Second Amendment history: the "taproot of gun culture"

Historian Dominic Erdozain has managed to make some important observations about a tired subject: our country's infatuation with privately owned weapons meant to kill.

... there's a value system that's current in the South before the Civil War, an honor code whereby a man is obliged culturally, socially, morally to defend his honor (and it is always him) when an insult is offered or made or even perceived in the most subtle of manners. And in the North, this was generally scorned. ...

...  after the Civil War, we start to see the spread of an honor code, this time attached to a kind of patriotic mandate, the idea that the tendency of the American mind is against retreat. And you get judges drawing rather eloquently and emotively on their Civil War experience to make a similar argument that it's unmanly, it's cowardly to retreat, and it's effeminate, and the great jurists like William Blackstone who talked about the tenderness of life and the law always existing to protect life, they are seen as kind of old world and effeminate and there's a kind of patriotic mandate for authorizing violence.

... it's a kind of romanticism of redemptive violence and this kind of Manichean idea that you have the bad people, the dangerous elements, you have the Native Americans, and then you have the less suitable White settlers from poor European backgrounds usually. And there's a kind of eugenic dimension to this, a very racialized ideology of the worthy and the unworthy. And there is the romanticism of individual force, even though historians have shown that really we should be talking more about the mild west than the wild west. Certainly there was much more violence still in the South and in the Southern states.

... I think of Edward [Teddy] Kennedy describing a gun as being unique among weapons because it's an instrument of instant and distant death, the power that allows you to kill without fighting. So yeah, there's a potency that is, I think, seductive and it's intoxicating.

... One thing I don't want to do is come across as speaking for a world that has got the solutions and I think that reading books like [Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost] about colonialism in the Congo and reading some of my own history, the British history of imperialism and slavery in the Caribbean especially, you quickly realize that had the Caribbean bordered Hampshire or Surrey or the home counties close to London everybody in Britain would own guns.

There is no question from my own research and that of many other scholars I quote in the book that slavery is the master cause or the taproot of gun culture in the United States and the reason that we don't have a gun culture back home is that the atrocities of our own empire were conducted overseas.

... But the historical truth is that the Second Amendment was really kind of an anti-war measure because the early Americans did not want America to go the way of all flesh, the way of all empires. And they feared that a military establishment would lead to imperialism. So they wanted to reduce the military and their way of doing it was to lean on citizens in a way that was never really going to be sustainable. So that's just obsolete in a way. And that explains a lot of the confusion as to why the Second Amendment came about.

H/t to Paul Waldman for the interview with Erdozain.

A civilizational test

 

Displayed this way, the rise in civilian mass murders looks like some kind of all-devouring snake monster that is ingesting more and more of us. A bloated python perhaps?

If we are to survive as a country, we will have to find a way to get rid of the guns. It's that simple.

We should not have to participate in a national suicide pact

Click to enlarge

Once upon time, not so long ago, mass shootings were relatively rare. Sure, the United States had a gun culture, but the carnage was much less. The red line that in the chart marks the year when a Republican-controlled Congress allowed the ban on civilian ownership of assault (military) weapons to expire. Whoopee -- now any nut with a bug in the ass can inflict carnage on a crowd. 

If the Supreme Court won't allow the vast majority of Americans to rein in the gun plague, we have to replace the Supreme Court. Their current reading of the Second Amendment is a nonsensical invitation to gun violence. Perhaps they should be required to wash the remains of shooting victims for burial in order to get paid?

The same goes for Republican gun fetishists. They are getting what they want.

I'm embarrassed to admit that I've lost track of the source for this excellent graphic. Looks like the Financial Times by way of someone I read. ?

International Transgender Day of Visibility

Transgender Day of Visibility is an international event on March 31 dedicated to recognizing the resilience and accomplishments of the transgender community. ...

Here are a couple of gentle, calm, beautiful videos from the Transgender Law Center for this occasion. Enjoy.

In the context of the rightwing brouhaha about the Tennessee school shooter, Shannon Watts of Moms Demand Action makes the obvious point:

People who are trans are much more likely to be the victims of violent crime than the perpetrators. It’s the guns.

