Bearing Arms

The Newton Massacre has brought all the usual rhetorical suspects to our discussions on this subject over at MilPub and my friends' Jim and Lisa's blog Ranger Against War.

I've said quite a bit on the subject of the "right to keep and bear arms" against the right to not have some armed sonofabitch busting caps at you for no good reason at both places. But I wanted to take a moment here to clarify my position on this whole business.

There seems to be two main veins of argument against any sort of tightened regulation of firearms. Boiled down to their bones, they are 1) humans are awful and will do terrible things, so there's no point in trying to use firearms regulations to do anything about that, and 2) the "right to bear arms" is sacred and guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and any attempt to mess with said right is to commit grievous harm to the liberties of American citizens.

Before I move on to my own points let me address both of these, which I consider largely canards and excuses not to do something that the speakers find either inconvenient to themselves or intellectual distasteful rather than actually critical to the issue of reducing the toll of dead Americans.

Regarding the first point, yes; humans are fucking awful. They are also miraculous, delightful, irritating, ridiculous, and bizarre. Man was born to trouble as the sparks fly upwards says the narrator in the Book of Job and what was true for the Hebrews of the Old Testament is certainly true today.

This human tendency towards fucktardry is one of the reasons that human societies devised things like laws and rules in the first place. We know that people will cheat each other if possible, so we institute things like certified weights and measures so that your butcher will not short-weight your beefsteak or financial regulations so that your bankster will not steal from your 401K. We know that people will rape other people, will drive too fast and do all sorts of other nasty, irritating business if not constrained by rules.

So it seems at best rather louche to pretend that this human bastardy is a reason against, rather than for, devising ways to decrease the mechanical advantage of firearms provided to people in general. I may feel perfectly capable of driving 120 in the interstate - and I may well BE capable of doing just that - but to allow that the state of Oregon would have to allow that fucking idiot in Clackastan driving the clapped-out beater of a Chevy K-car. That's a good reason for keeping the speed limit down to 65; the lower, the safer for all of us.

As for the second, well, the "right to bear arms" is only a part of the phrase "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." To understand this phrase is to delve into the minds of the Framers and understand the conditions of the United States at the time of this writing.

The men who wrote the Bill of Rights had had their belliesfull of goddamn regular soldiers. The British government had taxed the colonies to pay for the troops that had fought the French and Indian War and had forced the colonial gentlemen to house and feed those regular troops - you'll notice that the Bill of Rights contains another entire Amendment, the Third, that prohibits "quartering" of troops by fiat - and then used those regulars to try and suppress the colonists when they rebelled. So the idea of a standing force of regulars was a hissing and a byword amongst the lead men of this new nation.

The notion was that the United States would be defended by a hardy force of volunteer militamen arising from the armed populace; tens of thousands of Cincinnati rallying to the Colors when the nation was in danger, bearing the arms that they kept. This way the nation would be both free of the danger of Praetorian treason and the expense of paying for arms and equipment of a standing army - a win-win for the impoverished country!

So the Second Amendment is directed specifically at "providing for the common defense". The arms that the People are not to be infringed from keeping and bearing were for the security of the free state; target shooting for pleasure, home defense, fighting off the zombie apocalypse?

Not so much.

So; can we agree that, first, humans are shit and that's a reason FOR, not against, letting them have all the rounds they can shoot and, second, that the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution does NOT provide for unlimited private firearms possession but, rather, for the provision of an armed civilian military reserve with the implicit authority of the federal government to determine the nature of that armament in the same way it arms the regular military forces?

Well. Whether or not you agree I will continue.

So here's what I believe on this subject, and let me state for the record that this will be my final post on the subject; I will try and fully expound on what I believe here so we will not have reason to further address this here.

1. I don't think that there is ANY way to prevent people from killing other people. Homo homini lupus said Plautus in 195BC; "Man is a wolf to man". We are killers; with our native American genocide and the way we've applied - and are applying - our devastating military power overseas the United States certainly qualifies as one of the great killers of history. As individuals and collectively we have killed, and certainly will kill, our thousands and tens of thousands.

That, in my opinion, makes it a reason for, not argues against, making it more difficult for us to kill each other.

