What to Do About Guns

A single death is a tragedy.

A million deaths is a statistic.

--Joseph Stalin

 The Phantom heard an eye opening podcast from the NY Times today, which prompted some Googling and changed his mind about some things related to guns.

Some important things to understand:

1. As horrific as they are, mass school shootings like Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Columbine are very rare events compared to the daily rate of gun deaths in America, and they account for less than 1% of all deaths of children by gunfire--most children who die by guns die on street corners or from stray bullets, or in home accidents, or, in the case of adolescents, by gun suicide. 

Actually, the easiest number with the most agreement is that about 1% of all children killed by guns in this country die in school mass shootings. 

But trying to tease out the other numbers is maddeningly difficult. What you really want to know:

       a/ How many kids were killed by guns altogether, including those who were and were not killed in mass shootings?

       b/ How many kids were killed by guns they were playing with, i.e. not intending to use to harm anyone, but by accident?

       c/ How many kids were killed by gun violence aimed at other people, but were "collateral deaths"? That is, unintentional deaths.

       d/ In which states are most kids killed by guns? 

This last number is easier to come by: Unsurprisingly, the states with the highest number of dead kids from guns are in the South and West: South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Wyoming and Texas were the leaders while Massachusetts, New Jersey were relatively safe states for kids. States where the 2nd Amendment is considered the 11th Commandment have higher numbers of gun deaths. 

This is actually no surprise. Going back to pre Civil War day, the murder rates, mostly by guns, in the Confederacy and its extensions to the Wild West were far higher than in the more civilized East. The South and its extension into the Mountain West have always been violent places, poorer, relatively uneducated. They really do cling to their guns and religion in these parts. 

2. A "mass shooting" is defined as 4 or more people shot, either fatally or not, occurring as a single incident. This could be somebody is shooting unarmed victims in  a grocery store, but may often be shoot outs between armed gang members on street corners, where some of their targets have guns and some people are just caught in the crossfire. 

So when Uvalde happens and lots of statistics get put out by journalists who are saying Uvalde is just another example of mass shootings gone wild, they are misleading the public.  School shootings are likely an entirely different species. They are sui generis. 

What really horrifies us is the idea of a school shooting, so we want to pass laws to stop that, but hardening school, the major fix has not worked. 

Because it's often males under the age of 21 doing the shootings, limiting their access to AR-15's sounds like a reasonable thing to do, but looking at individual instances, given the small number of cases, it's not clear how many could have been prevented, given a determined adolescent who shoots his mother or grandmother on the way out the door. Exceptional cases make bad law. 

The problem is, when you start talking about solutions, the solution to one sort of horror (school shootings) may do absolutely nothing for another, e.g suicide or street shootings.

Utterly Vile

3. 54% of all American gun deaths are suicides. Lumping single men who blow their own brains out with a 15 year old shooting school kids with an AR-15 makes little sense.  And, while we might want to prevent suicide by gun, a laudable goal, talking about solutions to school shootings and mixing in solutions for gun suicides is ridiculous. 

"Gun deaths" are not the same as "mass shootings" which are not really the same as "school shootings" which are a very small subset of "mass shootings."

4. There are over 300 million guns in America and if we decided to take everyone's gun away, these guns could be simply buried in the back yard. Clamping down on ammunition would make more sense.

So trying to prevent the next Uvalde is difficult. The Phantom has to admit, he has no plan he thinks would work. Reducing the number of AR-15's sold to young homicidal maniacs makes sense. Most of the shooters are young males. 

The Phantom remembers so vividly witnessing a smiling White salesman in a Virginia Walmart, years ago, handing a large hand gun across the counter to a Black kid who looked to be no older than 12 and his younger brother, about 10. The fascination of that kids, as they touched, really fondled that black gun, and the gleam in the eye of the salesman--God only knows what he was thinking--are images indelibly burned into the Phantom's brain.

But, whatever plan we have, we have to know it is likely to fail to prevent all school shootings. We'll never know if any plan, say forbidding AR-15 sales altogether, prevented a mass shooting. You don't know how many school shootings you prevent. You can only measure the ones you did not prevent.

