A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
With all the talk about a “Ferguson Effect” and crime on the rise (both disputed by the Obama administration), I had a personal reminder of how far we’ve come since the bad old days when crime rates were much higher. I should start by saying that I live between Needle Park and “Death Wish.”
(Click on an image for a slightly larger view.)
In the 1971 film “The Panic in Needle Park,” Al Pacino is a junkie
hanging out with other junkies in what is and was officially known as
Verdi Square.
In the 1974 film “Death Wish,” Charles Bronson lives in an apartment building at Riverside Dr. and 75th St. It is in that apartment that vicious criminals break in, beat his wife savagely (she soon dies) and rape his daughter (she becomes catatonic.). Bronson becomes a vigilante, scoring his first kill when a mugger attacks him in Riverside Park.*
In the 1980s, my car was broken into twice (I park on the street). The bad guys smashed the window and checked the glove compartment for anything valuable. Car radios were often taken but mine never was. Car theft was rampant. One evening I saw a man standing next to a spot where only a couple hours earlier he had parked his car. Now it was gone. Word was to avoid Riverside Drive. Cars parked there were more likely targets.
That was then. The crime I was a victim of – breaking into a car and stealing stuff – is classified as “theft” or “larceny” for purposes of crime statistics.
(The data is for New York State – I couldn’t quickly find NYC data – but since the City accounts for more than half the crime, this graph reflects the actual trend. If anything, the real drop in NYC was greater than what the state data shows.)
This week I was reminded of those days when I would see shattered glass on the street – evidence of car break-ins. Last weekend, my son borrowed the car, and when he returned, he found a parking spot right across from Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” apartment building (see the map above). I didn’t need the car, so it wasn’t till Friday that I went to move it and discovered that he had left the passenger-side window half open.
Fearing the worst, I quickly checked the glove compartment. Everything was there – maps, cell phone charger. Ditto the trunk – beach chairs, bike rack. I sniffed the car for signs that a homeless person might have camped there, but no. In five days, the only intruders were a few leaves that had blown in.
Things change, and sometimes for the better.
As for Needle Park, this is what it looks like today.
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* The park scene is shot 15 blocks uptown from his apartment, mostly because of the photogenic stone stairway down to the park.
On The Weeds, the new podcast from Vox, Matt Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Sarah Kliff talk politics and policy for an hour or more. The talk is often informed by research and data even to the point of wonkitude (anyone for Consumer Price Index vs. Chained Consumer Price Index?). But what struck me on listening for the first time was not the content. It was Yglesias’s uptalk or upspeak. Here he is discussing gerrymandering and the drawing of Congressional district lines.
(transcript)
Because what the Democratic incumbents had been doing? they’d been doubling down on safety for themselves? and the independent commission forced the Democratic incumbents? to take on districts that were a little bit riskier? I mean still D-leaning? because it’s California? But so they picked seats up.
When I read the transcript by itself – no audio – I hear it without the rising inflections mid-sentence.
Here’s another example just few moments a later.
(transcript)
I mean, I think the Canadian case is interesting because one subtle psychological thing they do? is the districts have to have names? rather than numbers? and so that that encourages, I think, subtly but really an idea of community coherence? because you get districts with names like Edmonton Centre.
I think that what they do there with that naming? with that sort of principle? right that the district should represent a place, and the place should be something you can give a name to? because it should have some kind of tangible relationship? I think that lines up very well with the way most people think it should be done? Y’know I think it’s like authentic to the values? of the American people? I also think it’s a little bit dumb? because it allows for a ton of disproportionality? And actually Canadian elections? have awful disproportionality? in part because they have multiple parties? running in these seats?
Where did Yglesias acquire this inflection? Possibly it’s generational, and younger ears hear nothing noteworthy in Yglesias’s speech. Yglesias is under 40. I am well over 40. But the other two podcasters, Klein and Kliff, are younger than Yglesias but are not uptalkers. Or is it regional? I had thought that uptalk had started in California in the 1970s. But Yglesias grew up in New York city in the 1980s and has remained on the East Coast.
What is the meaning of these rising intonations? They don’t suggest uncertainty, nor do they seem to be asking “are you with me on this?” Some linguists see them as ways of saying, “I’m not finished with this sentence, so don’t interrupt me.” That’s one reason uptalk is more prevalent among women – they want to forestall interruptions from men.
I’m not complaining (uptalk – not that there’s anything wrong with that). The time for handwringing over uptalk as the end of civilization as we know it has come and gone. I’m just curious as to why Ezra Klein, the Californian, speaks with barely a trace of uptalk, and Matthew Yglesias, the New Yorker, saturates his speech with it.
When it comes to rule-breakers and rule enforcers, which side you are on seems to depend on the rule-breaker and the rule.
National Review had a predictable response to the video of a school officer throwing a seated girl to the floor. Most of the response when the video went viral was revulsion. But not at National Review. David French (here) said it clearly:
I keep coming to the same conclusion: This is what happens when a person resists a lawful order from a police officer to move.
The arrested student at Spring Valley High School should have left her seat when her teacher demanded that she leave. She should have left when the administrator made the same demand. She should have left when Fields made his first, polite requests. She had no right to stay. She had no right to end classroom instruction with her defiance. Fields was right to move her, and he did so without hurting her. The fact that the incident didn’t look good on camera doesn’t make his actions wrong.
This has been the general response on the right to nearly all the recently publicized incidents of the police use of force. If law enforcement tells you to do something, and then you don’t do it, it’s OK for the officer to use force, and if you get hurt or killed, it’s your fault for not complying, even if you haven’t committed an offense.
That’s the general response. There are exceptions, notably Cliven Bundy. In case you’d forgotten, Bundy is the Nevada cattle rancher who was basically stealing – using federal lands for grazing his cattle and refusing to pay the fees. He’d been stiffing the United States this way for many years. When the Federales finally arrested him and rounded up his cattle, a group of his well armed supporters challenged the feds. Rather than do what law enforcers in other publicized accounts do when challenged by someone with a gun – shoot to kill – the Federal rangers negotiated.
Bundy was clearly breaking the law. Legally, as even his supporters acknowledged, he didn’t have a leg to stand on. So the view from the right must have been that he should do what law enforcement said. But no.
