Across the Great Divide

Signs of Emotion.

I've had bullets on the brain, so the other day, we took a long hike to get away from the news, the blogs and discussions of the Second Amendment. Heading up Coal Canyon, we thought we might get to see some of the wild mustangs living there, but mostly we saw where horses had been.

You could walk for hundreds of yards, and then there would be a pile of horse flop. Often, it represented the work of several horses over a period of time. On previous trips, we'd seen the mustangs let loose on an existing deposit, like a dog marking a tree, but without the sniffing.

The only horses we saw was a pair far down valley, spotted near the end of our hike.

Of course, this being rural America, I couldn't totally escape bullet thoughts. Even the trail head sign that mapped the area's many trails was scarred with high caliber bullet holes.

Since I've been working on how to get past gun-owner and gun-restricter stereotypes, the blasted signs naturally brought me to this thought: What are the archetypal images — both positive and negative — that reinforce attitudes about guns?

My riddled signs can evoke one view, that boys with guns are reckless and irresponsible, with no respect for others and a strong dislike for anything that might restrain their personal enjoyment.

Here's a pair of posters from Oleg Volk who has an extensive gallery of gun photography and propaganda images putting forward the idea we've been discussing here — that guns are tools of empowerment and responsibility.

On the left is the face meant to reassure the rest of the world "we're just normal Americans looking out for ourselves." On the right is a typical appeal to logic (predators exist and the shepherd can't be everywhere) and emotion (you don't want to be a defenseless sheep like those anti-gun nuts).

 

There's a whole other category of propaganda aimed at reinforcing beliefs of the gun faithful that it's stupid to be a voluntary victim, while to a non-gun owner, these images might seem over-wrought and even paranoid. The image on the right bridges from personal safety to personal freedom, an important theme, since the feared armed intruders are not just criminals, they are a powerful and coercive government.

Volk is careful to avoid racial stereotyping when representing intruders, and most focus on the defender, allowing to viewer to conjure up their own threat. Other images reach out specifically to minorities who are disproportionately victims of violent crime. Images of family and cultural traditions, especially hunting, are other common themes.

Viewing these and the many more in Volk's gallery, I think to when I steered my conversation with Joel Rosenberg toward the emotional aspects of the gun control debate and met with impatience over talking about "feelings." It's impossible to look at the images employed to support the gun rights side and believe emotion has nothing to do with it. And while the visual propaganda may not be as prolific on the other side, it's there, too.

Remember the Ownership Society?

Back in his first term, President Bush was pushing what he called the "Ownership Society." The ownership society held up the vision of ordinary Americans climbing up the responsibility ladder and joining the propertied class where they would pluck prosperity leaves off the Liberty Tree forever more.

Or something like that.

Of course, it was largely the kind face of a scheme to privatize social security (and shovel business to Wall Street), gain support for education vouchers, shift health care costs to individuals and, of course, to cut taxes. The core symbol of the ownership society was home ownership, especially among minorities, who tended not to vote Republican, but may be persuaded to after getting a taste of the good life.

As Naomi Klein wrote back in January:

"Under 50 percent of African Americans and Hispanic Americans own a home," Bush observed in 2002. "That's just too few." He called on Fannie Mae and the private sector "to unlock millions of dollars, to make it available for the purchase of a home"— an important reminder that subprime lenders were taking their cue straight from the top.

Today, the basic promises of the ownership society have been broken. First the dot-com bubble burst; then employees watched their stock-heavy pensions melt away with Enron and WorldCom. Now we have the subprime mortgage crisis, with more than 2 million homeowners facing foreclosure on their homes. Many are raiding their 401(k)s — their piece of the stock market — to pay their mortgage. Wall Street, meanwhile, has fallen out of love with Main Street. To avoid regulatory scrutiny, the new trend is away from publicly traded stocks and toward private equity. In November Nasdaq joined forces with several private banks, including Goldman Sachs, to form Portal Alliance, a private equity stock market open only to investors with assets upward of $100 million. In short order yesterday's ownership society has morphed into today's members-only society.