2. I believe that there are steps we should take on the social and medical fronts to make these massacres more difficult and less frequent. It should be simpler for troubled people to get serious mental health treatment. It should be simpler for people who know people who are troubled to get those people referred to treatment, and simpler for people who fall into the legal system and show signs of genuine mental trouble that looks dangerous to get treatment.

This will not prevent these nutter-shootings, but it might help.

3. But I also believe that we can take steps to prevent private individuals from turning up heavily armed in public spaces.

- Nobody needs to fire more than six rounds without reloading. Period. If you are a hunter and you cannot drop your buck in six rounds you are a sorry excuse for a hunter AND a menace to both wildlife and your fellow hunters.

This is a simple solution; starting tomorrow every magazine will be manufactured with a fixed six-round cutoff, and a program established to buy-back all unaltered magazines. Possession of an unaltered magazine will be a Class C felony punishable by a ginormous fine.

- Close the "gun-show" loophole, and stiffen background checks. Prohibit sales of firearms, ammunition, and magazines over the Internet. Period.

- If you purchase a firearm you will be required to purchase a locking safety device such as a gun safe and a trigger lock and required to use it when not actively firing.

- Purchase of a firearm will require successful completion of 8 hours of firearms training, to include safe storage, handling, and operation of your firearms, to include a practical exercise. If you cannot or will not successfully complete this training you cannot possess a firearm. This includes every individual who buys a new firearm. You say you're a fucking expert and know every facet and quirk of your weapon? Too fucking bad; age and knowledge are no guarantee that you won't walk around doing stupid shit like keeping a round under the hammer.

I would consider these a minimum.

I don't pretend that these measures will end nutter shootings. NOTHING will end the human delight in destroying other humans. But it will make it harder for the nutters.

The simple fact is that killing people with firearms is simple. A child can do it, and children have. And firearms that produce volumes of fire make this simplicity even simpler. Forcing the nutters to reload once or twice would at least give their victims a chance to escape, or to tackle the nutter.

I don't consider these regulations "infringing" on people's "rights". Financial regulations don't "infringe" on banker's rights to make bank and speed limits don't "infringe" on your right to drive. But they do put some sensible limits on the abilities of skeevy bastards to endanger your bank account and your car insurance premium and as such constitute a fairly sensible approach to limiting risk while still allowing human commerce and travel.

You could still "keep" and "bear" your arms. You'd just have to do it in a way that insures a bit more domestic tranquility and provides a touch more public safety.

And...in case you think I'm being drastic, you have no idea.

Frankly, I think that young American males are waaaaayyyy too groiny about autoloading weaponry and waaaayyyy to casual about the horrors of war. With the end of the draft there are far too many young men whose sole experience with soldiering and warfare is through the ridiculous lens of Call of Duty Black: Ops or some such video crap. As a society we have far too little understanding of the ugly realities of what weapons do and mean. I think that has a lot to do with the casual way we treat the secret wars we are fighting in Asia right now; we have no skin in the game.

If I had my way I'd draft every goddamn mother's son for a sixteen-week basic military training. And this would be as nasty as I could make it; grim, spartan, physically painful and stressful. The guys would fire and clean their weapons repeatedly under the nastiest conditions, fire them until they were sick of the sight of them, clean them until they hated the smell of Break-free. They would live in the mud and the cold, eat cold rations, and march until their legs came off. They would get as close to the worst conditions of soldiering that I could make them.

Because that was what cured me.

I went into the service like most other green kids, thinking that it would be cool to be the Lord of War. But spending hours with a green plastic issue toothbrush and a black bottle of Breakfree grinding carbon off the bolt after more hours hunkered down in a concrete culvert staring at plastic Russians in the misting rain and cursing the forward assist knocked the magic and the mystery out of semiautomatic fire.

Knowing how to handle a rifle safely and accurately is a skill, and one (in my estimation) worth knowing. But the grim reality that comes with that skill, and is implied every time you squeeze the trigger, is even more worth knowing, and I would gleefully beat that knowledge into the fat head of every wannabe Rambo that came through my BT company. I came by it the hard way. I would be happy to provide that wisdom free of the charge in blood and death.

And then...I'd send them on to two years of National Service.

Those who chose could go on to the uniformed services. The others could pick a sort of Civilian Conservation Corps, doing pick-and-shovel work on infrastructure projects, or a VISTA/Peace Corps sort of national or international assistance doing anything from teaching kids to read to drilling wells to deworming goats.

