From Ta-Nehisi, Not Just For the Lost Battalion But For Every American, Every Son

If I could repost this article in its entirety I would.  But it's better to follow the link and read it yourself.

Ta-Nehisi Coates interviews the mother of Jordan Davis.  For the interview, he brings along his own son, 13 years old and black and pretty much in the same unsettling reality that Jordan and Trayvon lived (and died).

Last Thursday, I took my son to meet Lucia McBath, because he is 13, about the age when a black boy begins to directly understand what his country thinks of him. His parents cannot save him. His parents cannot save both his person and his humanity. At 13, I learned that whole streets were prohibited to me, that ways of speaking, walking, and laughing made me a target. That is because within the relative peace of America, great violence—institutional, interpersonal, existential—marks the black experience. The progeny of the plundered were all around me in West Baltimore—were, in fact, me. No one was amused. If I were to carve out some peace myself, I could not be amused either. I think I lost some of myself out there, some of the softness that was rightfully mine, to a set of behavioral codes for addressing the block. I think these talks that we have with our sons—how to address the police, how not to be intimidating to white people, how to live among the singularly plundered—kill certain parts of them which are as wonderful as anything. I think the very tools which allow us to walk through the world, crush our wings and dash the dream of flight.

I am white.  I grew up getting The Talk on how to behave with girls and how to obey the traffic laws and how to avoid drunken fights and that was it.  I was never lectured to be afraid of being hunted by my own neighbors or other adults the way Ta-Nehisi and his son had to be lectured.

I told her that I was stunned by her grace after the verdict. I told her the verdict greatly angered me. I told her that the idea that someone on that jury thought it plausible there was a gun in the car baffled me. I told her it was appalling to consider the upshot of the verdict—had Michael Dunn simply stopped shooting and only fired the shots that killed Jordan Davis, he might be free today.

She said, "It baffles our mind too. Don’t think that we aren’t angry. Don’t think that I am not angry. Forgiving Michael Dunn doesn't negate what I’m feeling and my anger. And I am allowed to feel that way. But more than that I have a responsibility to God to walk the path He's laid. In spite of my anger, and my fear that we won’t get the verdict that we want, I am still called by the God I serve to walk this out."

What happened to Jordan Davis wasn't Jordan's fault.  It's not Jordan's fault Michael Dunn was carrying his gun, it's not Jordan's fault that Dunn couldn't control his own anger when he called on Jordan's friends to turn down that loud music, it wasn't Jordan who pulled a trigger it was an angry man with a gun and a crazy broken law giving him license to open fire.  There are kids playing loud music everywhere.  They are driving in their parents' cars up and down these roads with the windows down and laying out a bass that shakes the surrounding car windows.  Some of them are white.  I don't see anyone at the gas stations shouting at them to turn the damn music down.

She stood. It was time to go. I am not objective. I gave her a hug. I told her I wanted the world to see her, and to see Jordan. She said she thinks I want the world to see "him." She was nodding to my son. She added, "And him representing all of us." He was sitting there just as I have taught him—listening, not talking.

Now she addressed him, "You exist," she told him. "You matter. You have value. You have every right to wear your hoodie, to play your music as loud as you want. You have every right to be you. And no one should deter you from being you. You have to be you. And you can never be afraid of being you."

She gave my son a hug and then went upstairs to pack.

The only difference between me at 13 and Ta-Nehisi's son at 13 is the color of our skin.  That and maybe whatever geek thing he's into that I'm not.  The only difference between me and Trayvon Martin at 17 was the skin color, and that he preferred Skittles over M&Ms.  The only difference between me and Jordan Davis was the skin.  And that I had Led Zeppelin blasting at top volume instead of Beyonce.

I didn't have to live with the fear of some angry adult blasting away at me because of who I was.

What the hell is wrong with us as a nation that we let fear dictate what we do?  That we let our anger get the better of us?  That we have some people who think themselves privileged enough to sell that fear and anger to get away with it?

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Why Stand Your Ground Is a Terrible Law

The weekend news has been how a Jacksonville FL jury held shooter Michael Dunn in the Jordan Davis killing guilty of three counts of attempted murder for firing at the three teen friends with Davis that cold night of November 2012... and how that same jury locked up into a mistrial over Davis' own death.