This is best understood not as a legal proceeding but as an act of civil disobedience. . . As a legal question Mr. Bundy is legless. But that is largely beside the point.
What happened to “This is what happens when a person resists a lawful order”? The law is now “beside the point.” To Williamson, Bundy is a “dissident,” one in the tradition of Ghandi, Thoreau, and fugitive slaves.
Not all dissidents are content to submit to what we, in the Age of Obama, still insist on quaintly calling “the rule of law.”
Every fugitive slave, and every one of the sainted men and women who harbored and enabled them, was a law-breaker, and who can blame them if none was content to submit to what passed for justice among the slavers?
(The equation with fugitive slaves became something of an embarrassment later when Bundy opined that those slaves were better off as slaves than are Black people today who get government subsidies. Needless to say, Bundy did not notice that the very thing he was demanding for himself was a government handout – free grazing on government lands.)
The high school girl refused the teacher’s request that she give up her cell phone and then defied an order from the teacher and an administrator to leave the classroom. Cliven Bundy’s supporters “threatened government employees and officials, pointed firearms at law enforcement officers, harassed the press, called in bomb scares to local businesses, set up roadblocks on public roads, and formed lists (complete with photos and home addresses) of their perceived enemies.” [Forbes]
A Black schoolgirl thrown to the floor by a weightlifting cop twice her size — cop right, rule-breaker wrong. A rural White man with White male supporters threatening Federal law enforcers — cops wrong, rule-breakers right.
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* More than one video has since emerged. This one – part of a newscast– clearly shows the officer flipping the girl, still in her chair/desk, backward onto the floor and then dragging her out of the chair and across the floor.
Thoughts of Mrs. S, my sister-in-law’s mother, rarely cross my mind. My brother’s wedding was the only time I ever met her. But as I read yesterday’s headlines about bacon, sausage, hot dogs, etc. – “Processed Meat Causes Cancer” – I recalled the one salient fact about her that I knew: For lunch every day of her adult life, Mrs. S ate a hot dog. She died at age 86, having outlived most women in her cohort.
I’m using anecdotal evidence here not to refute the scientific reporting from the International Agency for Cancer Research and W.H.O. I’m not James Inhofe using a snowball in late February to demonstrate that global warming is a hoax. But those headlines do raise the problem of how to report scientific findings.
To many people, the word “cause” implies a nearly certain relationship. Gravity causes the apple to fall. Every time. The stronger the gravitational force, the harder they fall. So “Hot dogs cause cancer” means that if you eat hot dogs, you’ll get cancer. The more hot dogs you eat, the sooner and more severe the cancer.
Some headlines used the more cautious “linked to” instead of “cause.” But that too gets it wrong. It suggests that we have mere correlation with no sure cause.
The accurate headlines talked about risk. Or as the New York Times cautiously put it, “Meat Is Linked to Higher Cancer Risk.”
(Click on the image for a larger and perhaps crisper view of the bacon.)
But what is risk? The way I explain it to intro students early in the semester is this: Risk is a way of talking about the individual as though she were a lot of people. The research shows that eating a lot of processed food increases the risk of cancer by about 18%. The overall risk of colorectal cancer in the US is about 50 per 1000. That is, if there were 1000 of you, 50 of would get cancer. Now if those thousand yous scarfed down the bacon and hot dogs, 59 yous out of the 1000 would get cancer. Your raised your risk 5rom 50 to 59 per 1000, or from 5.0% to 5.1%
Of course there’s only one of you. Either you get cancer or you don’t. You don’t get fifty one-thousandths of cancer or fifty-nine one-thousandths of cancer.
The headlines were also misleading in another way. The IARC report was not about a newly discovered increase in risk. It was about certainty. Their review of the existing research led them to put processed meats in their highest category of certainty: “causes cancer.” Non-processed red meat was in the next category: “probably causes cancer.” That increased risk for processed meats – from 5.0% to 5.1% – may have been small relative to other things you might do, like smoking cigarettes or working with asbestos, but the IARC was now sure that sausage and bacon caused that risk to increase.
Maybe the headline should have been:
Scientists Now Sure That Processed Meats Cause a Small Increase in the Risk of Cancer
As for Mrs. S, she died of lung cancer. It was the cigarettes* that finally did her in, not the hot dogs – or the Ho Hos, brownies, and chocolate candy that usually followed.
----------------------
* Cigarettes have long been in the category of causes that we’re certain about. The raising of processed meats to that same category led some news sources to the utterly wrong interpretation. “Just two rashers of bacon a day raises your risk of cancer: Health chiefs put processed meat at same level as cigarettes” said the Daily Mail
The Guardian was worse: “Processed meats rank alongside smoking as cancer causes – WHO”
Technically defensible but totally misleading.
Other headlines around the Internet were just plain wrong. To cite one of many, “World Health Organization: Bacon, sausage as bad a cigarettes”WRAL.com (a Raleigh, NC radio station).
Nonsense. Cigarettes are far more harmful. They increase the risk of lung cancer not by 18% but by 2500%.
The world of the tabloids is a constant drama of moral clarity. Usually the plot centers on a moral outrage – what bad guys do and get away with – but sometimes the good guys win. The point is that the moral boundary is unmistakable, and the characters are clearly on one side or the other. The specifics can vary, and either side may win, just so long as there are black hats and white hats.
In sport, we root root root for the home team, and when they are also on the good side of a moral conflict, and when they win, that’s the story that gets the front page. In today’s episode, the white hats and the black hats are both actually blue, but the only shades of grey are the visitors’s uniforms.
Yesterday’s playoff game between the Mets and the Dodgers at Citi Field was not just about winning and losing. It was about justice. In the previous game, Shane Utley had broken the leg of Mets shortstop Ruben Tejada on a slide aimed clearly at Tejada and not at second base. The Post abandoned the usual sports euphemism of “hard” (when basketball announcers say that a player has given “the hard foul,” they mean that the player has done something like smashing his elbow into another player’s body or face) and used the old-fashioned, morally charged term “dirty.”