After two years of this hopefully that would return to American life a bit more experienced in the world, and a bit less eager to barge about knocking things over. Plus a bit more knowledgeable about the sort of other people out there, the ones that many young men never know about other than through the television news, as fables and nonsense, or...through the sights of a rifle.

But that's just my wild notion.

On the subject of firearms I have no hope that any of my ideas will get past the idle discussion stage. Whilst we have gleefully pissed away so many of our rights in the current nonsensical wars against "terror" and "drugs" we find a critical minority of our fellow citizens unwilling to even consider a check on our "right" to bear any sort and any number of firearms.

We torture and even kill our helpless prisoners, hide them in secret without even admitting their names, we consider secret snooping and spying normal and natural. We lionize those who send out our soldiers to invade nations that have no injured us while we prosecute those who reveal the crimes of those we have celebrated. We have given up huge portions of our rights to speedy and public trials, to freedom from imprisonment without due process of law, to a free press and free speech.

And yet, on the question of restricting the "right" of a lunatic to shoot more than six rounds at a go we are adamant; this shall not pass!

What the fuck are we thinking?

Update 12/23 p.m.: And just because people who are smarter and funnier than you are should always receive their due, I refer you to the blog Goblinbooks for the most incisive and funniest takedowns of the whole firearms-as-the-guarantee-of-liberty horsepuckey. Good stuff and you can say I said so.

Update 12/25: And here's Badtux the Firearms Penguin with a rather brilliant explanation of why removing the sort of handguns and rifles used in the Newton Massacre (and many of the other nutter-shootings) would have a vastly minimal effect on private possession and use of firearms. I have no doubt that this will have zero effect on the sort of person whose masturbatory fantasies "need" two or more AR-15 knockoffs. But I sure as hell wish that Congress would read it.

Sol Invictus

Well, we're still here.

Another solar year has passed its longest night. We now enter the Dark Ages, the short, cold, wet days of winter that slog painfully towards the light of Spring. The winter is upon us, but the world hasn't ended.

This will probably come as a disappointment to some of the more woo-woo fringe here in Portland as well as those goofs at the National Geographic channel who made those ridiculous half-hour "specials". One hopes that, fueled by that sort of weapons-grade stupidity, very few of the rest of us took the opportunity of impending doom to take out large short-term high-interest loans on the ground that the impending doom would obviate the need to pay the money back.

Or, gee, anything else really foolish, either. Wonder what that could have been..?

Oh.

Yeah.

That.

But now we've dodged that slingstone the hard work begins.

That same hard work we do every day; get up, get dressed. Make food. Care for those who are too young or old to fully care for themselves. Work. Rest. Make love. Make war, or just make something. A chair, perhaps, or a painting, or a poem. Pet a cat, sing a song, filet a fish. Grow a crop or just grow older one day at a time.

Get on with living, in other words, the same way that people have done ever since there were people and will continue to do until the first flicker of the expanding corona announces the nova that really will mean the end is here.

And when all's said, that's the really difficult part, isn't it? Death and destruction and the End of the World are easy. It's living life, or at least living a decent sort of a life; being a good friend, a good lover, a good father or mother or son or daughter, that is hard. That's damn deadly difficult. Fairly amazing that so many of us manage it. I know that I'm going to need some more of this damn cold medicine if it's going to work for me tomorrow, and some more sleep. So I'm for bed, and hope you won't be reading this until the sun is up today.

G 'night.

But, hey, while we're still here - how about those sneaky Mayans with their stealth apocalypse?

Honestly. What a pack of jokers.

Hidden in Plain Sight

"Bacchus' blessings are a treasure,
Drinking is the soldier's pleasure;
Rich the treasure, Sweet the pleasure;
Sweet is pleasure after pain."

And sweet pleasure are the best words to describe The Hidden Thimble, a wonderful blog written by two young ladies from Down Under. Talyssa and Siree can take you anywhere in the world, from fashion - and these gals have a wicked deadly eye for what is enticing and ingenious - to Korea and everywhere in between.

Sweet, funny, clever, curious...I can't say enough good about them and their terrific blog. So give yourself a little present early this year, and go take a look. The gals won't disappoint.

