[Winstonm]

kenberg, on 2019-August-06, 04:46, said:

Reading the two posts directly above is a bit stunning. I tool Cherdanp's as a somewhat satirical exaggeration.. And yes, I got a kick out of it. Hannity is not being satirical, even if it does sound like something from Mad Magazine as I knew Mad in the 50s. Our president actually regards Hannity as a useful person to go to for advice, am I right about that?

We have a problem.

It is worse than just the president - millions of viewers also consider high school educated college dropout Sean Hannity as some kind of right wing Moses.

And this the same guy who was so taken in by a Russian bot created false story (Seth Rich) that he spread it for weeks on his show as factual, and after it was exposed as a lie, never truly renounced the lie so his viewers would understand that they, too, had been victims of Russian disinformation.

And, of course, besides Hannity this weekend also brought Mitch McConnell's campaign television advertisement that showed his opponent's name on a tombstone - I'm sure Hannity approved of that, too.

[y66]

From Greg Stohr at Bloomberg:

Quote

As mass shootings revive the U.S. debate over gun policy, the Supreme Court is weighing whether to go forward with a Second Amendment showdown for the first time in a decade.

The justices in January said they would hear a challenge to New York City rules that sharply limited where licensed handguns could be taken while locked and unloaded. Three city handgun owners said the regulations were the most extreme firearm-transportation restrictions in the country.

But then the city loosened its rules -- and said the case should be dismissed because there was nothing left for the court to decide. Gun-rights advocates called the city’s move a transparent effort to avoid a ruling that would bolster the right to bear arms nationwide.

The court could say this month what it will do with the case. It will be acting against the backdrop of gun massacres that killed 31 people last weekend in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio -- and ratcheted up the political acrimony in Washington. Congress has passed only incremental gun legislation despite heavy public support for some measures such as universal background checks.

A decision by the Supreme Court to forge ahead with the New York case would mean a ruling next year in the heat of the presidential campaign.

Ironically, a decision to drop the case could open the way to an even bigger ruling in the nine-month term that starts in October. The justices could take up a more sweeping New Jersey case they have been holding while they consider the New York City dispute. The New Jersey case centers on the right to carry a loaded handgun in public -- an issue that has divided federal appeals courts.

New Jersey is one of seven states, including California and New York, that bar most people from carrying weapons in public. New Jersey law requires people to show a “justifiable need” to get a carry permit -- a standard critics say very few people can meet.

Gun-rights supporters have been pressing the court for years to take up another Second Amendment case. The court hasn’t heard one since it threw out a Chicago handgun ban in 2010, two years after it ruled for the first time that the Constitution protects individual firearm rights. The court could become more receptive to pro-gun arguments with the addition of the newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh.

For now, the question is whether the court will rule in the New York case, even though the city said in court papers Monday that the challengers have received “everything they have sought in this lawsuit.”

Under the New York law, people with a licensed handgun at home were allowed to take it to one of seven shooting ranges in the city, but almost nowhere else. Weapons had to be locked and unloaded during travel, and ammunition had to be put in a separate container.

The residents who sued along with an advocacy group said they wanted to be able to take their handguns to more convenient target ranges outside the city and, in the case of a Staten Island man, to his second home.

The city and its supporters say those things are permissible after changes to New York City’s regulations and a related state law.

”There’s really no reason for the court to carry on with this issue,” said Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA Law School who wrote a book on the fight over the Second Amendment.

The residents said even the revised regulations are too strict, forbidding a handgun owner from stopping on the way out of town, requiring written permission to take a weapon to a gunsmith and precluding transport to a summer rental house. They urged the Supreme Court not to reward New York’s “undisguised effort to avoid a precedent-setting loss.”

New York state headed off a different Supreme Court clash earlier this year when it repealed a law banning so-called gravity knives -- easily opened with the flick of a wrist -- before the justices could say whether they would hear the appeal. The justices then turned away the challenge.

The gun-transportation case is different because the court has already agreed to hear it, said Erik Jaffe, a Washington lawyer who filed a brief opposing the restrictions. A federal appeals court upheld the restrictions.

“You’ve now wasted a whole bunch of time and forced people to write up a brief at the Supreme Court,” Jaffe said.

