Seriously, why is it the people who most love guns are always the people who should never, ever, ever be around a firearm, let alone dozens of them?
Gun nuts
Menace 2 Society
I’m sure many of you have already caught wind of this lunatic, but in case you have not, meet Police Chief Mark Kessler:
Mark Kessler really loves guns. “I carry an M-16 at work,” he says. He can do that because he’s a police officer — in fact, the chief of police in the tiny borough of Gilberton, a hamlet of less than a thousand in the coal-rich hills of Eastern Pennsylvania. But even in a profession where carrying a gun is part of the job description, Kessler is an outlier. Last month, he told a story to a local Tea Party group about how he was stopped by police officers in a neighboring town for displaying his machine gun to a friend, even though he was in full dress uniform. And that, Kessler said, is the problem with law enforcement today in a nutshell.
“They want to kick butt and take names, and ruin lives, over nonsense. They terrorize people over a turn signal,” he said, wearing an Oath Keepers t-shirt. “I’ve got better things to do with my time than worry about somebody who’s got a broken taillight. Seriously, I really do.”
Better things, for Kessler, include opening new chapters of the paramilitary militia group he founded, pushing legislation to fight the encroaching tyranny of the federal government, and making flamboyant YouTube videos that portray him “shoot[ing] a libtard out of a tree” or taunting the United Nations, but always shooting lots and lots of souped-up guns.
I wouldn’t freak out too much about this nutjob, because natural selection has already taken one stab at removing this stain on the human race and will no doubt finish the job soon enough:
The Gilberton police chief’s handgun that discharged during a scuffle in a borough bar early Sunday has yet to be recovered by state police.
Troopers are investigating an incident where Mark Kessler, who was off-duty at the time, became involved in an altercation already under way among patrons inside a crowded 2nd Street Pub about midnight when his pistol discharged, shooting him in the hand.
Sgt. Barry Whitmoyer, commander of the Frackville station, said Friday the weapon had not been accounted for and it is not known if the gun was fired intentionally or went off by accident.
“We don’t have the weapon and still have a lot of questions to answer,” Whitmoyer said. “At this point we really don’t know what we have.”
Guns, booze, and this guy. What a combo. I give him a year before he is in jail or dead. And isn’t disappearing his weapon after shooting it in a bar obstruction of justice?
Record and send
The Martin verdict may well be legally justifiable but I have less enthusiasm for the overall message, which boils down to make sure you kill the other guy first. Unless you are black. The upshot of this message for a young black man being harassed in his own neighborhood by an aggressive jerk, a scenario that HAPPENS ABOUT ONCE EVERY FIVE SECONDS, sounds pretty lose-lose. Here is one thought that will not whisk away the many layers of fear and resentment that makes race relations such a profound problem in this country, but it might help.
A while back, when my wife got her first smartphone, I mused* about how nice it would be to have a simple button or button combination that would start recording video while sending it to a pre-set friend or relative. It seems hard to think of any other personal safety device that is at the same time so cheap, effective and compatible with technology that everyone already carries around. If someone bothers you for whatever reason you can take out the phone as if to give it to them, push the button and invite them to proceed with the more or less total certainty of going to jail. This probably would not stop the truly crazy or someone wearing a mask, but it would have more uses than mace or a gun.
As far as I know the idea has not been implemented yet. Nonetheless, in situations that are more uncomortable than dangerous, for example men acting like a douche to women, the more awkward strategy of login-open camera app-snap-upload later works pretty well. How do I know that it works? One, anecdotal evidence. I have heard about plenty of encounters trending from bad to worse, but which turned around as soon as the dude found out that he might end up in a shaming post on some blog, tumblr or Facebook (with its quite good face-recognition software). Second, the men’s rights crowd are up in arms over it.
Sidebar note!
The ounter-feminists coined a clever protest term: ‘creep shaming’, cf. slut shaming. This illustrates once again what Atrios describes as the conservatives problem with consent. Whatever a ‘slut’ does is consensual. When non-consensual we call it ‘sexual asssault’ or ‘rape’. Creepy behavior is not consensual. Compare and contrast.
/sidebar
Like I said, a small thing like this will not heal the racial divide in America. Still, when harassed by a jerk it could really help to activate a record-and-send feature on the phone and ask the other guy whether he really wants to become a celebrity on YouTube. Whereas the legal system has a pretty high bar for proving that someone acted like a racially motivated jerk, most people understand that the internet jumps to conclusions like Nancy Grace on meth. In my view this kind of feature would pay for itself in the same way that a seatbelt will not save you in a sharknado but it helps in the kind of accident that most people encounter most of the time. Apple, Google, how about it?
(*) No link because even us unemployed do not have the time to deal with our C- search functionality.
