It's Not the Guns, It's the Fear

Pop Rocket, February 2013









Our media consumed the entire month of January with talk about guns, gun violence and what we might do to stop it. Most of it has been regurgitation of the same old time-wasting arguments, and I am absolutely resolved to avoid falling in that trap and wasting yet more of your time and head space. So like the country as a whole, I'm challenged to come at this problem from a different and maybe useful angle.
     Sincerely, it surprised me that Americans near and far took so to heart the killings of the little kids at Newtown. Over the decades we've generally become so inured to this sort of violence that I expected this mass shooting of innocents would quickly sink beneath the waves of popular distraction like the many gone before. That it's spurred a sustained public conversation about gun violence, of such power that every legislator and enforcement officer down to the local level seems compelled to weigh in, is amazing and encouraging. It's about time we got this issue out of the national sock drawer and had it out.
     As I've said in this space before, it's obvious to any thinking being that our national problem with guns is out of control, but there seems to be no practical way out of it. Towering reams of opinion good and bad, usually putting the onus on someone else, are being hacked out daily on this subject, so for both our sakes I'm going to have to assume that you're sufficiently plugged in and I can skip the basics.
     When a problem seems intractable, it's a signal to me that I'm not seeing the whole picture. So let's back up a step to: Why does an ordinary person want a gun?     I see two answers to that, two sides of the same coin: power, and fear. We feel powerless, we need to defend ourselves against something we fear. Drone on all day about the cold reality that holding a gun is vastly more likely to hurt the holder than any bad guy, you won't get through to someone who's afraid. Cite all the statistics in the world about how rare crime really has always been in daily life and how it's diminishing, the fearful seem to fear it all the more.
     Most of us have grown up with the teevee myth that a good guy with a gun always wins and every week he's beset by another bad guy, and while we know intellectually that it's all fiction and mostly nonsense, it still shapes our self-images, emotional landscapes, and ability to competently assess risk.
     Most of the time the bad guys turn out to be people who believed they were good guys, or at least doing the right thing within the mythology they'd created for themselves. We all go through changes and problems, and there's no clear way to be sure any of us won't wind up doing the wrong thing with that weapon. So the problem isn't guns, really; broadly, it's unreasonable fear, coupled with unrealistic myths about our ability to defend against those mentally inflated monsters. It's our national neurosis.
     On left and right we love to posit "mental health" deficiencies as an important cause of mass shootings, and there's no doubt that the murderers of random innocents and their own families are by definition mentally unfit. What we've yet to address is whether our society as a whole is unhinged, become a garden bed full of low-grade poison sprouting the odd murderous weed.
     From outside our borders, our collective neurosis is as obvious as that of a bum shouting at traffic. Citizens of civilized countries around the world, contemplating daily delusionary behavior that Americans take for granted as normal, go all wide-eyed and blanch at the thought that the lords of the world's largest nuclear arsenal could really be this nutz. But here inside the wire we're insulated from ourselves the same way a lunatic's skull contains and protects his delusion.
     At this point the religionists reliably pipe up, fingers wagging, and say, "That's what you get when you abandon Gad!" Man, it would be nice if it were that simple and most mass shooters and gun-huggers were non-believers. Exactly the opposite seems to be true. Magical thinking is much more the problem than the solution.
     But what if we could leave out the magical parts and apply the good and useful parts of religion? Trusting our neighbors, taking care of one another, dealing with one another morally and free of judgment, accepting responsibility, seeing something higher and better in ourselves and striving to live up to it -- the religious reflex, one face of our evolutionary heritage as social animals, is itself a method for assuaging fear and building a secure community.
     If a member of a religious community hurts his family, the group routinely looks to what it might have done differently. Now we have the opportunity for that sort of soul-searching as a nation, to see the shooters as our own family and our own failures, to squarely face the mirror they hold up and gauge what part we played in the tragedy.     Can we be adult enough to look at our national obsession and ask ourselves, how many deaths of innocents are we willing to accept as the price of our freedom to hold a deadly weapon? How can we allow so many of us to indulge in unreasoning fear? Is the illusory sense of comfort and power that gun gives us worth the lives of thousands of innocents every year? Could we maybe find more effective and less costly ways to feel secure?     Like a chain-smoker facing his addiction, we're at some point going to have to stub out our fear and let go of what's killing us.
     Maybe you think the essence of freedom is that the community has to leave you alone with your toys and personal myths. Sorry, it doesn't work like that, and never has. If you accept the benefits of community, you're obliged to follow its rules and care for it. Seriously, would you rather be in, or out?

Editorial: Church-state debate remains insoluble

The unnamed editor writes, "Almost daily an issue arises that continues to put the question of separation of church and state to the test. We can't seem to leave this alone and go our separate ways, choosing to believe what we prefer." This is the same voice that only a couple of weeks ago fired its own defensive salvo in the imaginary War on Xmas. Like parody, irony is dead, or at least on life support.

