Archie and the NRA

Back in the '70s, it must've been, Archie Bunker was a cultural icon. Played by Carroll O'Connor, a Hollywood journeyman who was, in fact, a leftie of the old school, Archie was the paterfamilias in a situation comedy in which the gimmick was his recurring arguments with his son-in-law. The son-in-law's name is lost, at least to me: Archie called him "meathead," because he was a classic liberal while Archie was an unreconstructed bigot at a time when that was still common enough to be funny.

The 70s were the heyday of airplane hijackings, the safe kind where the airplane actually landed, eventually. So hijacking was an issue; and Archie's solution, the subject of a vehement argument in one episode, was to "arm all your passengers." No hijacker would dare try anything if he knew that there were 100 or 200 guns on the plane.

Archie was played as satire; but it is worth noting that many viewers missed the satire and agreed with Archie, on this as on many other issues.

The President of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, said today that the solution to "a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun." Every school in the country, he said, should have an armed guard; and Congress should immediately appropriate the necessary funding.

So, let's see, here: according to the "Back 2 School Stats" from the National Center for Education Statistics, there are about 99,000 public schools in the U.S. To make the arithmetic easier, and noting that private schools are not included here, let's say one armed guard for each of 100,000 schools.  On one NPR broadcast today, I heard someone estimate a cost of $85,000 per armed guard, counting salary, benefits, equipment (the gun!), the entire training and supervision infrastructure.

So, that's $8.5 billion. Per year. Add private and parochial schools and we are clearly talking, say, $15 billion or so. But what the hey: spare no expense to protect our children.

But schools aren't chosen by wackos because of an animus against education; they're chosen because a reliably dense supply of people can be found there. Churches work, too; witness this year's shooting at a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee (the doofus thought the Siks were Moslems). So, while we're at it, we'd better protect the churches, mosques, temples, synagogues, meeting houses, and so on, too.

The Hartford Institute for Religion Research tells us that the best estimates say there are about 300,000 religious congregations in the U.S. Of course, most of those only have significant attendance once or twice a week, so let's estimate that we could do with part-timers to cover them. Maybe 50,000 to 100,000 full-time equivalents (this is complicated in that the vast majority of congregations meet at more or less the same time, so we would have to have a lot of part-timers).

But then, what about all the other places people congregate? Movie theatres, for instance, and shopping centers, and sporting events. We'd better have armed guards --lots of them, because these places have a lot going on, lots of entrances, lots of different people in charge, to varying degrees.

I expect we are going to need, maybe, a half-million armed guards, more than the police and private guards we already have. After all, we've got to have an adequate supply of good guys with guns, because, as Mr. LaPierre said, there are bad guys out there, with guns.

But I wouldn't be surprised if we could handle the whole thing for around $50 billion per year, which is chump change. Maybe we could even save on that, if we used, you know, community-watch volunteers.

Like that guy --Zimmerman?-- in Florida. We could just deputize them all. So, pretty much everywhere we would go, there would be a friendly, helpful, competent, well trained government employee keeping us safe. And don't forget, we'd all have guns of our own!

And it would be easy to pay for: just raise the price of every bullet sold, by the necessary amount.

The Secret

Something is going unsaid in the flurry of stories about guns in America, and the justifications, the real and important need, for unfettered access to them, for "protection."

But first, let me readily acknowledge that if I lived on a farm in central Nebraska, I would consider it only sensible that I have a firearm: the nearest law enforcement authority, even perhaps the nearest neighbor, would likely be a long way away, and the response to an emergency that I am used to in Hyde Park --often a matter of 5 minutes or less--, would not be forthcoming. That does not necessarily mean I would require a 30- or 100-round clip for my "semi-" automatic weapon. let alone that I would need 20 or more guns. But perhaps an absolute ban of the type we have had, until recent Court rulings, in cities such as Chicago might not be proper.

Those arguments are not heard, though. We hear undifferentiated claims of need for protection, at all times and everywhere. Indeed, there have been laments that the kindergarten teachers at Sandy Hook were not packing heat. The people making those kinds of statements would seem to envision a school full of Diamond Lil-type gals, Glocks tucked into their garters; because, after all, if it were in the desk drawer, or the purse, way across the room or down the hall it would not likely do the job, would it?

The real argument isn't being made: it is that a significant number of people in this country believe that they must protect themselves from the government.

They believe Obama will attempt to drive them into the salt mines of socialism; or that black helicopters will descend to enforce martial law on Happy Valley; or, like the Texas sheriff recently, that the U.N. will attempt to take over his county by force. And if they are too rational to buy into any of these widely-held fears, they believe that the government will simply attempt to ban all weapons and confiscate all those now in the hands of the populace.

