This Week in Voting
Fifty years ago, on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. It was necessary primarily because Southern racists had successfully prevented minorities from registering and voting for decades, leading to gross under-representation in the halls of government at every level. The VRA finally eliminated poll taxes, "literacy tests," and other tactics used to dissuade minority voters. Because certain states had been most responsible for the widespread disenfranchisement, those states were required, under the VRA's Section 5, to seek preclearance from the Department of Justice before making changes to their voting laws. For most of the last 50 years, the VRA has been relatively uncontroversial; hard-right conservatives didn't like it because they felt it infringed on the right of any state to be as blatantly racist as it wanted, but in 2006 it was reauthorized with a unanimous vote in the Senate and only 33 House members voting against it.
Then, in 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts and his conservative allies found their chance to shoot it down. They vacated Section 5, giving the previously offending states the leeway to restrict voting rights in any number of ways. States with Republican governors and legislatures followed suit (some had already begun the effort, since they didn't need to ask permission to discriminate), even if they hadn't been preclearance states under the old VRA. Minority voting found itself under attack in ways that it hadn't been since the Jim Crow era.
The majority opinion in that case threw the issue back to Congress. There could be a way, Roberts wrote, for Congress to restore Section 5 such that it didn't violate his interpretation of the Constitution. But the Republican-held House won't even consider doing so. And that's how, 50 years later, the far right gets away with systematically disenfranchising minority voters, elderly voters, and young voters--all of whom might conceivably lean Democratic. In the name of preventing imaginary voter fraud, these measures are actually preventing voting.
Jim Rutenberg has written a fascinating and important piece for the New York Times Magazine, describing the VRA's necessity, its history, and the awful course of its dismantling. It's long, but worth every minute you put into it. The right to vote is the cornerstone of a representative democracy, and there's a faction out there working hard to undermine it.
What effect will that undermining have? Analysis by William Frey for Brookings is mixed (emphasis ours):
"Yet, restrictive voting provisions such as stringent Voter ID laws and limits to early voting and voting hours in heavily minority communities will not adversely impact voting in the way the provisions’ authors intend. As I state in my book, '... over the long haul, the effects of such attempts to suppress voters will pale in comparison to the larger demographic sweep of diversity that will shape the nation’s civic decision-making.'"
"Simply put, the sheer force of our diverse demographic change (racial minorities account for 95 percent of our growth), will render such measures meaningless. However, in the near term—meaning the next couple presidential election cycles—voting restrictions that disproportionately impact minorities could be costly just as they are beginning to find their voice in the political arena."
We think the point of these efforts is the near term. The Republican platform is just not very popular with the American electorate. Change happens, and conservative attempts to freeze or roll back the clock are ultimately doomed to failure. In lieu of changing their message, they're trying to re-sculpt the electorate to suit their needs. It's a deeply cynical and dangerous game. As Frey writes, in the long run it's pointless; demography is what it is, and they can't disenfranchise everybody. At some point, they'll either have to retool their own thinking and come up with policies that address the needs of all Americans, or get out of the way and let some other political party take their place as the opposition. But in the short run, they can do a lot of damage to the country and the very concept of American democracy.
President Lyndon Johnson Signing the Voting Rights Act
Side Note 1: Oregon Governor Kate Brown just signed a law making voter registration automatic in that state. When a resident obtains or renews a driver's license or state ID, that person is registered to vote unless he or she specifically opts out. As Brown said, "...we have the tools to make voter registration more cost-effective, more secure and more convenient for Oregonians. Why wouldn’t we?”
Would that every elected official in the country felt that way. In Oregon, not a single Republican in either chamber of the legislature voted in favor of the bill, which really says all that needs to be said about today's Republicans.
(Thanks to TWiA special ballot box correspondent Marcy Rockwell for the tip.)
Side Note 2: On August 6, President Obama published an essay about the VRA, and about the need to keep fighting so that every eligible American can vote. He also declared September 22 National Voter Registration Day.
