My daughter tested positive for mentally gifted.

woo-hoo!!

that is all.

What they do, go and ban the AK/
The shit wasn’t registered ANY-fuckin-way - Ice Cube

In the case of the Supreme Court’s hearing on the constitutionality of DC’s ban on handguns, I’m on the “pro-gun” side. Maybe I should parse it a little more carefully and say that I’m anti-ban. I don’t have a gun (yet), but it’s really not that major because I don’t live in the District, proper. I live right outside of DC. So this is only marginally about me.

Generally, I don’t think a ban on handguns is effective in preventing crime committed with handguns. It’s certainly not effective in a city-sized jurisdiction. For one thing, there are too many places where people can get guns for a ban to be effective. What literal difference does it make for DC to have a gun ban when Maryland and Virginia don’t? It’s not like there’s an invisible shield on the Potomac, Eastern, and Southern avenues that disintegrates firearms. If I had a gun before I got to DC, I’ll have one while I’m in DC. So on a very literal level, a ban fails on the basis of geography. I know a lot of people like to bring up the example of places in the world where guns are banned to use that as an example, but a big part of what makes their bans effective is that there are geographical barriers in place that prevent firearms from entering in the first place. DC doesn’t have that.

Another limitation – a big limitation – to any sort of a ban on handguns is that the people who commit crimes with handguns tend not to be the people to whom they are registered. Meaning that they already have the gun illegally. So then you’re in the position of banning something that is itself already illegal. Well, actually, that’s where we are now. We have a law that says something illegal is (more?) illegal. The only people who don’t buy guns in the District are the ones who are following the law. I know this is one of the main arguments pro-gun people trot out all the time, but it’s true. What’s more, research has demonstrated that it’s only a certain subset of the population that uses guns for criminal purposes. It’s not like there’s this whole cadre of normal, mild-mannered people who all of a sudden jump bad and turn into raving, murderous, lunatics as soon as they touch a pistol. Naw. For the most part, the people who kill people with guns were already engaged in some criminal enterprises. Now that’s not to say that they all would have been murderers – their access to guns is what drove them over that line – but the point is that given the fact that it’s geographically impossible to keep guns from them, the fact that they used a gun in the commission of a crime is secondary to the fact that they were committing a crime in the first place.

Having said all that, I do recognize that the use of guns in the commission of crimes is a plague on our society. I was about to say that it’s particularly severe in the inner city, but it’s true in the suburbs too. The only thing is, because I work in the inner-city and live in a fairly (but not very) hoodish suburb, the city is what’s most relevant to me. Moreover, because I’m a Black male and still numbered among the demographic that is most likely to die by gunfire, I take gun violence very seriously. At the same time, I recognize that the question of how to curb crimes committed with guns is complicated. There are no simple answers, and if there were, a blanket policy wouldn’t be one of them. Let alone a blanket policy that’s so full of holes it’s essentially untenable.

So Major League Baseball has shut down a Philadelphia t-shirt vendor who parodied logos of baseball teams with the word ‘Obama.’ For real, though? That’s all they had to do? No worries about this steroids scandal that has embroiled two if its biggest stars. Naw. Get that t-shirt guy!

I think Jeremy’s spot-on in his assessment of which missing persons the media focuses on. Young white girl? It makes the news. Not a young white girl? Not so much.

The really smart part is that Jeremy points out the racist nature of this focus while noting that most people wouldn’t recognize this as being racist.

Here’s a great set of color pictures from pre-WW II America from a very old post at The Daily Kos.

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