Friday Jukebox: Santa, Baby Edition

Sorry so slow around here; brutal workweek, shitty weather, and the lingering aftereffects of a nasty little cold. Plus it's Christmas and y'all know how I am about Christmas...

But.

There magolian DOES provide some decent music, ranging from Bach to Irving Berlin. Here's one of the iconic songs from my childhood: Vince Guaraldi doing "Linus and Lucy" from the old Peanuts Xmas cartoon. Does the dude have that left hand working, or what?

There y'go. And here's Lou Rawls to warm the evening and you have yourselves a merry little Friday-before-Christmas, neh?

De Morituris: CPT Daniel Inouye, USA (Ret)

I will forever remember this treasure of the United States Senate for his callout of the skeeviest lying sack of shit to ever wear the uniform of my country for being a lying skeevy sack of shit:

"Colonel North, I am certain it must have been painful for you as you stated to testify that you lied to senior officials of our government, that you lied and misled our Congress and believe me it was painful for all of us to sit here and listen to that testimony. It was painful.

It was equally painful to learn from your testimony that you lied and misled because of what you believed to be a just cause, supporters of Nicaraguan Freedom Fighters, the Contras. You have eloquently articulated your opposition to Marxism and communism. And I believe that all of us, I am certain all of us on this panel, are equally opposed to Marxism and communism. But should we in the defense of democracy adopt and embrace one of the most important tenets of communism and Marxism: the ends justify the means?"

One day I hope we will come to realize that our collective unwillingness to properly punish the mendacious traitors responsible for the Iran-Contra Affair have, as unrequited sins always do, turned around to bite us on the ass as the one-time Nisei lieutenant of the 442nd RCT warned us in vain.

Stand at ease, soldier.

There and Back Again in One Night

Well, last night's The Hobbit was a success.

The Boy enjoyed the film overall and was very brave; it's hard not to be a little scared when you're not really sure that Baltimore Woods might not be full of vicious wargs, but he brought his stuffed friend Leo the Lion to hug and covered his ears during the loudest and scariest parts and so did quite well.

Although the film is long it doesn't drag once you've got past the opening scenes, and the story moves right along from one bit of action to another. The party of dwarves led by Thorin is sturdy, the goblins/orcs are reliably nasty sword-fodder, and the principals acquit themselves well, notably Ian McKellen as Gandalf, Martin Freeman as Bilbo, and Richard Armitage as Thorin Oakenshield.

Going in I couldn't help by wonder how Peter Jackson was going to manage to get a three hour film out of nothing more than the first third of a 300-page "young adult" novel.

Well, you do it by dragging in bits and pieces from the author's other works, including the appendices of his magnum opus as well as posthumous publications such as the Silmarillion.

I was frankly baffled by the appearance of Azog the Defiler, having completely forgotten the "War of Dwarves and Orcs" from the appendix of Lord of the Rings. No matter - he was a good, frightening "bad guy".

I do want to stop and give a deep nod of respect to Cate Blanchett, who manages to continue to provide her character with true gravitas and magic.

I never "got" Galadriel from the Tolkien stories. She seemed to be a nice Elvish lady and not the wonderous creature that dazzled the other characters. Blanchett's Galadriel, though, convinces you that she really is the ancient and luminous being that Tolkien wanted to portray.

Bravo, Cate.

The one thing that did irk me a bit (as a writer, tho, rather than a parent) is that I don't think that Peter Jackson really has a handle on what "tone" he wants to set for this series.

Lord of the Rings is Middle Earth as drawn by Victor Hugo; stern, tragic, monumental - and Jackson got that perfectly; his flicks are ol' Prof. Tolkien's "yea, verily" language in film.

But The Hobbit is Middle Earth as drawn by A.A. Milne with a touch of Georges Feydeau; confiding, jolly, romping, and a trifle twee - a children's book written by an Oxford don in the arch style of the kid's books of his day.

They're very different.

And a good example of this are the differences in how each story draws its bad guys.

In LOTR the forces of Evil are genuinely Evil; they're dangerous and frightening and they'll kill you if they can. And they do - several of the important Good characters are killed or badly injured through the course of the story.