Below the fold: August heat, 2016, debates, guns, and bears. Keep reading!
This Week in August
August is traditionally the month when the heat of summer starts getting to people. It also happens to be the month that Congress takes its summer recess, which is probably bad planning. Because when Congress recesses, members go back to their districts and hold town halls to discuss policy issues with their constituencies.
The trouble with that is that many of their constituencies--at least those who show up at town halls (often driven by special interest groups)--are often crazy. Think back to 2009, the summer of Obamacare town halls. People screamed at their representatives. They refused to listen to reason, on those occasions when it was offered. That was the summer we here at TWiA World Headquarters were at an event with Gabby Giffords, at which someone dropped a handgun on the floor. Why that person felt it necessary to take a gun to a "Congress on your Corner" event with Rep. Giffords was never fully explained, but in January, 2011, someone else brought a gun to one and killed six people, wounding 13, including shooting Rep. Giffords in the head and causing permanent brain damage.
This August, the topic du jour will be the Iran nuclear deal. Special interests are already spending money trying to ramp up opposition to the deal, and Republican members of Congress and presidential candidates are playing into the general paranoia about it on the right. Because there's no particular reason the deal should be opposed--except that it was an accomplishment of President Obama's, and the right has dedicated itself to hating him and everything he stands for since his inauguration day, if not before--those against it are left with arguments based in the willful ignorance of reality.
We've run down the basic outline of the deal a couple of times now, so we'll let Fred Kaplan at Slate do it this week:
"The real issue, which many senators are doing all they can to evade, is which is better: a deal that delays a nuclear Iran by 10 years (by some measures, 15 or 25 years), while in the meantime forcing deep cuts in its nuclear materials and infrastructure—or scuttling the deal and leaving Iran with the possibility of getting a bomb in a few months (if it wants one, which isn’t at all clear).
"Yes, the deal also releases $50 billion to $100 billion of frozen Iranian assets and opens up the country to international trade for the first time in years. But the European nations sustained the sanctions that froze those assets, and that barred trade, only because they saw them as the precondition to bringing Iran to the table and negotiating a nuclear deal. The P5+1 nations, the European Union, and the U.N. Security Council have now unanimously endorsed the deal. If the U.S. Congress scuttles it, the sanctions will soon collapse as well (almost none of the frozen assets are in the United States), and we will have the worst of both worlds: a hostile Iran with lots of money and on the threshold of being a nuclear power."
The Weekly Sift observes that those billions are, as Kaplan says, "frozen Iranian assets." That money isn't ours, it's theirs. We've been keeping it from them. The Sift makes an apt comparison:
"In exchange for those very real concessions, we agreed to a gradual relaxing of the sanctions that we created. What we’re 'giving' the Iranians are their own frozen assets. And we’re going to allow them to participate in the world economy, like any other country would.
"In what sense is any of that a 'concession' on our part? Imagine you’re in school, and you get a smaller kid in a headlock. He gives you his lunch money and you let him go. Have you 'conceded' anything to him, really?
"Your fellow bullies might claim that you let him off too easy, that if you’d squeezed a little harder he might have given you his sneakers too. And maybe they’re right: By walking away unscathed, the kid gained much more than you did, compared to the scenario where you beat the crap out of him and took his lunch money anyway. (As Senator Graham says, if it comes to war, 'We win!')
"But in a larger sense, all you’ve done is let him out of a situation that you created. You have his lunch money and he has nothing of yours.
"That’s the Iran deal: We have an agreement to keep them from building a bomb any time soon, and an inspection regime to make sure they keep that agreement. They got nothing from us."
