the unreasonable man

Are the Jobs Walmart Is Promising Veterans Any Good? (Video) | The Nation

Walmart drew positive press and White House praise this morning for pledging to hire 100,000 veterans over the next five years. The plan, first reported by the The New York Times, was formally announced by Walmart US President Bill Simon in a keynote address at a National Retail Federation conference. It was panned by labor activists, dozens of whom marched through the Jacob Javits convention center lobby following Simon’s speech.

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“You’re still subject to all the crap that comes from working for Walmart,” Owen told The Nation. “Extremely low wages, poor benefits and everything else. If that’s the best that’s available for veterans, then there is something wrong.”

Making the rounds: General Stanley McChrystal's curious statement about guns has been getting a lot of likes from gun control advocates:

"...an M-4 Carbine fires a .223 caliber round, which is 5.56 millimeter at about 3,000 feet per second. When it hits the human body, the effects are devastating. It’s designed to do that and that’s what our soldiers ought to carry. I, personally, don’t think there’s any need for that kind of weaponry on the streets, and, particularly, around the schools in America. I believe that we’ve got to take a serious look."

General McChrystal seems somehow to have missed the point rather widely. If someone is attacking you, presenting an immediate threat to your life (or that of another innocent person), you need a weapon that will stop them quickly and reliably.

That means, unfortunately, devastating their bodies. There is no reliable way of quickly rendering an attacker harmless that does not involve a potentially lethal level of damage to their body. I wish we could give everyone a phaser set to stun, but it's not the case. It's unpleasant to contemplate, but the whole point of defensive firearm use is to devastate someone's body.

General McChrystal was speaking about 5.56mm rifle rounds. Rifles -- of all sorts -- are used in only about 3% of homicides in the U.S. If we pretend that we could make all rifles disappear, and that people who would use them to commit crimes wouldn't just substitute handguns, and that no one ever uses them defensively, the impact on violent crime would be still be statistically imperceptible. So the general may be knowledgeable about warfare, but his statement here suggests he doesn't know much about violent crime.

It's worth noting that at close range, that small but fast bullet is not much more lethal (in some case, less lethal) than a larger but slower bullet from a large-caliber handgun.

And compared to other rifle rounds, like the sort used in the M1 rifles soldiers carried in WWII or by "big game" hunters, the 5.56 is actually less powerful; it's an intermediate-power round, not a high-power one.

Stumbled upon in criminological reading: this report on gender differences in violent crime victimization. It is from 1994, when violent crime was near it's peak; more recent data shows that violent crime against both males and females has decreased sharply since then. But I expect that the general patterns of differences in how violent crime affects men and women differently would still hold true today. A more recent report with a less detailed analysis shows that women are still more likely to know their attackers while men are more likely to be attacked by strangers; important stuff to consider as we work to reduce violence against all people.

This report examines how the sexes do or do not differ in the
patterns and number of violent victimizations they experienced.
Using the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and the
Supplemental Homicide Reports (SHR) of the FBI, the report
presents selected characteristics of the victims, incidents, and
offenders.

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* During 1994 men experienced almost 6.6 million violent
victimizations; women experienced 5 million. For every 3
violent victimizations of males, there were 2 of females.

* Females were more likely to be victimized by persons whom they
knew (62% or 2,981,479 victimizations) while males were more
likely to be victimized by strangers (63%, or 3,949,285).

* In 1994 for every 5 violent victimizations of a female by an
intimate, there was 1 of a male. Intimates committed over
900,000 victimizations of females and about 167,000
victimizations of males.

* For homicides in which the victim-offender relationship was
known, an intimate killed 31% of female victims age 12 or older
(1,394) and 4% of male victims 12 or older (669).

* Women separated from their spouses had a violent victimization
rate (128 per 1,000) over 12 times that of separated men (79 per
1,000), divorced men (77 per 1,000), and divorced women (71 per
1,000).

* When multiple offenders committed the violence, both males
(79%) and females (65%) were more likely to be victimized by
strangers than by persons whom they knew.

* Most violent victimizations did not involve the use of
weapons. Offenders were armed in 34% of victimizations of males
(2,047,502) and in 24% of victimizations of females (1,128,100).

* Female victims were more likely than males to report robberies
and simple assaults to law enforcement agencies.

* In assaults, but not robberies, females were more likely than
males to sustain an injury. When injured during a violent
crime, male victims were more likely than female victims to be
seriously hurt.