In fact, that's a huge theme of Tolkien's story; that sometimes in defeating Evil you suffer the loss of the very things you're fighting for. Frodo never recovers from the burden of the One Ring and his wounds at Weathertop. While he returns to the Shire he cannot remain. Through his suffering and pain he has lost the innocence and joy of the place he loves forever.

Pretty much all the goblins in the Hobbit are comedy bad guys, the the three trolls (Bert 'Uggins? Really?) are an outright joke. They don't really scare you. And while there are deaths - several of the dwarves including Thorin are killed in the Battle of Five Armies that ends the story - the overall tone is a jolly adventure. No deep sorrows are engrained, no hopeless losses endured.

This same pattern follows with all the other character types. Hobbit dwarves owe more to Snow White than to the Kalavala or the Norse sagas; they're a more than a bit roly-poly and cheerful compared to the grim axes of the LOTR dwarves. Hobbit elves are noble and graceful but can get drunk and foolish or cruel, a far reach from the austere, elegantly noble creatures of LOTR.

Jackson tried to reproduce the kid-lit tone of The Hobbit with stuff like the slapstick Radagast bits, the trolls, and the Goblin King's banter...but I think he had a hard time pulling his head out of the Grand Epic mode. It made the film uneven, veering from goofiness to gravity and back. Hopefully he finds a more steady approach to the next installment.

Mind you; he did do himself and everyone else a HUGE favor cutting the goblin's "Fourteen birds in five fir trees" song from the final fight at the end.

Now songs and poems are all through Tolkien's works, and The Hobbit is no exception. And generally the film did a fairly good job handling the singalongs as part of the story and not a sort of musical-comedy full stop. But had Azog and Company burst into song it'd have immediately turned the whole enterprise into Bored of the Rings and, while I'd have laughed my ass - getting slightly numb after 170 minutes of movie - off, I think that might not have been Jackson's intent at all.

So we emerged, satisfied and hungry for a late-night snack before bed. The Boy hugged his little stuffed friend, engulfed his french fries, brushed his teeth and tumbled into his bunk full to overflowing with even more stuffed buddies. I promised to "check on him" in a moment or three.

And when I returned to his darkened room he was unquietly asleep, his head moving and eyes darting under their closed lids, surely journeying with Bilbo and his party over the high peaks of the Misty Mountains.

I stroked his hair and spoke quiet nonsense until his movements stilled and his breathing steadied.

And kissed his head. And went to sleep.

Pump, 4M, Glass, 1pr.

Actually, I spent the evening with the family last night and DID find something that inspired me to blog about.

It's completely trivial and kid-centered, so if you're looking for more ire on the subject of private weaponry, prepare to be disappointed.

Anyway, the Girl is going though something of a Princess Stage.

It's not horribly awfully mawkish in the way I feared it might be, with her demanding to dress up in princess garb 24/7; yes, she loves all things sparkly and pretty and cute but retains an underlying snark about it all which saves us from disappearing underneath the quicksands of Terminally Cutesy. But, still - for the Girl, Princesses Über Alles.

So the other night when we came across the cable broadcast of the original 1950 Disney Cinderella we HAD to watch.

(The Boy, for all that he pretends to mock these princessy puff-pieces, watched - though he was able to throw in the occasional smartass comment when the whole macguffin got too ridiculous. The Cinderella royals really believed there was only one girl with size four feet in the whole damn kingdom? Riiiiight.)

The show actually entertained me, too, since it has been years since I actually watched it. We have all sorts of Disney Princess storybooks and picture-books and even the odd princess doll around the Fire Direction Center (though the ladies tend to shed their clothes rather quickly before ending up in the Tub Toy bin; along with that tramp Barbie I'm beginning to suspect that the Disney royals are a trifle naughty) but not the movie. So my recollection of the actual ur-Cindy was pretty vague, and the cartoon was kind of a surprise on several levels.

The first thing I had forgotten is how little Cinderella actually occupies the screen.

The damn flick should really be called "Animals in Clothes", since probably half the run time or more is taken up with the adventures of Cindy's animal pals, the mice and songbirds that she befriends and seems to have had time to sew teensy little shirts, hats, and shoes for.

Where she finds time or materials to do this heaven only knows, since she's portrayed as the overworked and impoverished slavey of her wretched stepfamily, but that's the kidVid biz for ya.