Should the Supreme Court press ahead, arguments would probably be in December or early next year, with a decision by the end of its term in June.

That timetable would push any consideration of the New Jersey case into the following term. Given the divide among federal appeals courts, Winkler said that case will be a strong candidate for review regardless of what happens with the New York fight.

“There’s got to be a pretty good likelihood they take the New Jersey case at the end of the day,” Winkler said.

Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg News parent Bloomberg LP, is a donor to groups that support gun control, including Everytown for Gun Safety.

The case is New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. New York, 18-280.

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2019-August-05, 12:35, said:

I understand. I am saying that we do not have to accept this as immutable. We need to keep the message simple. This is not because the intended audience is a bunch of morons but rather because simple is often best. If a large number of people have weapons that can be used to kill several people a minute, some of those people will do exactly that. So the choices are: Put a stop to the possession of such weapons, or let the killings continue. It is really that simple. We do not have to speak of R or D, of left wing or right wing. We do not have to discuss what the framers did or did not mean when they put in the introductory clause about militias. If we continue with the rules that we have, we will continue to get the results that we are getting. Mild adjustments to the rules will have no appreciable affect. Who would disagree? People can think that over, and then some will come to what I think is the completely obvious conclusion. As neighbor talks with neighbor, this can snowball. Then we get some long needed action. So I think. People like to go to malls without worrying that they or their kids will get shot.

I understand this, too. But we've been through this dozens of times now, and they just don't get it. Gun advocates point the blame every which way except at the obvious common factor. Cherdano's obviously satirical post represents their thinking. The simple message will have no effect unless we get the GOP out of power in the Senate.

Last night's "Late Late Show" began with a montage of James Corden's desk chats after each of the previous mass shootings since he's been on the air. Very depressing.

Trevor Noah debunked all the usual causes: mental illness, violent video games, etc. The difference between the US and other developed countries that don't have a gun violence epidemic is our easy access to guns.

[kenberg]

It is in large part easy access to guns. I think that there is another feature that gets too little attention, social expectation. Of course we do not have social expectation that someone will shoot up a mall, but there are many people who see the use guns as a reasonable approach to problems. This attitude spills over into extreme forms with some people. Like many young boys in the 1950s, I got my forst shotgun when I was 12 or so. This means that when I was going through the various troubles of male adolescence, I had easy access to it. Not only did I never reach for it, I never considered reaching for it. I never weighed the pros and cons of the matter. It was socially acceptable, socially expected. that a boy my age would like to hunt. It was socially completely out of the question that I would use a gun to solve a problem, never mind what the problem was or who was at fault. Now to be completely fair, there was a time when I was maybe 8 or 9 when my mother had a shotgun pointed at our screen door explaining to a man that he would not be coming in. He didn't. But it would take something like that. Guns were for hunting, not for resolving quarrels. Everyone I knew saw it this way.

That has changed.. There was an old song (Bing Crosby I think) about a pistol packing mama. And something called a feudin, a fussin and a fightin involving a grandma who got shot. But these were taken as jokes. Nobody I knew thought you brought a gun to a quarrel. I think that this has changed, and then, as I say, there is a spillover effect to the crazier among us.

We allow the sale of guns that can kill many people in a short period of time. There is no purpose for having such a weapon other than to kill many people in a short time. This sends a message about how society feels about using a weapon to kill many people in a short time. And so some do just that. It's about as close to inevitable as it can be.


I really think many people can understand this when it is put this way. Forget which wing a person flies by. Keep the message simple. Manufacturing and selling these weapons sends a message, and maybe the message some get from it is a little different from what is intended, but not that far off. We are saying that we think it reasonable for a person to consider using such a weapon to kill a large number of people in a short time and so they do. Anyone can understand this simple fact. If we wish to stop the killing, we have to address both the access to guns and the message that allowing such access sends.

[y66]

From Paul Krugman at NYT:

Quote

On Monday night the U.S. Treasury designated China a currency manipulator. This was deeply ironic to those of us who follow such things.