Biden Mans Up; White House Wimps Out

 

Joe Biden spoke  in Warsaw to a crowd waving Polish, American and Ukrainian flags and he spoke directly to Vladimir Putin.

He did not say, "Mr. Putin, tear down this wall," because it was Mr. Putin tearing down and, in fact, sending tanks over walls already;  that, in fact, is the problem.

What President Biden did say was good enough: To say that Russian troops are blasting through Ukraine to "denazify" Ukraine is "obscene" Biden said, of a country which elected a Jewish President whose father's family was murdered in the Holocaust.

That many Ukrainians took part in the Holocaust nearly 80 years ago, should not be forgotten, but some protected Jews and the point is, they elected a Jewish President just lately. To talk of Ukraine today as being run by Nazis, Biden said, "Is just obscene."

"For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power."

The President is saying what is obvious to anyone paying attention to the news, even in New Hampshire. The problem is not some historic coalescence of grievances, or some geopolitical game; the problem is one man, as surely as the Third Reich was one man and his obsessions. The only way for this war to end cleanly is for Putin to go the way of Hitler, with a bullet in his head. There, I said it. Everyone knows it, but nobody wants to say it. There might be some minions supporting him, but if Putin died tomorrow, those Russian troops and tanks would stop in their tracks.

Were it not for Putin and his dreams of glory and empire, there would be no problem between Russia and Europe or the United States.

Of course, while the President was in Europe, back at the White House some self important staffers were saying, "The President's point was that Putin cannot be allowed to exercise power over his neighbors or the region. He was not discussing Putin's power in Russia, or regime change."

Oh, that's a very fine point there, darling. We don't care what he does inside his own borders, but when he crosses borders, we are staunch. (By that policy, had Hitler not invaded Poland, then we would be fine with all those concentration camps inside Germany--but that's an argument for another day.)

You can imagine all the meetings at the National Security Council, the State Department and the Defense Department where everyone agreed we should not say we wanted Putin's head, but simply we wanted him to use his power differently, because, "It risks confirming Russia's central propaganda claim that the West, and particularly the United States, is determined to destroy Russia."

And what do we care about confirming Russian propaganda? Are we afraid we'll lose the Russian public? As if anything we do or say will affect the opinions of the Russian public, given Putin's lockdown of opposition journalism? 

No, what Biden is saying, which he should be saying as President, is that but for Putin we would have no quarrel with Russia, but we cannot deal with a psychopathic dictator and we'll treat him and his country accordingly. He can't concern himself with how this message is received inside a slave state. He is speaking to the rest of Europe, to China and to his folks back home, and he is speaking clearly.

What is aggravating is to see the rest of the American government unable to realize that when it comes to foreign policy, the United States has one leader, the President, and if he wants to say Putin has to go, then everyone else must scramble to catch up.

Biden has spoken his mind before, confounding the underlings and even his boss. He said he thought gay marriage was fine before President Obama had got to that point, but ultimately, he convinced Obama, because Biden, while he might have lost some brain cells, is still functioning on enough cylinders to know what right is.

Lincoln once said, "If slavery is not wrong, then I do not know what wrong is."

Biden is saying the same thing.

Renny Cushing: A Good Life, A Good Man in Bad Times

 

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, 
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, 
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum 
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. 

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead 
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead, 
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, 
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. 

--WH Auden

We got the news today we all knew was coming, but did not want to hear: Renny Cushing has died.

It does not seem right.

Death often does not seem right, but this man campaigned against death, against the death penalty in New Hampshire. Surely, death would respect that.

I met him only 14 years ago, which in Hampton time is the click of the second hand. Renny had lived his whole life in Hampton, graduated from Winnacunnet, travelled around the country and into Mexico but then came home.

He worked ceaselessly, often a boat beating against the tides, in the New Hampshire legislature, advocating for better health care, better mental health care, pushing against the death penalty even though his own father had been murdered, and by a policeman, at that.

I cannot say I knew him well, but I can say I knew enough of him to see the nobility, the grace, the enormous patience and the fastidious honor of the man.

It's a sad day for Hampton, for all those who knew him.

What's Really Happening with Putin and Ukraine?