Baseball officials had suspended Utley for his crime, so he was not in the game last night. But he played a key position in the tabloid headlines.* “Mets bash LA; Utley,” said the Post. The News was even more punishing of the Dodger who was nowhere to be seen, bashed, or kicked: “Kicked ’em in the Uts.”
In the tabloids, justice in absentia is better than no justice at all.
-----------------------------
* New York’s broadsheet, the Times, seems not to have noticed this triumph of Good over Evil. The front page is devoid of sports news, and if there is a moral angle in any of the stories, it rests subtly between the lines.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but the New York Times has three items today suggesting that greed, for want of a better word, isn’t always so good – not for the public and not for science. These articles suggest that corporations sometimes deliberately distort science in order to subvert the general welfare so that they can increase their profits. I hear you gasping in disbelief.
You’re right. It would seem a commonplace observation except that so many people in such influential positions think that the profit-seeking efforts of huge investment funds and energy companies and chambers of commerce all bring unalloyed good to everyone.
1. In an op-ed, Luigi Zingales warns about scientists nudging their research in directions favored by the people who bankroll them. Would scientists risk their reputations for a few pieces of silver? Under some conditions, yes.
A paper can be misleading or economical with the truth even when not blatantly false. . . . And reputational concerns do not work as well with sealed expert-witness testimony or paid-for policy papers that circulate only in small policy groups.
Then there is what Zingales calls “a scarier possibility”
that reputational incentives do not work because the practice of bending an opinion for money is so widespread as to be the norm.
Zingales does not give any estimate of the location of norm’s current boundary or the prevalence of such bending.
What triggered Zingales’s op-ed is Congressional testimony by economist Robert Litan and Litan’s related paper on consumer protection regarding retirement plans. It turns out that the paper was commissioned by the Capital Group, a trillion-dollar investment group not notably favorable towards consumer protection. The Capital Group generally underwrote Litan’s research, as Litan acknowledged; but they also commissioned this specific project, a fact Litan did not deem important enough to mention. Not surprisingly, the paper found that protecting consumers vis-a-vis retirement-plan brokers would be too costly.
(Zingales, by the way, is no lefty. He teaches at a business school, the Booth School
of Management at the U. of Chicago. I expect that neither he nor Booth
see his mission as radicalizing future MBAs.)
It’s not just economists. For a long time we’ve known that research sponsored by drug companies finds drugs much safer and more effective than does independent research (see here, for example).. But government-sponsored research has decreased, and research by Big Pharma has grown. As Marcia Angell, former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine said in 2009,
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
2. Also on the op-ed page (here), Naomi Oreskes discusses the efforts of Exxon (later Exxon-Mobil) to undermine the findings of climate scientists. Internal Exxon documents going back forty years show that the company’s own scientists were telling them that carbon-based energy would change the global climate.
In 1989, the company helped to create the Global Climate Coalition to question the scientific basis for concern about climate change and prevent the United States from signing on to the international Kyoto Protocol to control greenhouse gas emissions. . . . Journalists and scientists have identified more than 30 different organizations funded by the company that have worked to undermine the scientific message and prevent policy action to control greenhouse gas emissions.
Oreskes likens the Exxon-Mobil tactics with those of tobacco companies decades earlier – a strategy to “promote a message of scientific uncertainty” where the science was in fact settled. Of course today, tobacco companies today wouldn’t take such drastic efforts to undermine anti-smoking policies, would they?
3. The front page of the Times has a story about the Chamber of Commerce becoming the champion of the tobacco industry. The Chamber has traditionally worked for the interests of business in general regarding tax policy and regulation. Under new management in the person of Thomas J. Donohue, the Chamber is taking up the cause of smoking at home and especially abroad. And you thought “Thank You For Smoking” was a comedy.
True, their second-highest official has said, “The chamber is not opposed to tobacco regulation. Declarative statement. We don’t support smoking. Declarative statement.” Declarative but false.
The chamber’s own letters, many of which have been published in The New York Times, show the extent of the tobacco campaign, including an attack on excise tax in the Philippines, cigarette advertising bans in Uruguay and restrictions on smoking in public places in Moldova.
Needless to say, the tobacco industry and the Chamber also do research. Guess what the research finds.
During his first stint with the chamber in the early 1980s, [Donohue] was called on to calm restive cigarette makers, who were angered by a chamber health booklet that said smoking increases absenteeism. Mr. Donohue invited the tobacco industry to “supply some additional data” for a revised version, according to a letter later made public. Within a few years, the industry was citing chamber research that found “smoking has no influence on an employee’s likelihood of being absent.”
Philip Morris directed the chamber’s work on a polling project surveying attitudes about government-funded litigation. The chamber took the lead in public, while “PM stays in the background,” a Philip Morris memo outlined. The cigarette maker selected the polling firm and reviewed the questions.
Three articles in one day (and I haven’t read the whole newspaper). Maybe the Times save all its tilted-science articles for Saturday. Or maybe it’s just the Times, and if I had instead looked at the Wall Street Journal I would have found articles about all the unbiased research done by virtuous corporate-sponsored scientists.
October 7, 2015 Posted by Jay Livingston Are Conservative Republicans a breed apart? And are they getting even farther apart? A recent Pew survey compared attitudes a year ago and last month on the subject of abortion. The 2015 survey was done in the immediate wake of those now-famous videos of Planned Parenthood officials, videos shot surreptitiously and edited tendentiously. The demographic that showed the largest swing in opinion was Conservative Republicans.* Among people who identified themselves as Conservative Republicans, opposition to abortion rose from 65% to 79%. Four out of five Conservative Republicans now oppose abortion. No other group in the survey comes in at more than half.
(Click on the image for a slightly larger view.)
The obvious explanation is that in the past year, an additional 14% of Conservative Republicans have become more conservative on abortion. The hardliners are becoming even harder. But there’s another possibility – that many of the Conservative Republicans who did not oppose abortion a year ago no longer call themselves Conservative Republicans. That’s not as unlikely as it might seem.