In writing his attempt at a Rodney King moment, the editor entirely misses two key points that are so obvious it feels that just naming them is belaboring them.

 First, there is no legal "debate." The enforced separation of church and state, meaning the prohibition of any legal requirement of religious observance or the use of public resources to promote or facilitate religion, is long-settled law that not even the most right-wing Supreme Court since the Civil War can bring itself to breach.

Second, the only people making an issue of this are the religionists, under the direction of those who would move us toward theocracy. There are enough of those in government to force those of us who simply want our Constitution defended to stand up and point out cases where government allows behavior that crosses the legal line. But there's no question about where that line is. This is not about competing interpretations of the law. This is about people who want to reinterpret the law to favor themselves.

Maybe what the editor really wanted to say is that the religionists just don't seem to ever be willing to give up on their dead hobbyhorse. But his framing in this editorial allows the reader to continue to believe the ridiculous canard that there's some sort of liberal conspiracy to destroy religion. No, editor: liberals in this country are the strongest advocates for protecting religious liberty, and we do that by preventing the ascendence of any cult to official primacy.

Christians have played the victim card for two thousand years, it's built into the culture across the religion's many sects and cults. But believing you're the victim doesn't make it so.

If I squint and read charitably between the lines in the editorial, I might have hope that a good editor could have reduced the entire piece to one line: "Religionists should just stand down and shut the fuck up." Knowing where the editor and publisher are coming from in terms of faith, however, I just see confusion and internal conflict. This is a shame, because the editorial was an opportunity for the paper to act as a force for common sense.

The Ongoing Medical Buzzkill

Pop Rocket, January 2013









Readers who vaguely recall that two years ago Arizonans voted to legalize medical cannabis (for the third time) may be wondering why so little has so far come of it. It's true that foot-dragging by obstructionists in our state government is partly to blame (again), but you may be surprised to learn that a lot of it is more structural.
     Credit where credit is due must first go to Governor Jan Brewer, Attorney General Tom Horne and Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who have nearly exhausted their legal avenues for digging up excuses to avoid doing their duty and ushering in positive change. The courts have ruled pretty uniformly that no, state employees will not be subject to federal prosecution for issuing patient ID cards and fulfilling other related licensing functions, demolishing the state's argument time and time again.
     It's kind of touching to watch the contortions that these proud defenders of "state's rights" have to put themselves through to argue that we really should be obediently following federal law in this one area. That it also puts the lie to their "we the people" posturings is just cake.
     We should also note that it appears most county health departments have turned in their homework and set up the local infrastructure for regulating patients, dispensaries and suppliers. Kudos to them for doing their jobs.
     Cards are being issued, but only one dispensary is officially operating as of this writing, in Glendale, with another in Tucson about ready to go. Most entrepreneurs are waiting for what will likely have to be an Arizona Supreme Court decision finally declaring that the people have spoken (doh!) before they will even slightly expose themselves to the tender mercies of the likes of Maricopa Sheriff Joe Arpaio. At the federal level, answering the question of when Congress will finally get off the dime and move cannabis from Schedule 1 (Evil Things) to Schedule 2 (Very Profitable Things) under the Controlled Substances Act is anyone's guess, making truly secure business planning essentially impossible for the foreseeable future. But as we've seen in California and Colorado, a lot of people will be willing to accept that risk. The "user base," as we say in the biz-journo trade, is huge.
     The legal obstructions will eventually pass, at least at the state level, and in not too long. For people who are serious about this as a business, however, there are other, even more daunting obstacles.
     The official delays on the dispensary network are pushing suppliers through a loophole in the law for any patient who doesn't live within 25 miles of a dispensary. They are legally allowed to grow their own, and many are forming wildcat co-ops for that purpose, operations that they may not want to give up once the dispensaries start opening. You may have noticed a few shops around town last year supplying equipment for home growing. All in our area have closed again or gone back underground for the time being. (Update: I've since discovered that there's at least one smokeshop recently opened.)
     It seems that all the legal posturing in Arizona and the official ambiguity of the President and his Justice Department is turning off most landlords from leasing space for dispensaries and supply-chain businesses. And who can blame them? When the people who know most about this business have been operating as criminals for in some cases generations, they've already got big hurdles to clear to prove they'll be acceptable tenants. And they'd better not have a dog, either.
     Further, once past the warm glow of clearing the many legal hurdles and getting a business open, every entrepreneur discovers the need for a solid credit line, for capital improvements, payrolls, insurance, supplies, equipment, even startup advertising. But Arizona banks and credit unions are uniformly refusing to bank these businesses, blocking even just regular business checking accounts, fearing that if the Justice Department happens to feel like blowing hot one day, they'll be left holding stacks of unrecoverable loans, making their shareholders very unhappy. This is forcing these first dispensaries to operate on a cash-only basis, inevitably causing daily liquidity concerns and exposing the entire class of businesses to all sorts of financial abuse.
     So where does that leave the industry for 2013? We've had popular votes in 20 states and DC saying that cannabis can be good for you, including two that want to make it as legal as alcohol. More will surely come to that conclusion, and expectations are expanding that the weed will be imminently decriminalized and available, creating new unfulfilled demand right now. We have established a legal structure for distributing cannabis as medicine in our state, but structural discrimination against the industry is preventing all but the very well-heeled from getting involved legally.
     I'm thinking that if we can't get it together soon, our effort to end this campaign of the War On (Some) Drugs could ironically lead to unilateral disarmament and an unhappy scenario in which well funded, experienced and highly motivated criminal organizations could launder themselves into nonprofit respectability and take over the ground floor of what will eventually become a fully open and legal profitmaking industry. This is essentially what happened in the wheezing demise of Prohibition (without the nonprofit whistle stop), leading to the hegemony of Seagram's et al., and would prove to pot-haters that the whole idea was bad from the start. Then you're in backlash territory. Anybody remember 1980?     Would we be happy to see our seniors forced to buy medical cannabis from some infernal partnership between the Zetas and Philip Morris? Or would we prefer a more grass-roots (ahem) industry open to local entrepreneurs and employing Arizonans in what will surely become a significant labor force?
     To readers identifying themselves as conservatives especially, I'd like you to try to get beyond your entrenched feelings about cannabis and focus on the practical aspects of dealing with it as it comes out of the shadows and into common social acceptance. This is happening. Right now we have the opportunity to make positive choices about the future of this new industry, and I hope we won't blow it.