Republicans used to argue that if other countries had a taste of American-style freedom, then capitalism would sweep the globe and world peace would follow in its wake. They believed, then, in American exceptionalism, instead of just giving it occasional lip service. By opposing this deal, they're trying to prevent Iran from participating in the global economy. They want to keep the sanctions on Iran--sanctions placed on them and agreed to by other world powers, including Russia and China, for the specific reason of bringing them to the negotiating table so we could end their quest for nuclear weapons--even though, by turning our backs on the deal we made, we would guarantee that the sanctions would be dropped, anyway. And we'd get nothing for that--Iran would not have all of its frozen assets, perhaps, but they'd retain their nuclear capability, they'd have trading partners and income, and they would have a bomb, probably before 2016.
Also at Slate, William Saletan runs down the pathetic performance of Republicans during last week's hearings. He writes, for example, "In all three hearings, Kerry explained how the inspection and verification measures in the Iran deal are designed to rectify flaws that led to the failure of the North Korean nuclear agreement. He spent much of his opening statement outlining these differences. This made no impression. When the Senate held its next hearing a week later, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the presiding Republican, dismissed the Iran agreement with a quip: 'How did that North Korean deal work out for you?'"
Graham Allison, another expert in nuclear proliferation, provides a list of nine reasons to support the deal, and why we should listen to security experts instead of partisan politicians.
Republican arguments include an objection to negotiating with Iran just because they're more enemy than ally. They fail to take into account the fact that we're more likely to have differences of opinion with nations that are not allies, and that's precisely where diplomacy is most needed. They complained when previous Republican presidents like Nixon and Reagan negotiated with Red China and the USSR, but the doomsday scenarios they predicted then never came to pass (much like the doomsday scenarios they painted in their objections to the Affordable Care Act).
Various Republicans, including presidential candidates, have warned that any agreement won't last if a Republican takes the White House in 2017, and that party retains control of Congress. Likewise, Congressional Republicans argue that the president should have somehow involved Congress in the process.
Those arguments are absurd. If no foreign power could trust that an agreement made with one administration would be honored by succeeding ones, then there would be no agreements between us and any other country. And Congress has never been allowed to make its own foreign policy. The country can have only one voice on foreign policy, as long as that voice is in accordance with the law and the Constitution, as this deal is. If Congress had its own, competing foreign policy, different from the executive branch's, how would foreign countries know with whom to negotiate, who to listen to?
This week, President Obama spoke about the deal in a speech intended to echo one President Kennedy gave in 1963, about the need to negotiate with the Soviet Union to achieve the nuclear test ban treaty. In that speech, Kennedy said that the world knows America would never start a war. For most of our history, that was true, but it no longer is, and our moral high ground is forever compromised. To walk away from a deal now--or for the next president to invalidate the deal--would send the message that our word is not to be trusted, and we would lose that much more.
If Republicans want to remake America as an isolationist nation, refusing any dealings with nations beyond our borders, they should make a compelling argument as to why that would be a good idea. So far, they haven't done so. They haven't even tried. They don't say they'd support no diplomacy anywhere, only that they won't support diplomatic breakthroughs achieved by President Obama's administration. They've offered no serious counter-proposals, only the impossible replacement of sanctions or war with Iran.
So in the next month, their dismissal of reality, combined with the big spending of special interests opposed to the deal and the phony narratives of the right-wing media machine, will spur people to attend town halls and angrily declare the deal to be a disaster and the president to be a turncoat. There will be ugly scenes. There might be violence.
What there won't be--a fact that seems invisible to those with the loudest voices--is an Iranian nuclear weapon.
Side Note 1: Far-right Sen. Tom Cotton--the genius who wrote a letter to Iran's leaders, signed by most of the Senate Republicans, telling them not to trust that the President of the United States is empowered to make a lasting international agreement--is one of the few Republicans with a real alternate proposal. To no one's surprise, his idea is war.
Side Note 2: We're talking about the Iran nuclear deal the same week that, in 1945, the first two atomic bombs ever used were dropped on Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), Japan. Also the last two ever used, fortunately. Incidentally, the New Yorker has published on its website the entire text of John Hersey's classic of nonfiction narrative, Hiroshima. Here's the first paragraph. If you can stop after that, check your pulse.