Enough

Not much to say, really. It's hard to see beyond this.

Click to enlarge.

This map does seem to show that there is a high correlation between stronger regulation of guns and less gun deaths. Maybe we should start calling the current rightwing Supreme Court "the Suicide Pact Tribunal." Apparently their judicial philosophy amounts to "just die." 

You probably know that most gun deaths -- despite the publicity rightly given to school shootings, etc -- are suicides.

Heavily regulated Illinois where there are strict-ish gun laws appears an outlier here -- until you remember it's surrounded by places where running around with guns is easier. We're one country, even if it doesn't feel that way some times.

Prayer does seem highly appropriate -- for the ongoing parade of victims of our folly, and for us all.

Gun deaths top other causes among US young people

 

I did not know what this this graphic shows. Click to enlarge. Now that I do know, I'm not surprised by who is dying.

"Black boys are now eight times as likely as other children to die by gunfire."

Source: New York Times.

Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to provoking commentary. Some annotated by me. Lots of guns, GOPer malfeasance, and too little good cheer, but here goes ...

Ryan Grim: The horrifying massacre at Uvalde, then, is a graphic illustration of two of America’s worst problems: our epidemic of gun violence, and our plague of lawless, incompetent police departments. There really is a murder problem in many American cities, yet the police in most of them let the culprits get away with it half or more of the time. We’ve got far too many guns that are too easy to get, and we’ve got a sick police culture that needs to be torn out by the roots. San Francisco cops make an arrest in only 8.1 percent of reported crimes -- and naturally residents are not rushing to report. Why bother?

Sportscolumnist John Feinstein: If the NCAA had any moral standards, it would move the Men’s and Women’s Final Fours — one scheduled for Houston, one slated for Dallas — out of Texas next year. It would move all of its other championships from the state, too. And it would vow not to return until Texas reforms its gun laws. That might have an impact.

Food writer Soleil Ho: As a people, the amount of grief we’ve been asked to carry for the comfort of the gun lobby has rapidly exceeded our capacity to process it, and we need to acknowledge that. We can’t continue being their comfort food.

Senior journalist and media commentator James Fallows: Reporters like politics. Most readers care about governance—for which they wouldn’t use that term, but would instead think about schools, taxes, health care, jobs. Most reporters are interested in conflict and drama. Most readers and citizens would rather know that things are undramatically getting done. Reporters do thrive on the stories of who is up and who is down -- politics as sport. But too often, stories of governance only break through when the narrative exposes failures. It's hard to get heard about what's working.

Philip Bump: ... Defending the media is not easy. It’s uncomfortable, in part because it’s vexing to think that objectivity needs a defense.

Historian Serhii Plokhy: Poisoned legacy: why the future of power can’t be nuclear ... Can anything be done to make reactors safer? A new generation of smaller modular reactors, designed from scratch to produce energy, not to facilitate warfare, has been proposed by Bill Gates, and embraced, among others, by Macron. The reactors promised by Gates’s TerraPower company are still at the computer-simulation stage and years away from construction. But his claim that in such reactors “accidents would literally be prevented by the laws of physics” must be taken with a pinch of salt, as there are no laws of war protecting either old or new reactors from attack. There is also serious concern that the rapid expansion in the number of plants, advocated as a way of dealing with climate change, will increase the probability of accidents. While new technology will help to avoid some of the old pitfalls, it will also bring new risks associated with untried reactors and systems. Responsibility for dealing with such risks is currently being passed on to future generations. This is the second great risk from nuclear power: even if a reactor runs for its lifetime without incident, you still have a lot of dangerous material left at the end of it. Russia's scorched earth attack on Ukraine should end debate over "safe" nuclear power. Invading troops crashed on into Chernobyl, one of the best understood and marked off nuclear hazards on the planet. As a species, we are not capable of handling nuke waste safely in perpetuity, so it is grossly irresponsible to generate it.

