Children Pay the Price in Minneapolis

 

Just last week, Mad Dog happened to visit the Twin Cities, staying in St. Paul, just across the street from the Children's Hospital, and St. Paul's Cathedral, which is on a hill above the hospital.

Cathedral on a Hill

Today, that hospital, and its sister hospital in Minneapolis, are trying to save children who were shot at their church school.

Mad Dog climbed up that steep hill to the cathedral and sent these photos home to his co conspirator back in Hampton, who remarked, "A simple church to minister to the poor, as Jesus did." 

Well, okay, but it is a beautiful Cathedral, and in a city which is not known to be fabulously wealthy, it surprised Mad Dog--just as those cathedrals in small European cities did.

Actually, Mad Dog had to inquire if it was Catholic, as he has always associated Minnesota with the Lutherans, as anyone who listened to Garrison Keillor would. 

So now,  the report of yet another slaughter of children by a male gunman, as they attended opening ceremonies at their Catholic school.

As so many have noted, school shootings, and mass shootings in America are now so common we have lost track of when the last one was, or where. They are not common events, statistically, but they have a special currency.

Depending on how such shootings are defined and reported, the most common number on Google is 1,300 school shootings over the past 25 years, or 52 a year, or one a week, in a country of 330 million occupying an entire continent. On the other hand, googling, there have been only 14 deaths on commercial airplane flights over that same 25 year period, which might suggest it is safer flying from Boston to San Francisco, statistically, than going to school.

Crime statistics are endlessly arguable, although it's pretty clear from virtually every source, violent crime in American cities has declined precipitately, the reasons being variously ascribed to an aging population, the advent of abortion on demand, which resulted in fewer unwanted, unloved and unattended males. But, of course, now we hear from Stephen Miller that violent crime is on a rampage, which, of course, only Donald Trump and the might of the U.S. military can constrain. One wonders whether Trump will dispatch the Marines to Minneapolis. Mad Dog doubts that, as the population there is of Scandinavian origin, predominantly, so in Trumps eyes, it could not be all that bad and in need of tanks and bludgeons, George Floyd notwithstanding.

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

There are two problems Mad Dog is pretty sure he has no easy answer for: 

1. Homelessness  and 

2. Mass shootings.

In both cases, the role of insanity, mental instability, whatever you want to call it, plays at least some role.  

In the case of the homeless, there are clearly some homeless who are homeless by choice, intractably homeless, because their own mental makeup makes them unable and/or unwilling to live indoors near or with or in close proximity to other people. Some homeless, clearly would love to live in shelters with a roof and four walls, but do not have access to that. But some, likely a small percentage, really do not want to live in a fixed address indoors. Some are simply wedded to a life of addiction which makes rent, rules, social stability simply impossible. Others are simply victims of a quasi capitalist economy with too few safety nets. Those who study homelessness seem to indicate it is a problem which might be solved by government intervention. Certainly, big corporations have shown no inclination to solve this problem as there is no profit to be made, unlike with prisoners, who can be cash cows in private prisons.

Some cities in Texas have reduced homelessness with what appears to be simple solutions: changing zoning codes so inexpensive housing can be built.

Other solutions, most notably the infamous "housing projects" for the poor in cities like Baltimore became dens of iniquity and were actually razed out of frustration, when government and citizens decided they were worse than the original problem. "The Wire" documents this story in great detail. In other cities, New York City, housing projects have been significantly more successful. There are more roofs on housing projects in NYC (>700,000) than there are roofs in all of the city of Boston. 

St. Paul's, St. Paul, MN

As for school shootings, the reduction in access to guns and, more likely, to bullets may be something which at least reduces the likelihood of such anathemas. There are experiments in Australia, and even in America, where efforts at gun control seemed to coincide with reductions in overall shooting deaths, but school shootings, mass shootings in general, may not follow form, inasmuch as they seem to be special cases.

Even defining what constitutes a mass shooting is controversial, but nobody has any trouble defining what constitutes a school shooting from Columbine to Sandy Hook at  Newtown, Connecticut is not in doubt. (Unless of course, you are Alex Jones, who claimed Sandy Hook never happened, and whose lawyer said, on national TV, unless you were at the morgue yourself, to see the bodies of the children, personally, you could not be sure the whole thing was any more real than the moon landing.)

Mad Dog tried to visit the Portsmouth High School not long ago, and it felt like he was entering a high security prison, with walls of bullet proof glass in panels arrayed in such a way nobody could progress rapidly through them.

Trying to ride his bicycle through the parking lot of Marston [elementary] School in Hampton, as a short cut to the beach, Mad Dog was stopped by a police officer stationed there and questioned about whether he had a child in the school and he replied, no, he was just taking a short cut to the beach. He was sent packing. 

We will likely never know what motivated the Minneapolis shooter: He ended his own life before he could be questioned.

Chris Rock has a riff about "Black crimes" and "White Crimes" and he says that when you hear someone has shot kids in a school playground, you know it's a young White male. 

Christopher Hitchens once observed that people who do unimaginably horrific things, like blowing up a bomb in a crowded market, or blowing up a school, or shooting children, are either motivated by religious fervor, which is the only thing which can justify such vile behavior in otherwise ostensibly sane people, or they are psychotic.  

Even though this most recent shooting was at a Catholic school, one suspects it was not because the kids and their teachers were Catholics, although, as has been noted, we'll never know.

All we'll know is this is primarily an American phenomenon. 

At least we perceive it as such.

Occasionally, you hear about school killings and mass kidnapping in Africa. And who knows what is happening in Asia? 

But, Mad Dog's impression is "This America, man."

