Monday: Hili dialogue

May 30, 2022 • 6:30 am

The bad news is that it’s Monday; the good news is that, in America at least, we get the day off because it’s Memorial Day Weekend. (Next week the UK has two days off for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee). It’s Monday, May 30, 2022: National Mint Julep Day. An indigenous American drink, it’s one of the best when made properly, including good bourbon and fresh mint.

Things that happened on May 30 include:

  • 1431 – Hundred Years’ War: In Rouen, France, the 19-year-old Joan of Arc is burned at the stake by an English-dominated tribunal. The Roman Catholic Church remembers this day as the celebration of Saint Joan of Arc.
  • 1536 – King Henry VIII of England marries Jane Seymour, a lady-in-waiting to his first two wives.

She was queen for only 1.5 years, dying in childbirth.

A portrait of Seymour by Hans Holdbein the Younger.

Both men were hit in the chest, but Jackson survived.

Victoria, Albert, and their kids:

(From Wikipedia): Prince Albert, Queen Victoria and their nine children, 1857. Left to right: Alice, Arthur, Albert (Prince Consort), Albert Edward (Prince of Wales), Leopold, Louise, Queen Victoria with Beatrice, Alfred, Victoria and Helena[85]

Hart (below) served three years in prison. Also shown is her gun, a Colt 45. She was the only female stagecoach robber in Arizona history.

Here’s the victorious Wasp, having won the race with an average speed of about 75 miles per hour. You can still see the car at the museum at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. The device affixed to the hood in front of the steering wheel is the rear-view mirror.

Mengele (below) eluded attempts of Mossad to capture him in South America, and drowned after suffering a stroke while swimming in 1979.  Here’s a photo from his 1956 Argentinian ID document, which used his real name.  Let’s ask the theologians why God never punished him—at least while was alive!

A video; the mission took two astronauts to the ISS and then back again.

DA NOOZ:

*Don’t forget about Ukraine, which is not doing all that well (EU leaders are meeting this week in hopes of firming up a unified strategy against Russia).  Here’s a summary from the NYT:

As Russian forces kept up their relentless offensive on Monday against the eastern city that has become the focus of their campaign in Ukraine, European Union leaders prepared to meet in Brussels for a two-day summit that will test whether they can maintain their unity on the conflict in the face of fresh challenges.

The battered city of Sievierodonetsk has been in Russia’s cross hairs for weeks, pounded by the full might of Moscow’s artillery. Russian forces are now advancing from two sides on the outskirts of the city as President Vladimir V. Putin, stung by repeated setbacks in the first months of the war, seeks to extend Russia’s territory in a part of the eastern Donbas region where it already holds substantial ground.

In Brussels, the leaders of the 27 E.U. nations will try once more to agree on additional sanctions against Russia, including an oil embargo. Hungary has been holding up a proposal to halt Russian oil imports for weeks. How to organize the export of Ukrainian grain is also on the agenda, a task crucial to averting a global food crisis.

*Congress is deadlocked on legislation for gun control, although I had hopes that minimal reform might occur, like raising the age of gun purchases from 18 to 21. No dice. And yet the same bodies successfully voted to raise the age of purchasing TOBACCO from 18 to 21. It’s hopeless, and even Democrats aren’t united about what should be done. (Republicans, of course, are hpeless.) In lieu of federal action, the NYT reports that states are picking up the slack, but only Democratic-controlled states:

But states aren’t waiting.

In New Jersey, Gov. Phil Murphy urged lawmakers to advance firearms safety measures, including raising the age to 21 for purchases of long guns and exposing gun makers to civil lawsuits.

In New York — where an 18-year-old in Buffalo was charged two weeks ago with committing a racist mass shooting — Gov. Kathy Hochul said she would seek to ban people under 21 from purchasing AR-15-style rifles.