Update, Friday: Today I'm hearing that legislative Republicans will try to refer the law back to the ballot for a third do-over in November, hoping we voters will finally change our mind and repeal the entire system. This is of course why they've been doing all they could to stall implementation. Again, they only respect the will of the people when it agrees with them.

Courier's top news story buried on Page 6

The AP story on A6 should really be the front-page headline today, but you can't even see it online: Weather Disasters: 2012 another record-setter in the US. Mark me, folks, this is really what will define the 21st century and most affect all of us in the long run, for generations at least.

I guess we might be thankful that it's in the paper at all, but that sets the bar awfully low.

Editorial: Hobby (Lobby)'s stand on par with civil-rights fight

This is just so wrong on so many levels, it's hard to know where to begin.

What's sort of scary is that I'm confident the unnamed editor really believes what he's written, opening a window on the abyss of victim-thinking that our dominant white-male-religionist culture has wrapped itself in to justify its continuing efforts to turn back the clock and recover the days when women and nonwhites were kept firmly in their places, by force when necessary.

Wallace stands up for his rights in 1963. 

Yes, editor, it is a lot like the civil-rights movement, but not at all the part you're evoking. A much more apt analogy is George Wallace making a show of blocking federal troops from enforcing civil rights for blacks at the University of Alabama fifty years ago. Wallace firmly believed that his state had a right that superceded the rights of its citizens to access state education resources. It didn't work out.

We have a well respected principle in this society holding that an individual right ends where it infringes the right of another. You may not impose your beliefs on anyone, especially those over whom you wield power. The owners of a corporation may not treat its employees like children or religious congregants. They may own the enterprise, but not the people working for it.

The company argues that it should not have to provide resources for an action that it deems immoral. Company-funded health insurance is a form of employment compensation, so it may as well argue that it won't pay an employee who might use the money to buy contraceptives over the counter, either. It's a ridiculous argument on its face. Add in that the firm is under no compulsion to provide the insurance package at all, and we can see clearly that the issue is not about refraining from immoral action, but rather abusing its power as an employer to force others to do so.

In the long run we'll all come to see the Hobby Lobby show as just another ignorant and futile attempt to control women and impose religion on the rest of us, with the same sort of grandstanding that won George Wallace his place in the Hall of Fame for Stupid Cranks. It will fail, and in short order, that's obvious. The editor's defense of this idiocy as somehow heroic won't cause a ripple as it slips down the drain of antiquated babble, but it's still a shame for our community that our local paper is so backward and in thrall to magical thinking.

It's neither a good way to inform readers nor a good way to attract and hold advertisers. Make your case in your church pulpit if you must, editor, but please, keep it out of the paper, it's embarrassing and counterproductive for your business.

Talking past one another on gun violence

When I was in college many years ago, as both an art technique exercise and a meditation, I hand-drew a large copy of the ancient illustration at left. You may not be able to see the details well here, but what's most striking about it for me is how happy and industrious the monks are in contrast to the stolid world-weariness of the elephant.

The Courier's letters section has been awash in chatter about guns and gun violence since the Newtown massacre. The current round is larger in scale than usual, but not much different in quality than the reactions to any previous mention of guns on the op-ed page. I'd like to be optimistic that people are waking up to the seriousness of our national problem with guns, but, well, you know.

