Tag Archives: Gun Control

The Decline of the Militia

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From What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe:

Jeffersonians of the founding generation had reposed great confidence in the militia as an alternative to a standing army that could be used against the liberties of the people it supposedly protected.This militia, organized in each locality, consisted of all physically fit white males of military age, who would supply their own arms and donate as much of their time as necessary to keep in training and readiness when called upon to deal with insurrection or invasion. This was the “well regulated militia” postulated in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights and prescribed by the federal Militia Act of 1792.

The militia had proved ineffective on many occasions in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 (George Washington never put much trust in it), but its gradual disappearance in the generation after 1815 had nothing to do with its military shortcomings.

The militia gradually ceased to function because most male citizens resented it as an imposition, and hated serving in it so much that they either refused to show up for the periodic musters and drills, or if they came made a mockery of the occasion. Since the men who defied the militia laws constituted the electorate, politicians dated not to coerce service. White male democracy could successfully defy the law, as squatters defied landlords or Indian treaties…. When the war with Mexico came in 1846, the administration made little use of the militia and relied instead on its small professional army plus volunteers trained and equipped at government expense [p. 491].

Now, 170 years later, we have the most powerful military and most heavily-armed police in the world, while sad, angry men, with a death wish for themselves and others, “serve” in the “militia”.

PS – “994 mass shootings in 1,004 days”

Meanwhile, In Gun News

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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.

Cosmic Justice

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According to the Detroit News, a 19-year old black woman, Renisha McBride, had a car accident in the predominantly white suburb of Dearborn Heights, Michigan, at around 2:30 a.m. on Saturday morning. Her cell phone battery was dead, so she began looking for help. After knocking on the door or ringing the bell at a house on Outer Drive, she was shot in the head and killed. The Dearborn Heights police department found her body on the front porch. They know who killed her but haven’t released the person’s name.

Michigan is one of the states that now has a “Stand Your Ground” law. Michigan’s law says that a person has the right to use deadly force against another person if he or she “reasonably” believes such force is necessary to protect himself, herself or someone else from imminent death, great bodily harm or sexual assault. Given the facts reported so far, asking the woman ringing your door bell at 2:30 a.m. what she wanted or calling 911 would have been more reasonable than putting a bullet through her head. The incident is now in the hands of the Wayne County prosecutor.

In news that could be related, physicists have discovered that the Higgs field, what the New York Times calls “an invisible ocean of energy that permeates space, confers mass on elementary particles and gives elementary forces their distinct features and strengths” might undergo a phase transition resulting from a random quantum-level fluctuation. This phase transition would make the Higgs field much denser than it is now. That change would destroy everything in the universe more complex than hydrogen, the simplest element there is. 

In fact, a random fluctuation of this kind might have already occurred, meaning that the resulting phase transition (in effect, a wave of destruction traveling at the speed of light) might be heading for us right now. We won’t know if it’s coming or notice if it arrives: “the idea is that the Higgs field could someday twitch and drop to a lower energy state, like water freezing into ice, thereby obliterating the workings of reality as we know it”.

It would be as if Someone finally got fed up and turned off the cosmic switch that controls everything around us, including Dearborn Heights, Michigan.

Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your view of cosmic justice, it is very, very unlikely that the Higgs field will change any time soon. Nevertheless, it could happen, especially if Someone gets really fed up.

Update:  Apparently, it was a man who killed Renisha McBride. He did it with a shotgun and says it was an accident. He also says he thought she was an intruder (the kind who knocks on the front door or rings the bell?).  

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The death of Renisha McBride:  http://www.detroitnews.com/article/20131105/METRO01

The Higgs field: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/05/science/finding-the-higgs-leads-to-more-puzzles

A nice, 14-minute video that explains how very unlikely it is that the lights will go out while we’re still around: http://www.ted.com/talks/why_our_universe_might_exist_on_a_knife_edge

More Insanity

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I started this blog 14 months ago, a few days after the massacre in Aurora, Colorado (the one in which 12 people were killed and 70 injured during a Batman movie). The title of my first post was “Insanity”.

Now we have another 12 people murdered in Washington, D.C. And their killer shot dead by the police.

According to an article called “Facing the Real Gun Problem” in the New York Review of Books, there have been 1.3 million Americans killed by firearms since 1960, either in suicides, homicides or accidents. The author of the article, David Cole, argues that we should strengthen background checks and improve gun safety in order to reduce the ongoing toll of death and injury. He thinks gun owners would support these kinds of measures if they could be convinced that their right to own guns wasn’t threatened.

For that reason, Cole doesn’t think we should try to ban assault weapons, since relatively few people are killed with assault weapons and gun owners fear that a ban on those guns would eventually lead us down a slippery slope toward banning all kinds of guns. I don’t agree with him about the assault weapon ban, but he makes some good points, including the need to decriminalize certain drugs and reduce our prison population. He believes that guns are here to stay in America, so we should do whatever we can as a nation to limit the carnage.

To get a sense of how guns are used every day to kill and maim, you can check out a blog called “The Gun Report” in the New York Times. One of their columnists, Joe Nocera, uses the blog to discuss gun-related issues, but he also presents a daily list of shootings from around the country. It’s a daily accounting of American insanity.

There are 19 incidents described in today’s entry of “The Gun Report”. Here are a couple, chosen at random:

Lance Wilson, 3, was shot in the head and killed at a mobile home park in Michigan City, Ind., Sunday afternoon. 24-year-old Zachariah L. Grisham, who is romantically involved with the victim’s mother, was charged with reckless homicide. Investigators found that Grisham and the victim had been playing a game, with the boy using his hand to pretend to shoot Grisham. During the game, Grisham took out a handgun and, thinking it was not loaded, pulled the trigger.

A man was shot in the face and critically wounded after a verbal altercation in the Caddo Heights neighborhood of Shreveport, La., Monday afternoon. Police said someone in a car opened fire on the victim, who was in a Toyota Camry. A white SUV was spotted leaving the scene.

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Facing the Real Gun Problem:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/jun/20/facing-real-gun-problem/

The Gun Report:
http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/

What We’re Up Against, Part 2

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It’s good to be skeptical about the results of public opinion polls, especially if it’s only a single poll reporting a result.

On the other hand, if this is true, it explains a lot. Personally, I can’t believe that 18% of Democrats believe this. Maybe they’re worried about the Tea Party taking over?

From a Fairleigh Dickinson University Public Mind poll released today:

“Supporters and opponents of gun control have very different fundamental beliefs about the role of guns in American society. Overall, the poll finds that 29 percent of Americans think that an armed revolution in order to protect liberties might be necessary in the next few years, with another five percent unsure. However, these beliefs are conditional on party. Just 18 percent of Democrats think an armed revolution may be necessary, as opposed to 44 percent of Republicans and 27 percent of independents.”

http://publicmind.fdu.edu/2013/guncontrol/