And in California — where a politically motivated mass shooting erupted at a luncheon of older churchgoers this month — legislative leaders and Gov. Gavin Newsom fast-tracked tougher controls on firearms.

We’ll see if any of this legislation gets passed, but Republican states are of course doing nothing:

In Republican-controlled statehouses, however, the moves evoked an equal and opposite reaction. A day after Uvalde, rural conservatives in Pennsylvania and Michigan beat back Democratic attempts to force votes on long-blocked gun safety legislation.

And in Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott and other Republican officials blamed the school massacre on a gunman with mental health problems, not gun laws. They accused Democrats of politicizing the situation with calls for gun control.

“Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,” Mr. Abbott said a day after the Uvalde shooting.

Abbott is a moron. Plenty of people who go on to kill others would, before the murders, have not been classified with a mental disorder.

*The NYT has an interactive and informative timeline about how the Texas school shooting proceeded: “”78 long minutes“.  Warning: it will make you angry.

*Speaking of which, here’s a four-year-old Facebook post of the Uvalde Police Department, wearing the body armor they didn’t want to dent:

*The Wall Street Journal presents the depressing but practical guide, “The worst-case scenario guide to summer travel.” Coyne’s tip: avoid rental cars at all costs (and there are no “small” costs). Not only have the prices skyrocketed during the pandemic, but very often your confirmed reservation will not get you a car because companies have overbooked. Also, airline cancellations are skyrocketing, and it ain’t just because of the weather.

*For your holiday reading pleasure, the NYT has a list and precis of “88 books to bring your summer alive.” But the categories alone show that this is a fluff list (fiction is “science fiction and fantasy” and “gothic an horror”), and I couldn’t find much to pique my interest. Some may be good for the beach, I suppose. I do want to read the novel about the trans-Siberian railroad crossing, as that’s on my bucket list.

*The Trial of the Summer; Johnny Depp’s accusation that Amber Heard defamed him, for which he wants $50 million (she’s countersued) is now in the hands of the jury. I find the whole thing tedious and have no dog in the fight, but the legal issues, which involve the First Amendment, are engagingly discussed in an Associated Press article.

Breaking news of little consequence: Nancy Pelosi’s husband has been arrested in California for DUI (driving under the influence) and for driving with a blood alcohol content higher than 0.08% or higher. Both offenses are misdemeanors.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is with the new second edition of Pinker’s How the Mind Works, which she translated into Polish:

A: How the mind works?
Hili: I, too, wonder about it.
In Polish:
Ja: Jak działa umysł?
Hili: Też się nad tym zastanawiam.
But we’ll never know how cat’s mind works. . .

****************

From Diana MacPherson:

A “dad joke” from Bruce:

From Only Duck Memes. This is a person after my own heart:

From my magical Twitter feed. I agree; people should be left alone or in restaurants or in public spaces with families (and often when alone). I know some readers consider people they abhor as fair game for public harassment, but I see it as uncivil and as an invasion of privacy.

From the sensible Cathy Young:

From Barry. Cat leaps for pixellated birds, Husky is startled:

From GInger K.: an ad for the Ex-Muslims of North America:

From the Auschwitz Memorial:

Tweets from Matthew. The second one looks good, but I don’t think it’s a correct Venn Diagram, which should be multidimensional in this case.

Matthew kicks off a whole threat of gun loons:

There are tons of these photos. I apologize on behalf of my fellow citizens.

Note how the mimicry is enhanced by the spider holding its front legs forward, as if they were antennae:

39 thoughts on “Monday: Hili dialogue”

    1. People collect stuff. From outside, it always looks a little odd. The girl in the first image appears to be a 3-gun competitor. In that competition, they use an AR rifle, a pistol, and a shotgun. They go through a course where different target situations require different guns and stances. In nine years of competing, it is not surprising that she upgraded her guns several times, and has different ones for different course conditions.
      I could make a picture similar to those posted, although almost all of my guns are antique. I have one AR for hog hunting, but most of my guns are either ones that have been in the family for a long time, or those related to my interest in military history. If, as an example, we wanted to talk about Gallipoli , I could bring out an Australian Lithgow rifle that was there, and still bears bloody handprints of the soldier who was wounded firing it, but survived. That sort of thing is my area of interest. I have been been collecting for forty years, so they start to accumulate.
      I have a friend, Jewish and originally from NY, who has a really impressive collection of Nazi guns, including those owned by infamous KL commanders. He never shoots any of them. Does not keep ammo. Just collects them.