All along, the ownership society was really for those already owners. As Robert Reich pointed out back in 2004, many Americans couldn't afford to invest in their own futures. Their wages were stagnating, and they were already saddled with debt. Tax cuts delivered little to the lower half of earners, except perhaps the expectation taxes should be cut even further. Subprime loans and an exuberant housing market made it look possible, but we know how that turned out.

Bush floated his theme in 2004, stopped talking about it in 2005 and by 2006 it was dead. The cleanup is just getting started, and like most of his misadventures, will continue long after he begins collecting speaker's fees.

American Crosscut, Round 4: At Last, the Bill.

When I started this conversation, I didn't expect it to be a single-shot. Now it looks like we'll need a big magazine.

Joel and I switched red and blue last time, and I've kept those colors here.

Joel: When we last left off, Charlie, we'd agreed to move on to the specifics of the two bills, HF498 [Download pdf] and HF3324.  I'd like to take the first one first; all in all, I think it's the one that's much more likely to be in front of the lege this session — it may be amended onto another bill on the floor — and, if not, well, we'll be back to it next session.

I'm also going to try to keep my opening of this round short, and as focused on the bill itself as I can.  A bit of preparatory stuff, for those who have never looked at these before:  language that isn't either stricken through or underlined is in the law now; stricken through stuff would be removed, and underlined stuff added, if the bill becomes law.

609.065 JUSTIFIABLE TAKING OF LIFE USE OF DEADLY FORCE IN SELF DEFENSE.

Which is where I'm going to start off:  at the beginning, and what I'm going to focus on in this installment.  At present, Minnesota law is clear — both statute and case law — on when you can lawfully kill somebody, not when you can lawfully do something that may kill somebody, or legitimately and lawfully threaten somebody.  (I hope you will agree that there are times when it is legitimate to threaten somebody — not out of anger, but out of a reasonable fear that one is about to be harmed.)

That's a problem, and I'm going to draw on some experience as a guy who teaches civilians, cops and lawyers about this stuff in saying that.  Nobody — nobody sane — really wants to kill another person, even if under a deadly, violent attack.  But reasonable people do want to know what they can do — both short of that and, should it become necessary, including that — so that an encounter that they didn't want doesn't end up with their blood on somebody else's hands.

Let me tell you a short story; I'll file off some names and play around with dates and muck with some of the facts, but it was at least as bad as I'm telling you that it was; you've my word I'm not whitewashing this.

Al and Betty were having a few folks over one evening, when they heard a commotion outside their house.  When they went to the window, they saw four guys kicking the crap out of a fifth guy.  "Hey," Al yelled, "get away from him!" and they fled; Betty was on the phone to 911, and Al went out and administered first aid until the ambulance and the police arrived.  The kickee was hauled off in the ambulance; the police took a report and left.

A little while, there was another commotion outside.  The four perps plus another had returned, and they were not happy that Al had interfered with their kicking.  Another call to 911.  Average response time to a Priority One in Minneapolis is in the double-digit minutes.  They started moving up the sidewalk, announcing their intention to come in and do harm to Al and his family and friends, in no unambiguous terms.

At that point, Al made a decision that was to cost him. Granted, it almost certainly saved him to come to his wife come and his friends from some serious harm — but it was to cost him.  He stepped out on his porch, a shotgun in his hand, and told the thugs — remember, these were four men who had just beat another man unconscious, and then had been kicking the unconscious body; they'd brought along a friend — to go away.

They started to move toward him — he fired one shot into the ground, not near them, but signaling his intent — and they scattered.  Fast.

The police arrived.  Giving no consideration to the fact that they'd know where to find him if they needed to arrest him, giving no consideration to the fact that he had just called the police, twice — once to report the beatings; the second time (technically, yes, it was his wife) to call them for help — they cuffed-and-stuffed him, and hauled him off to jail.

He was charged with two felonies.

