. The few people who had crossed the burning sands before us were almost invisible. So I was moved to take this picture:

IMG_20150429_134012237If you look closely, you can see New York City off in the distance, on the other side of the bay, and a few tiny little people at the water’s edge. Considering that we were standing in the vicinity of 20 million other people who live in the New York-Newark-Jersey City Metropolitan Statistical Area, it was pretty darn lonely. And, quite appropriately, very, very sandy.

Justice Ginsburg Shoots Down a Dumb Conservative Argument

Posted on by

Our era’s radical Republicans are willing to take a conservative position when it suits them. Thus, during the recent Supreme Court argument regarding same-sex marriage, the right-wingers on the Court pointed out that marriage has involved a man and a woman for thousands of years. From ThinkProgress:

The Court’s conservatives [sic] fixated upon their belief that same-sex marriages are a very new institution. “Every definition [of marriage] I looked up prior to about a dozen years ago,” Chief Justice John Roberts claimed, limited marriages to opposite-sex couples. Advocates for equality, Roberts continued, are “seeking to change what the institution is.” Meanwhile, Justice Samuel Alito argued that even “ancient Greece,” a society he perceived as welcoming to same-sex relationships, did not permit same-sex marriage. Justice Antonin Scalia insisted that “for millennia, not a single society” supported marriage equality.

A natural response would have been: “Of course, and now we’re changing that. Sometimes we make progress”. Justice Ginsburg, however, pointed out that for thousands of years marriage was legally defined as a relationship between a dominant man and a subordinate woman. A further ThinkProgress article on the subject quotes the 18th century legal authority Sir William Blackstone:

…the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.

Traditionally, wives were subservient to their husbands. Being married wasn’t a relationship that two men or two women would ordinarily enter into. Today, however, the law considers marriage to be a relationship between equals. Since marriage is now egalitarian from a legal perspective, it makes sense for anyone who wants an equal partner, whether that partner is of the opposite or same sex, to want to be married. Since there are benefits to being married, and since being able to procreate isn’t a requirement, justice dictates that any two adults who want to get married should be allowed to.

The Riot, the Police and Some Music

Posted on by

I spend a lot of time on a web forum devoted to a certain great musician. Because some of the site’s visitors have ties to Baltimore, the riots and the effect they’re having on the city are being discussed — in a thread supposedly devoted to something else. Emotions obviously run high in such situations, which partly explains why one person who says he lives in Baltimore called for “the police and National Guard to show no mercy”.

I didn’t want to get into this topic on a musician’s website, but it eventually seemed necessary to add another point of view:

————————————————————————————————————————-

Since what’s been happening in Baltimore keeps being discussed, here’s something from The Atlantic:

Justice demands that participants in the riots are identified, arrested, and charged with whatever crimes they committed. Their unjustifiable violence endangered innocents, destroyed businesses, and harmed the economic future of largely black neighborhoods; they earned the frustrated contempt of Baltimore’s mayor and members of its clergy and strengthened the hand of the public-safety unions that are the biggest obstacles to vital policing reforms.

But a subset of Baltimore police officers has spent years engaged in lawbreaking every bit as flagrant as any teen jumping up and down on a squad car, however invisible it is to CNN. And their unpunished crimes have done more damage to Baltimore than Monday’s riots. Justice also requires that those cops be identified and charged, but few are demanding as much because their brutality mostly goes un-televised. Powerless folks are typically the only witnesses to their thuggery. For too long, the police have gotten away with assaults and even worse. The benefit of the doubt conferred by their uniforms is no longer defensible.

I didn’t realize until today that putting handcuffed suspects in the back of police vans without strapping them in and then driving with sudden stops and starts and making sharp turns so that the suspects get bounced around is common enough in cities like Baltimore and Philadelphia to have been given names like “rough ride” and “nickel ride”.

People have been paralyzed and otherwise injured in both cities and won millions of dollars in damages. The investigation isn’t over, but it’s reasonable to assume that this is how Freddie Grey had his spine and larynx destroyed while he was driven around the city in the back of a police van, before he fell into a coma and died.

The Atlantic article concludes:

I believe it is as necessary now as it was in 1968 [when Martin Luther King Jr. spoke about such things] to simultaneously insist upon the following: that riots are to be condemned; that they are inextricably bound up with injustices perpetrated by the state; and that it is a moral imperative for us to condemn both sorts of violence.

The whole article [by Conor Friedensdorf], which isn’t very long, is here.

The Soul Stirrers with Sam Cooke, “Stand By Me Father”, the early 60s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=weYZt3FAqi4

Ben E. King, “Stand By Me”, 1961
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwZNL7QVJjE

————————————————————————————————————————

Well, it’s a music site so it seemed best to stay somewhat on topic.