The Gallup poll shows that among Republicans, those who identified themselves as conservative on both economic and social issues – the largest segment of the faithful – dropped from 51 to 42 percent. What if all the dropouts were abortion moderates? I did some simple math. I imagined 100 Republicans in 2014. Of those, 51 were self-identified conservatives, and of those 65% opposed abortion. That makes 33 who thought abortion should be illegal nearly all the time. Last month, only 42 of those 100 Republicans said they were thoroughly conservative, 9 fewer than a year ago. Of those left, 79% were anti-abortion. That makes 33. In my scenario, these were the same 33 as a year ago. The 9 who defected to the less-than-fully-conservative camps were the ones who were wishy-washy about making abortion totally illegal. Perhaps this is our old friend social comparison. These nine people looked at the hardcore, and the next time that a pollster asked them about where they stood politically, they thought, “If being a Conservative Republican means wanting all abortions to be illegal, maybe I’m not so conservative after all.”
Conservative Republicans
%Anti- Abortion
Number Anti- Abortion
2014
51
65%
33
2015
42
79%
33
I’m speculating of course. Besides, the data and calculations here are surely too simplistic; I am not a political scientist. But maybe the party purists are indeed forcing others who used to be close to them politically to rethink their identification as Conservative Republicans.
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* The drop in support among those 30-49 and 50-64 does fall just outside the confidence interval of 5.5 points, but is only half as large as the change among conservative Republicans.
Sometimes I get the wrong impression from what I hear and see in the media. In the news, Planned Parenthood has been taking it on the chin. A few liberals have come to the defense, but my impression these past few weeks is that this organization has fallen out favor with politicians and the public.
Donald Trump on the other hand seems to have been soaring. He keeps coming out on top in those polls despite all the offensive comments. He is, the pundits tell me, tapping into a rich vein of American populist resentment.
So I was interested to see the results of a recent NBC - Wall Street Journal survey asking people how favorably or unfavorably they viewed people and organizations in the news. Here is what it shows.
(Click on a chart for a larger view.)
Planned Parenthood did draw some negatives – 31% viewed it unfavorably – but these were more than offset by the numbers of people people whose view was positive. The chart below shows both the Favorable and Unfavorable.
Trump is the opposite of Planned Parenthood. He has his admirers, but while they play an important part in surveys of Republicans, when the survey includes the general population, those supporters are swamped by people less taken with The Donald. The same is true to a lesser extent of Hillary Clinton. Her 39% positive is higher than that of any other presidential candidate. But there are a lot of people out there who do not like Hillary.
Surely there are political scientists who can make better sense of this than I can.
This video was making the rounds last spring. The video maker wants to make two points:
1. Cops are racist. They are respectful of the White guy carrying the AR-15. The Black guy gets less comfortable treatment.
2. The police treatment of the White guy is the proper way for police to deal with someone carrying an assault rifle.
I had two somewhat different reactions.
1. This video was made in Oregon. Under Oregon’s open-carry law, what both the White and Black guy are doing is perfectly legal. And when the White guy refuses to provide ID, that’s legal too. If this had happened in Roseburg, and the carrier had been strolling to Umpqua Community College, there was nothing the police could have legally done, other than what is shown in the video, until the guy walked onto campus, opened fire, and started killing people.
2. Guns are dangerous, and the police know it. In the second video, the cop assumes that the person carrying an AR-15 is potentially dangerous – very dangerous. The officer’s fear is palpable. He prefers to err on the side of caution – the false positive of thinking someone is dangerous when he is really OK. The false negative – assuming an armed person is harmless when he is in fact dangerous – could well be the last mistake a cop ever makes.
But the default setting for gun laws in the US is just the opposite – better a false negative. This is especially true in Oregon and states with similar gun laws. These laws asssume that people with guns are harmless. In fact, they assume that all people, with a few exceptions, are harmless. Let them buy and carry as much weaponry and ammunition as they like.
Most of the time, that assumption is valid. Most gun owners, at least those who got their guns legitimately, are responsible people. The trouble is that the cost of the rare false negative is very, very high. Lawmakers in these states and in Congress are saying in effect that they are willing to pay that price. Or rather, they are willing to have other people – the students at Umpqua, or Newtown, or Santa Monica, or scores of other places, and their parents – pay that price.
UPDATE October, 6: You have to forgive the hyperbole in that last paragraph, written so shortly after the massacre at Umpqua. I mean, those politicians don’t really think that it’s better to have dead bodies than to pass regulations on guns, do they?
Or was it hyperbole? Today, Dr. Ben Carson, the surgeon who wants to be the next president of the US, stated even more clearly this preference for guns even at the price of death. “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” (The story is in the New York Times and elsewhere.)
The great alto player (and sometimes clarinetist) Phil Woods died on Tuesday. Here’s my favorite Phil Woods story. I’ve edited it down slightly from an interview he did at JazzWax.
I had just graduated from Juilliard in 1952 and was playing at the Nut Club on Seventh Ave. and Sheridan Square in the Village. After all of that great education, here I was playing “Harlem Nocturne” ten times a night. [The Nut Club, as the patrons’ preference in music shows, was a touristy joint. It sometimes featured cockroach races.] I was saying to myself: My god, I’m a Juilliard graduate, and I can play great jazz, and here I am playing “Night Train” and “Harlem Nocturne.” I didn’t like my mouthpiece. I didn’t like my reed. I didn’t like my horn. I didn’t even like the strap.
One night somebody came into the club and “Hey, Charlie Parker’s playing across the street. He’s jamming.” The guy was referring to Arthur’s Tavern, which is still there on Grove Street across Sheridan Square. It was a little tiny hole in the wall with a little bar.
When I walked in, there was this 90-year old guy playing a piano that was only three octaves long. His father was on drums using a tiny snare and little tiny pie plates for cymbals. And there was the great Charlie Parker—playing the baritone sax. It belonged to Larry Rivers, the painter. Parker knew me. He knew all the kids who were coming up.
I said, “Mr. Parker, perhaps you’d like to play my alto?” He said, “Phil, that would be great. This baritone’s kicking my butt.” So I ran back across the street to the Nut Club and grabbed the alto sax that I hated. I came back and got on the bandstand, which was about as big as a coffee table. I handed my horn to Bird and he played “Long Ago and Far Away.”