It would just be nice if for once we could hold back on the rush to frame the issue, which is really all that's going on.

The gun lovers want to put the frame on the individual who did the deed, and in this case they're focusing on his developmental disability, blithely unconcerned about tarring everyone who's mentally challenged with the broad brush of scary difference.

The gun despisers want to put the frame on the weapons and the truly insane ease of access to them in this society, unconcerned about the many owners of firearms who keep them safe and under control.

Both these perspectives include essential truths. Both insist that there's nothing more to the picture, and as long as we refuse to put our arms completely around the problem, we can never come close to a solution or even useful alleviation of the incessant damage.

When will we accept the wisdom that we're unwilling and perhaps unable to see the whole picture? Could we at least reject the relentless framing, which amounts to putting out our own eyes, and open ourselves to seeing and hearing something new here?

The letters and comments are a complete waste of time, so I'm not linking to any of them.

It's a day for resolutions, and I'd like to hope that as a nation we can resolve to be better people, take better care of one another, pay better attention, and fear one another less.

Editorial: North Korea threat is no joking matter

Once again the unnamed Courier editor takes on an international news story and steps immediately out of his depth based on his armchair research before his mighty bigscreen boobtube.

Regular readers know that I lived for some years within missile range of North Korea. I know firsthand that Japan relied then for its security against the weird and sociopathic state not on its own military or the massive US forces occupying it, but rather on an extensive chain of shady gambling operations, to which Japanese authorities turned a blind eye, run by North Koreans who supplied most of the nation's hard currency by remitting the profits homeward. It was a not heroic, it wasn't something to brag about, but it worked and as far as I know continues to work.

It's correct to think that North Korea could do a lot of damage in a short time. It couldn't sustain a war or any more than a single hostile move, but it would hurt people all the same, by far the most likely in Seoul. It would then bring sure annihilation for the North Korean regime, and it's ridiculous to presume that just because they act crazy sometimes, they're really that crazy. To even begin to understand this regime you have to see it from the inside, a place so foreign that even most pro Asia-watchers stumble continually over its contradictions and absurdities.

The bottom line is that North Korea is building missiles not to hit the US, but to pretend to itself and its people that it maybe could. This it uses as what amounts to extortion leverage against China, which trades food and technology for maintaining a more or less secure border against the horde of North Korean refugees bursting to escape.

This graf caught my eye:

"North Korean officials insist that the purpose of the launch was peaceful - to put a satellite in orbit. Yet missile experts correctly point out that the technology for that task matches the technology for launching long-range armed missiles."

For "North Korean" the reader could substitute "The USSR" or "The USA" and create a direct quote from thousands of worried papers during the Space Race, and it's absolutely true. The American military made it eminently clear that the space program was entirely about ICBMs the day it ordered Chuck Yeager to abort taking the X-15 out of atmosphere and kiboshed the whole piloted space program. It's utterly naive to think that any missile-based space effort is not about the missiles, and that includes India, China, Japan, Iran, France and everyone else spending a dime on it. We've only got a lot of good science out of it by taking advantage of the military need for expensive fig leaves.

What makes North Korea special is that it won't make a deal and join the club. I have to think that if its military and political leaders (not Kim the third, who like his father is obviously just a pampered figurehead) really are as lame as our media and government would have us believe, it would be the easiest thing in the world to flatter and bribe them into complacency and exploitability. They're clearly not. They've long since decided that leaning into the crazy image will get them all they want and maintain their (imagined) independence and very real local power.

It keeps going this way because our own military-industrialists can use North Korean crazy to justify themselves and their high salaries. Since the War to End All War there has always been an irrational, implacable enemy tailor-made for building war machines. If the enemy's irrational, we don't have to explain why they hate us, we can just take it for granted (and not think about it). We used to go and actually fight them, now for the most part we just "prepare" for their eventual aggression, spending endless billions without ever having to prove there's a threat. It's a close to perfect con.

North Korea will continue to play this game as long as China goes along, and that's where the calculus ends. It's not about us, it's not even about South Korea, really. It's not inconceivable that if we were to drop our sanctions and pump enough aid into North Korea to get its people off the starvation bus, we'd see Chinese military hit teams cleaning out the alpha dogs posthaste. But the card-house of rhetoric we've built around this issue will never allow that.

North Korea is a complex diplomatic problem involving freakish internal politics and interlinked international interests in the status quo, which makes it frustrating. But "alarming"? No, Tim, not really.

Wiederaenders: World keeps turning despite predictions

Duh.

