New Depths of "Both Sides-ism": Gun Violence Edition

Commenting on the only-in-America news that the first 24 days of 2023 have already seen 73 Americans killed in mass shootings, Paul Campos points to a CNN article on the matter which he summarizes as

point[ing] out that fault lies on both sides of the political aisle for this epidemic, given that the Republicans don’t want to do anything about it, and the Democrats are unable to force the Republicans to do anything about it.

Ha ha -- good one, but obviously that's an exaggeration. Here's what the article says:

A partisan political system that is little help

Resignation that nothing will change is fueled by a political system that is so entrenched on guns that it can’t usually frame a meaningful response to shootings, let alone solutions. Offers of “thoughts and prayers” by pro-gun rights Republicans are routinely mocked by Americans looking for reform. Conservatives often divert blame to a national mental health crisis that they do little to alleviate.

Second Amendment absolutists often argue that if more “good guys” carried guns, everyone would be safer. In their own ritualistic response, Democrats often re-up demands for an assault weapons ban they know they can’t pass.

Sigh. 

Schoolchildren Shouldn't Have To Live Like Jews

In the wake of the Uvalde massacre, the internet is replete with proposals on how to avoid or at least mitigate the risks of yet another school shooting. Some in the Jewish community have suggested adopting some of the measures we have taken to keep our schools, centers, and synagogues safe -- things like controlled entry, on-site security, and other forms of "hardening the target".

Some of these suggestions might be good ideas, and most are being made with the best of intentions. But I feel like they overlooking something very important.

Growing up Jewish, these sorts of security interventions are so normal one can almost forget how abnormal they are. Of course there is a noticeable police presence during high holiday services. Of course someone has to check you in at the door before you're allowed to even enter the synagogue. Of course there is onerous keycard entry requirements if you want to access the building for a evening Torah study session. It is jarring to encounter the freedom of places that don't have that sort of security because they don't operate with the background presupposition that someone could be trying to kill their patrons at any moment.

Because these interventions are so normalized, we forget that having to impose these sorts of security measures is bad. These measures make Jewish life worse -- less open and more stressful, less accessible and more cloistered. Does anybody think that the ideal synagogue experience is like this? They may nonetheless be necessary because of the dangers Jews face -- but that's just it: they are reflective of Jews being a persecuted minority who are regularly targeted with violent threats and assaults. What does it mean to cross-apply them to the context of public elementary schools? It's saying that every 5 - 11 year old in America is as vulnerable as a member of the minority group that is, per capita, the most common target of hate crimes in the country! That's terrible! That should be seen as a catastrophe! If that is indeed the state of being a student in America, that is an appalling failure!

The title of this post is deliberately provocative. Jews should not have to live like this either. We should be able to live our communal life open and without fear, not looking over our shoulders for the next active shooter. But we've resigned ourselves to an inability to eliminate the root cause of our problem, antisemitism. We can't do it on our own, and broader society is not interested in investing the effort to make the project a success. So stuck with the reality of persistent violent antisemitism, at least over the medium term, these measures are suboptimal ameliorations of the consequences of our continued marginalization.

If schoolchildren are in the same boat, that must mean we've reached the same conclusion for them: as a polity, we just have given up on our ability to actually eliminate the threat to schoolchildren. We cannot be bothered to make the social and political investments necessary so that the status of schoolchildren is not analogous to that of a persecuted minority regularly targeted by violent threats. We have resigned ourselves to that level of vulnerability for our children, and now just seek to ameliorate the effects. That is appalling. It is appalling that Jews are forced to accept this; and it is a perverse form of justice that this quiescence be extended to every family with minor children.

I do not claim that the experiences of the Jewish community cannot be helpful in building out better security for public schools, in this decidedly suboptimal world where we have apparently decided to just accept this terrible vulnerability as a baseline. But we should not lose sight of the fact that if our experiences are even analogous -- what a striking indictment that is of our society. People should not have to live like this.

Well-Trained, Courageous Police Won't Stop Another Uvalde

There's a lot of chatter right now about reports that police waited quite a long time before police entered in force the Texas elementary school where a shooter had murdered nearly two dozen people. Much of that chatter is of a very typical brand of Twitter discourse of the "what good are cops, what were they waiting for, they're cowards, even in a situation like this they won't risk they're lives" variety.

I think that at least some of this criticism, though not all of it, is probably unfair. But more to the point: it is because I think that some of this criticism is probably unfair that I am very confident police responses are not going to stop another Uvalde. 

Here's the blunt truth: a school shooter, who does not care about his own life and hopes to kill as many other people as possible, has (to put it extremely bloodlessly) flexibility that those trying to stop him do not. To take one example: the gunman can, whenever he wants, enter any room he wants firing entirely indiscriminately. The police, by contrast, cannot simply enter any room they want firing indiscriminately; nor would we want them to. It's not a matter of courage, or numbers; it is a structural imbalance that favors the gunman over those trying to stop him.