Speaking of messes we've made, this one might be somewhat remediable. Sociologist Tressie McMillam Cottom: The time for debating student debt’s political messaging is over. Anything less than across-the-board forgiveness extends the life of the mess we made. Student loan debt is an albatross around the Democrats’ neck. Kicking the can down the road is throwing good political capital after bad.

Robert Samuels and Toluse Olorunnipa describe what they felt while reporting on the life of George Floyd: Before reporting this book, I considered systemic racism to be an unmoving, dark cloud that hung over us. As I watched life unfurl for these families, I understood that the residue of America’s original sin was something more terrifying. Racism is a pervasive, insidious force threatening to corrupt the spirit of every American if it is not acknowledged and confronted. I realized why so many of the families felt they had little choice but to fight racial injustice. You could not simply run away. George Floyd's murder taught both white and Black people what it can mean to be Black.

Karen Attiah: ... when it comes to white supremacy, White liberals have long held on to dangerously naive replacement theories of their own — that increasing populations of nonwhites will automatically dent anti-Blackness, for instance, and that younger generations are automatically less racist than their forebears. If President Biden’s reactions are anything to go by, the temptation is to believe that the salve for America’s racist spasms is a good ol’ dose of national unity. This liberal complacency puts us all at risk. The article describes the attractions for U.S. Black people of moving to Ghana.

Brennan Center Fellow Theodore R. Johnson: ... in 2016, I conducted a study to examine how the black vote might become less lopsided in presidential elections. ... The results were mostly unsurprising: For black Americans, as with the general population, the political party cues were so strong that they far outweighed every other consideration. There was, however, one rather unexpected insight. The political issue that most influenced black voters’ choice was abortion. Supporting a pro-choice presidential candidate was more important to black voters than the unemployment rate, obtaining new civil rights legislation, a candidate’s race, and every other presented factor except party. ... For black America, the revocation of a woman’s constitutionally protected right to choose to have an abortion raises questions about what other rights might be suddenly found revocable. Johnson's Black respondents didn't necessarily approve of abortion. But when the Man comes for rights ... who is next?

Speaking of rights, Stanford law professor Elizabeth A. Reese, Yunpoví (Willow Flower): The reemergence of tribal governments in the United States over the last fifty years has been nothing short of a renaissance of resilience. 

Organizer Scot Nakagawa: This morning I was the subject of an interview on KBOO, Portland’s listener-supported community radio station. ... During the interview, a caller made a comment about the left arming up, citing it as necessary in the face of an armed rightwing insurgency. ... If we break with strategic non-violence, we may find ourselves not too unlike the person who fights back against second-hand smoke by lighting up a cigarette and blowing smoke right back. They may, in fact, damage the health of those pesky smokers with second-hand smoke, but only while doing much more damage to themselves while the tobacco companies make out like bandits. Those folks in the Pacific Northwest have experience with right wing militias that many others can learn from.

Paul Krugman: Republicans are following an old playbook, one that would have been completely familiar to, say, czarist-era instigators of pogroms. When the people are suffering, you don’t try to solve their problems; instead, you distract them by giving them someone to hate. ... And history tells us that this tactic often works.  

In The Atlantic, David A Graham: Come November, the wackadoodles shall inherit the Republican Party. It's satisfying to mock them, but vicious know-nothings with power are no laughing matter.

Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon Jr.: The Republican Party isn’t fit to lead, and most voters know it — that’s why Joe Biden won the presidency. But all those 2020 Biden voters shouldn’t be expected to turn out for two more years of Joe Manchin III (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) blocking most legislation in the Senate ... The Democrats must stop trying to duck the so-called culture wars and instead fight hard to win them. There is no middle ground between White male Christian hegemony and multiracial, multicultural social democracy — and the Democrats shouldn’t be shy about using their power to impose the latter, since it’s what a clear majority of Americans want. 

Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson: Oddly for a secular age, our country might be waiting on a theologian equal to the moment. Previous generations of generally liberal politicians, like Barack Obama, looked to Reinhold Niebuhr. This is a more passionate moment that aches for compassion and empathy. Perhaps Nadia Bolz-Weber might suit us better?

Economist and provocateur Noah Smith: We were not born into this world to fight over scraps until we die. We were born into this world to remake it so that we don't have to fight over scraps.