* Females were more likely to be victimized at a private home
(their own or that of a neighbor, friend, or relative) than in
any other place. Males were most likely to be victimized in
public places such as businesses, parking lots, and open areas.

I guess the shark-mounted version is just a matter of time now. German Military Laser Destroys Targets Over 1Km Away

First, the system sliced through a 15mm- (~0.6 inches) thick steel girder from a kilometer away. Then, from a distance of two kilometers, it shot down a handful of drones as they nose-dived toward the surface at 50 meters per second....

The Independent reports on how the Obama administration has continued Bush II's policy of rendition -- the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process. (Sadly, I expect Obama apologists will make the same sort of excuses for this as they did for the NDAA and for drone murder.)

The men are the latest example of how the Obama administration has embraced rendition — the practice of holding and interrogating terrorism suspects in other countries without due process — despite widespread condemnation of the tactic in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

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Because of the secrecy involved, it is not known how many renditions have taken place during Obama's first term. But his administration has not disavowed the practice. In 2009, a White House task force on interrogation and detainee transfers recommended that the government be allowed to continue using renditions, but with greater oversight, so that suspects were not subject to harsh interrogation techniques, as some were during the George W. Bush administration.

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Lawyers assigned to represent the defendants in federal court in Brooklyn said the men were interrogated for months in Djibouti even though no charges were pending against them — something that would be prohibited in the United States.

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Harry Batchelder Jr., an attorney for the third suspect, Madhi Hashi, 23, concurred. "Let's just put it this way: They were sojourning in Djibouti, and all of a sudden, after they met their friendly FBI agents and CIA agents — who didn't identify themselves — my client found himself stateless and in a U.S. court," said Batchelder, whose client is a native of Somalia who grew up in Britain.

The sequence described by the lawyers matches a pattern from other rendition cases in which U.S. intelligence agents have secretly interrogated suspects for months without legal oversight before handing over the prisoners to the FBI for prosecution.

Sam Harris, author of several best-selling books on secularism and reason, has written the most rational recent piece on guns and violence I've seen: The Riddle of the Gun

Like most gun owners, I understand the ethical importance of guns and cannot honestly wish for a world without them. I suspect that sentiment will shock many readers. Wouldn’t any decent person wish for a world without guns? In my view, only someone who doesn’t understand violence could wish for such a world. A world without guns is one in which the most aggressive men can do more or less anything they want.

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It is reasonable to wish that only virtuous people had guns, but there are now nearly 300 million guns in the United States, and 4 million new ones are sold each year. A well-made gun can remain functional for centuries. Any effective regime of “gun control,” therefore, would require that we remove hundreds of millions of firearms from our streets. As Jeffrey Goldberg points out in The Atlantic, it may no longer be rational to hope that we can solve the problem of gun violence by restricting access to guns—because guns are everywhere, and the only people who will be deterred by stricter laws are precisely those law-abiding citizens who should be able to possess guns for their own protection and who now constitute one of the primary deterrents to violent crime. This is, of course, a familiar “gun nut” talking point. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

Over on Facebook recently, in a comment thread following up on a bizarre NYT op-ed suggesting we abandon the Constitution, the conversion turned (as it often does these days) to firearms politics and to the recent outbreak in mass shootings. In that thread, one person wrote:

Its not hard to reload a handgun quickly...especially if you're shooting from a distance. It's not like there weren't mass shootings when the Brady Bill was around

Note that the Brady Bill is still in effect, so this is an erroneous comment. But the point about reloading a handgun is true: for someone who practices (not me, but a dedicated shootist), changing magazines of a semi-automatic handgun or using a speed loader to reload a revolver is not difficult.

In reply, a friend -- a very smart and talented woman but someone who doesn't know a lot about the topic -- wrote:

Name a mass shooting that took place as you've described - with a guy standing around reloading a handgun. It doesn't happen.

So, replying to the request/challenge that she posted, I spent some time looking up the topic of mass shootings with handguns where the shooter reloaded -- which was educational, but depressing as all hell. It turned out that her comment was also erroneous. I posted what I found.

F.B. Purity is a browser extension that, in its author's words, "helps you to take control of the News Feeds on your Facebook home page. It does this by filtering out the application spam, such as quizzes and games etc, and also the messages such as 'x became a fan of y'". It also allows you to fix FB's broken "Timeline" layout. I don't use it myself -- I use a combination of other browser tools to filter Facebook -- but I have friends that swear by it.