      Reply

      1. “People collect stuff.”

        Do they collect competence – and how would anyone know?

        Do they have good mental health?

        And how would we know?

        It is so puzzling.

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  2. 1. Governor Abbott : “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,”

    Gee, I wonder what could ever fix it. Could it be… GOD?!?! [ channelling The Church Lady ]

    2. The number of weapons and amount of ammunition is one thing. But make no mistake, to _maintain_ that in one’s own home – clearly, that won’t work in an apartment building – takes lots of work. Lots of practice.

    So I could buy (if I had the money) a ton of cool electric guitars, and huge amps, and take a picture of it all. Says _nothing_ about what matters.

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    1. I’m pretty sure Governor Abbott has a mental health challenge too. Almost as big as his moral health challenge.

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  3. In 2021 the city of Chicago had over 4,000 gunshot victims, and about 800 gun homicides. Does anybody understand the dynamic here? Is this mostly a problem of kids getting their hands on guns? Is it drugs? Gangs? Why does the city tolerate such high levels of violence?

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    1. I’ve heard the guns are imported from nearby Indiana, which has far more lax gun control laws.

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  4. I normally would abhor all the coverage of the Depp trial, but I’ve been invested because I’m extremely troubled by it. Take a look at any mainstream media report on it, and all the articles will tell you is that Heard has “testified about a dozen different instances of abuse by Depp,” or similar. What they don’t tell you is that there are hours and hours of unedited audio recordings out there taken by Depp, which have been available for several years now, and during which you hear Heard physically, verbally, and emotionally abuse him, including her telling him that she will gladly falsely accuse him of abuse and even rape, saying, “who will believe you if you tell people I abused you?” and telling him she’ll destroy his career and life with false accusations.

    The media and the ACLU, among others, immediately jumped to Heard’s defense when this story first broke years ago, and they seem to be determined to suppress the truth of what happened — to suppress the voice of a victim in favor of the abuser — because the abuser in this case was a woman whom they defended. MSNBC released an editorial the other day claiming that people who are questioning the veracity of Heard’s claims are questioning all abused women and contributing to domestic violence against women. Nobody will say a word about what has actually been documented, because all of that documented evidence shows that the media destroyed a man’s life at the behest of his abuser.

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    1. From some snippets I’ve seen, it seems they have been abusing each other, and the jury is made aware of that. But one can expect that media distillation will tip it toward a more prurient story.

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  5. People who collect guns are just like people who collect anything: Stamps, shot glasses, beer cans, records, ceramic cats, Hawaiian shirts, etc. A friend of a friend has 3,000 guitars. Look at Jay Leno and his cars. If you cared to ask those guns owners why they need so many, I am sure they would minutely describe the difference between each, and what makes it so special.

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      1. Its not the getting so much as the legally owning and keeping.

        Which requires more work :

        Airplane/helicopter license
        Firearm license

        Which is more dangerous :

        Airplane/helicopter
        Firearm

        I don’t know.

        As Renton (Ewan McGregor) said in Trainspotting 2 :

        “You’re an addict! So be addicted! Be addicted to something else.”

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      2. Except that they aren’t military-style weapons. Regular infantry soldiers have not been issued rifles that can fire only semi-automatically since the Second World War.

