gehringer_2

Just ask: "How many murders are committed with automobiles in the US in a year as compared to handguns" and the issue frames itself easily. The simple way to put it is that >99.9% of vehicle deaths in the US are accidental. Probably 95% of gun deaths are intentional - though I wouldn't be surprised if the 5% accidental guess it too low, it is sadly not all that unusual for people do kill themselves by accident with their own guns. It is not logically conceivable to remove the possibility of accidental death in the real world, though we work toward that aim constantly. Conversely, not only is It is easy to imagine a world with out significant gun violence, I can, amazingly, simply look beyond the border and see any number of them!

If we were horse trading over abortion law, I'd go in a different direction. My opening position would be a national DNA database, so the father of every one of those children carried to term could be identified and required to be financially responsible for it until it was 18. Put that on the books and watch the demand for abortions in the US go to zero.

So I am curious, what do they accept as 'proof'?

That is true. OTOH, I don't know if we should judge and/or project all politics by the current weird state we are in. It wasn't always like this, it may not always be like this. For instance will the children of this generation of gun owners add their parents guns to their own collections when mom and dad go into assisted living, or will they have them destroyed because they have no interest in them? Buddha and I just came to different conclusions about whether the US is a regressing Culture or not. Whichever is true it probably won't stay the same as it is now.

That's true but not quite what I was trying to say. What I meant was more along the line that if the black on black crime happening in the US were black on middle class white, it wouldn't be happening and if that included gun control, then gun control would have happened.

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At least I don't think this year's field is very controversial. It could be moreso in retrospect if both Georgia and Bama lose their semi.

marriage has collapsed in the US among lower socio-economic groups among both blacks and whites. https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-marriage-divide-how-and-why-working-class-families-are-more-fragile-today

Haha - I thought your answer was going to be that if were middle class folk being shot in Chicago something would have changed be now - so I'll toss it out there anyway since you were going in a slightly different direction. I question how many of the middle American addicts created by prescription would ever have gone down that road had they been prescribed 800mg caplets of Motrin for whatever immediate ailment took them to their script happy doctors. Yes there had been a general economic turn down out in the sub/sub urban US but I have trouble envisioning the majority of these people would have sought out opiates on the black market. That would be a ton of cultural inhibition to overcome, at least until already addicted. I think without the boot strap of easy prescriptions those looking to deaden their mental pain would have been far more likely to have turned to alcohol. Now whether that would have killed as many as opiates in the end is still a fair question. And if it had been alcohol it would have been all that much harder to discern it happening as well. I've been hoping for data to start emerging that the legalization of marijauna in so many places is having some positive impact on the rate of addition to harder things, and/or the economics of the black drug markets, but haven't yet.

at the risk of igniting an old debate, Bryce Young has Doug Flutie written all over him.

when you live in a logic free zone, these things just flow right by.

has there ever been a party in any democratic country anywhere whose politics actually helped to kill their own members (other than in a war)? Is there any precedent to this in the short history of democracy?

I still don't know how much you can hang the double TO on Campbell when Glenn was screaming for it. You either trust your head coordinator or you don't.

well, dollars are fungible. That's like saying the state lottery money 'all goes to schools.' In the final analysis any organization has one pot of money.

don't you think this gets a little nutty though? OK, lets say the 'responsible' gun owners agree to a law that any gun in a house with a minor has be kept in a safe or at minimum with a trigger lock - then how much good is that gun against the home invader coming in the window? It's seems you can't secure guns and still have guns available for the purposes that people say they want them for. Doesn't that argue that getting rid of them (handguns that is) is probably the better course? That the collective security of a less armed society improves everyone's quality of life more efficiently? And maybe it takes 30 yrs to get the numbers low enough the get to where they want to be. So what. I'd still love to be able to leave that legacy to my grandchildren, or even my great grandchildren.

The conventional wisdom on the history is that banning opiates and cocaine was a response to their increasing use in the middle classes - such as was depicted contemporaneously in Doyle's Sherlock Holmes and O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, but in retrospect I wonder if the problem was ever as bad or the solution as effective as touted.

Correct - a natural* political outcome when commuters have more political clout than the affected locals. *natural in the sense of political decisions easy to defend as simply 'serving the larger constituency' despite the obviously disparate racial impact.