 As a humble citizen, unschooled in military strategies and geopolitical oil and gas stratagems, and the psychological profile of Vladimir Putin, I have only youtube, the Atlantic, the New Yorker and NPR to help me understand why Mr. Putin pulled an Adolph Hitler and launched his invasion.

Here's what I've got so far:

1/ Mr. Putin has some psychological buzz going on in his brain regarding things that have to do with the vagaries of respect, power, prestige and all like that. As Nina Khruschev has described him: He is a 5 foot five man trying to look 5 feet six. 

So there's that, the small man syndrome. 

And he has been reported to have commented on the demise of Omar Ghaddafi on multiple occasion, and he may well fear suffering a similar fate, should he ever relinquish  a scintilla of power. 

Masha Gessen and others have suggested Putin's invasion is simply pay back for the humiliation he felt when Clinton bombed Kosovo, when Russia was too weak to do much about it. It's a long revenge game, according to Gessen. 

That sounds titillating, but I'm not sure I buy that.

2/ But there are other concerns you can find on various youtube podcasts:

A very elaborate explanation about the geography of the great Russian/European plane which allows armies to sweep across the areas between the Baltic states, Germany, Poland, Byelorussia, Romania and Ukraine, and if you have Ukraine within Russia, that protects a flank. 

The problem with all this is it applies only if armies are sweeping across that vast plane on horseback, or even in tanks, and with airplanes, but how much does that sort of large World War II type battle scene matter when Russia is stacked high with nuclear missiles? 

Get too close to Moscow or Volgograd and poof: you are nuclear toast. 

It's the Jungian Thing

3/ The Gas/Oil theory: Now this makes a lot more sense. Apparently, Ukraine is not only the breadbasket of that part of Europe, but it has lots of oil in both eastern and western Ukraine on land, and off shore lots of natural gas, and the Crimean peninsula is particularly rich in oil and off shore natural gas.

With Russia providing 1/3 to 1/2 of Western Europe's gas and oil, and most of that crossing Ukraine, for which Ukraine exacts a large fee, it would be nice to control the gas line territory, so this invasion, bringing Ukraine back to mother Russia, makes sense as blood for oil.  

Russia, apparently, pumps more oil than Saudi Arabia. Who knew?

Enjoy the Beach, But we're watching you

It's a petrol state and it's more of a petrol state if it owns Ukraine.

So now we don't have to invoke Imperial Russia and Putin's psychopathology; we've got good old fashioned oil and power and we can certainly understand that. 

Then you get all the shenanigans about Russia and Ukraine being one country, or maybe one family with a divorce and whenever you get into the history, it gets really confusing. 

Khrushchev, who was born in Ukraine, apparently gave the Crimean peninsula to Ukraine sometime in the 20th century, not all that long ago, as a sort of consolation prize for becoming a republic in the USSR. And Crimea has not only all that natural gas and oil but it also has one of Russia's only big warm water ports, which does not ice over and allows the Russian Navy to rule the Black sea and to get into the Mediterranean. 

Putin has for years told anyone who would listen that Ukraine isn't even a real country, just part of Russia, which is like telling Jacqueline Onassis she isn't really an Onassis because she's really a Kennedy and then one of her sisters shows up and tells you she's actually a Bouvier. Gets very confusing.

What we all can see are the soldiers in tanks and Russians firing rockets into Ukrainian buildings and fighting their way into nuclear power plants and none of this looks like a humanitarian operation or a peace keeping mission.

And, except in the eastern part of Ukraine, the Ukrainians do not appear to be terribly fond of the Russians right now, even though many of them have relatives in Russia.

I imagine it's sort of like how people in Massachusetts feel about people from Texas, Louisiana and Kentucky: you know there's a connection there, and we speak more or less the same language,  but right now, we're not inviting any of them over for Thanksgiving dinner.

 

Charismatic Leaders

When Amy Klobuchar visited New Hampshire, during the Democratic primary season,  I asked her how she planned to run against a candidate of charisma with a campaign based on policy. She clearly had not been asked that question before and she smiled, thought for a moment and said, "Well, I think I have charisma, too."