A great divorce

Outside the NRA convention in Houston:

David Lauter explains in the Los Angeles Times:

Go back roughly 15 years: In 2005, California had almost the same rate of deaths from guns as Florida or Texas. California had 9.5 firearms deaths per 100,000 people that year, Florida had 10 and Texas 11, according to data from the National Center for Health Statistics.

Since then, California repeatedly has tightened its gun laws, while Florida and Texas have moved in the opposite direction.

California’s rate of gun deaths has declined by 10% since 2005, even as the national rate has climbed in recent years. And Texas and Florida? Their rates of gun deaths have climbed 28% and 37% respectively. California now has one of the 10 lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation. Texas and Florida are headed in the wrong direction.

David French has imagined how the gulf between the states might lead to a fictional CalExit via Joe Matthews:

It was gun violence that finally drove California to secede from the United States.

A series of mass shootings culminated in a savage, Columbine-style attack on a Sacramento-area school that killed 35 kids and two cops. The shooters used semi-automatic rifles and pistols with large-capacity magazines—weaponry that had been illegal in California until the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court threw out the state’s gun control laws. Californians raged that the justices—and the federal government—had effectively murdered their children.

That anger soon spiraled into a cold civil war, with California’s elected leaders openly defying federal officials and laws by outlawing most guns, and imposing a mandatory buyback. An authoritarian Republican president retaliated with an economic blockade of the state. After right-wing militias invaded the state and used Facebook Live to broadcast their massacre of California Highway Patrol officers enforcing state gun laws, California’s governor declared her intention to depart the Union, subject to the result of a referendum by voters. ...

Doesn't seem so farfetched after Uvalde,  does it?

Time for some different Senators

In case you missed this, don't. Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr reacts to the Texas school massacre.

"Any basketball questions don't matter. ... there's 50 Senators who refuse to vote on a [gun purchase] background check measure ... and the reason they won't vote on it is to hold onto power."

Shards from the Embattled Republic

An occasional list of links to provoking commentary. Some annotated by me.

Barbara F. Walter writing at The New Republic: "...The United States is the first white majority country in the world to go through this grand demographic transformation, but it will not be the last. The world will be watching how we, as a multiethnic, multi­religious democracy, navigate this change. The declining white majority can choose to further weaken our democracy in an attempt to institutionalize minority rule, and continue to stoke racial fears. They may think that this is an attractive strategy that ensures that power will remain in their hands for generations. What they don’t realize is that this also leads them closer to civil war." Actually, I fear more and more of the members of the old white majority think civil war might relieve their anxiety. That's a dangerous fantasy.

Political scientist Liliana Mason reports: "White Democrats and Republicans had basically identical levels of racial resentment in 1986; today they’re 40 points apart. So one of the most passionate divides that we’re seeing between the parties right now, more than it has been in decades, is, does systemic racism exist? Does systemic sexism exist? Have we done enough to overcome it? Have we gone too far?"

The Why Axis

From Convergence Magazine: "'Being part of the 2020 effort was one of the most profound experiences of my life,'” Stephanie Greenlea [from the union UniteHERE] said. “'In a moment of such intense and global rupture, with structures falling apart, and people being abandoned left and right with no net, over and over I saw people rise to the challenge, and do extraordinary things not just to improve their own lives but to build something better. That, and stories like it that are happening all over the place, need to be documented and told.'" We have experience with fighting back, our way.

Theodore Johnson, director of the Fellows Program at the Brennan Center for Justice, writing at The Bulwark, explains the likely Year of the Black Republican: "Put simply, movements like the Tea Party and Trumpism deepen partisan identity and make it far easier to identify who you’re for and who you’re against, even to the point of overlooking other traditional cues. As such, a black candidate who leans heavily into the movement’s symbols, rhetoric, and harsh critiques of prominent Democrats not only becomes an acceptable avatar but also an aegis against accusations of racial intolerance within the movement itself. Further, donning the partisan identity with the recognizable features of contemporary movement conservatism works to mitigate the perception of black Americans as beholden to big government progressivism that places these candidates at a disadvantage in Republican primaries from the outset." It's a good gig if you can get it -- and you want to take it up. People being people, we should not be surprised if some will. There is, of course, a principled Black conservatism, but that's not what Johnson is talking about.