As I’m listening to him play my horn, I’m realizing there’s nothing wrong with it. Nothing was wrong with the reed, nothing was wrong with the mouthpiece—even the strap sounded good. Then Parker says to me, “Now you play.” I said to myself, “My God.” So I did. I played a chorus for him. When I was done, Bird leaned over and said, “Sounds real good, Phil.”
I levitated over Seventh Avenue to the Nut Club. And when I got back on the bandstand there, I played the shit out of “Harlem Nocturne.” That’s when I stopped complaining and started practicing. That was quite a lesson.
He is often compared to Cannonball Adderly, and although I can hear the similarity, Woods was always one of my favorites while I never had all that much use for Cannonball. I first listened, really listened, to Woods when I bought the 1959 LP “The Jazz Soul of Porgy and Bess” – a big band playing arrangements by Bill Potts. The Otto Preminger movie had appeared that year, and lots of people wanted to ride its wake – Miles, Ella and Louis, and others. The Potts album was a fancy production with pages of photos of the musicians in the studio.
“Bess You Is My Woman” belongs to Phil Woods, from his section work in the intro to the final cadenza.
His sound is unmistakable. If you see the 1961 moive“The Hustler,” as the opening credits roll over a big band soundtrack, even though there is no alto solo, you hear the ensemble work and know that it’s Phil on lead alto.
His best-known solo, as I’ve noted before (here) is not in jazz. It’s the alto break in Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” I imagine all the people who have heard that track countless times since 1977. They know all the notes but have no idea that they are hearing one of the greatest alto players of the post-Bird era.
Conservatives have finally begun to emerge from their nearly fifty-year long infatuation with draconian prison sentences as the solution to the problems of crime and, especially, drugs. It’s as though America has just discovered that that property in Glengarry Glen Ross we’ve been making huge payments on all these years is mostly an undeveloped marsh. How did this happen? Who were those persuasive salesman, the ones who lived by the ABC slogan, “Always be convicting”? And why did we believe them?
The standard answer from the left has been: racists and racism. Starting in the 60s, politicians used “crime” as a code word for “race.” After all, you couldn’t say that you were against Black people, but you could say that you were against crime and for “law and order.” The strategy worked but not just because of American racism but because of the riots and the rise in crime in Black urban areas, then called “the ghetto,” now “the hood.” In the leftish view, the new laws – everything from mandatory sentences for a first offense to life-sentences for a third conviction – were basically good old American White-on-Black oppression. Whites were comfortable knowing that most of the people being sentence to long terms and occasionally death would be Black. Mass incarceration, in the title of Michelle Alexander’s book, “The New Jim Crow.”
New York’s Rockefeller drug laws, passed in 1973, were some of the first and harshest versions of the new look in criminal justice. Many other states took inspiration, and in the 1980s the Reagan administration’s launched federal war on drugs * – all with a predictable boom in prison populations. The increase was sharper for Black males. (Data from Pew here .)
But in Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, Michael Javen Fortner challenges the idea that the drug laws, and punitive policies in general, were a White regime foisted on Blacks. Black leaders in New York City – and the Black people they led – were, Fortner argues, a major force pushing for harsher laws.
The book is political history – how laws got made forty years ago. But it’s also relevant for the debate over the very recently arrived Black Lives Matter. Conservatives, in their reaction against Black Lives matter, often like to bring up the inconvenient fact of Black-on-Black crime. Here, for example, is Sean Hannity on Fox last month:
Don't we have to address the black on black crime numbers that, it's not cops. It's not white people. There are racists, everybody knows that, but the majority of deaths of young black males are coming from other young black males.
Fortner too argues that trying to explain criminal justice policy while ignoring crime
is like explaining Advil profits without mentioning headaches. In the 1970s, the highest rates of street crime were in urban Black neighborhoods. That’s still true, though those rates have decreased considerably in the last 25years.
In 1982, noted penologist Richard Pryor offered his observations on the proportions of Blacks in the general population and in prison. He also speculated that the disparity in these proportions was related to crime and the desire of Black people like himself to be safer. (It’s Richard Pryor. Do I really need to put a trigger warning here about language, sex, and violence?)
But are Blacks really more punitive than Whites? Fortner has a lot of anecdotal evidence – editorials in Black newspapers saying things like,“I’m in favor of burning them alive.” I haven’t read the book (the release date was only two days ago), but according to the review by Marc Parry in The Chronicle , Fortner “cites a 1973 New York Times poll that found 71 percent of blacks supported life sentences without parole for drug dealers.” I could not find that poll, but I did find a national Gallup poll from 1973 on the same question. Whites supported the drug laws 68-28%. Black support was less strong – 58-36%.
Other surveys too have found Blacks less punitive than Whites. They have always been less supportive of the death penalty; except for the high-crime years of roughly 1985-2000, a majority have opposed capital punishment. As for other sentences, look at the GSS item “Courts”: “In general, do you think the courts in this area deal too harshly or not harshly enough with criminals?”
Some obvious points:
Attitudes about punishment have softened in the last 25 years, probably because of the great decrease in crime.
Blacks have always been less punitive than Whites.
In periods of high crime, Blacks were strongly in favor of harsher punishments. Even today among Blacks, those favoring harsher punishment are in the majority.
But what about the other option on this question?
While the White-Black gap on “Not Harshly Enough” has been consistent at about ten percentage points, in recent years far more Blacks have come to see sentences as too harsh. While Whites still favor harsher courts by nearly 8-to-1, among Blacks the ratio is only 2½-to-1.
Perhaps these general attitudes help explain the differences over Black Lives Matter. The movement arose in response to several well-publicized killings of unarmed Black men by police. But even before Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, and others, a significant minority of Blacks in the US had come to feel that the punitive tactics of the criminal justice system were not making them safer and needed to be reversed.
Opponents of government aid to the poor often argue that the poor are not really poor. The evidence they are fond of is often an inappropriate comparison, usually with people in other countries: “Thus we can say that by global standards there are no poor people in the US at all: the entire country is at least middle class or better. ” (Tim Worstall in Forbes). Sometimes the comparison is with earlier times: “‘Poor’ Americans today are better housed, better fed, and own more property than did the average U.S. citizen throughout much of the 20th Century.” (Robert Rector at Heritage. The quote is from 1990, but I doubt that Heritage has changed its tune.)