The problem is that there is a perfectly sound counter argument, which is that there are plenty of places in the US with plenty of guns and little murder (at least the 'normal' crime kind - again keeping the mayhem events in their own class). That is why it is so easy to get derailed. In a huge sense you are absolutely correct, remove the guns and we don't need to worry about the complexities underlying why they are being used. But OTOH, if you have people on the gun side actually serious about trying to solve the issues around their use, I'm not going to complain about getting to anything that helps keep more kids alive.

but the city pop was approaching 2 million in 1960. The drain was already swirling by 1974 by any definition. another example - much of the prior commercial activity never came back to Grand River or Mi Ave after the '67 riots.

Let's look at the premise of your question. What make you think there has ever been such a thing as integration in America? We have a veneer of social integration of upper class Blacks, but Blacks and whites still live overwhelmingly in separate places and more importantly, with separate legislative representation. We have an integrated social world, but we are still nearly completely segregated residentially, educationally, and politically. Lets look at Detroit. A racist legislative system had been put in place decades before where all city council members were elected at large in order to prevent minorities from gaining council seats. Yet ironically that left every member vying for everyone's votes and there was a large stable black middle class in Detroit that had a measure of political influence. But Detroit was at heart a racist city (lots of southern transplants had come to work in the auto plants and brought it with them) and when the school desegregation case threatened existing geographical segregation in the Detroit schools, ( while the city income tax helped trigger the exodus of small business) it triggered a wave of human and small business emigration that emptied more than half the city's population, destroyed it's tax base, and more importantly also destroyed the value of the financial equity that middle class black families had in their homes ( the average American's biggest investment) as neighborhoods collapsed all around the city. And once that population left, its state and federal political muscle left with it. Is it so hard to fathom that the place and the population left behind ended up in a worse *economic* condition than prior to the civil rights era? Coleman Young achieved his ambition for Black leadership in the city, but it was command of a sinking ship. The saddest of Pyrrhic victories. Its been very insidious that white America has managed to take things away from black America in every act in which it has apparently yielded something to it. And as I've tried to stress, I don't even think a lot of this is motivated by overt political racism - it's just the natural outcome of a geography based representation, residentially segregated populations, and gerrymandering doesn't help! That's why it can be so persistent. It's tied to the core organization of American government.

what makes people not value life? Feeling like you don't have much to live for. *Most* murder in America has always been an underclass problem - you can overlay murder rates on income data census tract by census track and get nearly a one to one correlation. So the question is both simpler and more complex - which is how do you attack the poverty in US inner cities which is where most US poverty and most US murder are? A big part of the reason we have poor, decayed inner cities is because they are mostly black, and when whites moved away they took their political power and economic development resources with them. That's more or less the definition of institutional racism. Political resources allotment decisions made by majoritarian systems have a natural bias toward beggaring the minority. That's baked into the system. That's a hard political problem to solve. Integration is the 'easiest' answer in a system like ours where representation is geographically based, but America doesn't seem to be capable of it. But to be clear, murder in Chicago and mayhem like Sandy Hook or Oxford are quite different problems and we defeat ourselves when we don't keep the distinction clear. It's true they intersect at the availability of guns, and reduction in that availability would help both, but that is the only factor they share in common.

This is a good counterpoint to my earlier compliant that Campbell expects too much of Goff. It's true Campbell is more understandable in a context where you think that he believes he has build to build a culture where it's understood that execution is both expected and possible before he will ever get that execution.

well, let's not get too far ahead of ourselves.

it's just another deflection strategy. Understanding the linguistic tics of firearms has close to nothing to do with understanding their social, legal and public health effects. I doubt many traffic safety experts could tell you much about the thermodynamics of an internal combustion engine. For that matter do the self appointed firearms experts know anything about the chemistry of the powder or the phase diagrams of the metallurgy of said weapons, all critical to what they are - is that enough to disqualify them to speak?

Speaking of OSU - I was amused to see a disappointed Buckeye fan on the Columbus SBNation site accuse Ryan Day of DAntonio.ism - i.e. being unwilling to move on from under-performing staff.