"At exactly fifteen minutes past eight in the morning, on August 6, 1945, Japanese time, at the moment when the atomic bomb flashed above Hiroshima, Miss Toshiko Sasaki, a clerk in the personnel department of the East Asia Tin Works, had just sat down at her place in the plant office and was turning her head to speak to the girl at the next desk. At that same moment, Dr. Masakazu Fujii was settling down cross-legged to read the Osaka Asahi on the porch of his private hospital, overhanging one of the seven deltaic rivers which divide Hiroshima; Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura, a tailor’s widow, stood by the window of her kitchen, watching a neighbor tearing down his house because it lay in the path of an air-raid-defense fire lane; Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge, a German priest of the Society of Jesus, reclined in his underwear on a cot on the top floor of his order’s three-story mission house, reading a Jesuit magazine, Stimmen der Zeit; Dr. Terufumi Sasaki, a young member of the surgical staff of the city’s large, modern Red Cross Hospital, walked along one of the hospital corridors with a blood specimen for a Wassermann test in his hand; and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoshi Tanimoto, pastor of the Hiroshima Methodist Church, paused at the door of a rich man’s house in Koi, the city’s western suburb, and prepared to unload a handcart full of things he had evacuated from town in fear of the massive B-29 raid which everyone expected Hiroshima to suffer. A hundred thousand people were killed by the atomic bomb, and these six were among the survivors. They still wonder why they lived when so many others died. Each of them counts many small items of chance or volition—a step taken in time, a decision to go indoors, catching one streetcar instead of the next—that spared him. And now each knows that in the act of survival he lived a dozen lives and saw more death than he ever thought he would see. At the time, none of them knew anything."
This Week in 2016
Former Florida governor Jeb Bush (R) keeps demonstrating that he has a limited grasp of economics. This week, he combined that with showing his limited grasp of the Constitution. He's been complaining about members of Congress not showing up for work (the most egregious offender is fellow Florida Republican and presidential candidate Sen. Marco Rubio; Bush knows that only one of them can win the Florida primary, and whichever one loses that will come across looking very weak indeed). Bush recently offered a new proposal to fix the problem. "If Congress skips votes or hearings Jeb will cut their pay."
Sounds simple, right? Red meat for the Republican base. Trouble is, he can't actually do that. Not even Congress can do that. As ThinkProgress.org points out, "Bush’s proposal to unilaterally cut lawmakers’ pay is unconstitutional. The 27th Amendment provides that '[n]o law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened,' so any law changing congressional pay would not take effect until after the next congressional election. More importantly, the Constitution provides that 'Senators and Representatives shall receive a compensation for their services, to be ascertained by law,' so Congress itself would have to acquiesce in Bush’s proposal for it to ever become law. 'Jeb' does not have the power to 'cut their pay' on his own, even if he is elected president."
The idea is that Congress can't give itself a pay raise every year--any such raise wouldn't go into effect until a new Congress is elected, and having voted for that pay raise might result in a good number of members not being re-elected.
(It also means that those senators and representatives who offered to forgo their pay during the Ted Cruz Memorial Government Shutdown of October, 2013, couldn't actually do so. They could, and some did, cash their paychecks and then put that money back into government coffers, somehow, but they were still paid, regardless.)
If Bush really doesn't know that the president doesn't pay Congress, he needs to re-take his high school government class. If he does know it but made that empty threat anyway, then he thinks we're all idiots and he's lying to us. Neither scenario is particularly flattering.
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Then again, maybe he really doesn't know. Jeb's brother, George W., was notorious for mangling his words and phrases, in ways that were sometimes so entertaining that they were actually collected into books (look up Bushisms if you're interested. "I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family" is just one of many).