That is among the outrages that this law is needed, if not to prevent (it won't remove the "ham sandwich" prosecutor powers, but it might inhibit them a little), to make less common.

We can go into the provisions of HF 498 that would have been applied here, but I think — and hope — that you'll agree that he would not have been better off waiting until the threat was even more imminent, and he would have been allowed, under present law, as we've seen above, to take one or more of their lives.

Over to you.

Charlie: First, let me say I have no problem with Al's conduct. In fact, he behaved the way I'd want my neighbors to behave. You don't say what happened after he was charged, but based on your account, it sounds like he was dealt with unjustly. The story raises several questions for me.

One, was Al constrained by current law from doing the right thing? It doesn't appear so.

Two, will others, knowing what happened to Al, be constrained from behaving in a similar, responsible manner? Some will argue yes, though I bet most gun owners in his position, including those doing the arguing, would still act as Al did.

Three, should we try to prevent what happened to Al, if we can do it without unintended consequences that are worse?  Again, I say, yes.

And that brings me to four: How? I'm not convinced the bill under consideration would actually accomplish something we both agree would be a good thing. I've thought about this and have some alternative proposals, but if you want to convince me about this legislation first, keep going.

Joel: Well, after some time in jail, several thousands of dollars to a very good criminal defense attorney, the case was settled. He didn't go to prison. 

Was he constrained by law? Well, he clearly wasn't constrained from doing the right thing — he did it, after all — but he could have been, quite easily, put in front of a jury, and that's always a roll of the dice. He clearly was treated unjustly — it's the old MPD "arrest the gun" problem.  The cops — and for all I know they were good, service-oriented cops — weren't allowed to cut him loose, write up a report — and they weren't required to consider his self-defense explanation (as HF 498 would have required) before arresting him, even though they would have known, had they looked into it. that he wasn't some sort of transient who was likely to disappear, but a working man and homeowner who, had he been indicted, would have been easy to find.

It's still possible, I guess, that he could have been indicted; it's also possible that the cops wouldn't have done more than pretended to consider the circumstances surrounding it, and that it was pretty clearly self-defense... it's just more likely that he would have spent that night in his own bed — sleeplessly, fearfully, granted, but his own bed nonetheless — and never have been indicted in the first place.

Your second question — and it's a good one — is what would other folks do, knowing that.  I don't know; there is no way to tell.  But I think it's fair to guess that at least some, knowing about that, would say, "Hey, Betty — a guy's been kicked to death in the street, and if I go out and shout at them to stop, they are going to know that it's us who called the police, and we might end up, if we're lucky, like that guy Joel told me about in class. If we're lucky."

I'm really glad we've gotten to your third question, because I think it's exactly the right one. And exactly the right way to look at any changes in law. It's important, as you say, to consider both the benefits and costs.

In this case, we don't have to hypothesize. Language very similar to HF 498 exists in the laws of around 20 states; HF 498 is the Minnesota flavor of a bill that the NRA has been pushing for, nationwide.  (There are additional states that have very similar language — Utah, for example — but they don't have the same origin.)

So, I'll ask you, in all of those states — some of those having had similar language for many years, some for only a few years — what have the costs been?  Show me — I'm willing to consider that these laws have resulted in people being unreasonably killed when they otherwise wouldn't have been, or murderers have gotten off when they otherwise would have gone to prison. 

But give me examples — as many as you can.  Not, please, some prosecutor saying that if some gang banger shoots another gang banger he'll claim that he was scared and get off on a self-defense claim; for that sort of thing, show me where some gang banger murdering another gang banger got off on a self-defense claim because he claimed he was scared.  Don't restrict yourself to that; you don't have to.  Show me where, in the more than two dozen states that have similar language in their self-defense laws, authorizing scaring an attacker or not retreating has resulted in bad things happening that likely otherwise wouldn't.

Beyond that...