But that's exactly why all this talk of "hardening the target" or bringing even more cops with more guns is so clearly not a viable response. Putting aside (though we shouldn't) the problem that this "solution" is basically to convert our schools into fire traps or prisons. Once a shooter is on site with a gun and a disregard for human life, they have a built-in advantage that no amount of police presence can fully reverse. Sometimes their rampage will be stopped earlier, other times later, but it's all mostly a matter of luck. Short of turning schools into bunkers, the idea that the "right" security measures can stop a man who doesn't care about his own life and can freely and easily access high-powered weaponry without breaking a sweat is nonsense. 

I have no idea whether the Texas police who were on site during the Uvalde shooting responded with ideal tactics. And, as awful as it is to say, if a shooting is ongoing, there really isn't much replacement for bringing it to an end other than armed officers. But if a shooting is ongoing, we've already failed in the most relevant respects. If the goal is to prevent these shootings from occurring outright, not to shrug our shoulders and say "it could have been worse", armed police are not going to do much good -- and it has nothing to do with courage, or armament, or tactics, or temperament.

Uvalde Parents Are About To Learn Just How Little the American People Care About Them

A shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas has killed nearly two dozen people, including nineteen children.

I grieve for the parents and families of those who were killed. They are going through a tragedy I cannot even begin to fathom. But as awful as things are right now, I cannot imagine what the survivors will have to endure starting about a week or a month from now.

Because that is when it will be hammered home just how little the American people care about them.

I want us to really understand this point. We love to talk about tragedies bringing out the best in the American people. We love heartwarming stories about blood being donated and volunteers flooding hospitals and homes being opened up. I don't want to discount any of those things. But we never talk about, and we should talk about, how tragedies like this bring out the absolute worst in the American people -- and here I'm not talking about the shooter. I'm talking about us, all of us, as a collective polity, who in a democratic society is tasked with making a collective response to catastrophes like these and has consistently collectively decided to shrug and carry on as if nothing happened.

It is human nature to shout, holler, cry out when we are hurt or scared. The more grievous the injury, the louder the scream. Why? To attract attention. Deeply rooted in our psyche is a fundamental belief that if others become aware of our hurt, they will help us.

The level of grief and pain the Uvalde parents are going through is unimaginable to me. Experiencing it, and knowing that others know you're experiencing it, naturally breeds the assumption that others will try to help you. How could they not? How could they be impervious to such raw, acute anguish? How could they just ignore the cries?

Imagine if you were shot on a public street. You cry out; people see your distress. Imagine if they do nothing. They just keep going about their business. Perhaps a few shoot you a sympathetic glance as they carry on with their errands. You beg for help -- maybe your leg can be saved if you get to a hospital quick enough. Nobody does anything. You are left alone to fester in agony -- seeing with your very eyes people who you know know how hurt you are and are consciously electing to do nothing about it.

And yet -- we know from far too much experience that ignoring is exactly what will happen to the Uvalde parents. We all are witnesses to their anguish, we all hear their cries for help. They know we hear them, and we know they know we hear them. Even still, there will be no serious efforts to respond to this catastrophe or ensure it does not happen again; same as there were no such efforts for the catastrophe before this, or the one before that. In a few days, the American people will have moved on. In a few months, they will make choices at the ballot box that could be responsive to the pain of the Uvalde parents, but most likely will not be. We could choose to elect politicians who would enact policies that might stop tragedies like this, but we won't -- stopping CRT in schools or maximizing our tax breaks will be far higher priorities. And so our politicians will continue to not pass meaningful gun control measures, and our judicial overlords will continue to pick away at the few that are enacted in slavish fealty to a maximalist interpretation of the Second Amendment. Nothing will change. The Uvalde parents will have been utterly abandoned to their grief. They will know, in their bones, that Americans simply do not care.

I've been struck, when reading about the "anti-CRT" panic, how often the complaint of the activist-rabble rousers sounds in the register of avoiding "guilt". "I don't want my kid to feel guilty!" I absolutely do not believe anyone should feel guilty for who they are. But we absolutely can justly be made to feel guilty for the choices we make, or fail to make. Our collective decision to turn away from scores of grieving parents, to not take any meaningful action to try to ameliorate their pain or at the very least change course so the next tragedy does not occur, is indeed a choice, and one we should feel very guilty about.

Maybe that's the right approach. Fear that our children might be next doesn't motivate us; nor does justice and retribution for the last batch of victims. Perhaps being forced to sit with the guilt that our choices represent abandoning our fellows in their moments of greatest need, to really stew in our own callousness and confront our abject indifference to the searing pain around us -- maybe that will be enough to motivate a change in behavior. I'm doubtful. But maybe.

