Gun Nuts Media is reporting that ammunition is starting to fill up in the supply chain again after everyone was stripped bare for a while. He offers photographic proof. Prices have gone up, but that’s to be expected if demand is outstripping supply.
Month: August 2009
The Problem of Politics
I’m always amazed when people on the left believe there’s any such things as “for the public good” in politics. Ilya Somin points out some important facts in that regard to Matthew Yglesias, and tells us why we don’t get politicians who are concerned for the public good:
One might still ask why the power-seekers tend to predominate over those who place a higher value on the public good. The key explanation is selection effects. A politician willing to do anything to take and hold on to power will have a crucial edge over an opponent who imperils his chances of getting elected in order to advance the public interest. The former type is likely to prevail over the latter far more often than not.
That’s a big reason I have little faith in the political process to always produce good outcomes, and consider Government to be a necessary evil. I think Ilya is also correct in his refutation of Yglesias’ claim that standing up for the “public good” can make one a great political “hero.”  I can remember one local politician who probably thought this. Her name was Marjorie Margoles Mesvinsky.  How many readers remember her, let alone as a hero?
Most of the great political heros we remember, Lincoln, TR, FDR, and Reagan, were very adept at power politics, and navigating the difficult maze of interest groups.
Playing the Race Card in Politics
David Patterson thinks that the reason voters don’t like him is because of his race. I think the reason voters don’t like him is because he’s a lousy politician, and they don’t like his politics. This takes the cake though:
Paterson told a blogger that some people are uncomfortable with too many black people in power.
“Part of what I feel is that one very successful minority is permissible, but when you see too many success stories, then some people get nervous,” Paterson told political blogger Gerson Borrero over the weekend.
I’d like to see lots of success stories in this regard, but you know, I’d like them to be actual success stories. Patterson’s story is not about success. He’s a lousy politician. Nothing to be ashamed of, considering what success in politics requires. But I don’t think this country is so far backwards that any siginficant number of voters are uncomfortable that minorities are having all this success in politics.
The DGU Numbers
MikeB points to a recent bulletin in the Harvard Injury Control Research Center (Joyce Funded), suggesting that criminal use far exceeds civilian defensive gun use. It’s really a difficult number to come up with, because there doesn’t seem to be much good data on the amount of unreported crime. But just looking at some bare statistics, you have approximately 2.2 million residential burlaries a year, of which about 20 percent will be done while the resident is home.  Presumably about 40% of those households will have guns. If you figure even half of those households have residents who become aware of the breakin, that’s 88,000 DGUs right there.
But either way, some of the conclusions in this bulleten are pretty sweeping, like this:
By contrast it appears that the large majority of the self-defense gun uses reported using Approach 1 are socially undesirable; they are largely escalating arguments, or preemptive gun use out of fear rather than a response to an attempted crime. Most would appropriately be missed by Approach 2, and should not be considered genuine self-defense gun uses. They are actually reports of inappropriate or criminal gun use.
So basically, after arguing that there’s quite a lot of self-presentaiton bias, which is true, we’re going to conclude that just about any DGU reported by Kleck’s method is socially undesirable, and therefore should be considered criminal use.
Not Your Run of the Mill DGU
The Media’s Shallow Understanding
The media has never really understood the militia movement, and once again are just accepting the Southern Poverty Law Center’s generalizations and distortions about it. They used to say that the difference between conservatives and liberals were that conservatives thought liberals were stupid, and liberals thought conservatives were evil. Now it would seem they think conservatives are terrorists.
I am not any more a fan of the wacky rights as I am of the wacky left, but the media’s lack of interest in understanding the phenomena is striking.
Cost Cutting
Philadelphia is pretty much broke at this point. Over at PA Water Cooler we find out some lesser known parts of Nutter’s nutty plan to keep the city from going bankrupt, like laying off 1000 police officers, laying off 200 firefighters and closing 10 companies. Switching traffic signals to blink and shutting off all street lighting. What could possibly go wrong?