In the graf after his requisite lame attempt at a gentle-humor column (consider trying this on the Angus page, Tim, he's no funnier than you are), Tim plays a little catch-up on what he should have written for Monday, stating that the City money going into the courthouse lights is unrelated to the lighting ceremony and therefore there's no constitutional violation of church and state. (His first point, that no one is forced to attend, is completely irrelevant to the question of whether public resources are being spent on religion, showing just how unfamiliar he is with the legal questions.)

Doing this right would have meant acting like a journalist, getting the complete facts and citing sources. Making  a bald assertion on the opinion page does nothing to inform anyone but those who are already sold, so it really only throws fuel on the fire. (Fer gadaskes, act like  pro and try to see it from someone else's POV for a second, wouldya?)

Later he does a little more sucking up to Carol Springer, following up on a gushy editorial and a long political obit nervily slugged "THE PEOPLE'S POLITICIAN." It would be a major challenge to back that one up, I'm afraid, unless "the people" can be defined as rape-and-pillage developers.

Editorial: Objection to ceremony is wrong

Wow, the group that wrote letters objecting to the religious content of the courthouse lighting ceremony really got the unnamed editor's goat! I haven't before seen a Courier editorial written with such anger, seen not just in the word choices but in the hasty, sloppy thinking.

First to the facts: It's not the "Freedom of Religion Foundation," as seen in the news piece, but rather the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and it's not an "atheist group," as seen in the headline and body copy of same, but rather atheist, agnostic and nontheist. I'm sure that's a little nuanced for the mouth-breathers around here, but an editor ought to have the circumspection to get it right. Clearly "atheist" is meant as an offensive epithet.

When civil libertarians object and sue to halt religious use of public resources, the adherents to the affected cult (pretty much always white Protestants) go to the mattresses as if the next step is to raze the churches and put them all in reeducation camps. They invariably forget that the strongest protection for their religious practices is keeping all such practices out of government.

Had the editor been able to take a breath and think for a second, his defense could have been a lot more sober and effective. As far as I know the courthouse lighting is supported entirely by private funds and groups, primarily the Chamber of Commerce. If that's true as I suspect, the ceremony does not infringe on constitutional protections and there's no legal case to be made against it. The Wisconsin-based national watchdog group responded to a local complainant, probably without access to the accounting or other pertinent facts. Given the penchant among small red-state towns across the country to play fast and loose around religion, the objection isn't surprising, but it's likely an overreaction.

That said, it would be a good idea for local leaders to take this as a cue to check themselves on where the legal lines are. Prescott's state recognition as "Arizona's Christmas City" is likely over that line, for instance, both when the Legislature placed it on the statute books and whenever the City puts money into promoting it. To be within the law, we have to ensure that only private funds and resources go into this sort of nonsense, and the City stays officially clear of it.

Staying within the law (which despite all the religious wannabe legal eagles is clear and well established: church and state must remain strictly separate in this country) isn't any more difficult than adhering to the speed limit on 69, and most importantly, it protects all the silly celebrations and freedoms of religion. People of faith should be the first to support and maintain that separation.

Editorial: Foreign aid: Small dent, big impact

Once again we find the editor aiming for the right target, but his technique isn't quite up to hitting it.

For starters, he undermines his own point by parroting the talking point, "Congress has been spending too much money for decades." Every time researchers ask Americans about specifics, they find that we generally support the spending. What Congress has failed to do is maintain the revenue streams to pay for it.

At the end of the same graf he yarbles, "foreign governments such as China hold the notes on our debts." It's true that China holds American debt, but it's a minor piece. Over half of total US debt is held by the Federal Reserve and the US government itself. Americans hold over half the remainder (right, three quarters of the debt that everyone's screaming about we owe to ourselves), and China holds about a quarter of the foreign component. Here's a primer on our public debt worth studying.
Every American should know this stuff, especially a newspaper editor.

"We deem [foreign aid] an investment of monumental proportions," writes the editor. What he pretty clearly means to write is that it's a small investment with monumental returns. Would it be so hard to run this stuff past a copy editor?

The embarrassingly tiny amounts of money relative to GDP that we reluctantly leak out to assist foreign governments and NGOs for humanitarian aid are indeed invaluable investments in the people they reach and our own image and security. The editor's entrapment in teevee thinking and slapdash writing unfortunately cripple him in his otherwise noble attempt to defend common sense.

Editorial: What will it take to enact gun control?

In the context of the mass shooting events that come  around regularly every year, the Newtown event isn't objectively remarkable by itself, but something about the average age of the victims combined with the temporal proximity to a certain pseudo-religious holiday has got the attention of the unnamed Courier editor, who writes, "In this country, there has never been a serious or credible push to ever ban all guns. That is patently insane." The "ever" is obviously out of place and I'm not quite sure whether he means that never having pushed is insane or the idea of banning all guns is insane, so I can't offer any cookies for clarity, but it's clear in the body of the piece and the headline that he's had about enough of the killing and is encouraging readers to think in terms of stopping it. This is healthy.