We Chose This

I was in middle school when Columbine happened.

At the time, it felt like a national watershed. In hindsight, I actually don't know the degree to which Columbine stood out from other school shootings, versus whether it just happened to be "the" big shooting that occurred in the formative part of my life where I began paying attention to such things. Maybe for people born a few years earlier or a few years later, a different school shooting was "the" shooting. Lord knows we don't lack for choices.

Nonetheless, I remember thinking then that obviously Columbine was going to prompt us to do something about gun violence. There was no chance that our collective response to that tragedy would be to do nothing. As a kid, you believe adults are interested in protecting you. Perhaps as an adult, without strong evidence to the contrary, you also believe other adults will take the steps necessary to ensure children aren't being gunned down in schools or in streets.

But, more than 20 years later, our response to school shootings has indeed been: essentially nothing. We can't say we're still "working on it", or that we're still processing. At this point, it is fair to say America has made a conscious choice as a polity that we find school shootings to be an acceptable price to pay in exchange for allowing guns everywhere.

Twenty years after Columbine, nobody can pretend as if we don't know the consequences of our choices. We chose to let Oxford happen. We'll no doubt choose to let the next one happen too. There is nothing surprising or shocking or even unexpected happening anymore. Each of these deaths is attributable not just to the loathsome gunmen who pull the triggers, but to choices we've made collectively as a community. We are committed to an open highway of free, unfettered access to guns, and these bodies are the change the NRA throws into the tollbooth on the way.

Preparing the Meat Roundup

I'm going on the law school job market this fall. That process began this week, when I sent in my application to the "Faculty Recruitment Conference" in Washington, DC, charmingly nicknamed the "meat market". But possibly inappropriate name aside, it actually is a relatively humane way of organizing academic hiring: all the law schools come to DC for their first round interviews, which take place over one weekend at a single hotel. Makes for a rather frenetic weekend, but the centralized process does cut down on applicant labor time.

* * *

And then there were none: the last African-American GOP Representative in the House, Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, will not run for re-election in 2020. Hurd barely squeaked by Gina Ortiz Jones in 2018; Jones had already jumped into the race for 2020.

LibDem wave! LibDems picked up a parliamentary seat in the Wales constituency of Brecon and Radnorshire. The seat had been held by the Tories, and their defeat cuts Boris Johnson's parliamentary majority (which already depends on the support of a third party) to a single vote.

The Poway synagogue shooter was inspired by the Christchurch mosque shooter. That's because extreme-right Islamophobia feeds into extreme-right antisemitism, and vice versa.

Despite the efforts by some on the right that reflexively label the entire "squad" as antisemitic, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez actually hasn't said all that much on Israel or Jews. A recent interview changed that -- and revealed that her positions are for the most part wholly harmonious with those of liberal Jews across the country (absent, perhaps, her fondness for IfNotNow). "The same way that me criticizing Trump doesn’t make me anti-American, criticizing the occupation doesn’t make you anti-Israel, frankly. It doesn’t mean you are against the existence of a nation." Well spoken.

Long-time Baltimore-area Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) -- in the news after Trump attacked him by declaring all of Baltimore a place "no human" would want to live -- has long quietly promoted an exchange program bringing young Black Americans to Israel. JTA interviewed several of the trip's alumni -- they offer a great endorsement of what seems to be a wonderful program.

NPR interviews Wanda Sykes. Who knew she used to work at the NSA?

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) Shot in Tuscon

US Representative Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was reportedly shot in the head at close range while hosting an event in Tuscon, Arizona. Several other members of her staff were also reportedly hurt by the gunman, who is now in custody.

There is no word on Rep. Giffords' condition as of yet. Though the shooting occurred at a constituent event, there is no report on the gunman's motives, or whether Giffords was targeted.

I'll update this post as more information comes out. Please keep Rep. Giffords and all those injured in your thoughts.

UPDATE: Earlier reports had said Rep. Giffords had died, but the latest news is that she is currently in surgery but still alive.

UPDATE #2: MSNBC reports that Federal District Judge John M. Roll is among the dead.

Getting Me Killed

The Pittsburgh man who shot and killed three Pittsburgh police officers believed that the US was influenced by "Zionist propaganda":

Mr. Perkovic and other former classmates said they were surprised by this morning's events. Mr. Perkovic said Mr. Poplawski was opposed to "Zionist propaganda" and was fearful that his right to own weapons would be taken away but he wasn't a member of an organized group or militia.

"He always said that if someone tried to take his weapons away he would do what his forefathers told him to do and defend himself."

Another friend, Aaron Vire, 23, said he'd helped Mr. Poplawski and Mr. Perkovic with a radio show they'd broadcast on the Internet, discussing "politics, girls and life."