After all, Treasury shied away from calling China on its currency policy back in 2010, when the accusation was actually true, and the deliberate undervaluation of the renminbi, China’s currency, was doing real harm at a time of mass unemployment. As best I could tell — and I was talking to people with some inside information at the time — the Obama administration decided that accusing China of currency foul play, although it would have been accurate, would be counterproductive.

For while currency manipulation is illegal under international agreements, there isn’t any clear remedy. The Obama administration therefore feared that it would face a nasty choice: look ineffective by accusing China of sin, then doing nothing about it, or respond with tariffs that might set off a destructive trade war.

Things are very different today. At this point, China’s currency policy is actually fairly benign; if anything, its policies are keeping the renminbi stronger than it would be otherwise. Meanwhile, U.S. unemployment is low. There are plenty of things to criticize about China, but currency policy isn’t one of them. With unerring aim, the Trump administration has decided to accuse China of the one crime of which it’s innocent. Of course, this administration doesn’t have to fear setting off a trade war, since it has already done that.

Let’s back up for a minute. What does currency manipulation even mean? Currencies aren’t commodities like soybeans or natural gas, which have “natural” prices determined by supply and demand. Instead, we live in a world of “fiat” currencies created by governments; the supply of dollars is whatever the Federal Reserve says it should be. If a government decides for whatever reason to change the supply of money, the price of that money will change, but that’s not manipulation in any meaningful sense of the word.

So what we mean when talking about currency manipulation is fairly subtle: it refers to actions governments take to keep their currencies weak so as to achieve a competitive advantage. And China was doing that back in 2010: it was buying dollars to keep its own currency weak, and imposing controls to keep foreigners from investing a lot of money in China, which would have pushed the renminbi up.

Since 2013, however, China has been doing more or less the opposite: generally selling dollars, while imposing controls on the ability of its own residents to take money out of the country. To the extent that it is manipulating its currency, it’s doing so to keep the renminbi up, not down.

What China did Monday was to slightly relax its support for the currency, allowing it to fall through the symbolically important level of 7 to the dollar. So the U.S. is calling China a currency manipulator because it has, um, stopped intervening to keep its currency up. Orwellian much?

Of course, economic logic has very little to do with any of this. Trump wants China to make splashy concessions in the face of his tariffs; China let its currency slide a bit to signal that it won’t be bullied. Basically, it’s “Sanction me? No, sanction you!”

This isn’t likely to end well.

[hrothgar]

In my own case, my father spent the Korean war in a repair depot, sighting M1 rifles. He was a terrifyingly good shot. I grew up with guns around the house, and dad tried to teach me how to shoot a rifle without much luck. (With this said and done, I did take to hunting though I primarily use bows and spears with which I am someone more accurate...)

My thoughts about guns has been pretty much consistent over my adult life

1. I think that people should be able to own almost anything
2. Most guns need to be stored / used at licensed firearm ranges
3. If you want a weapon for hunting / self defense, you can get a bolt action rifle, a pump action shotgun, or a break away shotgun

I go back and forth wrt revolvers...

All this in conjunction with background checks, waiting periods, and the like...
And don't get me started on all this open carry nonsense.

From my perspective this presents a pretty reasonable trade off between folks ability to hunt and protect themselves at home and

1. Society's interest in preventing mass shootings
2. Individual's interest in not getting gunned down by their family members

[Winstonm]

My gun history is pretty much like others in my age group. I hunted in my teens and twenties then decided killing animals was not my thing. I still own a pump shotgun and 00 buckshot loads for home defense. I doubt I ever will need it but an older gentleman whose house I could hit with a thrown rock was killed by an intruder about 9 months ago, so you never know.

I looked at some polls yesterday that indicated 61% of the population wants stricter gun controls; assuming that to be reasonably accurate, it means that the minority is blocking genuine gun law reform. I don't think we need to convince more people; we need to remove the deadwood from power who only respond to the gun lobbyists.

[y66]

From Trump sets trap for China, steps in it by the Editorial Board at Bloomberg:

Quote

China’s leaders took a while to realize what close observers of Donald Trump have long known: The U.S. president is a terrible negotiator. Global investors seem to be catching on as well. Stocks plunged on Monday as investors weighed the consequences of an escalating conflict over trade.