Jeb manages to mostly speak English as we know it--he just uses the language to say incredibly dumb things, which he or his staff then have to walk back or try to explain. People in his own party are getting worried about his tendency to "misspeak."
For context, the "half a billion dollars" he isn't sure we need for women's health care is the same amount of money he expects to raise for the presidential campaign. So it's okay to spend that much to satisfy his personal ambition, but not for the health care of more than half of America's population.
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The Ron Paul/Rand Paul political machine has a history of involvement with some pretty shady characters. During the 2012 campaign, Iowa state senator Kent Sorenson was backing the presidential campaign of then-Rep. Michele Bachmann. Suddenly, shortly before the Iowa caucuses, he withdrew his support from Bachmann and threw it to Ron Paul. Later, Sorenson admitted having been bribed $73,000 by the Paul campaign to support Paul instead of Bachmann (whose campaign had paid Sorenson $7,000-$7,500 a month for most of 2011). Iowa Senate ethics rules, reasonably enough, forbid state senators from taking money from political campaigns. Bachmann accused Sorenson of accepting a bribe (she should know), and everybody on the Paul side denied it. They funneled Sorenson's payoff through a variety of shell companies to hide the paper trail. One of those deeply involved in the process was a top Paul aide named Jesse Benton, who also happened to be married to Ron Paul's granddaughter.
When Sorenson pleaded guilty to accepting the bribe, Benton was Sen. Mitch McConnell's campaign manager for his 2014 race. When the fireworks hit, Benton had to quit that job. In his infinite wisdom, Rand Paul hired Benton, who is now the head of the super PAC supporting Rand Paul's faltering presidential campaign.
He's also now under federal indictment, along with two other Ron Paul campaign staffers, for:
"...conspiracy, causing false records to obstruct a contemplated investigation, causing the submission of false campaign expenditure reports to the Federal Election Commission, and engaging in a scheme to make false statements to the FEC, according to the indictment, which was revealed Wednesday by the U.S. Department of Justice. Benton also has been charged with making false statements to the FBI."
All of which is in connection with that 2012 bribery scheme.
Rand Paul's judgment is often questionable (as is Ron's, for that matter). For now, he's standing by this likely criminal. One wonders if he'll cut Benton from his inner circle more quickly than he did the white supremacist who ghost-wrote one of his books.
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Sen. Ted Cruz (R/TX) doesn't think climate change is real. He says government researchers are "cooking the books," falsifying data, to support, for unstated reasons, a government attempt by "power-greedy" politicians to control the lives of Americans.
That's a pretty remarkable claim. It doesn't address the volumes upon volumes of research performed by non-government scientists, or scientists from other countries who would have no reason to participate in such a vast conspiracy, or why the details of the conspiracy remain hidden, when it would seem that at least a few climate scientists around the world would refuse to go along with it and would expose the conspiracy to the rest of us. To back up his theory, Cruz relies on only one data model (which has already been shown to be wrong). He says, "If you look at satellite data for the last 18 years, there’s been zero recorded warming. The satellite says it ain’t happening."
Cruz has already shown us that he's no scientist. Now he's trying to tell people that his reading of inaccurate satellite data should carry more weight than the reports of around 99.999% of all climate scientists. As Time points out, "Science, however, does not back up Cruz’s position. Geochemist James Lawrence Powell, an adviser to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, reviewed peer-reviewed science journals and found that only two articles rejected climate change during 2013. His sample size: 10,885 articles."
In other words, Cruz is putting his far-right agenda above real science, and he's doing so on a topic that deserves serious appraisal and real action. President Obama is trying to take meaningful action; Cruz and his Senate colleagues will certainly opt for ideology over reality. If a Republican wins the White House--any of the 17 currently running, at any rate--we can't expect to see any further effort on this critical issue.