It defies logic that Dunn will be held accountable for the murder attempts he missed... and yet was pretty much let go over the murder he did succeed in committing. (the state prosecutor's office says it will retry on the murder charge)

But there's a reason logic is getting stomped on here: it's because of a poorly-designed, open-ended, free-for-all free-for-gunowners law called Stand Your Ground (SYG).

The impact this law has had on Florida and other states applying SYG is pretty shocking.  Shooting deaths have gone up in states where the shooters claim self-defense under SYG.  Worse, about a third (34 percent) of the shootings when it's white shooter/black victim are deemed justifiable, while only three percent of black shooter/white victim are deemed justifiable.  That this law exposes the raw nerve of race is hard for me to focus on at the moment, and better explained by better writers like Ta-Nehisi Coates (please follow the link to what he wrote).  I'm better off ranting instead about how stupid and destructive SYG is.

Under the old laws regarding self-defense, it relied a lot on location - your own home or workplace where you have an expectation of self-defense - and it relied on the situation where you or someone else were threatened with bodily harm and there was no other recourse (no escape route or method to contact the proper authorities).  Stand Your Ground now allows someone carrying a firearm (and an anger management problem the size of Mount Doom) to go first for their gun and open fire under a "reasonable" expectation of fearing for their life, even when there are clear alternatives to blasting away in Vigilante Mode.

It's a bad law because it's basically a license for an aggressive, angry gunowner to go after someone and shoot that other person dead.  And then that gunowner can turn around and claim self-defense because he "feared for his own safety."  Regardless of whether or not the victim was genuinely a threat.  And sadly enough, the victim was never that big a threat.

Look at Dunn's testimony.  He's the one with the gun, getting off 10 shots and killing Davis in the process.  Dunn claims he "saw" Davis with a shotgun but the police found no evidence there was any weapon in the car at all.  Yet we're supposed to trust Dunn's testimony because he's the one sitting in the courtroom booth.  Meanwhile, we'll never hear Davis' side of the matter because Davis is dead, much like Trayvon Martin is dead and we'll never really know what happened the night George Zimmerman shot him dead.

Because we can't trust a word of what Dunn or Zimmerman claim, because it's in their own interests to make themselves look the victim.  And because they've got SYG giving them clearance to admit they "feared" for their own safety regardless of the situation.  Especially when - in both Dunn and Zimmerman's cases - the shooters were the ones who escalated in their own anger those situations into shooting deaths.

Are we going to trust the word of the 71-year-old who shot a man texting his babysitter (checking on a child at home) while at the Wesley Chapel movie theater that he was afraid for his life?  Under normal circumstances, the 71-year-old or anyone else upset that a cell phone was in use during the start of the movie would have gone to an usher or theater manager to complain (I did that once.  Guess what?  IT WORKED).  Under SYG, the 71-year-old stood there, let a box of popcorn get thrown in his face, and pull out his concealed gun to shoot dead the person who angered him.

He was threatened with popcorn.  The guy with the gun was threatened with popcorn, and shot the guy who threw it at him.  And now the 71-year-old packing heat gets to go before a jury to explain how he feared for his safety because popcorn was in his face.

Meanwhile the ones with actual bullets in them - Martin, Davis, a 43-year-old man with a fatherless child waiting at home - lie there dead, and what law speaks for them when Stand Your Ground trumps logic?  When it trumps common sense?

The law needs to go.  The courts need to rule it unconstitutional because it violates the victims' - usually unarmed - rights to due process (a presumption of innocence).  They need to overturn SYG because it's become a form of legalized lynching where angry white guys are shooting blacks over questionable slights (Trayvon Martin had every right to walk through his father's own neighborhood, for God's sake).  The legislatures need to stop passing these laws that violate public safety at the expense of a gun lobby that wants to conceal-carry wherever they want and pretty much shoot anybody they (don't) like.

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In the Navy Yard Shooting, These Are the Facts You Need To Know

Today was a bad day all around - even without considering the flooding disaster that is Colorado - when we found our nation handling yet another shooting spree... this time at a well-guarded Washington DC Navy Yard.