Trump has said that the U.S. will impose a 10% tariff on an additional $300 billion worth of Chinese goods on Sept. 1, unless China starts acceding to his demands. If he follows through, the president will have levied tariffs on virtually all imports from China, including toys, smartphones and other consumer goods that had previously been spared. China has promised to retaliate if the new measures go forward. The government reportedly told state-owned enterprises to suspend imports of U.S. agricultural products and on Monday allowed the yuan to weaken below 7 to the dollar for the first time in more than a decade.

Trump’s logic is simple, albeit wrong. He thinks that China, which had agreed to continue talks in Washington next month, is playing for time; he’s particularly irked that it hasn’t put in the big agricultural orders President Xi Jinping supposedly promised when the two met in June. The new tariffs help Trump look tough as he hits the 2020 campaign trail while imposing further pain on China’s limping economy. Any hit to U.S. output will presumably encourage the Federal Reserve to cut rates further — something Trump has been urging for months.

Yet the new levies are no more likely to produce the deal Trump seeks than his previous rounds. The cost of tariffs is paid by U.S. consumers and businesses, not China (and that’s not counting the billions in compensation the government has had to shell out to farmers hurt by Chinese retaliation). U.S. manufacturers have been forced to realign their supply chains and are struggling to secure crucial inputs. Meanwhile, any jobs leaving China are moving to low-wage countries such as Vietnam, not back to the U.S.

Trade tensions have dented China’s growth, but they aren’t the main reason for its recent slowdown. China’s leaders, moreover, have ways to prop up output and employment. They appear to have calculated the costs of additional tariffs and found them preferable to compromising on policies they see as fundamental to their economic model. They’re also figuring that they can bear the domestic political costs better than Trump, who is acutely sensitive to both rural voters and gyrations in the stock market.

Finally, the way Trump imposed the latest tariffs confirms Chinese officials’ greatest fear about striking a deal: They think he’s incapable of sticking to it. Trump acted just after trade talks in Shanghai had ended relatively amicably, and apparently against the advice of his top advisers.

The U.S. has legitimate complaints about China’s economic behavior. Beijing should be helped to spin concessions on those issues as being in China’s interest — as many, in fact, would be. If the U.S. had concentrated on making Chinese pledges as airtight as possible, the two sides might’ve made some real progress. Issuing unrealistic demands and painting any prospective compromise as a Chinese surrender will only stiffen resistance.

That’s not all. Over the past year, the U.S. should have been building leverage by enlisting allies and working through the World Trade Organization. Instead, the Trump administration has postured, picked needless fights with friends, and undermined global institutions.

Striking a deal won’t get any easier as the U.S. enters full campaign mode. And additional interest-rate cuts won’t avoid the economic damage being done. Trump has backed himself into a corner, and the U.S. will pay the price.

[cherdano]

kenberg, on 2019-August-06, 04:46, said:

I tool Cherdanp's as a somewhat satirical exaggeration..

No no! I am just taking conservative gun right supporters at their word that they want to prevent future mass shootings by addressing mental health and video games. You aren't claiming that they haven't really thought through about what this would mean in practice? Or that they are just throwing these things up and aren't actually planning to do anything??

[Winstonm]

All Republican pretense of non-racism is now off:

Quote

The Nebraska Republican Party called on state Sen. John McCollister to quit the party after he accused his fellow Republicans of “enabling white supremacy” by staying silent on President Donald Trump’s hateful rhetoric.

McCollister, a lifelong Republican, made headlines Monday when he condemned members of his party in a series of tweets for failing to speak out against “a Republican president who continually stokes racist fears in his base.”

The Nebraska Republican Party’s executive director, Ryan Hamilton, responded hours later — not by denouncing white supremacy, but by offering to help McCollister register as a Democrat.

my emphasis

[kenberg]

cherdano, on 2019-August-06, 15:22, said:

No no! I am just taking conservative gun right supporters at their word that they want to prevent future mass shootings by addressing mental health and video games. You aren't claiming that they haven't really thought through about what this would mean in practice? Or that they are just throwing these things up and aren't actually planning to do anything??

I am setting aside a half hour every day to prepare for the mental health exam.It has been suggested that I try for a couple of hours.