        Rifles available to civilians that can still kill a lot of people quickly have the following characteristics: semi-automatic action, centre-fire ammunition, and a shorter barrel than a standard hunting rifle. Canada put rifles with those three characteristics on its prohibited list 2 years ago. Current owners and family heirs are grandfathered but they can’t use, buy, or sell them, making now worthless property that was lawfully purchased with no intent to break the law. The ones used in the Nova Scotia spree were illegally acquired by smuggling. Only a few Canadians had bothered to own these guns because they were already restricted and practically useless already, so the objections came from a lunatic fringe in the rural hinterlands that was easy for our government to ignore. They are hardly ever used in crime, but when we did have a mass shooting every few years, it would be one of these now prohibited guns.

        To freeze the market for these guns in the United Sates would be another kettle of fish entirely. Even if you don’t go house-to-house seizing guns from armed homeowners, the size of these collections shows how motivated many owners will be to protect the economic value of their investment.

        BTW, if you can find Jerry’s tweet-of-the-week that had a longer sampling of collection photos, you will see it takes all kinds, not just white rednecks. There was an older Black lady who looked dressed for church, a Vietnamese family in Detroit, etc. I do hope the bad guys don’t hit their houses to steal their guns.

        I do have to wonder about people who spend $2500 (US) a month on ammunition, though. That is about half of what my wife and I live on, after income taxes.

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        1. Regular infantry soldiers have not been issued rifles that can fire only semi-automatically since the Second World War.
          Wrong. The standard rifle for years well after WWII in the British army was the FN SLR without a fully automatic mode.

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        2. I will chime in on the “since the Second World War” bit as well. The US fought the Korean war with the semiauto M1 and M2 as the standard service rifles.
          I also agree that the focus on “military style” weapons seems pointless. They look sort of like military rifles, especially to those unfamiliar with guns. Like a racing style car, which is just a regular car with a spoiler added and a number painted on the side.
          The people who claim to spend $2500 per month on ammo need to take on reloading as another hobby.

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        3. Happy to see historical record errors corrected, especially mine.
          Any thoughts on the feasibility of placing restrictions on present-day centre-fire semi-automatic rifles with short barrels, no matter how unscary they look? After all, the AR-15 does meet the layman’s definition of a scary rifle as well as meeting our three objective criteria but it is also a very popular style. I see much pushback from owners who can now, apparently, drive around with them on gun racks on their trucks and carry them to Town Meetings, which you couldn’t do in Canada even before 2020.

          I have no opinion on gun control or gun rights in any country but my own. I’m just curious how you would go about restricting a class of firearm in widespread common legal possession, …remembering that politics is the art of the possible, and narrowly focused threats are resisted with much more vigour than broadly appealing benefits are fought for.

          Some foreigners and some Americans think you have gone collectively insane. Having looked after insane people, I don’t think that’s true. I do see three large expenditures of political capital needed to regulate firearms more vigorously, though, if that’s what you decide you want to do.

          1) Repeal the Second Amendment or modify it to eliminate a general non-military right to keep arms. This will give legislatures much more scope to legislate in the interests of the majority.

          2) Establish absolute federal authority to set firearms policy. (In Canada this is easy because firearms are in the Criminal Code, the Firearms Act, and other federal laws. The provinces have no authority at all in these matters.). State laws could be more restrictive than federal policy but never less.

          1) and 2) haven’t got you any legislation yet. They just set up the Constitutional soil in which legislation can be planted.
          3) Actually pass the laws you want to see passed. 1) and 2) reduce the ability of minority positions to undermine legislation and prevent enforcement. But you still have to deal with that minority opposition to the actual bills before they get to the President’s desk.

          My guess is that you, collectively, will see this as more trouble than it’s worth. Mass shootings account for 1.6% of gun homicides. Even if the victims are more likely to be “innocent” and more often children than in other homicides, this is not a very big pay-off for the political effort. Especially since you won’t get much collateral benefit on the handgun side. These shootings are by people who don’t obey existing gun laws anyway, domestic violence and suicide being possible exceptions.