I'm going to be fair here.  If I was having this discussion with one of our local antis, who have been characterizing this as the "Shoot First!"  or the "Shoot the Avon Lady" bill, I'd be asking for the numbers of dead Avon ladies.  But I'm having it with you, and I'll refer to you how the bill would handle "arrest the gun":

(b) A law enforcement agency may arrest a person using force under circumstances described in this section only after considering any claims or circumstances supporting self-defense.

The emphasis is mine.

Your turn.

Charlie: I am not going to be drawn into representing all the anti-gun arguments in the world or separating actual from imagined consequences. I won’t supply you with a bunch of counter examples, because I am willing to grant you that the changes you seek may result in very few dead Avon Ladies, Mormon Missionaries or Trick or Treaters.

Ooops, here’s a dead kid in a Halloween costume, but it’s only one kid, he was a Japanese exchange student, and Rodney shot him in 1992 before these newer laws were in place.

Again, the way Al was treated was extreme, especially since no one was harmed. I have no problem with the cops saying, in cases like Al's, “don’t leave town for a few weeks while we look into this.” But I also think being dead is a pretty severe penalty, whether it's for someone’s mistaken reading of kids looking for a party, or for being on the wrong side of a drug deal. So I think it's reasonable to expect in those cases that even a normally law-abiding citizen could be inconvenienced a bit before the facts are sorted out.

I confess, I've read the text of the bill a number of times, and I've read a lot of pro-commentary on it, but it wasn't until re-reading the beginning of your post that some of the fog lifted. You said (my emphasis):

At present, Minnesota law is clear — both statute and case law — on when you can lawfully kill somebody, not when you can lawfully do something that may kill somebody, or legitimately and lawfully threaten somebody.   

If I understand you correctly, your intent is to cut some slack for Al — the guy who scared off some thugs. But not to let Rodney — the guy who killed a kid in a white tuxedo who didn't understand the idiom "Freeze" — off the hook.

You may hope HF498 would change that murky bathwater, but the bill still looks to me like it could excuse shooting screaming babies. (At least if someone had just finished reading Ray Bradbury.) It first presumes an individual who perceives a threat is justified in using force and then it appears to give a stay out of jail free card in (a) preceding the (b) you mentioned above.

(a) An individual who uses deadly force according to this section is justified in using such force and is immune from any criminal prosecution for that act.

Maybe you can walk me through how (a) and (b) relate, and how the new law would treat Al, Rodney and some of the other permutations likely under claims of self-defense.

What Obama Said to Me.

The week Barack Obama made The Speech About Race, I've been working on another conversation America needs to have. Nominally, it is about guns and the right to self-defense, but the larger topic is Obama's.

How do Americans with differences form a more perfect union?

My discussion with Joel Rosenberg is ongoing. For some, my side of it has been too general and naive, as Obama has been accused of being. Some others might mistake Joel's desire for clarity and doggedness about change as bellicosity, but committed struggle, too, was something Obama endorsed.

As two verbal and opinionated bloggers, we could easily have fallen to skewering each other in comment threads and planting unanswerable tarbombs in our posts.  That can happen when you don't do hard time in conversation and jump right into the fight. When you fill in the other's words for them. When you stick with your tribe and brand Them as embodying all your fears.

Instead, we've tried to have a conversation and actually listen to each other. Sometimes, it's gotten rocky or we've wandered off the tracks we'd each hoped to follow. At times, I've risked coming across as weak by simply letting Joel say his piece instead of standing up to every utterance with which I might have some difference.

Obama talked about that, too.

We may not move the other very far from where we started, but that's not the main point. It's to show how such a respectful conversation can take place, and then another, and then another, until we find that common thread that will lead to a better solution than the one we have.

I'm not a lawyer or a politician, so the modes of debate and fierce advocacy don't speak to me. As a career creative problem-solver, I've dedicated myself to discovering new ideas and reinvigorating old ones. I don't think good creative solutions come from fighting — or from compromise. But a new idea almost always brings together opposites in a new way.