Maybe this is why they call him Nutter.
More Alinsky, On Change
One theme Alinsky repeats again and again in Rules for Radicals is the need to accept the world as it is, and not how one wants it to be, and to begin activism from where the world is. In the preface, he laments how the young people at the time he wrote Rules, in 1972, weren’t getting this:
As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be — it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system[…]
Our youth are impatient with the preliminaries that are essential to purposeful action. Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or as I have phrased it elsewhere the demand for revelation rather than revolution. It’s the kind of thing we see in play writing; the first act introduces the characters and the plot, in the second act the plot and characters are developed as the play strives to hold the audiences attention. In the final act good and evil have their dramatic confrontation and resolution. The present generation wants to go right into the third act, skipping the first two, in which case there is no play, nothing but confrontation for confrontation’s sake — a flare-up and back to darkness. To build a powerful organization takes time. It is tedious, but that’s the way the game is played — if you want to play and not just yell, “Kill the umpire.”
Elaborating on this a bit further, he speaks of the importance of creating a reformation in pubic opinion before revolutionary change can happen:
We will start with the system, because there is no other place to start from except political lunacy. It is most important for those of us who want revolutionary change to understand the revolution must be preceeded by reformation. To assume that a political revolution can survive without the supporting base of a popular reformation is to ask for the impossible in politics.
Men don’t like to step abruptly out of the security of familiar experience; they need a bridge to cross from their own experience to a new way.
Alinsky was also a big fan of fighting today’s battles on today’s terms, and focusing on your battles right now, rather than fighting today the battles you should be fighting tomorrow.
Breast Registration?
It looks like fake boobs have registration.  At least enough that given a serial number (they appparently have serial numbers) you can find the owner of said fake boob. No word yet on where the Seventh Circuit stands on the consitutionality of boob registration.
Alinsky on Compromise
Politics is really the art of compromise. One of the reasons we have a Bill of Rights to begin with is because the founders meant to put certain rights outside of the political process so they would not, ideally, be subject to the vagaries and horse trading that’s inherent in the political process. At least that’s how it’s supposed to work. Over time pretty much everything is subject to the political process. But the point is that you can’t succeed in politics with absolutes. Here’s what the great leftist organizer had to say about it:
Compromise is another word that carries shades of weakness, vascillation, betrayal of ideas, surrender of moral principles. In the old culture, when virginity was a virtue, one referred to a woman’s being “compromised.” The word is generally regarded as ethically unsavory and ugly.
But to the organizer, compromise is a key and beautiful word. It is always present in the pragmatics of operation. It is making the deal, getting that vital breather, usually the victory. If you start with nothing, demand 100 per cent, then compromise for 30 per cent, you’re 30 per cent ahead.
A free and open society is an on-going conflict, interrupted periodically by compromises — which then become the start for the continuation of coflict, compromise, and on ad infinitum. Control of power is based on compromise in our Congress and among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. A society devoid of compromise is totalitarian. If I had to define a free and open society in one word, the word would be “compromise.”
That’s why it’s hard for me to take groups that claim “no compromise” seriously, because the system just doesn’t work that way. The objective is to keep moving in the right direction. There will, of course, be setbacks and obstacles along the way — it’ll take a long time to reach the eventual goal. But if activists stay focused on the ends, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get there. It certainly worked well for Alinsky’s cause, and for the gun controllers. How much of their agenda was asking for 100% and getting 30% again, and again, and again?  Even GCA ’68 was a compromise. They wanted total central registration in anticipation of eventual confiscation. They got distributed and incomplete registration in the form of 4473. But GCA ’68 motivated gun owners, and despite a major setback in the early 90s, we’ve generally been moving in the right direction after most of a century of moving in the wrong direction. Whether we get to our eventual goals or not remains to be seen. Alinsky certainly never did. But the struggle continues, and probably will for my lifetime.