[y66]

From Jonathan Bernstein at Bloomberg:

Quote

Time for a check-in on President Donald Trump’s approval rating, and what it says about his reelection prospects.

Trump remains unpopular. The FiveThirtyEight poll tracker estimates he’s at 42.3% approval and 52.2% disapproval. The historical comparison is as bad as ever: Of the 11 polling-era presidents through 929 days in office (Gerald Ford didn’t serve this long), he’s second-worst, beating only Jimmy Carter – and his disapproval just dropped behind Carter’s once again, making him dead last on that score.

It’s theoretically possible that an incumbent with a 42% approval rating could be reelected. Perhaps the electorate will be disproportionately drawn from those who like Trump. Perhaps there’s a polling error in his favor. Maybe an unusually high number of people who think he’s doing a bad job will vote for him anyway. After all, lots of voters picked Trump in 2016 even though they didn’t like him. And maybe he gets lucky again with the Electoral College.

That’s a lot of maybes, though, and none of them are guaranteed to help Trump. In fact, some of them could easily leave him doing worse than his polling suggests.

Remember, too, that it’s August 2019 and not October 2020. Trump is actually only a bit behind where Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were at the equivalent points in their first terms. By Election Day, Obama had rebounded to about 50% and Reagan was above 55%. It can work in the other direction as well: In August 1991, George H.W. Bush was still at nearly 70% approval after the Gulf War until a recession brought him low. Or both ways! Carter at this point went from 30% up to 55% long enough to win re-nomination, and then all the way back down.

In other words, there’s plenty of time for the president to improve – or to collapse further.

What’s harder to know is whether opinion is unusually rigid for this president. Trump has spent his presidency in an abnormally narrow range of public opinion, especially since May 2018. It seems possible that he could revisit his 2017 lows, when he fell to around 37%. Since his brief (and unimpressive) honeymoon, his peak has been 43.1% approval. Could that be close to a hard cap? There’s no way to know. But it’s difficult to imagine what events could significantly boost his popularity at this point.

If I were in the Trump campaign, what would really worry me are the president’s persistently high disapproval scores. Again, since that brief honeymoon, his disapproval rating has been above 50% throughout his term. In fact, he’s spent about as much time over 50% – after just two and a half years – as all of the other 11 polling-era presidents did in their first four years combined. There’s simply no record of any president with those figures recovering. And remember: It’s one thing to dislike a politician, but it’s another to think he’s doing a poor job as president – and the latter is usually a good predictor of vote choice.

In short, it seems possible that more than half the nation has already reached a tentative conclusion against Trump. And if they have, it’s not at all clear what he could do to win many of them back.

[barmar]

hrothgar, on 2019-August-06, 11:20, said:

From my perspective this presents a pretty reasonable trade off between folks ability to hunt and protect themselves at home and

Statistics show that a gun at home is far more likely to be involved in accidental shootings (including among children), suicide, or family violence than self-protection.

You can say that properly securing the firearm can prevent the accidents, but how can we ensure that? Police can't do random checks to make sure everyone is locking up their guns.

[PassedOut]

barmar, on 2019-August-07, 08:46, said:

Statistics show that a gun at home is far more likely to be involved in accidental shootings (including among children), suicide, or family violence than self-protection.

You can say that properly securing the firearm can prevent the accidents, but how can we ensure that? Police can't do random checks to make sure everyone is locking up their guns.

Hence the requirement to store firearms at licensed ranges.

[kenberg]

barmar, on 2019-August-07, 08:46, said:

Statistics show that a gun at home is far more likely to be involved in accidental shootings (including among children), suicide, or family violence than self-protection.

You can say that properly securing the firearm can prevent the accidents, but how can we ensure that? Police can't do random checks to make sure everyone is locking up their guns.

There is a very interesting issue here. Should statistics, which necessarily involve what other people do, be used to control what I am allowed to do? We do not have young kids over that often and when we do we are careful to put medicines out of reach. We could easily put firearms out of reach if we had any (we don't). I am not given to temper tantrums, I maybe have some wine in the evening but by no means so much as to affect my judgment, and as for suicide, I have no such intentions but if that were to change, based for example on some medical diagnosis that promised no hope and much suffering, I am not sure that the choice is anyone's business except my own and to some extent my wife's.

