Throwing It All Away

I don't have any fresh content today, nothing written especially for this post, but it is still a current and relevant compilation. The second half is topical items I'd been collecting then drifted away from a week or two ago. The first half are additions to my reaction to the latest school shooting captured in And Another and Another and Another: A Group of Schoolchildren Is a Target a couple of weeks ago. Most I shared first on Facebook or other places in the feed.

A thought:

Every new mass shooting there are lots of people commenting that every new mass shooting the cycle is always the same--the same reactions from the same people, the same dialogues back and forth, the same arguments put forth--and the conclusion that nothing ever changes, that the cycle simply repeats.

But that's not true. For many years now, we've seen an overall trend of more permissiveness toward guns, fewer and fewer restrictions, a chipping away at the few laws and regulations pertaining to guns that have existed; along with constantly more guns being made, purchased, and circulated throughout our nation.

"Nothing ever changes" simply is not true. We have changed toward more guns, less gun control. Are things improving?

From NPR:

Research Shows Policies That May Help Prevent Mass Shootings — and Some That Don't 

Researchers analyzing decades of data found two policies that may help lower the rate of deadly mass shootings:

1. Requiring gun purchasers to go through a licensing process.

2. Banning the sale of large-capacity magazines or ammunition-feeding devices.

I won't try to make any more arguments because they fall on deaf ears, but I couldn't resist at least mentioning these reasonable steps from a politically center source based on "decades of data."

Another simple solution: gun locks for free at the Indianapolis Public Library.

A friend shared this comic with the following lead:

"The word "leaders" in this cartoon is both unnecessary and misleading. It absolves Republican voters of the moral responsibility for the policies they support."

I responded:

Well, you see, a good guy with a gun can stop a bad guy with a gun; but a straight white male Christian is likely to, uh, be turned into a satanic black woman by those other things. Oh, I get it--a minority. Better dead than a minority. Because minorities should, by natural law, be treated worse than dirt.

Then later added another comment.

A strange new talking point (strange to me; new to me) I've just started seeing is: police are not meant to protect us. The only thing police are tasked with is catching those who break the law, and it's not their responsibility to protect anyone.

Which is, I guess, is the next logical distortion of their "personal responsibility" mantra. Only you are responsible for protecting you, not the police.

I wonder how much longer before they start saying the same about the military?

It seems there is nothing they don't want to undermine or reverse.

Not directly about guns, but part of the same dynamic. I love how clearly and succinctly Heather Cox Richardson put it in her June 3, 2022 "Letter from an American.

In 1981, Reagan Republicans took power with the plan of cutting the government back to the form it took in the 1920s. But Americans like a basic social safety net and protection for consumers and workers, so to win votes for tax cuts and deregulation, Republican leaders warned that white Christian men who just wanted to work hard for their own success were under attack by a government in thrall to minorities, women, lazy organized workers, and secularists who were destroying traditional values and turning the country over to socialism. 

As wealth concentrated upward and it became harder and harder for ordinary Americans to rise, Republican leaders demonized Democrats and, when voters kept electing them, delegitimized elections themselves. Increasingly, they talked of the need for violence to protect individualism from an overreaching government.

Finally, as of January 6, 2021, they have rejected the idea of democracy and have convinced their followers—and perhaps themselves—that the only way to save America is to destroy it. . . . 

Reacting to the arrest, Representative Louie Gohmert (R-TX) told Newsmax, “If you’re a Republican, you can’t even lie to Congress or lie to an FBI agent or they’re coming after you.”

And here's where we transition back to things I collected in May.

A couple of thoughts that have been widely shared:

Book Banning: When you erase the history/experience of one kid to "protect" another, what you're also saying is that there is one type of kid worth protecting.

In Germany, teaching the Holocaust is mandatory. It includes visits to concentration camp, museums, etc. They don't shy away from their own ugly history. Yet the kids aren't damaged; they're strengthened, matured, humbled. US needs to do same RE slavery. Not that complicated.

An article that more fully develops this second perspective included here.

A few libraries have responded to recent book banning campaigns by offering widely open, online access to ebooks to anyone anywhere. Now there is a backlash against that as well.

Conservative Parents Take Aim at Library Apps Meant to Expand Access to Books

Some parents want the apps to be banned for their children or even for all students. And they’re getting results.

A school superintendent in a suburb of Nashville, Tennessee, pulled his system’s e-reader offline for a week last month, cutting access for 40,000 students, after a parent searched the Epic library available on her kindergartner’s laptop and found books supporting LGBTQ pride. 

In a rural county northwest of Austin, Texas, county officials cut off access to the OverDrive digital library, which residents had used for a decade to find books to read for pleasure, prompting a federal lawsuit against the county. 

