On gun control, it's "heads, conservatives win; tails, progressives lose"

This blog post in National Review points out that the Oregon mass murderer obtained all of his guns legally, then snarkily concludes:

Presumably this will stop precisely nobody linking the incident to their preferred firearms-purchasing reforms.

Of course, if he had obtained the guns illegally, National Review and other conservatives would be saying that shows the gun laws were ineffective at stopping murder, because murderers brazenly violate the law.

That the current laws allowed him to obtain the guns is consistent with those who say the laws should make it harder to obtain guns.

Now, I don't know whether there's any good reform that would have stopped him from obtaining his guns, since this isn't a big issue of mine and I'm just not very well-informed about it. But I can state the obvious: pointing out that the law allowed a mass murderer to possess the gun he used to kill people does not make the case against cracking down on gun possession!

"Sorry I Murdered Everyone …

… But I’m An Introvert."

Why is most child murder not in the news?

Emily Bazelon says this about the Newtown, Connecticut mass murder:

They could be us, and we could be them, right? It was so easy for me at least to feel that way, looking up Newtown’s suburban demographics: Family median income $100,000 a year, almost half the town families with children, nearly three-quarters married couples. I don’t live in the suburbs, but I live in a small-city neighborhood filled with two-parent families about 45 minutes from Newtown, and I have a son in elementary school. That was more than enough to share in the chill that spread through the country Friday. I wish I identified as much with the families of drive-by shootings of children in my city, but I don’t. I use class and, I’m sure, race to distance myself. That doesn’t work this time though.

Based on a quick Google search, well over 1,000 children are murdered in the US every year, and somewhere between 3,000 to 5,000 children are killed by guns every year. (It's not surprising that the second statistic is much larger than the first — accidents and suicides are more common than murder.) How does the media decide that 20 children killed are more important than thousands of other children killed? Of course, what happened in Newtown was especially horrific because of the large number of children who were killed all in the same place and at the same time. But how much less horrific is the murder or reckless killing of one child? In the latter case, the pain may even be compounded by the realization that it isn't considered "news."

A few points about Justice Scalia's comments on sexual orientation and murder

Speaking at Princeton University, Scalia was asked by a gay student why he equates laws banning sodomy with those barring bestiality and murder.

"I don't think it's necessary, but I think it's effective," Scalia said, adding that legislative bodies can ban what they believe to be immoral.

Scalia has been giving speeches around the country to promote his new book, "Reading Law," and his lecture at Princeton comes just days after the court agreed to take on two cases that challenge the federal Defense of Marriage Act, which defines marriage as between a man and a woman. . . .

"It's a form of argument that I thought you would have known, which is called the 'reduction to the absurd,'" Scalia told Hosie of San Francisco during the question-and-answer period. "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?"

(Source.)

My mom, Ann Althouse, links to that article and points out that Justice Antonin Scalia is "antagonizing — antoninonizing — students."

My thoughts on this:

1. I interpret Scalia's phrase "moral feelings against" to refer to disgust. He lends this an air of dignity by using the lofty word "moral," but what he's really talking about is a visceral or aesthetic reaction expressed by interjections like "Eww!" and "Yuck!" We need to think about whether it's actually legitimate for disgust to serve as a primary motivation and justification for passing a law. There's no question that there are good laws that prohibit behavior that happens to be found disgusting. But the question is whether mere disgust can justify a law that would otherwise not seem to have a rational justification. It's fine for people to be disgusted at the thought of a particular couple having sex or even showing any kind of affection. This could be based on any number of factors, including the couple's gender, age, or physical attractiveness. Most people would find it offputting to see certain couples do so much as kiss in a movie — more offputting than they would find a movie scene showing a brutal act of murder. There's a much wider audience for images of violence than for atonal chamber music, but as long as even 1% of the population finds that kind of music pleasant, some people are going to happily exercise their right to create it, no matter how large a majority experiences it as a bunch of noise with no redeeming value. I wouldn't want to live in a society where the presence or absence of such feelings of disgust and revulsion determined what kinds of behavior we're allowed to engage in.

2. I assume Justice Scalia realizes that mentioning gay people and murderers in the same breath is going to be very inflammatory to a lot of people, and isn't the best way to win over those who didn't already agree with him. (He winked at this by sardonically adding: "I'm surprised you aren't persuaded.") This doesn't mean his words were poorly chosen — he might have good reasons to try to stir up controversy over this. And, of course, he has a right to express his viewpoint in his own inimitable style even if he offends people. But while he's remarking on the way voters can make their decisions based on visceral repulsion, he might want to consider that many people are viscerally repulsed by the way he makes his point, and this may affect people's votes in future presidential elections.

3. What matters far more than anyone's visceral feelings about what is or isn't disgusting is this: Murder laws uphold the principle that everyone in a society should have equal rights and responsibilities.

A hypothetical, inspired by last night's debate

Say you're a police investigator, and you find a dead body with no clear cause of death. It's a high-profile case, and the public wants to know if there was foul play. You give a press conference in which you say, "One thing's for sure: no act of murder will ever shake our resolve." By making that statement, have you announced that the person was definitely murdered? No. You've just uttered a platitude to express the fact that you're taking the case seriously, without committing to a position on what actually happened.