Thomas Paine, Scalia and the Originalists

Three provisions of the Constitution refer to “the people” in a context other than “rights”—the famous preamble (“We the people”), §2 of Article I (providing that “the people” will choose members of the House), and the Tenth Amendment (providing that those powers not given the Federal Government remain with “the States” or “the people”). Those provisions arguably refer to “the people” acting collectively—but they deal with the exercise or reservation of powers, not rights. Nowhere else in the Constitution does a “right” attributed to “the people” refer to anything other than an individual right.⁶

What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention “the people,” the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. As we said in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 265 (1990) :

“ ‘[T]he people’ seems to have been a term of art employed in select parts of the Constitution… . [Its uses] sugges[t] that ‘the people’ protected by the Fourth Amendment , and by the First and Second Amendment s, and to whom rights and powers are reserved in the Ninth and Tenth Amendment s, refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community or who have otherwise developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of that community.”

This contrasts markedly with the phrase “the militia” in the prefatory clause. As we will describe below, the “militia” in colonial America consisted of a subset of “the people”—those who were male, able bodied, and within a certain age range. Reading the Second Amendment as protecting only the right to “keep and bear Arms” in an organized militia therefore fits poorly with the operative clause’s description of the holder of that right as “the people.”

We start therefore with a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans.

--Antonin Scalia

Reading Thomas Paine is stunning, when you think this  guy was writing 250 years ago, addressing issues so basic we are still struggling with them today.

Of course, some of those issues have receded, as most of us have got past the idea that mankind needs a king and hereditary monarchies to rule them and that the rights of kings and aristocrats to have so much power and wealth is God given and rightful.

But the idea of the importance of "stability" and "continuity" persists and controls us in very practical and important ways. To pick only the most egregious and obvious example, our Supreme Court still labors under the weight of the ideal of "originalism" which is to say the Constitution constitutes an immutable law, handed down by sacred "founding fathers" who spoke with one voice and of one mind and gave us the law, which is the original truth, Biblical in its constancy and all the answers are contained in it, if only we are wise enough to read and follow it.

Of course, Antonin Scalia revealed in his contorted opinion in Heller v DC, the absurdity of such a position. It was clear the gun loving Scalia, a devout Catholic who needed an inviable text to justify his pronouncements, turned to the 2nd amendment, which is about as unambiguous as any sentence in the entire Constitution, and the only place in that document where the authors took pains to explain the reason why they grant a right: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Anyone reading this sentence who does not understand that "the people" here are specifically members of this "well regulated" militia, has got to be fooling himself. It is even more telling  the amendment's author was not content to simply leave it at "a militia" but deliberately put in "well regulated" with the clear meaning that these people bearing arms were under control of the state.

So how did Justice Scalia get over, under or around this clear barrier to a right to individual gun ownership, which is, obviously, where he was so determined to go?

The mental contortions and back flips Scalia performs are breath taking. If ever you want to see a man in the struggle to convince himself that black is white or that 2+2=5, this would be a good example to consider.

Consider Thomas Paine dis-articulating the argument that our current generation, in the 21st century, beset by assault rifles which can mow down 50 people within an instant, should be bound by any rule set down in at the end of the 18th century. 

"There never did, there never will, and there never can exist a parliament, or any description of men, or any generation of men, in any country, possessed of the right or the power of binding and controlling posterity to the 'end of time,' or of commanding for ever how the world should be governed, or who should govern it: and therefore, all such clauses, acts or declarations, by which the makers of them attempt to do what they have neither the right nor the power to do, nor the power to execute, are in themselves null and void. Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generation which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies." [Italics added]

We have now a Supreme Court which is a peculiar amalgam of "originalists" like Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Alito and a justice who rejects precedent because he sees the history of the law in this country as being unjust (Thomas) and one who vacillates between dismissing precedent when it suits him and clinging to it when it doesn't (Roberts.)

Stare decisis has for this Court become stare plasticity.  Scalia ignored generation after generation of prior decisions which specifically denied the Constitution bestowed an individual right to gun ownership.

Whatever we have, we have a court of unelected men who are faced daily with cases which fall between the cracks of the structure nailed together by the framers and who do, some would say, must, make up the law as they go along.

Just consider the righteous baker case: A Colorado baker receives an order from two gay men to prepare a wedding cake for their ceremony. He is a fundamentalist Christian who says his religion forbids him from sanctifying such a sinful union, and he refuses. The Supreme Court looks at the way the lower courts have decided the case and they point to the disparaging remarks made by the courts about the baker's religion and they find that the courts have erred in disrespecting this man's religion.

The baker also emphasizes how he was mistreated by the angry gay couple, which is somehow relevant to the Supreme Court.

Now it is the righteous baker who is the victim, not the gay couple.

It is a problem for today's originalist justices to look for guidance from those gentlemen in powdered wigs and silk stockings who wrote the Constitution and said "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

One might say: "Ah, there it is. The lower courts violated the baker's right to not bake that cake by prohibiting his free exercise of religion."

But then you have to deal with all those folks whose free exercise of religion forbade them from allowing people of color in their motels, which forbade serving colored people at their lunch counters, which instructed them to pass laws forbidding inter racial marriage.  What do you do when religious belief directs people to violate other parts of the Constitution?

For that you need a Court willing to make decisions unencumbered by direction from the grave.


And as current opinion and belief change, so must our Court. 
One of the most important issues ignored in our discussion of who should lead the Democratic Party in 2020 has been the issue of packing the Court.

The Evangelicals and a whole far right sector elected Donald Trump in no small part because they wanted a Court which would reverse Roe v Wade. 

The Dems didn't see that coming and still are blind to it.