          If you ever figure out a way to red-flag mentally unstable people, especially young men, and keep them away from guns, more power to you.

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          1. A short barreled rifle, which in the US is one with a barrel shorter than 16 inches, is regulated exactly like a machine gun.
            It is possible to own such things, but the process to obtain one is lengthy and expensive. Once you have one, the process of keeping it is also complex, as there are specific record keeping, inspection, and storage requirements. A person with lots of time,money and a spotless record can own one, in the same way one can own a Tiger tank or a P-51 fighter.
            “Some foreigners and some Americans think you have gone collectively insane.” I can certainly see why you would, assuming you rely on general media coverage, which reflects a particular ideology, rather than any sort of objective reality. Truthfully, none of us will visit most places in the US or elsewhere, so we have our own impressions of what people are like in those places.
            My family tends to move between two rural communities, as both my wife and I come from rural ranching areas, She is from west Texas, and my relatives are based in Southern Colorado. Both of those communities have very high rates of gun ownership, but very low rates of violent crime. One expression I tend to use is that I prefer to live in a community where if my elderly mother has a flat tire on some rural road, she need only sit patiently for a little while, and some young man will be certain to stop, change it for her, and refuse any payment beyond “thank you”. Right now, my truck is parked outside with the doors unlocked and the key on the dash. It will still be there tomorrow.

            Many of the people most obsessed with gun control in the US live in communities where one would never leave a car unlocked, where many of the houses have bars on the windows, and where (even before Covid) you had to interact with many shopkeepers through thick lexan barriers. When grandma has a flat, she hopes that the predatory tow truck gets to her before the armed robbers. And of course, they restrict firearms ownership heavily.

            The point of my long screed is that we have people fixated on the idea that banning guns will solve all their problems. Selling gun control to people where guns are ubiquitous but violence is rare is a difficult thing to do. Throw in a general urban disdain for the yokels, who see us as ignorant racists, and the end result is people who are extraordinarily unlikely to give up their guns to people who hate them and constantly lie about them.

            The logistics are a problem too. There are at least 50 million households with legal guns in the US. There are 2 million sworn police officers and military combined. Communities with high gun ownership rates have lower per capita police, which complicates any realistic plan to kick in all those doors. Beyond which, what does kicking in all those doors accomplish? They were not really bothering anyone in the first place.

          2. Max, I hope I didn’t cause you to think that I believed Americans had gone insane. I mentioned that only to say that I didn’t accept that common accusation. I think everyone is following incentives that he sees as furthering his interests and resisting those who work against them, the exact opposite of insanity. My wife and I have been beneficiaries of the kindness of strangers in rural Pennsylvania under exactly the circumstances you imagine. (And rural British Columbia, too, for that matter.) When traveling by bicycle in rural America we don’t give a thought to the idea that people have guns. Not a single thought. But Toronto is having an outbreak of armed random car-jacking, which has never happened before.

            I should have been more clear about barrel length. A sawed-off rifle or shotgun with a barrel less than 18″ has long been prohibited in Canada. But the firearm we are talking about here was, before 2020, defined only as restricted, not prohibited, if it was all three of: semi-auto, centre-fire ammunition, and barrel less than 18.5″ (units translated from legal metric into inches.) In 2020, the RCMP by Cabinet Order scheduled dozens of these semi-auto, centre-fire rifles by name explicitly. Even if one had a barrel 18.6″ long it would now be prohibited. My point is just that the popular AR-15 and all rifles with similar properties and capabilities are now prohibited in Canada. The government was able to do this because not many people have them or sought to obtain them because, being restricted, there was little practical usefulness to them. With them prohibited, you can’t even fire them. None of my in-laws who hunt, own anything other than conventional bolt-action rifles.