In the opposite direction, the crime situation where I live is so mild that I see no need for a weapon.

But as far as a weapon for self-defense goes, I would prefer to use my own judgment rather than to have someone else decide based on a statistical argument that includes data from people whose situation, both in terms of themselves and their environment, is far different from mine. I gave up hunting in my early 20s. Winston speaks of concern for small animals, that wasn't the reason at all in my case. I learned to clean fish at such a young age I cannot recall not knowing how to do it and I squash bugs, I don't capture them inside and release them outside. I just thought hunting was, for me, a really stupid and somewhat dangerous activity. But I do not want to stop someone else from doing it, and I do not want to stop someone from making reasonable assessments of their own need for self-defense. What's reasonable? Well, we each have to make a choice on that. I am not enough of an expert to be exactly clear on that but I think that I can be reasonable and I think a great many other people could come together with me and select something that is broadly seen as reasonable. There will always be people who want no restrictions at all and there will always be people who want to confiscate everything. To get back to small animals, and large animals, there will always be vegans and there will always be people who want a pound and a half of steak every day, maybe twice a day. The rest of us can work out something in between.

Added: One very reasonable thought for handguns. A handgun gets registered in the buyer's name, after which the default is that this buyer is responsible for any usage of this gun by anyone. The default position can be contested if the buyer can show that he had behaved responsibly and there was no way he could have foreseen or prevented the use to which it was put. Carelessness would definitely not be a way out. If someone broke into his house, blew open his safe, and the gun was then used in a robbery, that could be seen as relieving the owner of responsibility.

[Winstonm]

I have to admit I do find comfort in the confirmation of my views by people who are way smarter than I am.

Quote

“Trumpism, like the Brotherhood, is a political movement built on the mass mobilization of faith—in the one case religious faith and in the other case faith in a single charismatic individual,” we wrote.

[hrothgar]

barmar, on 2019-August-07, 08:46, said:

Statistics show that a gun at home is far more likely to be involved in accidental shootings (including among children), suicide, or family violence than self-protection.

You can say that properly securing the firearm can prevent the accidents, but how can we ensure that? Police can't do random checks to make sure everyone is locking up their guns.

Few quick comments

1. I agree that accidental shootings and domestic violence are very important issues

2. I don't believe that there is any kind of one size fits all solution

3. It's unclear to me that it is reasonable to completely ban firearms in the home. For example, my preferred solution would allow individuals to keep long arms in their house

When it comes to issues surrounding domestic violence, my belief is that waiting periods and licensing requirements will have the most impact. Not sure if you can do that much wrt an abusive individual who already has a weapon. Sadly, having another family member make use of a red flag law or some such is likely to trigger the very behaviour that we're worried about.

When it comes to accidental shootings, your best best is insurance / licensing costs

Folks who

1. Have a gun in the house
2. Don't have a gun safe

Need to pay a lot more money if they want to keep a gun at home

[barmar]

kenberg, on 2019-August-07, 11:05, said:

There is a very interesting issue here. Should statistics, which necessarily involve what other people do, be used to control what I am allowed to do?

Sorry, but I think it should.

We have too many people in the population to try to tailor laws to every possibility. it's simply not feasible to figure out who are the safe gun owners and who are the ones we should be worried about.

I'll bet most people who have been involved in accidental shootings and domestic violence thought similarly to you. We can't depend on self assessments of competence, see the Dunning-Kruger effect. I used to drive really fast (80's) on highways, I now realize that I was suffering from D-K when I felt I was safe doing this; probably the only people who are actually competent to drive like that are trained racecar drivers (and maybe even not, since consumer cars are not engineered the same as racecars).

Red flag laws wouldn't have helped this week -- neither of the shooters was considered mentally ill. In fact, most mass shooters were not. It's not the "mental health" problem that Trump and others make it out to be, unless you define after the fact that anyone who would do this must have been mentally ill. But that definition is useless for prevention, which depends on diagnosing the illness before they commit violence.