The author of this software reports that he's now been banned from Facebook:

The best overview I've found of the case that gun control laws do not and cannot reduce violence is this article from the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy by Don B. Kates & Gary Mauser: Would Banning Firearms Reduce Murder and Suicide? A Review of International and Some Domestic Evidence. I don't agree with all of their analysis, but the facts they present are pretty conclusive against the notion that more guns makes for more violence.

While American gun ownership is quite high, Table 1 shows many other developed nations (e.g., Norway, Finland, Germany, France, Denmark) with high rates of gun ownership. These countries, however, have murder rates as low or lower than many developed nations in which gun ownership is much rarer. For example, Luxembourg, where handguns are totally banned and ownership of any kind of gun is minimal, had a murder rate nine times higher than Germany in 2002.

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A second misconception about the relationship between fire‐
arms and violence attributes Europe’s generally low homicide rates to stringent gun control. That attribution cannot be accurate since murder in Europe was at an all‐time low before the gun controls were introduced. For instance, virtually the only English gun control during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was the practice that police patrolled without guns. During this period gun control prevailed far less in England or Europe than in certain American states which nevertheless had—and continue to have—murder rates that were and are comparatively very high.

In this connection, two recent studies are pertinent. In 2004,
the U.S. National Academy of Sciences released its evaluation from a review of 253 journal articles, 99 books, 43 government publications, and some original empirical research. It failed to identify any gun control that had reduced violent crime, suicide, or gun accidents. The same conclusion was reached in 2003 by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s review of then‐extant studies.

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One reason the extent of gun ownership in a society does not
spur the murder rate is that murderers are not spread evenly throughout the population. Analysis of perpetrator studies shows that violent criminals—especially murderers—“almost uniformly have a long history of involvement in criminal behavior.” So it would not appreciably raise violence if all law‐abiding, responsible people had firearms because they are not the ones who rape, rob, or murder. By the same token, violent crime would not fall if guns were totally banned to civilians. As the respective examples of Luxembourg and Russia suggest,individuals who commit violent crimes will either find guns despite severe controls or will find other weapons to use.

Evanston PD photo, via Evanston Now

It's easy to focus our thoughts on things. We have a lot of practice with that in our culture, especially this time of year. "I want a Red Ryder BB gun, and a new iPhone, and a Wii U." When times are good, we think about the things we want. And when times are bad, we think about the things we need and don't have. "I need a decent meal, and medicine, and decent clothes, and a warm, dry, safe place to sleep."

Things are simple. Our relationship with them is pretty one-sided. We are the subjects, they are the objects, always. We can act upon them or with them, but it's always us doing the acting. That makes them a lot easier to model in our minds than people.

So when our actions don't work out the way we want them too, it's easy to blame the things involved. "Dammit, if I had that $1,500 guitar, I'd play better." Or, "Stupid hammer! Why did it miss the nail and hit my thumb!?"

For minor mishaps, we usually realize how silly that is, and recant. "Ok, maybe I need to practice my scales more than I need a new guitar." Or, "Oh, I see, I need to swing the hammer differently."

But when people's lives go very, very wrong, we seem to have a stronger impulse to blame the things involved. "Heroin ruined her life," rather than "She ruined her life with heroin." Or "He was killed by a 9mm handgun," rather than "He was killed by a person who used a 9mm handgun."

It's interesting that there seems to be a bias the other way when objects are used towards a good outcome. There -- if we talk about these incidents at all, which we rarely do compared to the more dramatic bad outcomes -- we credit people. "She defended herself against the rapist with a 9mm handgun," not "A 9mm handgun defended her against the rapist." Or, "Doctors eased her pain with drugs," not "Drugs eased her pain."

So we blame things when events go awry, and we don't balance that out by crediting things when events go well. This biases our thinking, and in our minds things often become the source of our woes.

So we declare war on these things. Photos like the one above, showing our police capturing the evil things, have become standard news features. They're evidence of our "success" in the War on Drugs and the War on Guns, and never mind whether capturing those evil thing actually makes a difference in people's lives or not. (After decades of drug prohibition, some estimates say that ten percent of Baltimore residents are heroin addicts, though that probably conflates use, abuse, and addiction; and gun seizures and gun control laws don't prevent violence, while the U.S. murder rate actually declined 50% from 1991 to 2010, a time when most states liberalized CCW laws.)

In the wake of last week's horrific slaughter, we can sadly expect politicians and pundits to focus on the things involved, the guns, rather than the killer. We'll get proposals for more laws against things...laws that take people to enforce them, people who could more effectively prevent violence by spending their time supervising dangerous people than in engaging in another War on Things.