She may have had some charisma, but clearly, nothing like Donald Trump. She did not become the candidate on the Democratic ticket.  Elizabeth Warren was a crowd pleaser, but she has a wispy voice  and she's a wisp of a woman, just not physically imposing. Bernie Sanders has plenty of charisma, and I thought he would stand up on stage best against Trump, but his policies scared Democrats. His policies were so extreme, he scared too many people.

Beyond Sanders, the Democrats have trouble finding leaders who can speak above a whisper. 

When 11 candidates presented themselves for consideration for the Congressional seat in the 1st district of New Hampshire, the candidate of charisma, Terrence O'Rourke, got 900 votes. He scared women. He seemed too angry for Democratic women. Chris Pappas, who barely speaks above a whisper, got 21,000. Pappas comes from the state's most populous city and his family owns a big restaurant and he has lots of friends in town, but he is a house cat. A woman who looks like she could win a spot on FOX News, Maura Sullivan, got 19,000 votes, even though she had no base of friends in New Hampshire, had only moved to the state recently, but she had tons of dark money running TV ads constantly. She had a modicum of charisma, but no policies. 

Great Charisma, Horrific Cause

When it comes to charisma, nobody beats Hitler. Crowds of women wept has they saluted him rolling by in his open Mercedes, standing up arm outstretched, brow in a stern frown. A man of strength.

The man had appeal, Heaven knows why.

George Washington had charisma. He was over six feet tall at a time most men were five feet eight. 

Had someone put a bullet in Hitler's brain somewhere around the beer hall Putsch, in 1929, would the Holocaust or World War II ever happened?

We'll never know. But I'm betting, none of those co conspirators could ever have pulled off the Third Reich without him: Himmler, Hess, Goring, Goebbels. Just to banal or too ugly. 

Now, we have Putin, that little man, who Nina Khrushchev says is a 5 foot five inch man who is trying to sell the idea he is five feet six.

He marches down long red carpets, against a back ground of golden drapes and walls, with those peculiar guards, who look not just like wooden soldiers from the time of Catherine the Great, but like wind up toy soldiers of the Nutcracker ballet. There's something weird they do with their necks and chins and heads, which is a little creepy.

What is that all about?

I'm guessing it's about projecting of not just power but past glory.

But it's all in the mind of a single man. A little man trying to be big. A little man who wants Russia to be a goliath again.

And he is a man who orders other men poisoned.  Firing squads are not his favored expedient. He likes poison. Poison is a little more worrisome. You just never know when it might get to you. 

Fiona Hill noted Putin never touched a bite or sipped a drink at the state dinner she attended, sitting next to him. Fear of poisoning?

Another favorite Russian tactic is throwing people out of windows.  Don't ask me why. I suppose it's one of those things about plausible deniability. Russians like to lie to your face with a wink, saying they know you know they are lying, but they enjoy lying while you know they are lying.

So, Mr. Putin's current project in Ukraine is a "humanitarian intervention."

Obadiah Youngblood

Senator Lindsey Graham has expostulated that someone needs to kill Putin. Put a bullet in his brain. For once, Graham has spit out the truth. But Putin, like most dictators, has taken great care to protect himself, to hunker in the bunker. 

Putin, it has been written, obsesses over the demise of Omar Ghaddafi. Apparently, he was sodomized before he was shot. That, if what we are told is true, disturbs Putin greatly. 

John F. Kennedy remarked, "Any man who is willing to trade his life for mine can kill me."

As it turned out, his killer or killers did not actually have to do that.

The men who killed Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy did not hang for their deeds.

In a day of drones and remote killing machines, one would think a leader, even Putin, could be reached.

But, apparently not. 

And so we have Ukraine.

But we also have, unexpectedly, Zelensky, that guy nobody had ever heard of in the West--like Trump, a TV creation, but in the case of Ukraine, a good creation, who actually had brass balls when the time came. 

And he had great timing and delivery.  When Putin claimed Zelensky had fled the country or was cowering in hiding, Zelensky said, "I am here. I'm not going anywhere." And he smiled that faint, economical smile and he was, in an instant a man of more charisma than either Trump or Putin, because he was a real patriot. America offered to whisk him away to safety. "I don't need a ride," Zelensky said. "I need ammunition."