Cruz should, but probably won't, run afoul of the NRA and other pro-gun death groups for his latest attempt at a viral video, which claims to show him making "machine-gun bacon." In fact, the weapon he's using is an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, not a machine gun. He's firing it in single-shot mode. How this is supposed to convince voters--even those who love guns--that he's the best person in the United States to become president? He's wasting bacon and ammunition. So much for fiscal discipline.
* * *
A new Monmouth University national poll released this week--one of those used by Fox to determine who got onto their debate stage--shows that Donald Trump's approval rating among Republicans has jumped to 52%. He's in majority territory for the first time. Only 35% of Republicans view him unfavorably. 26% of Republican and Republican-leaning voters want to vote for him--more than his two closest rivals (Jeb Bush: 12%; Scott Walker: 11%) combined. A Fox "News" national poll released on the same day has also has Trump at 26%, with Bush at 15% and Walker at 9%. The next day, a new Bloomberg Politics national poll put Trump at 21%, with Bush at 10% and Walker at 8%.
Trump continues to tell the lie that America is hated all over the world, that under President Obama we've lost prestige and popularity. There is, of course, no data to back that up because it's the opposite of true. Even Mitt Romney spoke sentences with some truth in them from time to time, a feat that seems impossible for Trump.
But you know who is hated all over the world? Russia. And Vladimir Putin. Out of 40 countries polled, the only one where Russia is significantly more popular than unpopular is Vietnam. The rest exhibit various levels of loathing. As the Pew Research Center reports: "Outside its own borders, neither Russia nor its president, Vladimir Putin, receives much respect or support, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. A median of only 30% see Russia favorably in the nations outside of Russia. Its image trails that of the United States in nearly every region of the world. At the same time, a median of only 24% in the countries surveyed have confidence in Putin to do the right thing in world affairs, and there is far less faith in the Russian leader than there is in U.S. President Barack Obama."
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Speaking of Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (R), in what might be the slimiest move of the campaign so far, although he certainly knows that President Obama is a Christian, he won't say so--letting the large bloc of conservative Republicans who think Obama is a Muslim continue to believe that lie. Elected officials are supposed to govern, and part of governing is explaining things to and educating their constituents. Lately, Republicans seem to have given up that part of the job--hence things like denying, or claiming to deny, climate change and evolution and the president's religion. They're content to let their political bases hang on to their ignorance, for political advantage.
This Week in The Debate
Note: This was all written before the debates on Thursday night. Actual debate coverage will be contained in a separate post, over the weekend, when we've had a little time to digest and study the transcripts.
Former four-term Texas governor Rick Perry was robbed.
As if more proof were needed that the Republican National Committee and Fox "News" have entered into full partnership, the RNC has let Fox run the entire process for the first televised debate of the primary season, including allowing Fox to winnow the 17-member field down to 10.
Fox set the criteria it would use for that winnowing weeks ago. The network would average the results of the 5 most recent national polls, and the top 10 candidates would be invited to debate. They left open the possibility of putting an 11th podium on stage, in case of a tie.
According to this CNN report:
"Fox News' Decision Desk said the five polls included in Fox's average were conducted by Bloomberg, CBS News, Fox News, Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University.
"Those five were the most recent national polls from non-partisan, nationally recognized organizations, she said, using standard methodology. Other factors: They used live interviewers, random digit-dial sampling techniques and included both landlines and cellphones and their GOP primary vote question mirrored the ballot by reading all candidate names in random order and without honorifics, according to the statement from Fox News."
What CNN doesn't tell us, but MSNBC's Rachel Maddow does, is that the final item on that list--"random order and without honorifics" was a criterion revealed only on the day they announced the line-up. Doing so allowed them to ignore the actual 5th most recent poll, from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News. That decision made a significant difference, as Perry and John Kasich were in a statistical tie with that poll factored in. Without it, the difference was great enough that Kasich could be included and Perry excluded.