Guardians of the Gated Community
I didn’t sleep much last night and woke up feeling sick with sorrow and dread. Yesterday was a monumentally shitty day in this corner of the blogosphere, what with the confirmation of General Stuck’s death and then the horrible news about Tunch, John’s feline doppelgänger (a big ol’ sweetie disguised as a badass) and this blog’s floofy, fabulous, irreplaceable mascot.
Hard on the heels of that, we learned that George Zimmerman skates after shooting an unarmed teenager to death. Many of us expected this, but it was still hard to hear. I watched a bit of the coverage after the verdict came in, and the most affecting commentary I heard was from Joy Reid, my fellow Floridian before MSNBC wisely signed her, whom I first became aware of when she and I were slugging it out with some jackasses in the comments section of a Florida newspaper during the first Obama campaign.
Reid described having “the talk” with her teenage son, walking him through the steps involved in optimizing a black male’s odds of making it through an encounter with police officers without getting tased, beaten or shot. Be respectful and non-threatening. Don’t make any sudden moves. And now she wonders how to tell her son that he needs to walk on eggshells with virtually everyone, not just the local authorities. Because now just about anyone down here can appoint themselves Sheriff of the Sidewalk or Cop of the Cul-de-Sac.
We’ve spent a lot of time and energy here in spirited discussions (and interminable internet slap-fights) about the NSA revelations and what that all means. It’s a discussion worth having, and despite a few extreme exceptions that prove the rule, I think most of us agree we don’t want to live in a police state and most support greater transparency and want to ratchet down the war footing, however we may disagree on the true nature of our current status and the methods for getting to a better place.
But honestly, I’m more worried about the fake police state, the mindset that compels a shlub like Zimmerman (and millions of others) to think it’s perfectly normal to shove a loaded pistol in his pants for a trip to Target, which is where he claims he was going before he profiled, pursued and killed Trayvon Martin.
Zimmerman’s horrible brother Robert Jr. was on CNN last night and noted that he’s glad George Zimmerman’s gun will be returned to him since he needs it for protection. He cited death threats on Twitter. Well, Zimmerman thought he needed that gun in a far more fortunate time, before any of us knew his fucking name.
Florida issues more concealed carry permits than any other state – over a million so far. But don’t think that this is the answer, as amusing as it is:
[Edited to replace “Bugs Bunny sawing off the state of Florida” GIF with a link.]Because it’s not just Florida. It’s a sickness at the heart of this country, which is ass-deep in guns from coast to coast. It’s a putrification of the soul that would allow a Zimmerman to put words from a Dirty Harry script into the mouth of the kid he just killed: “You’re gonna die tonight, motherfucker!” “You got me!”
The laws in this state are particularly fucked up because, thanks to the tireless efforts of the NRA, they were designed to specifically remove the “duty to retreat.” But please don’t make the mistake of thinking this is a Florida problem.
Remember that 20 mostly white children were gunned down in affluent, civilized Connecticut. So far, despite the tireless efforts of their families, President Obama and Vice President Biden, not a damn thing has been done to address it.
This is an America problem, this obsession with guns, this fixation on dispensing hollow-point justice to “the other,” and it will take the combined efforts of all of us to change it. We have to try.
The Wild, Wild South
A defense lawyer writes to Josh Marshall at TPM:
In Florida, if self-defense is even suggested, it’s the states obligation to prove it’s absence beyond a reasonable doubt(!). That’s crazy. But ‘not guilty’ was certainly a reasonable result in this case. As I told in friend in Tampa today though, if you’re ever in a heated argument with anyone, and you’re pretty sure there aren’t any witnesses, it’s always best to kill the other person. They can’t testify, you don’t have to testify, no one else has any idea what happened; how can the state ever prove beyond a doubt is wasn’t self-defense? Holy crap! What kind of system is that?
I understand the reflex to lash out at the jury, but what were they supposed to do if that’s a fair reading of the law? Apparently the Florida legislature wants a system where gun nuts who prowl the streets and get themselves in fights can shoot the other guy and get away with it, as long as there are no witnesses.
You’ll Have to Read This to Believe It
In what can only be considered a modern masterpiece of wingnuttery, Daniel Flynn pens an op-ed in the American Spectator that is one half Kim Du Toit’s infamous Pussification of the Western Male and 1/2 half Ron Paul newsletter. You really have to read it to believe it:
They don’t make men like they used to. One can consult a Danish study that shows plummeting testosterone levels for scientific confirmation of this. Or, one could more easily turn on any cable news network’s wall-to-wall coverage of the Zimmerman-Martin case, a tragedy involving two males fumbling in the dark on how to be men.