If you were my client, I wouldn't show you all this work in process, because I'd want to dazzle you with my solution later. But here, I'm willing to show how messy and difficult this business can be, so that you won't be discouraged when your own efforts at reaching across the divide don't produce anything right away.

I don't know exactly how this will conclude, but I am full of hope.

In Case You Think I've Gone Gun Crazy...

Over at my grown-up blog, I have a post about how the governor is up to old tricks:

Suppose you are in a working family, just barely getting by, in a state where “compassionate” tax-cutters say they are looking out for you.

If you’re in Minnesota, you’ll hear right away about a sales tax cut that benefits you hardly at all, while in the fine print of the same budget proposal you might be among the more than quarter million households who would lose a tax refund worth at least 30 times that much.

There's also a piece about how Minnesota fares in a new study that grades state government management performance. (Hint: With grade inflation, the gentleman's C is now a B-.)

And an earlier post about the state's low appetite for government accountability — odd, given all the rhetoric about rooting out waste — was picked up today by MinnPost.

Number of the Day: The Sperm Whale on the Roof.

At the outset of the Iraq war, the Bush administration predicted that it would cost $50 billion to $60 billion to oust Saddam Hussein, restore order and install a new government.

Five years in, the Pentagon tags the cost of the Iraq war at roughly $600 billion and counting. Joseph E. Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and critic of the war, pegs the long-term cost at more than $4 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office and other analysts say that $1 trillion to $2 trillion is more realistic, depending on troop levels and on how long the American occupation continues.

— "Estimates of Iraq War Cost Were Not Close to Ballpark," New York Times

Keeping up the Washington practice of ignoring the elephant in the room until everyone's up to their chins in elephant dung, no current officials want to address the real impact of the Iraq War on our economy, our ability to address other domestic issues and our future indebtedness.

If fact, talking openly about the costs — and providing an estimate twice what the Bush Administration put forward — helped get Lawrence B. Lindsey fired as President Bush's economic advisor.

We can't do much about the money we've already spent. But the future costs, including those incurred already but not yet paid off, aren't just an elephant in the room. They're the sperm whale on the roof.

Only one economist initially came close to the likely cost of Mr. Bush's expedition, according to the Times article. William D. Nordhaus of Yale offered a worst-case estimate of $1.9 trillion in December 2002.

Lindsey now says:

 

While potentially interesting from an academic viewpoint, not to mention politically provocative, these estimates put too much emphasis on computing a price and not enough on putting those costs in a geopolitical context. To make a fair estimate on this scale, one has to consider the costs of the alternative, which in this case was leaving Saddam Hussein in power, as well as the possible benefits toward which we've made a huge down payment. Economically, what matters in a war is whether you win or lose. It is as simple as that.

Geopolitically, however, it matters whether you started a war you didn't understand in a country you didn't need to fight.

For those "possible benefits" — control of Iraq's oil reserves — we've not only made a huge down payment. We have a big mortgage.

And there's a whale on the roof.

 

American Crosscut, Round 3: Still Haven't Shot Each Other.

In the last round, I managed to yank Joel's chain and he let me know about it. Please notice how we're working through this. For those readers who are accustomed to seeing vilification in comment threads when you venture into alien territory, I also recommend visiting the version of this on Joel's blog, where I've been treated with some tough love.

And I think Joel is the first person on the planet to recognize my fundamental innocence!

Joel: Well, I think you want this to be the last round, and I can live with that, but I think there's some business from the last round, and an overview of what we've been doing that I really need to deal with. 

In general:  I'm finding your unwillingness to dig into the details both frustrating and counterproductive.  We agreed to talk about two legislative proposals here, and what we've spent much of our time discussing, alas, are feelings to the detriment of exploring what these proposals are all about and what they might mean to the lives of the people they'd affect, should they become law. 

Now, were I feeling combative and thought you were being willfully deceptive — I don't, as to the second, although I'm starting to develop a bit of steam; hang on, as the ride's about to be just a little bumpy — I'd argue that your last posting was intentionally misleading and dishonest, because you've got an assumption buried in it that is loaded, offensive and misleading, and as long as we're discussing feelings, I'm feeling pretty damn irritated.  Irked, even.