In other words, as Maddow puts it, the results were rigged to include only 10 candidates. The debate takes place in Ohio, where Kasich is governor, and the Republican National Convention will be held there next year. Ohio is the most important swing state in the country, and no Republican has ever won the White House without carrying it. It would have been embarrassing not to have Kasich there. They wanted Kasich on stage. They don't care about Perry's presidential hopes. We don't begrudge Kasich's appearance there--he's a serious guy who deserves real consideration, and (writing before the debate) we think he's one who could make a genuine impression and come out of it with forward momentum.
Rick Santorum's campaign argued--correctly--that national polls are meaningless this early in the season. The early primary states: Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, represent three very diverse parts of the country, and they have traditionally begun the winnowing process. By letting a TV network do it instead, the party is negating the decisions those voters make.
There was a "kids' table" debate at which the also-rans could appear. But it wasn't in prime time, and without the big guns like Trump, Bush, and Walker in it, its audience was a fraction of the real debate's.
As Santorum pointed out, the also-rans included the 2012 runner-up (himself), a sitting governor (Bobby Jindal), three former governors (Perry, George Pataki, Jim Gilmore), a sitting US senator (Lindsey Graham), and a former female Fortune 500 chief executive (Carly Fiorina). Of those, only Jindal was clever enough to buy commercial time on Fox during the debate.
By making it a popularity contest instead of a serious political event, Fox included ego-driven celebrity candidates who will never win the presidency: Donald Trump, Ben Carson, and to a certain extent, Mike Hucakabee. Those goofballs took up space and oxygen that could have been used by genuine contenders.
This Week in Gun Safety
We frequently point out that while mass murders are relatively rare, they tend to be headline grabbers and take the focus off the tens of thousands of suicides, homicides, and accidental shootings that take American lives every year*. (Although, as we noted last week, mass shootings in which the number of people killed is lower than the threshold required to be identified as mass murders are becoming more frequent--we're still running an average of one per day in 2015.)
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) has a new report out, studying mass murders from 1999 to 2013. They find that the rate of mass murders has increased since the 1970s (1 per year) to now (4.5 per year), but that it has plateaued at that new level. The headline on this Trace article is misleading, since it says "mass shootings," but the report itself clearly confines its findings to mass murders.
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* An organization called Gun Violence Archivists (GVA) keeps track of those other, less reported shootings. They find that "[in] the 37 days between the shootings in Charleston and Lafayette, at least 1,433 people were killed with a gun in the United States." (We're pretty sure they mean "with guns;" that much shooting would put a lot of strain on a single gun.) Here's how they arrive at their numbers.
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Firearms researcher David Hemenway looks into the data behind the common argument that people need guns for self defense. His conclusion? Not so much.
"In terms of deterrence, a recent study found that states with higher levels of household gun ownership have higher levels of firearm crime and do not have lower levels of other types of crime.
"Another study, in 2003, found that counties with higher levels of household gun ownership have higher rates of household burglary, not lower. Burglars like to steal not only cash and jewelry but also guns. A homeowner with a collection of firearms may not want to advertise that fact.
"As for thwarting crime, gun advocates claim that guns are commonly used in self-defense, and that without a firearm, one is essentially at the mercy of a criminal. Yet, again, that is not what the data show."
...
"More than 42% of the time, the victim took some action — maced the offender, yelled at the offender, struggled, ran away, or called the police. Victims used a gun in less than 1% of the incidents (127/14,145). In other words, actual self-defense gun use, even in our gun-rich country, is rare.
"It is sometimes claimed that guns are particularly beneficial to potentially weaker victims, such as women. Yet of the more than 300 sexual assaults reported in the surveys, the number of times women were able to use a gun to protect themselves was zero.
"Indeed, a study of 10 previous years of crime survey data found that of more than 1,100 sexual assaults, in only one did the victim use a gun in self-defense."
...