Don Moynihan warns: "The attack on American democracy by one of the two main political parties in America should be the dominant theme of our politics right now. It’s not. It’s a five alarm fire generating a one-alarm response. I don’t know what can fix this dynamic. But we should stop assuming it will fix itself. If you like living in a democracy you should oppose the people with a record of trying to overturn elections. While such opposition still matters."  For some it's a five alarm fire, but not enough of us. It burns to keep the threat front of mind and heart. But losing democracy would be worse.

More Moynihan: "We often think about attacks on democracy in terms of election outcomes. But public administration is democracy in action. We can’t keep watching our public institutions be attacked and assume that they will still meet the expectations we place on them to provide quality public services."

A Slate book review: " ... the impression left by Lessons From the Edge: that [former U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine Marie] Yovanovitch—as well as [Fiona] Hill and [Alexander] Vindman—inhabits a different ethical universe not only from Trump but from nearly everyone else who sold their souls to work in his White House. All three were immigrants from families who viewed the U.S. as a place that enabled them to achieve what they couldn’t in their homelands. As a result, they understand America as a set of principles as much as a land or a source of sentimental patriotic identity. This may make them naïve in the eyes of some, but as Yovanovitch persuasively argues, it is people like them who stand between American democracy and the autocratic forces Trump represents." Those of us with long histories struggling for justice for immigrants are getting a reminder that it is not only poor, Salvadorans, Haitians, and Hondurans whose lives allow them to see the good potential of this imperfect country. It's also highly accomplished white professionals who migrate from the less privileged parts of Europe. Those of us with long roots here owe gratitude to our perspicacious new neighbors .

From the Los Angeles Times: "The two brothers suspected of involvement in the recent deadly shooting in Sacramento, Dandrae and Smiley Martin, share something in common besides blood. They both beat women — a warning sign for gun violence, according to researchers. In 7 of 10 mass shootings, the perpetrator (let’s be real, usually a man) either had a history of domestic violence or was targeting someone he had a relationship with. About 1 in 4 homicides in the United States are related to domestic violence, and too often include bystanders." January 1, 2019 to 26 April 2021 were big times for gun sales; 7.5 million of us became new gun owners in that period, according to a study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Jessica Valenti opines: "I often wonder if the stereotype that women have more ‘emotional intelligence’ is true or if we’re just trying not to be killed. Of course we’re attuned to the world around us, we have to be."

From the military publication Task and Purpose:  "A study released last year by Brown University’s Cost of War project estimated that 30,177 active duty service members and veterans have died by suicide since 2001. In 2020, the suicide rate for service members aged 18-24 was more than double that for civilians in the same age bracket." 

Let's give the last word here to Margaret Atwood: "Don’t panic. Think carefully. Write clearly. Act in good faith. Repeat." Apparently even Margaret Atwood has to make herself available to the public on publication of a new book. We're the luckier for it.

Guns in the home don't make us safer

To many Californians, that's a pretty intuitive notion.  Now there's an exhaustive study using a solid, large data set that supports that conclusion.

California adults who live with a gun owner face twice the risk of death by homicide
Between October 2004 and the end of 2016, adults in the state who didn’t own a gun but took up residence with someone who did were much more likely to die a violent death than people in households without a handgun, researchers from Stanford University found. 

Those who lived with a handgun owner were almost twice as likely to die by homicide as their neighbors without guns, the researchers found. More specifically, adults who lived with the owner of a handgun were almost three times more likely to be killed with a firearm than Californians in households where no handguns were present.

... Among the 866 homicide victims who died in their homes during the period studied, cohabitants of handgun owners were seven times more likely than adults from gun-free homes to have been killed by someone who ostensibly loved them. Rendered into the statistics of public health, the findings suggest that for every 100,000 unarmed adults whose cohabitant acquired a handgun, 4.03 more were killed by a firearm in the ensuing five years than would have been if their households had remained gun-free.

