Killing Gun Legislation

August 27, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

When it comes to passing law,s do the gunslingers always win?

The father of one of the victims and the governor of the state have called for stricter gun laws. I’m sure they are sincere, but it all seems so familiar, part of usual post-massacre minuet.  The stylized and mannered sequence of steps: We need stronger gun laws. Now is a time for prayer not politics. Gun-death rates in the US are several times higher than in other countries. Second Amendment. And so on.

Laws are proposed. Then the gun manufacturers and their minions (NRA, et al.) get legislators to dilute the proposals or defeat them entirely.

Here’s a headline from eight months ago.

But the gun lobby does not get its way all the time. Yes, they win at the federal level. Yesterday’s on-air killings will not lead to any tightening of federal laws. By the time a bill is written and goes to committee, those shootings will be a vague memory. And although shootings hold the attention of the public, the grind of legislation does not.

But at the state level, gun-law advocates can sometimes make some headway. The anti-gun sentiments raised by the killings do not fade as quickly in places nearer to where the killing happened. Of course, in Texas or Wyoming, no amount of gun killing will budge the legislature. But in less absolutist states, a local massacre may enable gun law proponents to pass new laws. After Sandy Hook – an assault rifle massacre of twenty schoolchildren and six teachers – all newly proposed federal laws were killed by pro-gun US Senators. But Connecticut, where the crime happened, and neighboring New York passed stronger limitations or an outright ban on assault weapons.

The news media may also be a key element, and yesterday’s shooting expands the part they usually play. First, the shooting was broadcast live.  That immediacy may heighten people’s awareness of just how dangerous and deadly guns are. Seeing someone actually shot to death is far more powerful than seeing a reporter doing a stand-up against a background of yellow tape and parked police cars.  Second, because the victims were TV reporters, they were far better known than victims in other shootings, and local people may feel more of a tie to them. That closeness too may make people more sensitive to the danger of guns. Third, it’s also possible that the media themselves – now that two of their own have been killed – will be more sympathetic to anti-gun groups. If the armed and dangerous disgruntled employee might be not just a postal worker somewhere out there in America but a guy in the newsroom, the news editor might decide to give more coverage to the threat of guns.

I am just speculating of course.  I have to hedge with “may” (“X may have an impact”) and “it’s possible that . . .” because I do not know the published research on the connection between mass shootings* and the passage of gun laws more likely. I would expect that the variables to study include

• the political climate of the state
• the social position of victims – that is, the more similar that are to people who have the most influence on laws
• the number of victims
• the location of the shooting (public spaces or buildings vs. private)
• the ostensible motive of the killer

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*By some definitions of “mass shootings,” the minimum number of deaths is four. So yesterday’s killings, even including the shooter’s suicide, do not qualify as a mass shooting. I guess it’s just another one of your ordinary, everyday American shootings.

The Tragedy of the Comments

August 19, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

That’s all. No post. Just the title.

It’s one of those titles that says it all – like Psychobabble (1977). If you were around in the 60s and 70s (and by “around” I mean Boston or Los Angeles, not Oklahoma), you read the title, and you knew. You didn’t have to read the book. The title crystallized all those vague doubts that had been lurking in your mind off  to one side – doubts about all the books and magazine articles and maybe even about what your own therapist was saying.

Comments – seemed like a good idea at the time. A way to enhance the discussion with new ideas and information. Maybe it still is for blogs with a small or a select readership.

You’re reading this blog, so you probably also read other blogs – big blogs, maybe newspaper sites.  Places with hordes of readers.  If you’ve ever scrolled through the comments, dominated by the loonies, the angries, and the illogicals;* if you’ve ever posted your own comment only to see it lost in the sea of 496 other comments, you don’t need me to write this post. The title is enough.


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 This American Life had a wonderful example last January in the episode “If You Don’t Have Anything Nice to Say, SAY IT IN ALL CAPS” (here - read the transcript, or better, listen to the first 2-3 minutes).

This Isn’t About Race

August 17, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Bill Clinton, facing impeachment in the Senate, chose former Senator and fellow Arkansan Dale Bumpers to make the closing argument for the defense. The impeachment charges were perjury and obstruction of justice. As the House Managers presenting the charges had said,

This case is not about sex or private conduct. It is about multiple obstructions of justice, perjury, false and misleading statements, and witness tampering - all committed or orchestrated by the President of the United States.