They won't say this, at least not many of them. But there are deeply-held fears that the always-at-hand "they" are coming to get "us." The fact that the president is a Negro has exacerbated these fears, no matter that Obama is not Malcolm X; hell, he isn't even Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. But once you have such a fear, any attempt at any kind of regulation is viewed as confirmation of the belief.

And so the primary response, across the country, to the killing of a couple dozen six year-olds in a school in Connecticut has been a run on large-capacity magazines and rapid-fire weapons.

Scalia, Sodomy, Bestiality, & Murder

To be fair, the distinguished Justice said that he wasn't equating sodomy with murder. He was just showing that banning one of these practices was much the same as banning the other: both prohibitions would simply be an expression of community morality. The Associated Press (as reported by Slate) quoted Scalia as saying, "If we cannot have moral feelings against homosexuality, can we have it against murder? Can we have it against other things?" 

He was saying that it is legitimate for communities to express their moral feelings via legislation, prohibiting those things to which they object. His example was murder; but how about smoking, or listening to rock and roll, or uncovering a woman's face in public?

Leaving aside the imprudence exhibited (not for the first time) in his speaking publicly on an issue that is currently before the Court, it is instructive that Justice Scalia is willing to follow Rick Santorum in making comparisons between things that have fundamental differences. Santorum, as widely noted at the time, asked how, if we were to allow homosexuals to marry, we could legitimately prevent a man from marrying a monkey. He was ignoring the most obvious feature of the comparison he attempted to force: that of consent. It is present in a marriage between humans, but a member of a non-human species cannot, we understand, give its consent. The same is true, of course, in the case of murder: both parties typically do not consent to the act (if they do, we call it "assisted suicide," and we sometimes allow it). If my morality would forbid some private action by other individuals, Scalia seems to think that I have the right to ban it.

But even ignoring this basic issue, it is hard (though not impossible, I admit) to believe that Scalia would endorse, for example, laws against interracial marriage. Segregation itself was generally a matter of, well, morality, as the majority would have had it, when the Court ruled it unconstitutional. Why was Plessy v. Ferguson wrong and Brown v. Board of Education right, when the former represented an endorsement of widely-held community standards and the latter repudiated those same standards?

Scalia appears, in short, to be saying that the rule of law under the Constitution is whatever the majority says it is, regardless of the rights of the minority.

A Letter to My Senator

Senator Durbin -- on one of the talk shows today you argued (1) that the Medicare eligibility age should not be raised, and (2) that Medicare should be means tested.

As to (1), I agree with you, and not mainlly for the reason you gave (to avoid a coverage gap for retired 65 and 66 year-olds), but because it would save the government very little money. 66 year old people are not the expensive Medicare beneficiaries; various commentators have estimated the savings at such small amounts that such a move sounds just, well, stingy, a suitable first step for a Republican whose actual agenda is to destroy Medicare.

As to (2), means-testing an "entitlement" turns it into a welfare system rather than a universal right. Don't go down this road; it's just the first step, again, in a Republican design, first to denigrate the program's participants as recipients of "welfare," then to destroy the program by "ending welfare as we know it" --substitute "Medicare" for "welfare" and you have Paul Ryan's call to arms. As a defender of traditional American social values, you should not, I think, be willing to place yourself in such a position.

Thank you,

Tony Walters

Business, Small (or, B-S)

Okay, it's time to parse one of the big recurrent themes of the Republicans in Congress, and what Pat Buchanan would call their "Amen Chorus" in the pundit class: Raising taxes on the top 2% would hurt Small Business (the phrase is always, like the name of the deity, capitalized --we will follow that custom here, out of a deep respect for American Religion).

The argument goes more or less like this:

• Most "Small Businesses" are, in fact, flow through entities (e.g., sole proprietorships, limited liability companies, partnerships), the profits of which are taxed on the returns of their owners. Hence, they are taxed at the individual rates.
• Therefore, increasing the tax on upper-income individuals means increasing the tax on their companies, in all these cases.
• When you increase taxes on Small Business, you prevent those companies from hiring more employees. So you stifle growth and employment.

Now, I suppose the first thing to point out are the underlying assumptions:

1. The Small Businesses in question are profitable enough to generate at least $250,000 in profits for (each of) their owners, assuming they file joint returns.
2. Given the opportunity to increase the business by, say, gaining a new customer that would require hiring a new employee, the owner would gladly hire the new person if the owner faced a tax rate of 35% on the extra profits thereby generated. But he would forego that opportunity if his tax rate on the resulting profits would be 39.6%.

As it is only the profits in excess of $250,000 per owner that would be taxed at the higher rates, the additional tax on, say, a $300,000 profit would only be 4.6% of $50,000, or $2,300. Not zero; but not exactly confiscation.