            What was imposed with minimal squawking in Canada would be a far different proposition in the United States, if you ever decided to go that route, simply because there are so many owners of guns. And areas with little gun crime have many lawfully owned guns. One could not expect residents of those areas to embrace restrictions on or forfeiture of their long guns, however lethal, just because they are occasionally used in mass shootings. I don’t think it would be politically possible to do it anywhere anyway, for the reasons I mentioned. Gun control advocates would have to accomplish the Affordable Care Act three times over. Whether you want to do that or oppose it is, of course, up to you.

            As for people who don’t care to know anything about guns except that they can be used to kill people, one suspects that they just want to ban and seize all guns and be done with it. No one needs to hunt, either. Certainly in Canada that is a stated policy aim on the Left. If they want less than that, they need to know enough about guns to know if they support or oppose a party’s policy on the issue.

    3. Yes, and people collect other things too. Sometimes they know enough to maintain them.

      Some trained collectors – who I think flew this aircraft – once took their original B-17 Flying Fortress to Connecticut.

      Some collectors keep electric guitars.

      So collectors – yeah. And rare things. Wow. They can collect things that can be rare. And keep them. Somewhere. Mmm.

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    4. There are lots of dangerous things people could collect but we outlaw most of them. Not guns for some reason even though they are arguably the deadliest of all collectibles. (Sure, there’s nuclear weapons.) Go figure.

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  6. “Anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health challenge, period,” Mr. Abbott said a day after the Uvalde shooting.

    Does that mean Gov. Greg Abbott plans to commute the death sentences of those convicted of murder by firearm now sitting on Texas’s death row on the basis of mental-health mitigation? (Texas is by far the nation’s most prolific employer of capital punishment, having executed approximately as many inmates as the next seven highest states combined since the four-year national moratorium on capital punishment ended in 1976.)

    Reply

    2. Having a mental health condition does not by the fact itself render an accused unfit to stand trial or to be convicted and punished according to the law. The test is, at the level doctors understand it, Was the person at the time of the offence unable, because of a disease of the mind, unable to distinguish right from wrong? (Or, You must never hang a half-wit.) How this test is applied is up to the legal side of things. We do try to stay in our lane.

      The practical drawback, to the accused, of a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity (or whatever it’s called now) is that incarceration in a provincial mental hospital may be for life if the shrinks cannot convince themselves that the patient can be safely let out. Prison offers the near certainty of parole and early release, at least in Canada. (Our Supreme Court just ruled that life without chance of parole for first-degree murder is unconstitutional.)

      Reply

      1. There is a distinction, Leslie, between not guilty by reason of insanity and diminished mental capacity as a sentencing factor. The first is (in most US jurisdictions) a complete defense; the second, a consideration in mitigating a sentence from the harshest possible punishment.

        If Gov. Gregg Abbott means what he says, a “mental health challenge” would provide a valid basis for him to exercise his power of executive clemency to commute a death sentence to life imprisonment.

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        1. We do the same. Gladue reports filed with judges commonly mitigate sentences of Indigenous defendants for whom the process is mandated. Fetal-alcohol syndrome is often present; many of these poor people really are half-wits. Gladue reports can range over many mitigating issues, not just mental health narrowly defined. I was speaking more to the insanity defence.

          The last hanging in Canada was 1962. After that, all death sentences meted out by judges were commuted by Cabinet (the Minister of Justice I think), regardless of which party was in power until the death penalty was eventually abolished by Parliament. Before 1962, I can’t say we didn’t ever hang any half-wits.

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  7. It should also be mentioned that Crew Dragon Demo-2 was the first manned commercial spacecraft. Since earlier manned spacecraft presumably contained components made by commercial contractors, I’m not sure how this is specified. However, since SpaceX made both the rocket and the capsule they do deserve the credit.

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  8. “If pro-lifers posted Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s address on the internet and threatened to show up to her house because they were angry she voted to uphold abortion, the FBI would have already thrown them in solitary confinement”

    Boy, that’s some right-wing grievance mongering. What law does Mr. Greg Price think such protestors are breaking, and what’s his basis for asserting that the FBI would fail to to afford, say, Amy Coney Barrett the same equal protection of the law as Ruth Bader Ginsberg?