Bumpers merely pointed out what everyone in America knew:

H.L. Mencken said one time, “When you hear somebody say, ‘This is not about money,’ it’s about money.” [Laughter, not much at first, but then building after a second or two as the Senators realize where it’s going.] And when you hear somebody say, “This is not about sex,” it’s about sex. [The video, with Bumpers looking very much like Atticus Finch, is here.]

Republican dominated states have been passing voting registration laws, both before and, in the South, after the Supreme Court’s 2013 decision in Shelby. For Chief Justice Roberts, who wrote the majority opinion, the case was about federalism, especially since the South was no longer tainted by racism as it was when the Voting Rights Act was passed (“40 year-old facts having no logical relationship to the present day"). Of course, as soon as the decision was announced, Southern states rushed to pass new voter ID laws. These laws, according to their supporters, are intended merely to reduce voter fraud. They have nothing to do with race.

Right. Where are Mencken and Bumpers when you need them? When someone says, “This isn’t about race,” it’s about race.

The current venue for denying what is in plain sight is jury selection.

Here are some reasons prosecutors have offered for excluding blacks from juries: They were young or old, single or divorced, religious or not, failed to make eye contact, lived in a poor part of town, had served in the military, had a hyphenated last name, displayed bad posture, were sullen, disrespectful or talkative, had long hair, wore a beard. [from today’s New York Times]

These facts are related to a death-penalty case that the Supreme Court will hear in the coming term. A Black defendant was convicted by an all-White jury. The question is why none of the Blacks in the jury pool were selected, or more specifically why the prosecutors used peremptory challenges to remove all Black jurors.

It wasn’t about race, according to the prosecutor.

All the [Black] prospects were said to be some combination of confused, incoherent, hostile, disrespectful and nervous. Three did not make enough eye contact. A 34-year-old black woman was too close in age to the defendant, who was 19. (The prosecution did not challenge eight prospective white jurors age 35 or under.) “All I have to do is have a race-neutral reason,” Mr. Lanier said, “and all of these reasons that I have given the court are racially neutral.”

The judge agreed. But it now turns out – surprise, surprise – that the prosecutor’s real reasons may not have been racially neutral.

Prosecutors worked hard to exclude blacks from the jury. In notes that did not surface until decades later, they marked the names of black prospective jurors with a B. They highlighted those names in green. They circled the word “black” where potential jurors had noted their race on questionnaires.

The ball is now in the Court’s court. According to the Times, “Some legal experts said they hoped the Supreme Court would use the Georgia case to tighten the standards for peremptory challenges.”  I’m not sure what these experts are basing their hopes on. Scalia and Thomas have never met an execution they didn’t like. Alito “is probably the most pro-prosecution member of a pro-prosecution court” (Linda Greenhouse in the NYT here). Roberts, as he did in Shelby, can find lots of reasons to dance with the conservatives what brung him. That leaves Kennedy.

In Miller-El ten years ago, Kennedy sided with the defense. That case was egregious but instructive.

In support of his claim of systematic discrimination, Miller-El offered evidence that for decades, the Dallas County District Attorney’s Office had used written discriminatory policies, including a 1963 treatise on jury selection prepared by a top aide to then-Dallas County District Attorney, which warned prosecutors to avoid “Jews, Negroes, Dagos, Mexicans, or a member of any minority race [from sitting] on a jury no matter how rich or how well educated,” and a treatise written in 1969 but included in all training manuals for prosecutors until at least the early 1980s, which stated that minority jurors were undesirable because they “empathize with the accused.” The Court found this evidence to be persuasive, noting that “the prosecutors’ own notes proclaim that the [jury selection] Manual’s emphasis on race was on their minds when they considered every potential juror.” [source]

Just as the politicians writing and passing voter ID laws today know not to mention race, the writers of jury-selection manuals today know better than to specify race, and prosecutors today know better than to speak about it out loud. Like the lead prosecutor in this year’s case, they claim that their peremptories are based on the person being too young, or too old, or not making eye contact, etc. Yes, say the prosecutors in effect, “We use peremptories three times as often for Black jurors as for Whites. But racial intent? How could you even think such a thing? And yes, you may see lots of juries that are all-White. But who you gonna believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?”