But, no, I don't think it was willfully dishonest; I just think it's all the more offensive for its -- and your -- innocence. 

Charlie: [For the record, I asked Joel if I could insert my responses into his original submission this round rather that post a long reply, and he agreed.] Joel, we can have more rounds. My blog is about a lot more things than this topic, and one important one is how people learn to  talk to each other and hear each other. As long as we're making progress, I'm willing to continue where this takes us.

But your email illustrates part of the struggle I'm having. It is already 1,100 words, and once a regular post of mine gets to 2,000, I feel like I've gone on too long. So how do I respond to this scroll?

Joel: However you want to.  I don't say that to be easy, or difficult, honest; I just see posts differently than you do.  I don't have a feeling that I need to make them either long or short, or a belief that I do.  I figure that those folks who are interested in what I have to say will want to read at any length I'm willing to write at, and those who aren't, well, they aren't going to become interested if I keep it short. 

Let's look at it. In detail. You be red; I'll be blue.

I don't share your same suspicion of government powers, but after eight years of the Unitary Executive, I agree it's more important than ever to watch the erosion of freedoms and to keep the risks before the public.

Now, let me get this straight.  You're suspicious of the Executive branch of the Federal government, the most closely monitored, overseen and checked branch of government in the whole United States, but you're not suspicious of local governments, which are far more likely to direct affect the lives of the people they're supposed to be serving.

But . . . we've had exactly one American citizen, captured on US soil by the Feds, hauled off to Guantanamo. And he eventually got a high-priced lawyer, and is facing trial.  But we have all sorts of abuses by more local governmental officials — cops, zoning authorities, city and county prosecutors, and let's not get to the Ministry of Love — that happen every day, are almost utterly unchecked, not overseen and barely monitored, and you don't worry about those? 

I just don't get it.  You worry about George W. Bush, whose ability to affect your life directly is minimal — but not the unchecked power of the cop down the street, the city and county attorneys, the zoning officials, and . . . well, you get the idea.

On the second part of your question, I have a brother working on a brutal double murder case that's 33 years old. They just might crack it, and one of the main reasons he can work on a cold case that happened when he was still in high school is those records have been preserved, so I don't think that's a bad thing.

Here's where I'm getting really irked.  In context, you're suggesting that maintaining records indefinitely of lawful transactions between citizens is the same thing as preserving evidence of a crime.  If you're trying to bridge even some small divide, could you start by accepting — implicitly and explicitly — that citizens, simply by engaging in lawful transactions that you don't care to engage in yourself, don't become suspects and that records of those transactions aren't, in and of themselves, evidence?  Don't you understand how offensive that is?

Charlie: To be clear, I'm talking about a broader concern over government powers beyond being hauled off to prison at night. A lot of people here and around the world have definitely had their lives impacted by the supposedly closely monitored and checked Mr. Bush — looked at the economic news lately? — but I know that's not our topic here, so I'll move on.

I do trust local government more, and here's why: Because I do think their power is checked when citizens become involved locally. I know people in local government and have close relatives who work in four different law enforcement agencies. I've worked on community issues with local government. I can write editorials that will get published; research and influence local issues; attend hearings; volunteer for task forces; help people I respect get elected. Also important, I can talk with my neighbors and organize them, just as you've done.

I am not going to have much influence on the war in Iraq or the bailout of Wall Street or national surveillance policies. And if I only stay home and blog, I'll have the same amount of trust and influence with local government.

As for the comment that irked you, I didn't mean to equate maintaining records of lawful transactions with criminal evidence. In fact, the investigation I referred to is using public records, even to who was in certain classes in school many years ago. And I believe when they find the perpetrator, it will be someone who had no prior criminal record. So I agree that the records you refer to aren't "evidence" any more than who flunked gym class in 1968. But if having reasonable access to them helps solve a crime, I'm not very worried.