"Almost two-thirds of the people in the U.S. population live in homes without guns, and there is no evidence that the inhabitants of these homes are at greater risk of being robbed, injured or killed by criminals compared with citizens in homes with guns. Instead, the evidence is overwhelming that a gun in the home increases the likelihood not only that a household member will be shot accidentally, but also that someone in the home will die in a suicide or homicide.
"In addition, hundreds of thousands of household guns are stolen each year. Gun theft is a main pathway by which guns end up in criminal hands. The public health costs of gun ownership are very high."
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This fascinating article in The Guardian discusses findings showing that the mere sight of a weapon makes people more aggressive (and, among other things, which types of police uniforms generate what kind of public response).
"Aggressive impulses can sometimes be strong enough to override common sense, studies have found. Confronted with a pickup truck driver who had stalled at a green light, drivers in one 2006 study were more likely to honk at the pickup with a rifle than they were at the pickup without a rifle. The study developed a similar 1975 experiment that also included a bumper sticker reading 'vengeance'".
"'You’d have to be complete idiot to honk your horn,' Bushman said, 'but that’s the power about the weapons effect, people don’t think about it much. The effects are very automatic.'"
"Studies have also shown that carrying a gun tends to make people more likely to deliver electric shocks, increase paranoia about people and objects, and increase testosterone. (The 'vast majority' of perpetrators of gun violence are men, according to the APA.)"
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Senator John Cornyn (R/TX) has introduced a bill that sounds a little like a gun safety bill. The NRA endorses it (and Cornyn has an A+ rating from the organization), so you're right to be a little skeptical. If it becomes law, states would be financially rewarded, through increased law enforcement grants, for providing to the federal background check database information about people who are legally ruled mentally incompetent or committed to a mental institution. States that didn't provide that information would be penalized through cuts in those grants. As it is now, some states do and some don't, which makes for an ineffective patchwork.
But the flip side is that it applies only to people legally ruled mentally incompetent or committed to an institution. Someone undergoing treatment who has not yet been committed or subject to legal action could still go unreported, even though he's far more likely to be a threat than someone who's already confined in an institution. Further, the bill allows people discharged from institutions to buy guns immediately upon release; currently, they need court approval to do so. And under the bill, if military veterans are found mentally incompetent, a court would have to weigh in before they could be prevented from buying guns.
All in all, the end result of Cornyn's bill would be better reporting of certain categories of the mentally ill, but it would also make it easier for mentally ill people to get guns. That's not a very comforting tradeoff. No wonder Cornyn has an A+ rating.
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Late update: the shooter in the Aurora, CO movie theater mass murder, who killed 12 and wounded 70 more, was sentenced on Friday to life in prison without the possibility of parole. 17 months ago, the defense team offered prosecutors the exact same deal. Prosecutors wanted to try for the death penalty, so they declined the offer. Instead they put witnesses through a wringer, disrupted juror's lives, and spent millions of taxpayer dollars. The death penalty, we should note, does not deter mass murderers. Many of them take their own lives, many more die from police gunfire. At that point, they have lost touch with what's reasonable, what's right and wrong, what tomorrow might bring. The idea that in a couple of years, they might be sentenced to die does not even enter their minds when they take their guns out to wreak havoc.
Prosecutors made the wrong choice, a wasteful choice. In the future, they should be more thoughtful and less reactionary.
This Week in Comedy
Thursday night, Jon Stewart signed off for the last time as host of Comedy Central's The Daily Show. Keeping the show fresh and funny (and occasionally making real news) for 16 years is a comedy achievement that won't soon be topped. Not many comedians can honestly say they helped make the country a better place. Stewart likely wouldn't say that, either, but he has. His set has been donated to Washington D.C.'s terrific Newseum, and he's going to open an animal sanctuary on his farm. Thanks, Jon, for all you've done and all you'll do.
This Week in Bears
Ricki, the black bear who had been cooped up outside a Pennsylvania ice cream shop for 13 years, is thriving in her new home in Colorado. Her fur has grown back in and she's happy, healthy, and making friends.
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