I parodied this approach in a post a few years ago (here) by using the ridiculous argument that poor people in the US are not really poor and are in fact “better off than Louis XIV because the Sun King didn’t have indoor plumbing.” I mean, I thought the toilet argument was ridiculous. But sure enough, Richard Rahn of the Cato Institute used it in an article in the Washington Times, complete with a 17th century portrait of the king.
Common Folk Live Better Now than Royalty Did in Earlier Times
Louis XIV lived in constant fear of dying from smallpox and many other diseases that are now cured quickly by antibiotics. His palace at Versailles had 700 rooms but no bathrooms. . .
Barry Ritholtz at Bloomberg has an ingenious way of showing how meaningless this line of thinking is. He compares today not with centuries past but with centuries to come. Consider our hedge-fund billionaires, with private jets whisking them to their several mansions in different states and countries. Are they well off? Not at all.They are worse off than the poor of 2215.
Think about what the poor will enjoy a few centuries from now that even the 0.01 percent lack today. . . . “Imagine, they died of cancer and heart disease, had to birth their own babies, and even drove their own cars. How primitive can you get!”
Comparisons with times past or future tell us about progress. They can’t tell us who’s poor today. What makes people rich or poor is what they can buy compared with other people in their own society. To extrapolate a line from Mel Brooks’s Louis XVI, “It’s good to be the king . . . even if flush toilets haven’t been invented yet.”
And you needn’t sweep your gaze to distant centuries to find inappropriate comparisons. When Marty McFly in “Back to the Future” goes from the 80s back to the 50s, he feels pretty cool, even though the only great advances he has over kids there seem to be skateboards, Stratocasters, and designer underpants. How would he have felt if in 1985 he could have looked forward thirty years to see the Internet, laptops, and smartphones?
Do people below the poverty line today feel well off just because they have indoor plumbing or color TVs or Internet connections? Hardly. In the same way, our 1% do not feel poor even though they lack consumer goods that people a few decades from now will take for granted.
“I swear they're going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing . . . [I] overhear from somewhere, ‘Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh’.” That was part of a rant posted in 2011 on YouTube by a UCLA student complaining about Asian students using their cell phones in the library when she was trying to study. The video went viral, and the PC police swarmed in with justifiable accusations of racism. She soon deleted the video.
My comment (here) was not so much about racism as about a single word – “thing.” Turning “the tsunami” into “the tsunami thing” says in effect, “I don’t know or care much about this because it’s not very important.” Even The Language Log took note.
So I couldn’t help but notice this headline in today’s New York Times.
The story is about public relations agents whose efforts to get their clients’ events widely noticed these past two days were swamped under the flood of Pope coverage in the media.
But spare a thought for that handful of souls for whom the papal visit on Friday was less pleasure than plight. We speak of those who toil in public relations, and struggled to have their entreaties heard on this holiest of busy news days.
These are their lamentations.
Consider the 11 a.m. announcement of a new dog park in Astoria, Queens, a $1 million project sure to delight local canines and their owners, but less able to compete for headlines alongside Francis’ visit to the National September 11 Memorial, which was scheduled for roughly the same hour.
“It didn’t really cross my mind until yesterday how many reporters were going to be covering this pope thing,” said Shachar Sharon, communications director for Councilman Costa Constantinides, who hosted the event. [emphasis added]
“That kind of put a damper on things,” she added.
Adding “thing” to a noun insults those who take that thing seriously. You’d think that a public relations specialist would show some tact. But Ms. Sharon probably didn’t think that her choice of phrases would get into the newspaper. After all, she was merely talking to a reporter, not doing the PR thing.
Maria Konnikova is a regular guest on Mike Pesca’s pocast “The Gist.” Her segment is called “Is That Bullshit.” She addresses pressing topics like
Compression sleeves – is that bullshit?
Are there different kinds of female orgasm?
Are artificial sweeteners bad for your health?
Does anger management work?
We can imagine of all kinds of reasons why compression sleeves might work or why diet soda might be unhealthful, but if you want to know if it’s bullshit, you need good evidence. Which is what Konnikova researches and reports on.
Good evidence is also the gist of my class early in the semester. I ask students whether more deaths are caused each year by fires or by drownings. Then I ask them why they chose their answer. They come up with good reasons. Fires can happen anywhere – we spend most of our time in buildings, not so much on water. Fires happen all year round; drownings are mostly in the summer. A fire may kill many people, but group drownings are rare. The news reports a lot about fires, rarely about drownings. And so on.
The point is that for a good answer to the question, you need more than just persuasive reasoning. You need someone to count up the dead bodies. You need the relevant evidence.
“Why Do We Admire Mobsters?” asks Maria Konnikova recently in the New Yorker (here). She has some answers:
Prohibition: “Because Prohibition was hugely unpopular, the men who stood up to it [i.e., mobsters] were heralded as heroes, not criminals.” Even after Repeal, “that initial positive image stuck.”
In-group/ out-group: For Americans, Italian (and Irish) mobsters are “similar enough for sympathy, yet different enough for a false sense of safety. . . Members of the Chinese and Russian mob have been hard to romanticize.”
Distance: “Ultimately the mob myth depends on psychological distance. . . As painful events recede into the past, our perceptions soften. . . . Psychological distance allows us to romanticize and feel nostalgia for almost anything.”
Ideals: “We enjoy contemplating the general principles by which they are supposed to have lived: omertà, standing up to unfair authority, protecting your own.”
These are plausible reasons, but are they bullshit? Konnikova offers no systematic evidence for anything she says. Do we really admire mobsters? We don’t know. Besides it would be better to ask: how many of us admire them, and to what degree? Either way, I doubt that we have good survey data on approval ratings for John Gotti. All we know is that mobster movies often sell a lot of tickets. Yet the relation between our actual lives (admiration, desires, behavior) and what we like to watch on screen is fuzzy and inconsistent.
It’s fun to speculate about movies and mobsters,* but without evidence all we have is at best speculation, at worst bullshit.
UPDATE: In a message to me, Maria Konnikova says that there is evidence, including surveys, but that the New Yorker edited that material out of the final version of her article.