    Sidewalks and streets or traditional public forums. I don’t think it’s too big an intrusion on the rarefied, cloistered existence of Supreme Court justices that they might have to peek out from behind their curtains and see a handful citizens carrying placards or doing a bit of chanting (albeit I don’t think it’s an effective means of achieving those protestors’ legal goals). After all, it was SCOTUS that held that the 35-foot buffer zones around abortion clinics constituted a violation of the First Amendment. Why should the SCOTUS justices themselves be entitled to great protections from free speech than women seeking an abortion (or even just a Pap smear from their local Planned Parenthood clinic) have from being harangued by anti-abortion zealots?

    I’m opposed, in almost all circumstances, to people confronting public office holders in restaurants or when out with their families — unless, like Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, they refuse to meet with constituents or to hold town-hall meetings back in their home jurisdictions, while jetting around the country to dun fat-cat out-of-state donors. And, when out on the streets, an elected official who would be willing to accept congratulations from a satisfied constituent should be equally willing to accept constituents’ complaints that they’re doing a crappy job. Goes with the turf.

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    1. It makes sense that people should not be allowed to intimidate judges or juries.

      Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

      https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/1507

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      1. Under the circumstances of the protests thus far conducted, I do not believe a criminal prosecution under this this statute could be sustained consistent with the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause.

        In any event, pace Greg Price, a violation of this misdemeanor statute (even in the event of a conviction, something Mr. Price omits entirely) would not result in an offender’s being “thrown in solitary confinement” — something the FBI is entirely without authority to do in the first place.

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  9. A minor point, but …
    as I understand the story (which has changed over time, to be sure), it wasn’t the Uvalde Police Department that refused to enter the school, but the head of the Uvalde School Police Force who refused to let police engage the gunman.

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  10. I can’t get WEIT to recognize my WordPress login. I’m trying a comment here to see what happens.

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      1. Drinking without praying works a helluva lot better than praying without drinking. But maybe the two are synergistic. After all, the Roman Catholic Church includes wines in the sacrament of the Eucharist. 🙂

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        1. I don’t want to get into trouble with WEIT, but these people have been praying so hard for so long that I am sure there is something to it. The good men of Grimbergen Abbey are probably onto something here. Maybe THW is just unable to articulate it properly. Perhaps she should write her column when sober.

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          1. Perhaps she should write her column when sober.

            Writing has long been the curse of the drinking class.

  11. One common variety of gun nut response is that we gun control advocates just don’t know enough about firearms and, for example, get confused by semi-automatic vs fully automatic, or just don’t know what AR stands for. If we’re writing legislation, these things do matter, but who doesn’t know what a gun does? I’m willing to stipulate that other people know more about guns than I do. Now get to your point!

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    1. Very well, Paul. What sort of gun control do you advocate? Seizure or mere prohibition of use, purchase and sale? Or some lesser restriction? All firearms, or only some? If only some, which ones? Remember a lot of people are going to oppose you. The vigour of their opposition will depend on what you are trying to impose. If you say, “The Right won’t compromise. They’ll oppose even little baby steps,” then you need to tell your fellow advocates how you are going to crush the intransigence of the opposition.

      If you can’t articulate a position and a plan, then you are not much different from thoughts and wishes.

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      1. As I said, if you are going to draft gun control legislation, you need to know the details. As a voter for gun control legislation, all I need to understand is what is being proposed. Even then, if it means fewer people can get their hands on guns, guns are going to be taken off the street, or some gun types are made illegal to own, I really can’t see not voting for it. It’s simple really. As far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing about the Second Amendment that needs protecting. It was poorly worded and no one can agree on what it was really about. I’m not an Originalist anyway. The world is nothing like it was in the late 1700s.

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