***On the maturity count, Trayvon Martin might reasonably plead not guilty by reason of chronology. Seventeen-year-old boys quite often act like, in the vernacular of Zimmerman, “f—-ing punks.” Most grow out of it, but Mr. Martin unfortunately will not get that chance. Rarely, in spite of their exaggerated masculine posturing, do teenage boys behave as mature males.
Martin’s Twitter feed reads as a parody of poor grammar and an even more impoverished vocabulary. There, he’s a “No Limit N-gga,” girls he knows are “bitches” and “hoes,” and the primary extracurricular activity he immerses himself in is marijuana. The gold-teeth smile, the tattoos, the ten-day suspension from school, and all the rest appear as pathetic attempts to assert his virility. Yet, as his supporters point out, Trayvon also liked Skittles and Chuck E. Cheese’s. The presentation that Trayvon affected and the Trayvon that his supporters present are, like so many making the journey from adolescence to adulthood, at war internally.
George Zimmerman, in contrast, projects a courtroom image of a meek pudgeball who wouldn’t (couldn’t?) hurt a fly — and not in a Norman Bates way. Perhaps this is the effect that his lawyers intended. But it jibes with what we know. According to one unidentified witness, Zimmerman endured a domineering mother’s frequent beatings and a docile father who failed to stick up for his kids. His mixed-martial arts instructor described him as “physically soft,” a student who lacked athleticism and “didn’t know how to really effectively punch.”
One wonders if the cage-fighting classes, the pursuit of a career in law enforcement, and a firearm kept ready to fire were Zimmerman’s ways of discovering his elusive manhood in a manner akin to Trayvon’s tattoos, coarse language, and demonstrative drug use. With the teenager sans a father in the home to serve as guide, and the neighborhood-watch captain growing up watching the cowed captain of his home, the pair’s past altered their future as much as anything else did.
Zimmerman’s screams and Trayvon slamming Zimmerman’s head into the concrete weren’t the acts of men. A man is neither a woman nor an animal. The proper response to an assault by a 158-pound teenager isn’t to scream for help or grab for a gun. It is to punch back or better yet subdue and issue a spanking. And a sucker punch, the repeated hitting of a downed opponent, and the bashing of a skull against the concrete doesn’t pass muster with the Marquess of Queensberry. Perhaps the “No Holds Barred Fighting” dojo that Zimmerman had signed up for would approve.
***Civilizing men out of existence has come at great cost to civilization. Instead of men, we get feminine imitations lacking beauty. We get lost boys compensating by becoming barbarians. We get Sanford, Florida, February 26, 2012.
It’s breathtaking, especially as beyond the racism and sexism, there is also the firm belief that Zimmerman is the victim- notice the notion that it is Martin who should be pleading not guilty. Not to mention, there is a political party that would like to reduce the number of guns in the hands of unstable people. Daniel Flynn is not in that party.
I think I feel sick.
You Can Fool the NRA, But You Can’t Fool the Underwriters
A new Kansas law allowing gun owners to carry weapons in public buildings, including schools, has thrust a major Des Moines-based insurer into the national gun control debate.
The EMC Insurance Cos. insures 85 percent to 90 percent of all Kansas school districts and has refused to renew coverage for schools that permit teachers and custodians to carry concealed firearms on their campuses under the new law, which took effect July 1. It’s not a political decision, but a financial one based on the riskier climate it estimates would be created, the insurer said.
“We’ve been writing school business for almost 40 years, and one of the underwriting guidelines we follow for schools is that any on-site armed security should be provided by uniformed, qualified law enforcement officers,” said Mick Lovell, EMC’s vice president for business development. “Our guidelines have not recently changed.”The Kansas Legislature passed the law after the fatal shootings of 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Conn., in December.
***“It’s one thing to have a trained peace officer with a gun in school; it’s a completely different situation when you have a custodian or a teacher with a gun,” Skow said. “That changes the risk of insuring a school and magnifies it considerably.”
Insurers simply don’t know how to price the added risk yet, he said, but they know it’s there.
No kidding.
Somewhat related, the fraternity boys are always bitching about how slow the college is to fix things, and some things are dangerous and no one pays attention to them (they have a deck on the back of the house that really needs to be redone, as it is, it is starting to slide down the hell)> I always tell them, if they are serious about it, take some pictures, walk up to the President’s office, show them the pictures, and then tell him that if it isn’t fixed in a timely manner you are going to send them to whomever insures the school. A bunch of lazy administration folks might not pay attention to you, but boy howdy will the idea of a deck with dozens of young men and women sliding down the hill on a Saturday night causing who knows how many injuries and fatalaties raise some eyebrows at the insurance company HQ.
Although knowing this current college admin, their solution would be to rip down the deck and just put yellow danger tape everywhere and be done with it.
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