Mr. Poplawski had supported Republican candidate John McCain in the presidential election and had "very spirited debates" about Democratic candidate Barack Obama, Mr. Vire said. Mr. Poplawski was opposed to Mr. Obama's election, which he thought would result in the loss of his rights, Mr. Vire said.

"He wasn't a racist but thought some of his amendments were overlooked," Mr. Vire said. Even though Mr. Vire is black and Mr. Poplawski is white, the debates over President Obama did not hurt their friendship, he said.

Mr. Poplawski told him he bought his guns "because he felt the quality of life was being diminished," Mr. Vire said.

"He said he'll be ready if there's ever an invasion of the United States and that he had stockpiled foods and guns for that eventuality."

Dave Neiwert already has the goods on how Mr. Poplawski was probably stoked by right-wing extreme paranoia about Obama, liberals, and guns. Today, three Pittsburgh officers died because of it. But it's worth noting the usual right-wing intersection between anti-state violence and anti-Semitic attitudes.

Believe me, I know enough to worry about left-wing anti-Semitism. But in this country, it remains right-wing elements which are most likely to provoke and implement violence against me and my family. When Beck, Limbaugh, et al launch their rants and ratings calling for violence and insurrection, that gets pointed directly at me, because I'm contained on the list of legitimate targets by the folks with the gun. And it's something I keep in mind about anyone who supports or apologizes for these inflammatory thugs.

Compare

Here's John Derbyshire on the victims of the Virginia Tech massacre:

As NRO's designated chickenhawk, let me be the one to ask: Where was the spirit of self-defense here? Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn't anyone rush the guy? It's not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness' sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren't very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can't hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren't bad.

Yes, yes, I know it's easy to say these things: but didn't the heroes of Flight 93 teach us anything? As the cliche goes—and like most cliches. It's true—none of us knows what he'd do in a dire situation like that. I hope, however, that if I thought I was going to die anyway, I'd at least take a run at the guy.

And here's Nathaniel Blake:

Something is clearly wrong with the men in our culture. Among the first rules of manliness are fighting bad guys and protecting others: in a word, courage. And not a one of the healthy young fellows in the classrooms seems to have done that. ...

Like Derb, I don’t know if I would live up to this myself, but I know that I should be heartily ashamed of myself if I didn’t. Am I noble, courageous and self-sacrificing? I don’t know; but I should hope to be so when necessary.

And here's the story about Virginia Tech shooting victim (and Holocaust survivor) Liviu Librescu:

Virginia Tech University Prof. Liviu Librescu, described as a family man who once did research for NASA, sacrificed his life to save his students in the shooting rampage yesterday.
[...]
The students in the class dropped to the floor and started overturning desks to hide behind as about a dozen shots rang out, he said.

Then the gunfire started coming closer. Librescu, 77, fearlessly braced himself against the door, holding it shut against the gunman in the hall, while students darted to the windows of the second-floor classroom to escape the slaughter, survivors said.

Mallalieu and most of his classmates hung out of the windows and dropped about 10 feet to bushes and grass below - but Librescu stayed behind to hold off the crazed gunman.

Alec Calhoun, 20, said the last thing he saw before he jumped from the window was Librescu, blocking the door against the madman in the hallway.

He died trying to protect the students.

As well as survivor Zach Petkewicz's heroic actions:

Monday's toll inside Virginia Tech's Norris Hall might have included 11 more students had it not been for a long, rectangular table and a quick-thinking senior who used it to deflect the rampage of his fellow classmate.

Zach Petkewicz said he didn't recognize the sounds that pierced the door and cinder-block walls of his classroom as gunshots until he heard a scream from the hallway of the engineering building.
[...]
"They immediately slammed the door shut, told us, everybody kind of went into a frenzy, a panic. I hid behind the podium and then just kind of looked up at the door. Like, there's nothing stopping this guy from just coming in. And so I said, 'We need to barricade this door.' "

Petkewicz described his state of mind unabashedly: "I was completely scared out of my mind originally, just went into a cowering position, and then just realized you have got to do something."

Petkewicz and two other students shoved a table against the door and held it there as gunshots continued to ring out from the hallway outside the classroom.

"He came to our door, tried the handle and couldn't get in because we were pushing up against it -- and tried to force his way in and got the door to open up about 6 inches -- and then we just lunged at it and closed it back up and that's when he backed up and shot twice into the middle of the door, thinking we were up against it trying to get him out."

But Petkewicz said that instead he and the other students had placed themselves in front of the cinder-block walls, where they listened to what was going on out of sight a few inches away.

"I just heard his clip drop to the ground, and he reloaded and I thought he was coming back for a second round to try to get his way in there. He didn't say a word, and he just turned and kept firing down the hall and didn't try to get back in."

Suffice to say, even had there not been heroes like these, I'd hold Derbyshire and Blake in utter contempt. If you ever needed one, they are the picture of tactless, disgraceful assholes.