Of course this brings out the anti-gun hardliners to joust with the firearm devotees, horsed on swaybacked old nags of argument and carrying blunted lances that never engage the opponent, because most everyone is talking past one another. An exception, from a commenter signing herself Kat Camacho:

"In July of 2011 I buried my child because it's okay for anyone to have a gun, get mad, go into a home a shoot and kill another human, MY SON. Until any one of you folks above have to bury your child because there is no control or justice, I urge you to shut the heck up! Guns don't belong in all of society because sick, evil, spineless creatures live and creep around in this society and Kill with these weapons. Shame on you people."

Hear, hear. She's exactly the sort of person to which I referred in my comment earlier, viz:

On the very same day as the Newtown mass murder, another madman attacked a school in the Henan Province village of Chengping, in China. He knifed 22 children between the ages of six and eleven. Local health-care workers say none was seriously hurt. If the madman had had a gun, of course, that story would have ended quite differently. 

My position on the American cult of the gun is well known, and I'm not the guy who's going to convince any gun lover that it's finally time to start talking seriously about the elephant in the room. It's not the editor either, though it's encouraging to see these words on this page after so many years of this paper going along with the gag*. No, the people who will matter in this debate are the parents in our community who heard the news yesterday and shuddered and cried to think that it really could be their kids, at any time. It's long past time for them to clear their heads and get serious about protecting their children and our society as a whole from this deadly and eminently preventable disease.

Since then I've seen more details come out. The presumed shooter,  Adam Lanza, was a 20-year-old with a disorder on the autism spectrum. The three guns, including an AR-15, belonged to his mother, a kindergarten teacher at the school, with whom Adam lived. She was the first to die. Others are missing who may be victims as well. You're probably ahead of me on this, since this is probably running nonstop from the cable news monsters.

Aside: What kind of society are we living in where a kindergarten teacher with a mentally disabled adult son feels the need to keep two handguns and an assault-style semiautomatic weapon?

Back to the editorial and the subject du jour, the editor's heart is in the right place, but like pretty much all the commenters he's trapped in the world of simple answers to complex problems. Leaping to the idea of "gun control" only raises the defenses of the fearful and locks up the brakes on progress. We have to recognize that to some extent, everyone in this argument has a piece of the truth and no one has all of it.

Gun lovers have it right when they say that the mentally deranged and the criminals (often the same thing) will always be among us,  and that there's no way we can hope to disappear guns from our society.

Gun despisers like me have it right that more guns lead to more violence, that far and away the likeliest person to be hurt by a given gun is its owner or a loved one, and the idea of citizens using their trusty pistolas to face down determined criminals or a tyrannical government is juvenile fantasy.

Even if we could legislate away the weapons, we can't legislate away the sense of entitlement to personal deadly violence that many people read into the Second Amendment. And we can't censor away the fascination with deadly violence in our media and culture without becoming something we all agree would be bad.

Like other forms of crime, gun violence on the whole has been diminishing with our aging population. Mass shootings/suicides have not, and stress-related emotional and domestic violence is as bad or worse than ever. This implies that what so many of us see as individual criminality or derangement is the extreme expression of a much broader-based pathology. Our society is sick.

You've likely heard that one before, but if we take it to heart it means that the practical solution to the problem of endemic gun violence is much more complex, involving the entire society in multi-front treatment that under the best of circumstances will take generations to show positive effect.

But it may not be all that difficult in day-to-day terms. Consider the example from Chengping. Another mentally diminished individual lashes out emotionally, chooses children as his victims and wields his weapon with impunity. The differences: his access to a firearm of any kind was much more restricted than it is here, and his society is much less tolerant of social violence. China is near the other end of the spectrum from us in both these factors, with the rest of the civilized world falling in between somewhere and producing far less gun violence as well. You need both parts, less access and less tolerance.

It's a canard to say that a given deranged person bent on violence who doesn't have a gun will either find a way to get one or kill as effectively with some other weapon. The crimes we're talking about here are emotional paroxysms, not calculated mayhem, and the aggressors use whatever they have at hand. Access to firearms makes death and maiming more likely in the encounter. That's why gun lovers love guns, after all — they're more effective.

We can't start to have a useful dialogue about this very real and deadly problem until we can move out of our accustomed entrenched positions. If you keep a gun because you feel the need to protect yourself, you should be amenable to the idea of reducing access to guns in sensible ways for the people you fear. If you want to see fewer guns in our society because it will reduce violence for all, you're smart enough to  recognize that we can't wish half a billion guns away.

The ultimate solution is bottom-up: we'll have less gun violence when we reduce our tolerance for violence, in daily life, in conversation, in media, in our children, in how we talk about solving problems. If we can make progress on our twisted, adolescent thinking and grow up a bit, then all that's left to do is clear away the mess.