And on the east coast of Florida, the Brevard County school system removed the Epic app from its computer system, saying it didn’t want kids to have access to material its own school librarians hadn’t vetted.

Sigh. Again, The Freedom to Read Statement.

A bit more on the leaked draft of the Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade:

The Horrifying Implications of Alito’s Most Alarming Footnote

A throwaway footnote on Page 34 of the draft cites data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that in 2002, nearly 1 million women were seeking to adopt children, “whereas the domestic supply of infants relinquished at birth or within the first month of life and available to be adopted has become virtually nonexistent.” . . . 

Footnote 46, quantifying the supply/demand mismatch of babies, follows directly on another footnote in the opinion approvingly citing the “logic” raised at oral argument in December by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who mused that there is no meaningful hardship in conscripting women to remain pregnant and deliver babies in 2022 because “safe haven” laws allow them to drop those unwanted babies off at the fire station for other parents to adopt. . . . 

Second only to the creeping chatter of state birth control bans, the speedy pivot to celebrating forced birth and adoption is chilling. It’s chilling not just because it discounts the extortionate emotional and financial costs of childbirth and the increased medical risks of forced childbirth. It’s chilling because it lifts us out of a discussion about privacy and bodily autonomy and into a regime in which babies are a commodity and pregnant people are vessels in which to incubate them. If this sounds like a familiar, albeit noxious, economic concept, it’s because it is.

The economics of chattel slavery itself reflects a long, sordid history of using women’s bodies to incubate babies for the benefit of others, and it’s no exaggeration to say that the 14th Amendment’s guarantees of “substantive due process”—much derided by Republicans and Alito—was an effort to put an end to that practice. References to “safe havens” and the depleted domestic supply of adoptable babies are terrifying because this is exactly what the 14th Amendment sought to curtail. . . . 

Alito’s “domestic supply of infants” footnote might be buffed away by the time we get a final opinion in Dobbs. But it bespeaks a fundamental and cruel misunderstanding of autonomy and liberty rights, and a return to something far more pernicious. Forcing pregnant people to carry to term for the benefit of others isn’t a gentle or neutral recalibration of fetal personhood rights against maternal liberty interests; it is the very definition of subjugation, which is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition” in ways the 14th Amendment actually sought to correct.

We are not kind to our minorities.

Source for the images and data below: Perils of Perception

Referred by:

Can Bad Number Sense Amplify Deadly Hate?

According to data from the Census Bureau, immigrants make up a smaller percentage of the American population than they did in the late 19th century.

Our values around not killing people obviously shouldn’t depend on how prevalent those people are. At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if these killers would be more resistant to radicalization if, while spelunking the internet, they became as curious about the numbers around them as they are about finding reasons to hate people.

I think we should all strive to develop number sense for our world, especially because it’s so easy now to find basic data with a few seconds of search. Perhaps familiarizing young people with the numbers around them would also be a great thing to do in school, year after year.

Muslim: The average U.S. citizen assumes our population is 17% Muslim; the actual number is 1%

Happy: The average U.S. citizen assumes 49% of our population say they are happy; the actual number is 90%

Wealth: The average U.S. citizen assumes the least wealthy 70% of our population owns 28% of the wealth; the actual number is 7%

Health: The average U.S. citizen assumes 31% of GDP is spent of health; the actual number is 18%

Ignorance: The U.S. is #5 out of 40 least accurate in its perceptions of itself

Finally, one more from Heather Cox Richardson. From May 18, 2022:

There was big news today from a quarter that made it easily overlooked. . . . 

What is at stake with this decision is something called the “nondelegation doctrine,” which says that Congress, which constitutes the legislative branch of the government, cannot delegate legislative authority to the executive branch. Most of the regulatory bodies in our government since the New Deal have been housed in the executive branch. So the nondelegation doctrine would hamstring the modern regulatory state. . . . 

In 2001, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected the argument in a decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, who said the court must trust Congress to take care of its own power. But after Justice Clarence Thomas suggested that he might be open to the argument, conservative scholars began to say that the framers of the Constitution did not want Congress to delegate authority. Mortenson and Bagley say that argument “can’t stand…. It’s just making stuff up and calling it constitutional law.” Nonetheless, Republican appointees on the court have come to embrace the doctrine.

In November 2019, Justice Brett Kavanaugh sided with Justice Neil Gorsuch-—Trump appointees both—to say the Court should reexamine whether or not Congress can delegate authority to administrative agencies. Along with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Thomas, they appear to believe that the Constitution forbids such delegation. If Justice Amy Coney Barrett sides with them, the resurrection of that doctrine will curtail the modern administrative state that since the 1930s has regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure.

As Justice Elena Kagan pointed out, the nondelegation doctrine would mean that “most of Government is unconstitutional.”

It seems there is nothing they don't want to undermine or reverse.

Pictures taken of this exhibition