These are the facts as can be confirmed (EDIT 9/26/13, I feel the need to add a little more for those Google searchers pulling up this article, SEE BELOW):

1) Early reports of multiple shooters proved wrong, as usual: there's always confusion during these mass shooting incidents, with survivors and eyewitnesses confused about where and when the violence takes place.  There was just one guy.

2) The shooter brought with him just a shotgun, but used the fact he was shooting up a military installation to secure additional firearms - handgun and rifle - to continue the shootout.

3) The shooter had his own access card to the grounds.  Working for a private tech firm supporting the Navy Yard, he would need some form of access to get into work areas as part of his job.

4) The shooter was involved in a previous shooting incident in 2010 when he lived in Texas, when he was charged with shooting a gun he claimed he was cleaning when it accidentally went off.  Those charges were dropped.  He was also charged in 2004 shooting out a car's tires in Seattle.

5) The shooter had a background as a military reservist from 2007 to 2011 when he was discharged.

6) There are reports that the shooter had undergone - and maybe still undergoing - psychological treatment for sleep issues and anger management.

7) The shooter was African-American.
7a) The identities of the victims have not been established yet.  The authorities are most likely talking to victims' families first.
UPDATE: The identities were released to the public, Washington Post created a memorial site.  By the looks of it the shooter did not discriminate, he shot at White, Black, Hindu Indian, male, female.  Most of the victims were middle-aged or near retirement age.

8) There are currently 13 dead, with 8 wounded.

These are the speculations:

1) Would the current needs for universal background checks as supported by a broad majority of Americans stopped the shooter from getting a firearm?  Probably not in this case: since that Texas gun charge was dropped it wouldn't have shown up on the background check.  And I'm not sure if the 2004 charges would have expired otherwise, or if the psychological treatment would have been a red flag under the rules.

2) Would the shooting have been less tragic if there were more people at the workplace with firearms / conceal permits?  You have to be kidding: this was the Navy Yard.  There's supposed to be armed guards, fences, barricades, defensive systems across the place.  And yet I won't be surprised if we're gonna get gun enthusiasts arguing for conceal-carry and more gun permissiveness at a military base (again: they said this crap after the Fort Hood shootings).
UPDATE: This did not stop LaPierre of the NRA from declaring the shooting wouldn't have been as bad if there had been more "Good guys with guns," the blanket NRA excuse against sensible gun safety laws.  Never mind the fact that there were armed guards on the site, the cops responded within 2 minutes, never mind the possibility of a "good guy with a gun" getting confused at who to shoot, and then having the cops shoot at him thinking he might be a second shooter (refer back to the earlier point of the reports of multiple gunmen).

3) What motivated the shooting?  The shooter did not leave behind any obvious clue like a letter or a death threat on a website.  There is no evidence as of yet what triggered the shooting.  (any further speculation based on race would really be in poor taste until we get specifics)
UPDATE: Huff Post has an article that the shooter left a note, indicating the shooting was a twisted case of a mental breakdown.

4) The shooter is someone with a serious track record of gun ownership.  This was not an overnight impulse to buy a gun and shoot up someplace: he's had guns before.  And he's used guns before...

5) The more obvious point about the shooter is the anger management (lack of).  A huge red flag in any shooting spree.  Any kind of terror attack, really.  The patterns still all point to one thing: an angry guy lashing out at a supposed injustice and taking it out on a lot of people who had nothing to do with causing that anger.  Mostly the shooter is an angry white guy, but we've had angry black guys as shooters before, there's been angry Asian guys, there's been angry ethnic guys across the board.

But the common link is there: Anger.  There are a lot of gun owners in the United States, I will grant you that.  Most of them never pull the trigger outside of legal usage such as practice ranges and/or licensed hunting.  But you get the gun owner with the persecution complex, the rage against women/the job/next door neighbor who leaves the flood lights on.  It's the combination of rage and access to firearms that ought to be of concern.

It'd be nice to have a debate on the matter, on the problem of guns and anger.  But David Frum is right: we're never going to get a debate on guns at all anymore, are we...?
UPDATE: Still don't have a serious debate on gun safety.

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This Is What Fear And a Gun Creates: Trayvon Martin Is Dead.