The path to that kind of maturity is to keep the innocent victims in mind and see that it's only luck that you or I isn't in today's body bag. Tomorrow brings another roll of the dice. Wouldn't you like to increase your odds?

*: As recently as nine days ago, btw.

Must read: Worrying about the wrong kind of debt

Robert Wright, writing in The Atlantic, considers what may be a key metric of danger to the economy in What if the Fiscal Cliff Is the Wrong Cliff?, making a strong argument for restructuring of private debt not just to improve the economy, but to avert the continuing threat of economic depression. Key concept: we're still in deep enough to crash the bus.

Where's winter?: November was hot and dry here; heat and emissions on the rise globally

I was briefly flabbergasted to read this piece — a straight news story in the Courier calmly relating facts about climate change. Who screwed up and let this through?

Even that gratuitous final reference to trumped-up controversy, "In conservative states, the term 'climate change' is often associated with left-leaning politics," points up the isolation of the critics from reality. I notice no one took a byline on this one, no surprise in a town where such behavior might get you disinvited from the parties, but even so, just having it appear in the paper is a breakthrough. Could the tide be turning at last?

Related: End of the Arctic Era

Williams: Minority conservatives get unfair deal

In which our token local reactionary defends the honor of poor downtrodden nonwhite and women reactionaries, assailed and vilified in public not for their actions and policies, but for their nonwhiteness or gender.

Putting on his Pat Buchanan-signature blinders, Buz pulls examples out of thin air and ancient history to construct a way to see non-reactionaries as the racists in the room, a classic psychological projection all the more pitiful for its transparency.

Here's a clue, Buz: If you were to go back and review the actual coverage and commentary about Clarence Thomas, Alberto Gonzalez, Condoleezza Rice and the rest of your list, you might discover that the criticism was substantive and focused on their actions and policies, just as it was for Robert Bork, John Ashcroft, Henry Kissinger and the rest. Seeing the nonwhite-nonmale group as separate, while refusing to countenance the substance of the arguments against them, only indicates your own prejudices. It's really that simple.

Another example of this kind of "thinking":

Editorial: Once again no, we can't talk about gun laws

Yet another deranged man shoots his domestic partner to death, then pops himself off in a public display. He's famous, she's not, and he gets all the media attention, even sympathy. A sportscaster steps out of his accustomed role and mentions the tragedy of the deranged man having easy access to a deadly weapon. America's powerful gun cult swings into action, and suddenly the criminal isn't the deranged man, it's the sportscaster. The victim is forgotten. What ought to be satire has long since become daily reality here on Bizarro World.

What strikes me about this podunk-paper editorial reacting to a national media-hype story that has nothing at all to do with our community other than our unhealthy average time suckling the glass teat, is the raw defensiveness underpinning it.

Why do gun cultists feel the need to rush to the defense of their demigod and man the barricades at the slightest suggestion that we might consider rethinking our insane national addiction to firearms? Could it be that deep in their hearts they realize just how shaky their argument is? Could perhaps their faith be flagging just a little?

If so, it's about time.

Editorial: Humiliation is not the way to go

The unnamed editor seems so confused about the issue of school discipline that I have to wonder why the board thought it was a good idea to write about it at all.

How many sides of the issue can one editor stand on? He writes, "... a bright red, aching backside was effective. ... We just can't believe that public humiliation is an appropriate way to deal with a juvenile problem ... but it seems very unlikely that those two boys will fight on school grounds again. ... In-school suspensions also are an effective innovation. ... an area that used to be as simple as swatting away trouble. .... raining down scorn on a pair of wrongdoers, effective or not, is a stretch of that authority."

First, it's off-base to imagine a clear distinction between the corporal punishment of old and the public shaming that the editor refers to here. They are essentially the same. The act of placing another human in a helpless physical position to inflict pain with impunity isn't about the pain so much as the humiliation, and you can be confident that whenever someone was paddled in school, it was known to all the students, making it pointedly public. Second, shame is where it's at. Instilling discipline means shaming, in every human society everywhere. It's essentially the society telling the perpetrator that bad behavior carries the risk of societal rejection, the worst punishment for a social animal.

If there were a broadly effective method for getting every kid to behave well in class, our schools would be using it. Let's talk about the "in class" piece of that. What we have to recognize is that assembling kids in large groups with minimal adult supervision leads them inevitably to make up their own social structures, which will be immature by nature. The problem is not the kids, it's the culture they come from plus the ones they create in the context of the industrial-style education model that we all grew up with.

I think the old way is better, but I go back a lot further than the corporal-punishment fascists. Preindustrial education was done on a much more individual basis, the children working among adults, not with other kids, acquiring skills directly from the people who used them. This raised the child directly into the adult social context, providing both structure and role models, and if later in life they worked with a teacher, it was someone with specialized skills that would clearly lead to professional and/or social advancement.