Licensing doesn't help, both these shooters obtained their guns legally.

The simple fact is this: If there are lots of guns, there will be lots of gun violence.

Gun proponents argue that this is true for other things: cars cause lots of accidents and deaths, not to mention climate change, but we don't ban them. The difference is that this is not the primary intended use of cars -- it's an incidental problem that we have to live with because modern life would be practically impossible without them. We also make efforts to reduce the danger, we've been adding more and more safety features to cars.

Guns in homes, on the other hand, exist for no other purpose than to hurt someone.

So I think we're forced to face the fact that we do need to adopt a one-size-fits-all policy, based on statistics -- anything else is just too complicated. We have similar policies in other areas -- critically ill people can't take drugs that haven't been FDA approved, even if there's no approved solution (I think there may be some exceptions). Racecar drivers can't get a special license that allows them to exceed speed limits.

[y66]

From Richard Parker, author of "Lone Star Nation: How Texas Will Transform America", at NYT:

Quote

EL PASO — If consoling the nation in a time of desperate need is a vital and yet simple task of the American presidency, Donald J. Trump failed miserably this week.

From his flight on Wednesday to Dayton, Ohio, to this sprawling high-desert city on the Mexican border, the 45th occupant of the White House not only littered his consolation tour with petty insults — but just to rub salt in the wound, doses of renewed racism. Yet most striking was how alone and outnumbered the president was: rejected, ostracized and told to go home.

The people who streamed the scene of the terrorist attack here — brown, black, white and every hue in between — defiantly defended the nation’s diversity. With no public appearances, the president seemed to shrink, ever more alone as he clung to his white nationalist politics and governance. But he and his supporters were grossly outnumbered. For perhaps the first time in his angry, racist and cruel presidency, the tables were turned in smoldering, righteous popular anger — and he was on the receiving end.

You have to give this to Mr. Trump: He never backs off. He doubles down like a wild gambler in a casino, raising the stakes one more time demanding just a few more chips from the house. Leaving the White House on Wednesday morning, he said, “I think my rhetoric brings people together,” adding he was “concerned about the rise of any group of hate. I don’t like it, whether it’s white supremacy, whether it’s any other kind of supremacy.”

As if there was some other kind of violent political ideology that has killed people — blacks and whites, Jews and Latinos — from Charlottesville, Va., to Pittsburgh, Dayton and El Paso. Leaving Dayton, Mr. Trump insulted the mayor and a senator from the safety of Air Force One and, of course, Twitter.

Trump even jabbed a racist poke at El Paso, ridiculing the former Democratic Representative Beto O’Rourke’s Spanish first name, though he is of Anglo descent: “Beto (phony name to indicate Hispanic heritage) O’Rourke, who is embarrassed by my last visit to the Great State of Texas, where I trounced him, and is now even more embarrassed polling at 1% in the Democratic Primary, should respect the victims & law enforcement — & be quiet!”

While it was bad manners for a nation in mourning, it was more than that: It was a fresh dose of racism. In an era in which minorities are becoming majorities, as in Texas, and intermarrying with Anglos, who is Mr. Trump to judge people’s race and ethnicity based on their names? My last name is Anglo, but I am the son of a Mexican immigrant.

At the makeshift memorial to the 22 killed for the hue of their skin while shopping at a Walmart on a Saturday, I spoke with a young soldier from the 1st Armored Division at nearby Fort Bliss. Big and burly in his camouflage uniform, Pvt. First Class Richard Riley, 20, stood with arms crossed, staring silently at the piles of flowers, plastic hearts and white crosses, one for every victim.

But behind his dark glasses, his eyes welled up. “I just can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m Hispanic, too. And I can’t believe that these people were killed because they were.”

In the dark hours after the attack, fear swept over my hometown. Lightning flashed on the horizon, illuminating empty streets and parking lots. Bars and restaurants shuttered their doors. Wherever I went, as I departed I heard this: “Take care out there.” That was a phrase I’d never heard in this city in more than 50 years.

Even at a public library, near the site of the attack, people openly advised each other to be careful, even exiting to the parking lot. “You gotta look both ways when you head out there,” said one man, loud enough for all to hear. “Be safe out there in all aspects.”