During the pandemic, lot of people sought protection by buying guns. We all felt plenty of fear, much of it free-floating fantasy. But for some, it meant "time to get a firearm."

The same study found no evidence that having a gun in the house protected against attack by strangers.  

Resident women and teenagers, however, were at increased risk of violence in the presence of a gun.

There's got to be a better way to feel safer without genuine dangers.

San Jose is trying a new tack to regulate guns

This year our rightwing Supremes most likely will throw out nearly all limits on ownership and display of personal guns under a bonkers interpretation of an 18th century legal guarantee that states might maintain "well-regulated" militias. 

A California city is trying a new regulatory strategy. Just as we are required to carry insurance to cover the deadly carnage we might inflict with our cars, gun owners in San Jose will be required to carry liability insurance and pay a fee to support gun violence education.

Under the city’s vision, [a] nonprofit will send out letters to registered gun owners who live in San Jose asking them to pay the annual fee. Once a payment is made, the nonprofit will send the gunowner a form with their proof of payment and a space on the form to fill out their insurance information. Gun owners will be required to carry or store a copy of the paperwork with their firearm, according to the mayor. 

Residents who are exempted from the ordinance include sworn, active reserve or retired police officers, people who have a license to carry a concealed weapon, and low-income residents facing financial hardships. 

Failure to abide by the law could result in a civil fine or temporary forfeiture of a firearm.

The new law is pretty weak stuff:

San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said that having liability insurance would encourage people in the 55,000 households in San Jose who legally own at least one registered gun to have gun safes, install trigger locks and take gun safety classes. 

The liability insurance would cover losses or damages resulting from any accidental use of the firearm, including death, injury or property damage, according to the ordinance. If a gun is stolen or lost, the owner of the firearm would be considered liable until the theft or loss is reported to authorities. 

However, gun owners who don’t have insurance won’t lose their guns or face any criminal charges, the mayor said.

They might, however, find themselves paying for any damage they allow with their lethal toys.

Predictably, cry-baby gun lovers have whined about "tyranny" and run to the courts to kill the ordinance. I wonder, do they carry auto insurance?

I also wonder whether a court system packed with Republican judges will throw out this common sense measure. Worth trying.

Michigan school shooting

I don't usually look to Twitter for ethical instruction. But this, from The Rude Pundit, brought me up short.

What the kid did at Oxford High School is horrific. He should be punished. He should not be charged as an adult.

His parents, though, should be imprisoned in a hole under the jail.

Every once in a while, I see just how much liberalism has changed. It used to not even be a question on the left that it’s wrong to charge kids as adults and to do so is just part of this country’s wrongheaded approach to “justice.” But, from the responses, I guess no more.

He's right (the RP's Twitter pic is of a "he"). This particular crime feels so egregious, it was easy for me to forget that I've campaigned against the death penalty and excessive sentences for people who were under 18 when they were guilty of crimes. We know teenage brains have not yet developed all the connections fully formed in adult brains. (Some parental brains may be just as disconnected, but what to do with those people is different problem.) What the kid did is bad enough. We don't raise the level of civilization by pretending this was an adult shooter.

One of the tweet comments captures where I sit on this:

My head agrees with you. My gut does not.

Here's the shooter's mug shot:

• • •

And while we are at it, here are the names of the victims who died:

Hana St. Juliana, 14; Madisyn Baldwin, 17; Tate Myre, 16; and Justin Shilling, 17

More teens.

Fog of war in the time of the Tweeter

Ever wondered what people serving in the U.S. armed forces make of the incoherent leadership they are getting from the President? Here's military reporter Jeff Schogol trying to make sense of what he gets from the Pentagon.

In past wars, it was possible to mark the U.S. military's positions with flags on paper maps. But we live in the age of Twitter, and since the commander in chief seems to be visited by the Good Idea Fairy every 15 minutes, there is no way to have an updated map of where U.S. forces are.

With regards to Syria, the U.S. military isn't leaving. It's repositioning forces because the mission has changed from fighting ISIS to protecting the oil. (This also may make the first time a sitting president has not tried to camouflage sending troops to protect oil by claiming the United States was liberating oppressed people.)