Trouble

August 16, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston


Yet another article about microaggressions and trigger warnings and the like, this one in the Atlantic, written by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Oh dear, college students are demanding to be treated like toddlers. Worse, colleges and universities are giving in to those demands.

“The Coddling of the the American Mind” (here) follows the standard template for these articles. It grabs you by the lapels with news of egregious examples

• “law students asking . . . professors at Harvard not to teach rape law—or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in “that violates the law”) lest it cause students distress”
• “by some campus guidelines, it is a microaggression to ask an Asian American or Latino American ‘Where were you born?,’ because this implies that he or she is not a real American.”

Never mind that it was one law student asking one professor, not students (plural) asking professors (plural), and never mind that the professor apparently did not accommodate the request. (The New Yorker article they cite is here) Never mind that the “Where were you born?” notice is part of “guidelines,” not a formal regulation.

What these examples most remind me of is the song “Trouble” from “The Music Man.”

Well, either you are closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community. [You can see and hear the entire song here.]

But the problem isn’t pool.

Well, you got trouble my friend, right here in Campus City. With a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for Political Correctness.

Trouble indeed. But how much trouble? Usually, if you want to know how big a problem something is, you try to measure how much of it there is. The you-got-trouble forces will usually provide numbers, and while these can and often do fall into the category of “making shit up” (“50,000 children kidnapped each year!”), at least the moral entrepreneurs recognize the obligation to estimate the size of the problem. But the people decrying the microaggression mentality don’t even bother to make up numbers.  Haidt is a social scientist, so I assume that if statistical estimates existed, he would have included them. Instead, he and his co-author are left with anecdotes, probably from the files of Lukianoff’s organization FIRE.

We’ve been here before. The title of the Lukianoff-Haidt article alludes to a book of thirty years ago, The Closing of the American Mind, by Alan Bloom.* Bloom too told us we got trouble. Universities had abandoned the Western canon, putting materials from other traditions into the curriculum, and all for political purposes. The required non-Western course “in every case I have seen . . . has a demagogic intention.” It was all part of the liberal agenda, “the imperative to promote equality, stamp out racism, sexism and elitism (the peculiar crimes of our democratic society), as well as war.” And just as Prof. Harold Hill the music man railed about “ragtime – shameless music,” Bloom warned that “Rock music has one appeal only, a barbaric appeal, to sexual desire –  not love, not eros, but sexual desire undeveloped and untutored.”

Lukianoff and Haidt are not bothered by sex, drugs, and rock & roll (or if they are, they keep their misgivings to themselves). But like Prof. Harold Hill, they want to arouse our concern about what will happen to the children – “the effects of this new protectiveness on the students themselves.” 

What are those effects? Well, you got trouble my friends. 

It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.

The problem is that Lukianoff and Haidt provide not one bit of evidence to substantiate their claims that four years at a PC university has any of these long-range effects on the graduates.

So Lukianoff and Haidt provide no measure of the independent variables, nor do they offer even anecdotal evidence about the outcome variables.**

Instead, the article is about the horrors of trigger warnings, guidelines, regulations, etc. – certainly a legitimate concern. But mostly the article is about cognitive styles – different ways of thinking, some more useful than others. More specifically it is a critique of the cognitive styles that provide the basis for the protectiveness mentality. On this, Lukianoff and Haidt have much worthwhile to say, and I hope to get to it in a later post.


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* Every few years a conservative will publish a liberals-are-ruining-the-universities book – Cultural Literacy, Illiberal Education, Tenured Radicals, even back to Buckley’s God and Man at Yale.  Conservatives often have the Presidency, usually dominate at least one house of Congress, have had the majority in the Supreme Court for nearly half a century, control most state governments, business, the military. You’d think that liberal influence at few dozen college campuses wouldn’t be such a big irritant. But you’d be wrong. Can you say “hegemony”?

** Lukianoff and Haidt do provide statistics showing that psychological and emotional problems are more frequent on campuses now than in the past. But they offer no comparisons between campuses that are more PC and those that are less so, or between students who have more of the protective mentality and those who have less. They don’t even provide comparative data on kids who didn’t go to college. And they caution, “We do not mean to imply simple causation,” the academic’s version of “Just sayin.’”