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* Nine years ago, in what is still one of my favorite posts on this blog, I speculated on the appeal of mafia movies (here). I had the good sense to acknowledge that I was speculating and to point out that our preferences in fantasyland had a complicated relation to our preferences in real life.
The anniversary for this blog comes roughly at the same time as the Jewish New Year – bit daunting, nine compared with 5776. Atonement for the blog’s shortcomings will have to wait till Yom Kippur next week. For now, I’ll toot my own shofar for a few posts that for one reason or another I liked.
Don Draper and the Pursuit of Loneliness. The Pursuit of Loneliness (1970) by Philip Slater was one of the best books inspired by America in the 1960s. “Mad Men” was one of the best TV shows inspired by America in the 1960s.
Shootings and Elephants(The post has nothing to do with Orwell’s essay, “Shooting an Elephant.”) My point is the obvious one – if you want school shootings to be more common, make it easier for schoolkids to get guns. I posted it only because so many people seem to be ignoring the obvious.
Poverty, Perceptions, and Politics Another seemingly obvious idea – the more socially distant people are from the poor, the less compassion they will have for the poor. Yet some people were surprised by the evidence.
Higher Ed as Cheerios One ill-chosen picture for a college catalogue cover reveals assumptions about race and gender but also about the basic purpose of a university education. Does anyone remember those old classic Cheerios ads? Does anyone remember those old classic ideas about education?
This post was going to be about kids – what the heck is wrong with these kids today – their narcissism and sense of entitlement and how that’s all because their wealthy parents and schools are so overprotective and doting. giving them trophies for merely showing up and telling them they’re so great all the time.
I’m skeptical about that view – both its accuracy and its underlying values (as I said in this post about “Frances Ha”). But yesterday in Central Park there was this young dad with a $7500 camera.
I was reminded of something from a photo class I once took at Montclair. We were talking about cameras – this was decades ago, long before digital - and the instructor Klaus Schnitzer said dismissively: “Most Hasselblads are bought by doctors who take snapshots of their kids on weekends.”
Now here was this guy with his very expensive camera taking videos of his 9-year old daughter doing cartwheels. And not just filming her. He interviewed her, for godssake - asked her a couple of questions as she was standing there (notice the mike attached to the camera) as though she were some great gymnast. This is going to be one narcissistic kid, I thought, if she wasn’t already. I imagined her parents in a few years giving her one of those $50,000 bat mitzvahs – a big stage show with her as the star. My Super Sweet Thirteen.
Maybe it was also because the dad reminded me of the Rick Moranis character in the movie “Parenthood,” the father who is over-invested in the idea of his daughter’s being brilliant.
(The guy looked a little like Moranis. I’ve blurred his face in the photos here, but trust me on this one. My wife thought so too.)
But here’s where the story takes a sharp turn away from the millennials cliches. My wife, who had been a working photographer, went over to ask him about his camera. It turns out that he works for “20/20,” and ABC had asked him to try out this Canon C-100. It was ABC’s camera not his, and as much as he was indulging his daughter, she was indulging him – agreeing to do the cartwheels and mock interview for purposes of his work.
OK, it wasn’t exactly the second-generation kid working in her immigrant parents’ vegetable store, but it wasn’t the narcissism-generating scenario that I had imagined.
The point is that my wife was a much better social psychologist than I was. If you want to find out what people are doing, don’t just look at them from a distance or number-crunch their responses on survey items. Talk with them.
The previous post was about the University of Illinois football coach forcing injured players to go out on the field even at the risk of turning those injuries into lifelong debilitating and career-ending injuries. The coach and the athletic director both stayed on script and insisted that they put the health and well-being of the scholar athletes “above all else.” Right.
My point was that blaming individuals was a distraction and that the view of players as “disposable bodies” (as one player tweeted) was part of a system rather than the moral failings of individuals.
But systems don’t make for good stories. It’s so much easier to think in terms of individuals and morality, not organizations and outcomes. We want good guys and bad guys, crime and punishment. That’s true in the legal system. Convicting individuals who commit their crimes as individuals or in small groups is fairly easy. Convicting corporations or individuals acting as part of a corporation is very difficult.
That preference for stories is especially strong in movies. In that earlier post, I said that the U of Illinois case had some parallels with the NFL and its reaction to the problem of concussions. I didn’t realize that Sony pictures had made a movie about that very topic (title - “Concussion”), scheduled for release in a few months.
Hacked e-mails show that Sony, fearful of lawsuits from the NFL, wanted to shift the emphasis from the organization to the individual.
Sony executives; the director, Peter Landesman; and representatives of Mr. Smith discussed how to avoid antagonizing the N.F.L. by altering the script and marketing the film more as a whistle-blower story, rather than a condemnation of football or the league. . . .
Hannah Minghella, a top [Sony] executive, suggested that “rather than portray the N.F.L. as one corrupt organization can we identify the individuals within the N.F.L. who were guilty of denying/covering up the truth.” [source: New York Times]
I don’t know what the movie will be like, but the trailer clearly puts the focus on one man – Dr. Bennet Omalu, played by Will Smith. He’s the good guy.
Will the film show as clearly how the campaign to obscure and deny the truth about concussions was a necessary and almost inevitable part of the NFL? Or will it give us a few bad guys – greedy, ruthless, scheming NFL bigwigs – and the corollary that if only those positions had been staffed by good guys, none of this would have happened?
The NFL, when asked to comment on the movie, went to the same playbook of cliches that the Illinois coach and athletic director used.
“We are encouraged by the ongoing focus on the critical issue of player health and safety. We have no higher priority.”
The Illinois football head coach, Tim Beckman, was just fired after a ton of evidence showed that he forced Fighting Illini scholar-athletes to play hurt.
[A] player, Simon Cvijanovic, alleged that Beckman and his staff pushed the athlete into playing with an injured shoulder and knee and lied to him about how long his recovery would take. He said that the coaching staff frequently berated injured players, threatening to take away their scholarships if they did not return to practice quickly after an injury.