... Every time Trump tweets about the military, the Defense Department has to pretend the president's latest missive is all part of a wider plan that has been properly thought out ahead of time.

By giving as little information as possible, the Pentagon hopes to avoid revealing that it is actually reacting on the fly to try to make Trump's latest great idea not end in a total disaster.

Schogol does point out that the Obama administration was also often not very transparent about troop deployments. The Pentagon is used to these games and resents them....Now Trump is crowing that U.S. forces have killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of ISIS. The guy will certainly not be missed if the report is accurate. That's a real success. But given the number of times that the U.S. has reported the demise of various al Qaeda and ISIS leaders only to have them turn up the next week, a more disciplined leader than Tweeter in Chief might have waited for all the evidence.

A Defense Department official said before the president’s announcement that there was a strong belief — “near certainty” — that Mr. al-Baghdadi was dead, but that a full DNA analysis was not complete. The official said that with any other president, the Pentagon would wait for absolute certainty before announcing victory. But Mr. Trump was impatient to get the news out ...

Democrats probably don't have to worry that killing Baghdadi will give Trump a big political boost outside his base. Killing Osama bin Laden never did much for Obama's standing either.

People here get worried by the school shooting next door or the white supremacist murdering our neighbors. Trump isn't doing anything about that while Democratic candidates struggle to figure out how to reduce the armaments in private hands in this country.

Oddments from Rawlins, WY

This billboard was not what I expected to encounter on Interstate 80 outside Green River, Wyoming. Apparently it is a national campaign reaching the considerable number of states where LGBTQ people still do not enjoy full civil rights. Sure, we can get married. But we may have no rights in employment, or to receive medical care from unwilling medical professionals, or to eat in restaurants that don't want us around. Don't know what erecting a few billboards does, but the Beyond I Do campaign provides national information on continuing discrimination.

We stopped to use the facilities at the original Little America which was unimposing, selling expensive gas and sundries. I'd driven by many times but don't think I'd ever before been into this heavily advertised truck stop and motel. Oh yes -- there were also these for sale in the lobby. Click to enlarge. Wyoming is a different culture.

Morty had a far too interesting day. I knew he wasn't going to enjoying driving uphill from Salt Lake City to Park City, Utah. He did not -- howling all the way (perhaps his ears were popping?) and breaking into the body of the car from his jail in the far back. Here he explores the front seat while the humans repaired his enclosure. I don't think he can do that again. Once the road straightened out, he did better for the rest of the drive.

We've crossed the Continental Divide -- it's all downhill from here. Ha!

Remembering our own

The outline of a new mural is coming into view on the Calle24 Latino Cultural District building at 24th Street and Capp.

Guatemalan migrant worker Amilcar Perez Lopez (left image) was shot by the police with six bullets to the back on February 26, 2015 just two blocks away. At right, the mural includes lights for Alex Nieto and Mario Woods, two other local victims of trigger happy cops. No police officers were ever charged for their killings, nor for the shooting of homeless Mission resident Luis Gongoro Pat also pictured on the mural.

Soon their images and their stories will cover the side of the building in the center of the Mission, less than a block from BART. The Mission remembers thanks to the Justice4Amilcar Coalition with Fr. Richard Smith, HOMEY, Mission Housing Development Corporation, and Calle24. The mural team is led by Carla Elena Wojczuk.

There's a GoFundMe raising money to support the mural.

To be afraid is appropriate, not crazy

Friends online, seeking to contextualize the El Paso massacre, pointed to this PBS documentary. (I snagged it from Netflix, but it is readily available in many outlets.)

It's a good, thorough, narrative of the sequence of events -- the ATF storming of Ruby Ridge, the incineration of the Waco Branch Davidians -- that formed the 1990s catalogue of government offenses that right wingers used to justify organizing in violent militias and, eventually, the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma's federal building. That domestic terrorist act killed 168 people, of whom about 100 were low level government employees and many of the others children in a daycare center. The film asks an all too contemporary question.