Trayvon Martin's intent: walk to a store and back for a bag of Skittles and a bottle of tea. George Zimmerman's intent: follow a black kid walking through a neighborhood while carrying his gun. Confrontation ensues. Zimmerman shoots Martin. 
Zimmerman gets acquitted because of "reasonable doubt". Trayvon Martin is dead.
Try to remember this: Trayvon Martin had a bag of Skittles and a bottle of tea. Martin was not committing any crime. He was walking home through his neighborhood. Zimmerman still chases after him. And Zimmerman shoots him dead.
As a teenager I spent a lot of time biking and walking through my neighborhood, but I never had some freaked-out adult chasing after me with a gun fearing for his life. Maybe because, gee I dunno, I was white. Who's to say? Certainly not Trayvon Martin. Because he's dead now.
It is now legal in Florida, and pretty much the rest of the nation, for terrified angry white guys to shoot young black kids walking through neighborhoods.
This is not justice.

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How Went the Year 2012?

Well:

1) I'm still looking for full-time employment.  I have a contractual will-call job at least, which keeps me active and up-to-speed with the technological needs of my information-based profession.  I did get about six different libraries interviewing me - two of them with follow-up interviews! - which is a vast improvement to the number of interviews I had in 2011 (one) and 2010 (one).  And I still have an interview scheduled for this Friday, with one of the libraries that interviewed me with a follow-up, so I'm hopefully in good standing with them (fingers crossed for luck).

2) My guy got elected to President.  The Far Right's attempts to paint Obama as a "failure" and a "disaster" went nowhere.  And the one place at the federal level where the Far Right still holds any power - an unbalanced U.S. House - is one vote away from falling into chaos.

3) A lot of great genre movies - The Avengers, Dark Knight Rises, Wreck-It Ralph, Brave, Skyfall - this season.  I'd love to see all of them nominated like crazy for the Oscars this year... but noooooooo, it's all gonna be Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty instead.  Sigh.

4) Too many shootings.  And even now, there's reports that someone shot at firefighters responding to a New York state neighborhood fire with two firemen dead and two others wounded.

5) The Mayans did not doom us.  Which is kinda okay, because the real Mayans never wanted the apocalypse anyway: it was some crank Eurowhite guy trying to sell his books.

6) Breitbart's legacy - a website smear machine - is going through some rather public splits right about now.  Schadenfreude, thou art pretty tasty during the holidays...

How was the year for you?

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What the Second Amendment Has Become: A Death Note On Everybody

Update Below

The Second Amendment has gone from being an 18th century constitutional concern for well-regulated militias to basically a license in the 20th-21st centuries for individuals to go on goddamned shooting sprees.

We had a shooting spree earlier this week in Oregon at a shopping mall, during the busiest time of the year Christmas season (here's your War on Christmas, Mr. O'Reilly), with a gunman using a military-level semiautomatic rifle that was once banned during the Clinton years but allowed back on the market during the Bush the Lesser years.

And just right now, as I'm writing this, we're getting reports of a shooting at an elementary school in Connecticut, with 20-27 deaths reported, most of them KIDS.  There's a whole school a whole COMMUNITY of survivors now, traumatized, friends they just spoke to minutes before now dead...  It's said that childhood ends when you learn what death is... and these kids just learned death in the most horrifying way...

This is after a mass shooting in Aurora Colorado at a movie theater.  This is after year upon year of yet even more shootings in public places and gatherings, where most law-abiding non-gun-owning Americans would like to gather without fear of GETTING SHOT AT.

Every year, we've got a body count of gun-related deaths in this country equivalent to a goddamn civil war in some Third World nation.  As of 2009 (for statistics, it takes awhile to tally up numbers), the United States had 15,000+ homicides with 9,000+ caused by guns/firearms.  That's roughly 60 percent of violent deaths due to guns.

People kill people, you say?  True.  But it's also true that GUNS MAKE IT TOO GODDAMNED EASY.

Dear National Rifle Association:

FUCK YOU.

We need gun control in this country.  We need laws restricting gun ownership, not making it easier.  We need to restrict ownership the same way we restrict car ownership, to make sure people are insured, licensed to use 'em, tested with exams to make sure there's no goddamn loose screws in their heads.  We need to restrict gun sales to ensure that gun sellers are NOT selling or passing on firearms to unqualified would-be buyers (Dear God, they're selling 'em online exactly BECAUSE online sales are unregulated.  NONE OF THEM CARE FOR SAFETY OF OTHERS, JUST THE GODDAMN SALE).