This isn't a perfect model either, but it offers a contrasting angle that throws the deficiencies of the current model into relief. Warehousing children in large groups to train them in a standardized curriculum seems insane when we need to produce adaptive, creative self-starters for an increasingly entrepreneurial society. Until we can find a way to get out from under the old industrial model, discipline in the classroom (and society at large as a result) will be a growing problem, no matter what methods we try.

Editorial: Forum a microcosm of nation's polarity

The unnamed editor's Barcalounger turns in the column for today, rehashing Ken Hedler's piece from Friday's edition about an amateur theatrical ostensibly about economics, held by and for Prescott's Very Serious People Club.

The chair seems to get it right in characterizing the show as "an accurate picture of division in our country." I'm a little skeptical that it really understands why, however.

Where the chair seems to have seen "contrasting views on America's slow recovery from the Great Recession," what actually happened, as Ken describes it, was that one guy gave a talk on economics while the other ranted about his political ideology.

This is indeed how the bulk of our public discourse has been playing out for about twenty years. One side talks about facts and policy, the other talks trash. And no, these roles do not reverse according to the issue -- the trash comes from the reactionary Republicans. It's long past time for us to stop pretending that the sides are equally at fault and simply trashing one another at every opportunity. There is legitimate, fact-based criticism based on facts, and there is schoolyard name-calling. They are not of equal value, and the sooner we stop pretending as much, the sooner we'll begin to move forward in addressing the systemic and cultural problems that are crippling this nation. If we can't have an adult conversation, we can't have adult solutions, let alone smart ones.

On that score I've got a cookie for Ken for having the balls to point out in print that one guy was talking and the other just barking. I can't speculate on how that got past the editors, but let's have more of it.

Letter: Founding Father avoided fiscal cliffs

Tom Steele writes to wag his finger against public debt, using a quote from Thomas Jefferson.

Mr Steele is here parroting a line that's appearing all over the right-wing blogosphere and in not a few letters to the editor. The quote is from Jefferson's 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval (click here to see it all), and neglects his main point, which may irk "originalists" like Mr Steele:

"Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the arc of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment. I knew that age well; I belonged to it, and labored with it. It deserved well of its country. It was very like the present, but without the experience of the present; and forty years of experience in government is worth a century of book-reading; and this they would say themselves, were they to rise from the dead.  I am certainly not an advocate for frequent and untried changes in laws and constitutions. I think moderate imperfections had better be borne with; because, when once known, we accommodate ourselves to them, and find practical means of correcting their ill effects. But I know also, that laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. It is this preposterous idea which has lately deluged Europe in blood. Their monarchs, instead of wisely yielding to the gradual change of circumstances, of favoring progressive accommodation to progressive improvement, have clung to old abuses, entrenched themselves behind steady habits, and obliged their subjects to seek through blood and violence rash and ruinous innovations, which, had they been referred to the peaceful deliberations and collected wisdom of the nation, would have been put into acceptable and salutary forms. Let us follow no such examples, ...."

Jefferson lived and died in an agrarian backwater that we would not recognize as a viable state, let alone the richest and most powerful nation on the planet it is today. His economic sagacity left him perpetually broke. I imagine were he confronted with the challenges of governing this land in the 21st century, he would likely have the humility and wisdom to heed his own advice and avoid foolishly standing on outdated principles.

Further, Sunday: We should also note the context for Jefferson's rant about debt. In 1816 the US had just come through its first war of choice, a disastrous encounter thoughtlessly trumped up for political gain from which we managed to escape only lightly scathed because the British had more serious business to attend in Europe. In those days government borrowing was almost exclusively about financing war. So we may take Jefferson's admonishments, in context, to be against running up debts to finance military adventures, a no-brainer in my book.

Editorial: Economy doesn't need more red tape

Today the unnamed editor reacts to the idea of a federal Secretary of Business, under which the government would consolidate related functions.

From the vague official trial balloon the editor imagines a nightmare of new bureaucracy and more problems for business. Having built this straw man, he dances with his torch and sets his helpless adversary alight.

In point of fact neither I nor the editor nor anyone else knows how this proposal might shake out in real life, because the plan is not yet written. The editor is writing against his own imagination, nothing more, failing at the starting gate.

The core of his argument, that "red tape" would increase, is clearly contrary to the intent of the proposal. Having never set up and run a business himself, perhaps he doesn't realize how much red tape is generated because related government divisions don't talk to one another or coordinate their responsibilities, forcing business owners to negotiate complex minefields of overlapping and often conflicting regulations. At least in theory, an overseeing authority could improve on that. So let's wait for the details before we fire our torches.

In context, it's interesting that when the idea arose to consolidate authority over intelligence, border security, travel security, customs and the Coast Guard under the Orwellian title of Homeland Security, the Courier was all for it, once again reacting to parochial imaginings rather than reality on the ground. We can only get above this reflex by reserving judgment till we've done the research.