How could somebody get to that state in their life where they would be so angry and upset they would do something like this?

Joe Hersley, FBI agent

The perpetrator, Tim McVeigh, wanted to start the "next American revolution." A disgruntled failed soldier who loved guns, he drifted into neo-Nazi circles and became convinced that "the only way government is going to get the message is with a body count ..."

In the film, that indefatigable researcher of the right-wing, Leonard Zeskind, answers what we are now asking about El Paso suspect Patrick Crusius: was McVeigh some kind of sick sociopath, or did he come out of an identifiable right wing milieu?

There was no massive conspiracy, that much is true, but the idea that Timothy McVeigh was a lone killer, that is wrong headed. because it absolves the movement from which it all sprang. Timothy McVeigh was not on his own, he was the creation fo the white supremacist movement. He carried the Turner Diaries around and read it to people. He lived at the gun shows. He met neo-Nazis ... and the idea that there was no connection between the white supremacist movement and the events in Oklahoma City is patently false. There was a strong connection ...

And now we have a president who vibes with white nationalists ...

She beat the gun lobby -- and they want to take her down

The National Rifle Association has a new president, one Carolyn D. Meadows. Apparently the NRA got tired of that old con man Ollie North; or maybe the mendacous former Marine lieutenant colonel got tired of the NRA's homegrown grifters like Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre. Hard to tell amid the swirl of scandal and accusations of misuse of funds.

Anyway, Carolyn Meadows was up to be named North's replacement as the public face of the NRA.

So, naturally, she explained one of her priorities in her new job was to win back a Georgia congressional seat which the Democrat Lucy McBath had won narrowly last November. Where Newt Gingrich had once sat, McBath must be an unqualified interloper. And Meadows thought she knew why McBath won.

"... we'll get that seat back,” Meadows said. “But it is wrong to say like McBath said, that the reason she won was because of her anti-gun stance. That didn't have anything to do with it — it had to do with being a minority female. And the Democrats really turned out, and that's the problem we have with conservatives — we don't turn out as well.”

Daily Kos

You are missing something, Ms Meadows.

Lucy McBath introduced her campaign with this ad in which she tells the story of losing her son to a man with a gun. Here's how McBath explained her intent to Georgia voters.This short video is still worth your time even though the election is over.

Like all Congresscritters, McBath always needs support to stay in office. Meadows has backtracked, knowing she'd stuck her foot in her mouth -- but the NRA will certainly be coming after McBath in her next election.

Learn from an expert

Generation Lockdown tells the story.

In my grade school, it was pamphlets from the state governor urging families to build fallout shelters. Some people my age never recovered from being taught to dive under desks when the nuclear bombing came ...

The suggestion that we support background checks on gun purchases seems wildly inadequate to the threat. But March for Our Lives is effectively carrying the long struggle and deserves respect!

Elections have consequences: Nevada Dems move gun background check bill

They aim to have the measure covering private gun sales signed by the one year anniversary of the Parkland High School mass shooting on February 14. Steve Sisolak, the new governor our Reno campaign helped elect, has promised to approve the legislation, commenting:

... in the long run I firmly believe it’s going to save lives.”

Nevada Democrats have been working for this for a long time. They passed a similar bill closing the gun show sales loop hole in their state in 2013; the Republican governor vetoed it. So they went the initiative route, passing a background check measure in 2016 when they also carried the state for Hillary Clinton. But their victory was extremely narrow, 10,000 votes or .9 percent of the the total. They carried only Clark County (Las Vegas). The measure was never implemented because of disputes over what branch of law enforcement would conduct the checks and the hostility Republican office holders. So today's victory for a small measure of gun control has been a long time coming....Here in California where we have more gun control than anywhere else in the country, and look to win more in the current Dem legislature, it's worth remembering that this took a while and strange twists and turns facilitated it. In my memory, protesters could carry visible firearms into the state capital. (Unmentioned in the video, a failed attempt to recall Diane Feinstein when she was mayor of San Francisco in protest of our gun laws launched the now-seemingly perpetual Senator in our political universe.) Well worth a look.