A patriot needs to take a risk, to put his fortune or his life at risk in the face of palpable threat, something neither Trump nor Putin have ever done nor ever would do. That, Trump would say, is for suckers.

There is no such thing as patriotism without risk or without cost or sacrifice. The Proud Boys and FOX News staff are all about phony patriotism: tough talk, posing with guns, slogans, flags. None of that easy, safe patriotism is anything more than posing. Zelensky is at the front. 

Zelensky says, "No." That is what heroes do. 

And therein lies the difference. 

Separation of Church and State

 

The very first words of the very first amendment in the Bill of Rights are, "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion."

Unlike the Constitution of the State of New Hampshire, which says, ""No money raised by taxation shall ever be granted or applied for the use of the schools of institutions of any religious sect or denomination, ” the interpretation of what constitutes the establishment of religion is not spelled out in the US Constitution.

The ultraconservatives now occupying the Supreme Court keep whittling away at what constitutes establishment of religion.

One big trend is to allow governments to provide to religious institutions and the schools which are an inseparable part of them, the same benefits as are provided to public school students or to students at non religious private schools: For example, if you say you will provide all students in Hampton, NH with bus transportation to school, you cannot say, "well, except for those kids who want to be transported to Catholic school." (Everson) If you want to offer playground equipment to all kids in town, you have to provide it to the playgrounds on the Lutheran church campus (Trinity Lutheran Church v Comer). So the argument that you cannot discriminate when handing out goodies because some school is religious has become law.

But a new decision (Espinoza v Montana Department of Revenue) expands the area in which the state has to pay religious schools, in which scholarships made available to private schools have to be made available to private religious schools, so now a state is required to fund religious education if it provides similar grants to non religious institutions.  Justice Roberts argues if you must provide playground equipment, then you must provide scholarships to learn religion, which just goes to show how Catholic education can infiltrate brain cells of almost anyone. 

When and if the Court is ever packed or rearranged or infiltrated with more liberal justices, this decision will be, hopefully, one of the first to go.

In Maine, there are students who live so far from any public school the only practical schools available to them are religious schools and the state government is now facing a Supreme Court which will probably direct Maine to pay to send these kids to religious schools. 

But in New Hampshire, there is a case which potentially could break the back of the establishment clause altogether when and if it ever makes it to the current SCOTUS. 

In the town of Hampton, every year, the town votes to set up an account of $65,000 in the town's department of education, for the use of the Catholic Sacred Heart School. This debit card has been used to pay vouchers presented to the town from the Church, and each year about $42,000 is used to pay for a school nurse (which New Hampshire law says every school can or must make available to every student at every school in town) but $23,000 is used for computers, testing materials, textbooks and possibly painting classroom walls--it isn't clear--but for operating expenses of the school, which is owned by the diocese of Manchester, NH. 

What is meant by the "establishment of religion"?

Well, if the town of Hampton declared in writing that the Catholic church was the official church of the town, choosing it over the Baptist, Congregational, Episcopalian, Methodist and Faith Community Church, most people would agree that's government (not Congress, but what applies to Congress applies to all levels of government) establishing a church.

But beyond statements, and naming rights, what else could be establishment? How about if a judge erects a huge cross in his court room or, say, places a big plaque with the 10 Commandments on his wall? Or a nativity scene at the front of the courtroom, right next to the witness stand? Or a picture of Pope Francis?

But for most state churches as they function in England or Europe the big thing is not symbols, but rather money. The Church of England gets money from the state to paint church walls, pay staff, buy computers.  So if we, here in America, the land of Jefferson, Madison and Franklin, start paying for the costs of operating churches, would that not constitute an establishment of church by the state, especially if only one church were so blessed?

With the current Thomas/Alito/Barrett/Kavanaugh/Roberts Court, it's not clear they would see anything wrong with selecting one church out. They might say, well if the citizens in a town all vote for that church to be funded by taxpayers' money, would we want to interfere with the free exercise of religion by those voters who are good Catholics and choose to direct their taxes to the Church?