But in the human cycle of grief, the fear, disbelief and anxiety has transformed into a seething anger. El Paso is not a volatile, rioting city where the president could expect trouble. But he inevitably saw how alone he was in his toxic, racist politics, some throwback to a receding time in America.

When Air Force One touched down, the temperature was soaring toward 104 degrees and just one single local official, Mayor Dee Margo, was there to greet him (Gov. Greg Abbott was there as well).

Along the president’s route from the airport to a hospital, people lined the roads to greet him — largely with rejection. “What’s more important?” Asked one man’s sign. “Lives or re-election?” American and Mexican flags sprouted together in the August heat. Signs with quotes bearing his name came back to haunt him: “We cannot allow these people to invade our country.” “Not Welcome” covered a stage at a park where people protested the president. The El Paso Times ran a black front page with this headline: “Mr. President, We Are Hurting.”

How people actually live here stands in stark contrast to Mr. Trump’s white nationalism, consistently separating Americans into old-fashioned, racist categories. (Among other instances: He has told American Jews that Israel’s prime minister is their leader and proudly boasted of his few black supporters by calling them “my African Americans.”) Six in 10 Americans here have family on the other side of the trickling Rio Grande, according to a study by the El Paso Community Foundation, while six in 10 Mexicans just across the border have family on the American side. Thirty percent of Latinos here marry outside their ethnicity, usually an Anglo. Nationwide, one in six marriages are interracial, according to the Pew Research Center.

And what is usually forgotten is that racial violence in America has almost never been a two-way street. Instead, it has been visited, unfortunately, by the majority — whites. What whites have historically called “race riots” have actually been one-sided assaults by whites: Anglo-on-Latino in Texas, white-on-Chinese further West, white-on-blacks in Oklahoma and the Deep South. And so it continues, in 2019.

As if to symbolize just how out of touch Trumpism is here and in much of America, a sole woman approached the makeshift memorial at the Walmart where 22 people died. She wore a bright red MAGA hat, and quickly over 30 people surrounded her chanting: “Take it off! Take it off!” She refused, yelling back that the president should be accepted here — only to be drowned out. Later, young people appeared, dressed in black, chanting: “white violence, White House.”

Something is shifting. Mr. Trump may not have felt it during his few hours in town, but walking around, you couldn’t miss it. The El Paso massacre brought together the most active of America’s shifting tectonic plates: racism, assault weapons, a national Latino population of 60 million now with a target on its back, Mr. Trump’s white nationalism and his awful manners for a country in mourning.

Another president might have been sensitive enough to sense the shift, and changed course accordingly — played the convener, the unifier. Instead, Mr. Trump displayed just how small he is, no matter how big his mouth or powerful his office. He never once appeared in public. By 6:01 p.m., after just a little more than two hours, he was safely aboard Air Force One again and it was wheels up into the sky. But he is a shrinking president, stuck in a racist past, flying over a changing America. And I think we — or most of us — are all El Paso now.

[helene_t]

kenberg, on 2019-August-07, 11:05, said:

There is a very interesting issue here. Should statistics, which necessarily involve what other people do, be used to control what I am allowed to do?

Yes I think so. If I try to take some pest insects into New Zealand, airport biosecurity will destroy them (and fine me, if I didn't declare them). I may say that "but I am a responsible insect keeper, I would never release them into the environment" but they would not believe that. If I run a Zoo or an animal testing facility I can obtain a license, but the burden of proof is on me.

Analogously, if I wanted to buy or 3D-craft a gun, IMHO I should have to show that I have some acceptable reason for such high-risk activity (maybe I run an olympic shooting range or a military training facility) and that my staff is properly trained.

To some extent I can buy into the idealistic view that freedom from government intervention is a core value. I could live with the government allowing people to trade crack (as long as they don't sell it to children or mentally disabled, and don't sell it on credit to people who will struggle to pay) and I am OK with the government not preventing consenting 12 years old from having sex with adults. And allow restaurant owners to allow smoking in their own restaurants. And driving without seatbelts. Even if I think those are very bad things, I am not convinced that the government should be in the business of regulating it.

Allowing guns goes too far for me, though.