(See the "10:15" update on my live-blog of the debate.)

"No One Murdered Because Of This Image"

Jonah Goldberg analyzes the profound significance of an Onion article.

Attorney General Eric Holder: “The facts are clear. Intimate partner homicide is the leading cause of death for African-American women ages 15 to 45."

And he's right that the facts are clear. The facts are clear that Holder is wrong.

As that Volokh Conspiracy blog post explains (corroborating a column by Christina Hoff Sommers), homicide is not the most common cause of death of African-American women ages 15 to 45. It's the 5th most common. And those are homicides by anyone, including strangers; only a fraction of them involve domestic violence.

Sommers adds:

Holder's patently false assertion has remained on the Justice Department website for more than a year.

How is that possible? It is possible because false claims about male domestic violence are ubiquitous and immune to refutation. During the era of the infamous Super Bowl Hoax, it was widely believed that on Super Bowl Sundays, violence against women increases 40%. Journalists began to refer to the game as the "abuse bowl" and quoted experts who explained how male viewers, intoxicated and pumped up with testosterone, could "explode like mad linemen." During the 1993 Super Bowl, NBC ran a public service announcement warning men they would go to jail for attacking their wives.

In this roiling sea of media credulity, one lone journalist, Washington Post reporter Ken Ringle, checked the facts. As it turned out, there was no source: An activist had misunderstood something she read, jumped to her sensational conclusion, announced it at a news conference and an urban myth was born. Despite occasional efforts to prove the story true, no one has ever managed to link the Super Bowl to domestic battery.

Snopes has a longer takedown of the Super Bowl myth. Snopes concludes:

The ensuing weeks and months saw a fair amount of backpedalling by those who had propagated the Super Bowl Sunday violence myth, but — as usual — the retractions and corrections received far less attention than the sensational-but-false stories everyone wanted to believe, and the bogus Super Bowl statistic remains a widely-cited and believed piece of misinformation. As Sommers concluded, "How a belief in that misandrist canard can make the world a better place for women is not explained."

Video: Egyptian police shoot a man dead.

He seemed to be calmly standing with his arms outstretched, unarmed.

It happens near the end of this video, at 2:21 (via this blog post, which is via Nicholas Kristof's Facebook page):



Our tax dollars . . .

What should we learn from Hugo Tale-Yax, the homeless man in Queens who lay dying on the street while no one stopped to help?

This seems to be the feel-bad-about-humanity story of the moment:

Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax’s last act may have been helping a woman who was having an argument with another man last Sunday morning in Queens. But his last hour or so was spent as a curiosity for people passing him on the street as he lay face down in blood after being stabbed several times.

Mr. Tale-Yax, 31, was pronounced dead by medical workers who responded to a 911 call around 7:20 a.m. on April 18. The police confirmed the authenticity of surveillance video on The New York Post’s Web site that shows dozens of people walking by Mr. Tale-Yax, who was homeless, lying on the sidewalk at 144th Street and 88th Road in Jamaica. After more than an hour, the video shows one man shake Mr. Tale-Yax before turning him over to reveal the wounds.

This Metafilter thread about the story shows a wide range of different reactions. The standard response is that this is like the famous incident with Kitty Genovese, who was stabbed (also in Queens), and slowly died in public as many people failed to help. (I'd be remiss if I didn't note that this account has been seriously called into question.)

This supposedly shows the "bystander effect": people don't help someone in distress if there are many other people around. (Incidentally, this is at odds with the conventional wisdom that seemingly altruistic behavior is actually done out of a self-interested desire to appear benevolent: people are apparently more likely to be good Samaritans if there's no one watching.)

A related reaction is that the Tale-Yax incident is even worse than the Genovese incident:

For the first time in history, most of these people could have called 911 using an object in their pocket. Most people fundamentally suck. You've just got to try to be different.

Another reaction is: we shouldn't castigate the passers-by, because they probably had no idea what was going on. Tale-Yax probably just looked like an ordinary homeless person. Yes, he was lying in a pool of his own blood, but his body may have been covering up the blood. A Metafilter commenter elaborates on this:

I'm sorry, but when you are walking early in the morning and see a homeless man face-down on the sidewalk (a not-infrequent occurrence), you assume they are passed out drunk, because 90% of the time they are. You don't stop to see if they're okay, because that can turn into a dangerous situation if they awaken still intoxicated. I say this as a social worker who genuinely cares for the plight of the homeless and understands that the majority of the time their circumstances are caused by mental illness that they didn't have the resources to treat. But, I'm also a person who cares for her personal safety and lives in NYC and would likely have walked on by too, not assuming the worst.

It's also worth considering this commenter's experience:

I'm a woman, and I've been threatened by homeless dudes in various states of inebriation/mental confusion a few times in NYC. Just for walking too close/sharing a subway car. It's as terrifying as you expect, and pretty much removed my willingness to go up to homeless strangers and help them unasked.