We need to establish ACCOUNTABILITY with guns much in the way we have accountability for car drivers, employees in high-risk industries, what have you.

We don't need civilian militias anymore.  The frontiers are closed.  The borders have guards now (even with the illegal immigrant issues, so shut up).  We have an organized permanent military (the Founders may have feared the threat of tyranny from such a thing, but for the most part the military traditions of answering to civilian rule have reduced that risk to nothing).  It doesn't take days to answer to a threat anymore, it takes minutes for law enforcement to respond.  The NEED to own guns has gone down as crime rates have gone down (violent crime in particular has dropped).  Just what the hell are you afraid of, gun nuts?  (answer: other gun nuts, usually)

It is time, it is WELL PAST TIME that we as a nation rewrite that Second Amendment, and make it damned clear that while gun ownership is possible it MUST BE REGULATED to ensure the safety and protection of ALL Americans, including the ones who DON'T OWN GUNS.

What's more important, National Rifle Association: an 8-year-old's life that could have become a doctor or a teacher or a parent or a President, or a goddamn lump of metal that has only one purpose - to kill?  Which do you worship more, you sons of bitches

Update: David Frum is angrier about it than I am:

A permissive gun regime is not the only reason that the United States suffers so many atrocities like the one in Connecticut. An inadequate mental health system is surely at least as important a part of the answer, as are half a dozen other factors arising from some of the deepest wellsprings of American culture.
Nor can anybody promise that more rational gun laws would prevent each and every mass murder in this country. Gun killings do occur even in countries that restrict guns with maximum severity.
But we can say that if the United States worked harder to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, there would be many, many fewer atrocities like the one in Connecticut.

And I'll say: I'll accept no lectures about "sensitivity" on days of tragedy like today from people who work the other 364 days of the year against any attempt to prevent such tragedies.
It's bad enough to have a gun lobby. It's the last straw when that lobby also sets up itself as the civility police. It may not be politically possible to do anything about the prevalence of weapons of mass murder. But it damn well ought to be possible to complain about them - and about the people who condone them.

Fuck you, NRA.  Fuck you.

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At What Point Can We Have an Honest Debate About Guns?

There has been another mass shooting, this time at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.  Seven dead reported for now.

Can we finally, please for the Love of God, discuss the possibility that the Second Amendment - written in an era when there was no standing army, when it took days to travel from one end of a state to another, when the frontier was open and the need for immediate local responses were higher, when state-formed militias made sense - is an outdated amendment that needs revision and recognize that the need for civilian-owned firearms isn't there anymore?

We've got closed borders now.  We've got 24/7 police and law enforcement service.  If we're gonna get invaded by Aruba our military response will be in minutes, not weeks.  The need for "well-regulated militias" isn't there anymore.  The fantasy of needing civilian soldiers against some nefarious government plot of epic doom is just that: a FUCKING fantasy.  The right of an individual to own a firearm needs to be balanced with everyone else's right TO NOT GET SHOT AT.

The NRA and gun nuts out there are gonna scream and kick and throw tantrums and whatnot to make sure we don't even have a goddamn discussion about this.  And even though we're not in a warzone, we're gonna have a body count in the United States about as bad as some war-torn Third World nation.  All because a small, very vocal minority of citizens worship some hunks of metals more than they care about peoples' lives.

We have sensible restrictions on a lot of things that can hurt people.  We restrict car ownership and driver's licenses with regard to public safety.  But the automobile came after the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written, so the car doesn't have an amendment allowing its free open use for any drunken incompetent who could plow into a school bus full of kids.  Yes, that still happens anyway with car accidents, but at least we have laws and a method of enforcement to reduce such a deadly risk.  We can't for guns.

And innocent people get shot because we DARE NOT consider even the slight possibility that we don't need a Second Amendment to protect the frontier anymore.

Madness.

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Tragedy July 20 2012

To the families and friends who lost people last night in Aurora, Colorado, my prayers and sympathies are with you.  These are weak words, they always are, compared to the suffering you all are going through right now.

These people went to the movie theater to be entertained.  Instead, they received pain and sorrow because of a sicko with a gun and with hate and fear in his heart.

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