Cvijanovic tweeted that athletic medical staff withheld information from him regarding the extent of his knee injury, and that he now faces a “lifetime of surgery” related to the deterioration of an injured muscle that was largely left untreated. The staff called hurt players derogatory names and dressed them in a rival team's colors during practices in an attempt to shame them, the former player said. [Source: Inside Higher Ed.
In response, Coach Beckman said,
The health and well-being of our student athletes is of paramount importance to me, and any statement made to the contrary is utterly false.
You can’t blame the coach for lying. What else could he have said?
The problem is not that the coach is a liar or that he callously ignores the risk of lifelong debilitating injury to his players. Beckman is surely not the only coach who pressures players this way, and it’s not because the coaches all lack moral character. Nor will firing one coach have much effect. Coaches “act like our bodies are just disposable” (as Cvijanovic tweeted) not because coaches are moral monsters but because the entire system of Division I football is focused on winning.
Deep Throat was right: follow the money. Winning teams at big schools can bring in big money – media deals, tchotchke sales, alumni donations, etc. That multi-million dollar contract that Illinois gave Beckman wasn’t for improving the health and well-being of the players. It was for winning.
As long as the team’s won-lost record was improving,* university officials were not concerned about what Beckman was doing. Or if they knew, they probably assumed, correctly, that this is how coaches coach. When the news first reported Cvijanovic’s accusations back in May, Coach Beckman’s boss, the Athletic Director, said that Beckman “has put the welfare of this young man above all else.” It was only after the investigation – triggered by the young man’s tweets –
that the Athletic Director was shocked, shocked to discover that Beckman
made footballers play hurt.
Will the NCAA now impose new rules on the treatment of injured players? If so, my guess is that the reason will not be an overriding concern with the health and well-being of players. I’m going with Deep Throat. The IHE story doesn’t mention it, but Cvijanovic has filed a lawsuit against the university. As with concussions in the NFL, a few successful lawsuits might lead to changes. Failing that, it will be the Humanitarian Impulses of the coaching staff versus the economic pressure on Winning. In that contest, Humanitarian Impulses is a big underdog. My advice: go with Winning and give the points.
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* When Beckman took over in 2012, the team went 2-10 and 0-8 in their Big Ten division. Two years later, they were 6-7 overall and 3-5 in the division.
The Metropolitan Opera’s Summer HD Festival offers free screenings of operas in the large plaza at Lincoln Center- a different opera each night. Tonight it’s Carmen, and the operas to come are nearly as well known – La Traviata, Don Giovanni, Tales of Hoffman, etc.
For the opener last night the Met chose West Side Story – the 1961 movie.
The great irony is that we were sitting in what had been the setting for the story – a neighborhood known as San Juan Hill. Back then it was a “slum”; today it would be called a low-income, predominantly minority community. It was San Juan Hill even in the 1940s, when it was still nearly all Black, as it had been since the turn of the century. In the 1950s, Puerto Ricans began arriving, and some Blacks moved uptown or to Brooklyn. Gang violence was rife – fights between the Black (and later Puerto Rican) gangs of San Juan Hill and Irish gangs from Hell’s Kitchen just to the south.
DIESEL: What do you say, Riff?
RIFF: I say this turf is small, but it's all we got, huh? I want to hold it like we always held it.
In the 1950s, however, the real turf battle was not between the Jets and the Sharks. It was between the residents of San Juan Hill and a gang led by Robert Moses and John D. Rockefeller III – not exactly an even match. It wasn’t much of a rumble.The winning side demolished the slum and build Lincoln Center.
I wondered whether many of my fellow moviegoers knew this West Side history, but then the speaker who introduced the film mentioned it. Some of the film was shot right here on location, he said, and in fact the film’s producers (or was it Jerome Robbins, the choreographer?) asked the city to delay part of the demolition so they could complete some of the dance scenes. The speaker related these as interesting factoids, as if to say, “You’re sitting where Maria and Tony’s balcony scene might have taken place,” and expecting us to feel a Washington-slept-here sense of connection to history.
Instead, I was thinking of class and politics. I was thinking of The Urban Villagers and Boston’s urban renewal destruction of the West End; I was thinking of other Robert Moses projects in New York. Working-class and lower-class people displaced for buildings or highways that benefit middle class people, promoted and partly financed by upper-class people. The audience at the free movie last night had few Marias or Bernardos, Riffs or Diesels. Or Blacks. The paying customers coming from the ballet at the New York State Theater David H. Koch Theater just to our left were even Whiter and older.
As Lincoln Center was being built, some critics like Paul Goodman suggested that major arts centers should be dispersed to different places in the city, maybe even different boroughs. Why put the buildings for the opera, the ballet, and the symphony together in one place? (I was reminded of this when the noisy crowd coming out from the ballet next door made it hard for us movie watchers to hear what was happening on screen.)
But these grandiose projects of megalomaniacs sometimes work. And once they are in place, it’s hard to imagine the city without them – Paris without the Haussmann boulevards and buildings. They add to the greatness of the city, though thinking about a city in terms of its greatness essentially cedes the argument to the megalomaniacs. The other question to ask is whether they make life better for the residents of the city – and not just residents who like opera.
He died in 1955 at age 34. He would have been 95 today.
I’m sure that there is much sociological to be said about Bird and birth of bebop. As Howie Becker has taught us, art is collective enterprise. That’s especially true of jazz, and Becker’s ideas about art in general originated in his own experiences working as a jazz pianist. But individual artists are important, and Charlie Parker remains one of the great figures in American music.
“Man, you gotta go up to Minton’s and hear the way this cat plays ‘Cherokee,’” musicians would tell one another. As you can hear in these two studio takes, Parker decided to dispense with the melody of ‘Cherokee’ (a standard from the big band era). In the first take, after the 32-bar intro (unusually long for bebop), Bird and Miles play the melody for a few bars. Then Bird calls a halt. In the second take – the one that was issued – after the intro, he just starts soloing on the changes. The tune was listed on the record as “Ko-Ko,’ and that’s the way Parker played it from then on.
The drum solo is by Max Roach. Curley Russell was on bass. The pianist was supposed to have been Bud Powell, but he didn’t make the session, so Dizzy Gillespie was called on to comp on piano.
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.