But my favorite reaction is this one from another Metafilter commenter:

I guess the way to reconcile this is to say: the problem isn't that people walked on by without calling for help, and from this we can conclude that people suck; the problem is that it is so common and unremarkable to see human beings so totally destitute and outcast that they are, for all appearances, lying dead in the street, that when one of them actually is dead, because he has recently been murdered, nobody can tell the difference.

Should we read a mass murderer's blog?

After that guy opened fire in a parking lot the other day, killing three people and himself, someone posted his blog to Metafilter with this teaser:

A murderer attempts to explain, justify, and understand his crime (before the fact).

Now, that link to his blog doesn't work anymore. The full content of the site has been preserved at other URLs, but I'm not going to link to them since his blog encourages harassing specific private citizens at their addresses and phone numbers. (If you're really curious, you can look for them in the comments of the Metafilter post.)

Many commenters on Metafilter reacted very negatively to the decision to link to his blog, but most of them weren't objecting to the addresses and phone numbers. Many comments were along these lines:

I say delete this, so his "my voice will speak forever" crap is denied.

That's a reference to a message that the killer, George Sodini, posted at the bottom of his site:

This should not be taken off the web. It is obviously my view and opinion. Reproduce this as you wish, in its entirity. Copy this to usenet/newsgroups where my voice will speak forever!

And no less than the New York Times gave him what he wanted by immortalizing his words in an article with the headline, "Blog Details Shooter’s Frustration":

Mr. Sodini, 48, described his anger and frustration in painstaking detail ... in a chilling online diary, offering an extraordinarily stark portrait of a killer’s motives. ...

In his online journal, ... Mr. Sodini, a programmer-analyst at a local law firm, said that he had not had a girlfriend since 1984 and that he had not had sex since July 1990, when he was 29.

“I actually look good,” Mr. Sodini wrote in an entry dated Dec. 29, 2008. “I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me — over an 18- or 25-year period. That is how I see it. Thirty million is my rough guesstimate of how many desirable single women there are.

“A man needs a woman for confidence. He gets a boost on the job, career, with other men, and everywhere else when he knows inside he has someone to spend the night with and who is also a friend.”

Here's what I said to those who said we shouldn't be reading his words:

Isn't it worthwhile to try to understand the thoughts of someone who's going to commit murder? Similarly, I think it's worth reading bin Laden's writings to try to understand the terrorist mindset. The idea that Sodini's website should be ignored sounds a lot like those who balk at the idea of "understanding" terrorists. You can understand what went on in someone's mind without excusing their actions.

The fact that the site implores the public to harass random citizens is way over the line. I wouldn't mind seeing this deleted for that reason. But on the whole, I think his blog is pretty interesting, in the same way I find bin Laden's fatwas and Hitler's Mein Kampf interesting and important reading.

If you had read Mein Kampf when it originally came out, you might have been able to predict that the Holocaust would happen. Hitler describes huge natural disasters as positive things that could wipe out the weak elements of humanity, leaving a few strong people to start a super-race. We can't stop the Holocaust now, of course. But does that mean there's no reason to read Mein Kampf? No, it's still inherently worthwhile to try to understand the mind of someone capable of doing such great evil.

Similarly, some of the Metafilter commenters pointed out that reading Sodini's blog isn't going to help anyone stop this from "happening again." Even assuming that's true (though I don't know how they know that), the site can be worth reading without clearing the threshold of "This could save lives!" I actually find some of Sodini's comments (about how men need women) to be poignant and a little insightful. Of course, this is absolutely no excuse for killing random innocent people.

But some people will say this is missing the point: the problem is that if we pay any attention to the details of what Sodini said or what was going on in his life, we're "glorifying" a killer. Well, no, there's nothing glorious about it. His writings make him sound absolutely pathetic and insignificant. It's hard to imagine copycat murders inspired by the guy who claimed that he opened fire out of frustration that he couldn't find a girlfriend. It's easier to imagine the reverse: that a self-aggrandizing potential mass murderer out there would feel deflated to find out how utterly lacking in glory this guy is.

More proof of human stupidity

This sentence recently appeared in a serious news report in the Economist:

[E]fforts to convict albino-killers have been thwarted by a rotten judicial system, with witch doctors using bribery or threats of spells to escape trial.

If humans were truly rational beings, that sentence would never have to be written.

More:

Alas, the killing of albinos has spread outside Tanzania’s borders to Kenya, Uganda and particularly Burundi. On January 2nd an eight-year-old albino boy living in Burundi was hacked to death in front of his mother. The killers took his arms and legs. ...

Investigators say the body parts of a single murdered albino sell for over $1,000, with the skin and flesh dried out and set into amulets and the bones ground down into a powder. Artisanal miners in the gold and diamond fields directly south of Lake Victoria are the main buyers. Some sprinkle albino powder on the walls of their narrow pits, hoping for glitter. Uneducated and desperate to strike riches, they are taken in by witch doctors’ stories of the wealth-giving properties of the potions.