Joel: You said: On the first part, if society says firearms sales should be regulated, I don't know why the rules should be different for a transaction between me and my neighbor, as opposed to me and a dealer. If he sold me his car — or even gave it to me — we'd have to go downtown and transfer the title, same as if I bought from a dealer.

Sure. But the right to keep and drive cars isn't a fundamental human right, and there is no history of car registration leading to confiscation. You only have to transfer the "title" and go through all that red tape -- which, by the way, you can accomplish in five minutes by him signing the title over to you and you dropping a stamped envelope in the mail -- because you've agreed to all that red tape in return for being allowed to have your car on public roads.  Keep it on your own property, and you don't have to do any of that.

How would you feel about the government keeping permanent records of every book you (and all the rest of us) have ever checked out of a library, bought in a bookstore, or loaned to a friend for a few hours?   After all, in some cases preserving that "evidence" might help your brother solve a brutal crime.  Some religious groups — Thugs, some Muslim sects, Christian Identity, for example — have a history of criminal behavior, and others may go all jihadi.  Let's be sure that entry and exit into their establishments are monitored, and the evidence preserved. Safely, of course, available only to law enforcement.

Ditto for monitoring — and permanently recording, protected, of course, by appropriate data practices act safeguards, like all the rest — all of everybody's emails, web browsing history, etc.  I can guarantee you that letting the government have full access to the latter will solve crimes — after all, there's apparently plenty of people who look at unlawful porn, and get away with it. 

And maybe, just in the interest of preserving evidence, we should be not only fingerprinting children at birth, but taking DNA samples — some of those will, certainly, become evidence in a criminal investigation.

Charlie: The Founding Fathers couldn't very well make owning a car a fundamental right any more than the Magna Carta would've enshrined a right to firearms. My point was about consistency. Why register some transactions and not others? And it's fair for you to say why register any?

All kinds of ownership has some red tape, and a big part of the registration process for cars, houses, marriages and births, loan documentation, hazardous materials permits, etc. is about protecting the owners as well as other interested parties. Ownership of a gun does have other potentially interested parties. — your neighbors, but also criminals and people who are concerned about maintaining political power.

I and a lot of other left-leaners would agree with you that monitoring issue is potentially very dangerous political territory. The question is how we make common cause around the freedom aspect without getting hung up about legal gun ownership. Maybe we're just paranoid about different aspects of the same thing.

Joel: You said:  A private gun sale wouldn't be that simple under the bill proposed this year, and I agree that was a convoluted process unlikely to stop criminals from getting guns.

Then what was the actual purpose, if the stated one falls apart under even very light examination?  Wasn't it to take the Brady Bunch/HCI/CSM program of getting rid of private citizens rights to have guns, one step at a time, one step farther?   

But one reason it has to be complicated is because the gun lobby insisted that background check records not be preserved, so the process has to be repeated. I don't have the answer, and I understand why proposals like that annoy law-abiding gun owners.

Well, as to your last phrase:  good.  But no, it doesn't have to be complicated; it doesn't have to be, at all. 

And, until you really get that, I'm not sure that we're going to be bridging this here divide. 

But, anytime you're ready, I'm up for another try. 

Charlie: Then let's get to the details you've been wanting to talk about all along.

Seems to About Cover it.

Mr. Bush similarly emerges from this book as a naïve, impulsive and stubborn leader, whose moral certitude and penchant for denial have made him more inclined to double down on a bad bet than ever to admit a mistake, a president whose post-9/11 search for a bold new approach to the world made him susceptible to neoconservative ideas of pre-emption and unilateralism that had gained little traction with his father or Bill Clinton.

President Bush’s strategies, Mr. Kaplan writes near the end of this incisive book, failed “because they did not fit the realities of his era”: “They were based not on a grasp of technology, history or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith and willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.”

— From a review of Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power

So Much for Laissez-Faire.