I found these animal antics rather flat but, then, I was raised on the old Warner's cartoons, where cat-versus-mouse or rabbit-versus-hound had a real nasty edge to the humor. I tend to like my anthropomorphic critters with a bit more bite to them. Sorry, Jacques. Sorry, Gus. Just sayin'.

Between them Cindy and Prince Charming got less on-screen business than the comic Grand Duke, or the comic animals, or the comic King; it was as if ol' Walt knew that his audience didn't care about the lovey-dovey stuff as much as having a bit of a larf. Or knew that his prince and princess were pretty...and boring...so he stuffed the story with everything else under the sun. But it certainly didn't make our heroine any more compelling, and that's even without all the sobbing.

Anyway.

The other bit I didn't recall was just how delightfully eeeeeevil stepmommy-dearest Lady Tremaine is.

Even the Disney Wiki mentions this at length, so, clearly, it's not just me. Lady T is a terrific villain in the classic melodramatic sense, in that she hurts and twists our heroine for no better reason than her own personal enjoyment. She's a colossal bee-yotch and - since Cindy is a bit of a drip and not really much of a character - her pure evil is about 85% of why you root for Cindy; because she's NOT a bitch like her stepmother.

The "ugly sisters" are nasty and spiteful, too, but no more. They're just cat-scratches, irritations, naethings. Cindy and the viewer can just ignore them.

Lady T is a deadly steel dagger hidden inside a silken sheath and never lets you forget it, and she never lets her stepdaughter forget it, either.

What I had also completely forgotten was the terrific voice work of the 1950 Lady T, Eleanor Audley. She's perfect and makes the original Evil Stepmother work on vocal strength alone; cold, controlled and controlling, but with a sort of frightful majesty that makes you afraid of her even when you know she's armed with nothing more dangerous than a mean backhand.

She's an unusual Disney baddie, too; she's got no magic, no powers, nothing but an iron will and a consuming, implacable selfishness. She's not even really "ugly" in the Cruella de Ville/Malificent tradition; she's not humpbacked or bug-eyed or snaggle-toothed. Her skin isn't green, she doesn't turn into anything nastier than a scary relative, and she can't command lethal huntsmen or flying monkeys.

Yeah, she's got that hook-nosed aristo face, but if you put her in a slinky drop-front black satin gown and quirked those lips into a sultry smile she'd be a sort of purple-gray-haired Step-MILF, a bit of grown-up sexytime for the fella that likes his ladies slim, arrogant, and evil.

Nope, she's frightening because she's just a regular human woman; her power comes from her pure malevolence, from her lambent hatred of her lovely stepdaughter.

She's the animated female Khan Noonien Singh; "From hell's heart I stab at thee!".

She's the Mother from Hell, every boyfriend's worst nightmare.

Can you imagine her as Charming's mother-in-law? Brrrr. I'll bet getting the whole family together for Christmas dinner at the Tremaines was a fucking nightmare.

I mean, the woman is a tartar. Even after she's lost the game, after it's all up, after her daughters' ginormous feet have defied every attempt to shoehorn the glass slipper, Lady T is by God going to screw over her stepkid or know the reason why. She trips the page and breaks the slipper, and it's not her fault she hasn't foreseen that Cindy still has crystal loafer #2. She's still in there swinging, horrible woman that she is, and I felt a certain affection for her because of it.

She's a wonderfully awful character and I have this mental picture of her post-defeat, lounging at the edge of the swimming pool in the expensive tropic hideaway she's fled to escape royal vengeance, sipping something with a paper umbrella in it as though she owns the place.

The way she arches that long predatory body and eyes the cabana boy makes him hunch over his groin protectively. And all the while her vulpine smile bodes very ill for the next encounter with that ungrateful stepchild of hers.

She's defeated, not beaten, and the loathing she feels for the entitled little bitch will ensure that her brain is still racing, still plotting a dire fate for the Happy Couple long after they've "moved on".

Lady T doesn't do "moving on". Fuck that shit. Lady T does "Revenge is a dish best served cold."

Good stuff.

The kids liked it, too.

Well, tonight the Boy and I are off to see what Peter Jackson makes of J.R.R. Tolkien's children's tale. I daresay I may have something to add on that subject when we return.

Don't bite any poison apples, now.