This is predictable. 

But it does not mean it's right.

Fact is, we have for over 200 years been free of the state being beholden to any church and we have forgotten why that might be a problem.

At a recent deliberative session in town, considering defunding the church, one lady pointed out that same church school closed down a book fair because one of the books put on sale told the story of a same sex couple raising a child. 

Oh, my.

The fact is, Hampton schools have failed to teach history to its folk, and they have forgot all the mischief religious wars and intrigue of popes and religious institutions have caused. 

For my part, I'd recommend the TV series, "The Tudors" be shown in class. It's got lots of sex and nudity and would hold the interest of the students, but it really does show the dangers, as heads get chopped off and people get burned at the stake and villagers are impoverished trying to meet the tithes demanded of them to support the churches. 

But I won't hold my breath.

Hampton is a small New England town and as Grace Metalious observed in Peyton Place religion is a volcano.

Dr. Matthew Swain, the hero, describes the Catholic and Congregationalist churches which bracketed the town like bookends as "a pair of goddamned volcanoes. Both of 'em breathin' brimstone and fire...There were three things he hated in the world, he'd said often and angrily: death, venereal disease and organized religion. In that order."

It is, of course, Dr. Swain who is put on trial at the end of the book for performing an abortion on a teen age girl raped by her step father, a set of extenuating circumstances which today's Catholic church would not find exculpatory.

We have here, in small town New England, folks who stand up at deliberative sessions and say we have funded the Catholic Church in town for 50 years and they see no reason to change that no matter what the Constitution in Washington says. And when asked if they would allow taxpayer dollars to fund any other church in town, they smile knowingly and say, "Well, if they can get enough votes for that, the way we have..."

And so we sail on, in this nation of laws.

Things You Cannot Vote On

 

When I was growing up in Virginia, the local townsfolk voted to have segregated schools. The folks wanted White kids in one school and Negroes in another school. Been that way for 100 years. Then, the Supreme Court said, "No, you cannot vote on that because that local law violates the law of the land, the most basic law, which is the Constitution."

Monday night, in Hampton, New Hampshire, I heard the same sort of argument coming from a very agitated man who said he had grown up in Hampton, and for 50 years the town of Hampton had voted to write checks to the Sacred Heart (Catholic) School to support their operating expenses. But that night citizens rose to object to funding a religious school, a church with town taxpayer funds and he was dumbfounded and outraged.

There was an attempt at obfuscation: The supporters of the government funding of religion attempted to say that this money was being spent on the school nurse and that the state government says that every school child is entitled to a nurse and so we can't discriminate against the kids in the Catholic school. But the treasurer of the school board said 65% of the $65,000 was spent on the nurse--as if that made it alright--and she left unsaid that meant 35% or $22,750 was spent on textbooks, computers and testing materials, operating expenses of the Church school.

When a woman proposed that if any other school, a Muslin or Jewish school for instance requested the same $65,000 this be automatically awarded. The Catholic school folks objected to this on two grounds: 1. The school requesting the money might be a church of Satan and we would not want to give money to a church preaching stuff we don't approve of  2. The Catholic Church had done its "due diligence" which is to say, it had come to the town government, got itself a warrant article and got that warrant article voted through, so every other school, Jewish, Baptist or Episcopalian ought to have to "earn" it the way the Sacred Heart School had done. 

The New Hampshire state Constitution specifically forbids spending state funds on religious institutions,

The NH State Constitution says that "no money raised by taxation shall ever be granted or applied for the use of the schools of institutions of any religious sect or denomination.” 

 but that didn't matter to the folks at the meeting: They vote 22 to 11 to fund Sacred Heart and the same vote to not fund any other church school unless that school managed to get a warrant article passed and they approved of the $22,750 being spent on non nurse items, like computers, and for all I know, the painting of classrooms and other operating expenses.

Apparently, the mechanism is the school spends money and then sends invoices to the school board or some Hampton town official who then cuts a check to cover the costs.

So, in Hampton, every member of the school board voted to reject the 1st amendment of the US Constitution, "Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion." 

Apparently, the school board has not been schooled in civics, in Hampton, New Hampshire.