Trickle-down economics is really non-intervention for the little guy and protection for the bigs. Freemarketry  works when the casualties in the financial markets are only two million homeowners. But when Wall Street is in trouble and internationally the dollar is attracting the same enthusiasm as the peso, it's time to go to work.

Mr. Bush singled out Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. for praise, saying he had shown “the country and the world that the United States is on top of the situation,” an assertion that was broadly disputed by the president’s critics.

“I want to thank you, Mr. Secretary, for working over the weekend,” Mr. Bush said in brief remarks in the Roosevelt Room.

With markets melting down and the country highballing into a recession, the Treasury Secretary gets props for working over the weekend? I would hope he might be able to tear himself away for a few extra hours. What kind of world do these guys live in?

Or maybe it was just the famous Bush jocularity trying to calm the waters. Hard to tell without video.

Mr. Paulson dismissed questions of whether the administration was bailing out a financial giant [with a $30 billion bailout of Bear Stearns] while homeowners faced foreclosure, noting that Bear Stearns shareholders received only $2 a share for stocks that not long ago had been worth $170.

‘This was an easy decision,” Mr. Paulson said outside the White House after the president’s second meeting with advisers and regulators. “This is the right outcome. And again, in terms of the moral hazard, look at what happened to the Bear Stearns shareholders.”

Columnist Richard Gwyn digs into that phrase, "moral hazard":

The current example is, of course, Bear Stearns. This financial company went more deeply into the high-risk, subprime mortgage market than did any other. It was known in the industry for its highly "aggressive" style, a delicate way of saying it skirted to the very edge of the legal line.

This is the firm that the Fed has just chosen to wrap inside a protective bubble of moral hazard.

Effectively, the Fed has just nationalized Bear Stearns, although, since in the U.S. the word "nationalization" is synonymous with socialism, the Fed has got another financial company, JPMorgan, to take it over at a fire-sale price.

Nominally, JPMorgan has bought Bear Stearns for $2 a share. (A year ago, the shares were valued at $170). To cover this cost, the Fed has advanced JPMorgan a $30 billion loan and will itself take control of Bear Stearns' portfolio of financial assets.

None of these financial contortions alter the central fact: a company that was a substantive cause of the financial crisis is being rescued from its own ineptitude.

Moreover, the money to do this is coming from ordinary American taxpayers, many suffering the consequences of that financial crisis in the form of lost houses and jobs.

Homeownership Reconsidered.

If you earn eighty thousand a year, no one will lend you four hundred thousand dollars to buy stocks, but plenty of people were willing to lend you that money to buy a house.

[...]

According to a recent study by the Federal Reserve, homeowners took out more than six hundred billion dollars in home-equity loans between 2004 and 2005 alone—ten times as much as they had a decade earlier—and are spending much of it on personal consumption. That destroys the forced-savings aspect of homeownership, since people are using up their home equity instead of saving it for the future. And it means that many homeowners have to devote more and more of their income to paying off home-equity debt, contributing to the current slowdown.

—"Home Economics," The New Yorker [via twincitysidewalks]

Okay, we're familiar by now with that part of the story. But author James Surowiecki adds that homeownership can also retard a recovery by rooting people in places where the economy no longer needs them. 

(In the U.S., it may be worth noting, the states that have the highest unemployment rates—states like Alabama, Michigan, Mississippi—are also among those with the highest homeownership rates.) And reluctance to move not only keeps unemployment high in struggling areas but makes it hard for businesses elsewhere to attract the workers they need to grow.

Meanwhile, at least 25 state governments project deficits for the coming fiscal year.

North Dakota, which has been ridiculed for losing population (ostensibly because of high taxes), is sitting pretty.

North Dakota, seven months into its fiscal year, is $90 million ahead of official projections, said Pam Sharp, director of the State Office of Management and Budget. “There is no shortfall at all,” Ms. Sharp said. “We’re at 13 percent ahead of forecast.”

She added: “We haven’t experienced the prime mortgage turnover. The states that are seeing that shortfall in sales taxes are states that have been hit pretty hard with the mortgages.”