French on Hawley

Something so rich (?) about Josh Hawley writing a book about masculinity when we saw him running for his life during the January 6, 2021 attack on our Capitol. He could have stood up to the liars about the election. He was afraid to. 

The Right Is All Wrong About Masculinity

By David French

Opinion Columnist - New York Times

There is a certain irony in discussions of masculinity. The group that is most convinced of a crisis of masculinity, the American right, is also busy emasculating itself before our eyes. It correctly perceives that young men are facing an identity crisis, yet it is modeling precisely the wrong response.

The release of the Missouri senator Josh Hawley’s new book on manhood is the latest peg for a national conversation about men, but the necessity of such a conversation has been apparent for some time. If there’s anything that’s well established in American social science, it’s that men are falling behind women in higher education, suffer disproportionately from drug overdoses and are far more likely to commit suicide.

Indeed, the very definition of “masculinity” is up for grabs. In 2019, the American Psychological Association published guidelines that took direct aim at what it called “traditional masculinity — marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression” — declaring it to be, “on the whole, harmful.”

I strongly disagreed. Aside from “dominance,” a concept with precious few virtuous uses, the other aspects of traditional masculinity the A.P.A. cited have important roles to play. Competitiveness, aggression and stoicism surely have their abuses, but they also can be indispensable in the right contexts. Thus, part of the challenge isn’t so much rejecting those characteristics as it is channeling and shaping them for virtuous purposes.

I should note here that traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us. On my recent visit to Kyiv, I was struck by the restraint and courage of the men and women I met. In the face of the greatest of challenges, they exhibited a degree of calm conviction that’s all too foreign to our domestic politics.

If you doubt the need for such stoicism in our own country, I’d point you, ironically enough, to the side of our political divide that is most critical of the A.P.A.’s conclusions: the American right. In its words, the right claims to uphold traditional masculinity; in its deeds, the story is very different.

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage. Do not allow yourself to become too high or too low. (“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two impostors just the same.”) Persevere.

It’s a compelling vision — although one that can become an emotional trap, to be sure. Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the patience and perseverance that mark stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun those values. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

Instead, the new right chooses to shriek about “groomers” on Twitter.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

In 2016, for example, the single most important intellectual work of the new right was an essay by Michael Anton entitled “The Flight 93 Election.” It began like this: “2016 is the Flight 93 election: Charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees. Except one: If you don’t try, death is certain.”

That’s right: The argument was that electing Hillary Clinton, a thoroughly establishment Democrat, would mean the end of America. It’s an argument that people never stopped making. In 2020, I debated the Christian author Eric Metaxas about whether Christians should support Donald Trump against Joe Biden. What did he argue? That Joe Biden could “genuinely destroy America forever.”

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.” Did a senator vote to confirm Ketanji Brown Jackson for the Supreme Court? Then he’s “pro-pedophile.” Did you disagree with Florida’s H.B. 1557, which restricted instruction on sexuality and gender identity? Then “you are probably a groomer.”

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness. Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

Twitter, even in its pre-Elon Musk state, seemed as if it had been constructed in a lab to contribute to a constant state of hysteria. Every single perceived left-wing outrage or excess is shared far and wide. “How can you be calm?” right-wing activists demand to know. “Didn’t you see that the North Face is using drag queens in its ads?”

Last month, my friend Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”

No one should think that this hysteria is confined to online spaces or that it ultimately remains merely petty or cruel. Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

If the right is going to claim it defends traditional masculinity — through its books, its viral Jordan Peterson videos and its Tucker Carlson documentaries — should it not at least attempt to exhibit the best virtues of traditional masculinity? Yet rather than model the traits of Kipling’s “If—,” the right mimics the attitudes of the countercultural 1968 film “If…,” which offered a sardonic inversion of Kipling’s virtues in its tale of a violent, schoolboy-led insurrection at a British boarding school.

I share many of the right’s concerns about young men. As I argued in one of my first pieces for The Times, American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose. I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”

Outrage is cheap, he told me. And he doubted that I, as a young lawyer, had even begun to understand what true legal outrage looked like. Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.

I worry for the young right. As Jonah wrote, all too many of them “have no frame of reference, no meaningful political experience or memory of politics prior to this shabby era, they think being shabby is normal and smart.” But there is a better way. It includes paying close attention to the very masculine values they claim to uphold, and it can start with remembering a singular admonition: “Keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs.” It’s a step toward reason, a step away from the emotional brink and a key to understanding what it truly takes to be a good man.

Original (unlocked)

Biden & Freedom

Good column from Anand Giridharadas. It's from this past April, but is still quite current. He's on Substack, where a lot of good writing is taking place these days. Elon Musk will probably try to buy it and kill it.

Biden's "freedom" pitch and the coming political realignment

As the right retreats from the theme of "freedom," the left sees an opening

ANAND GIRIDHARADAS

APR 25, 2023

In the final days of the 1964 presidential campaign, a professional pitch man and public speaker named Ronald Reagan recorded a video on behalf of the Republican nominee for president of the United States, Barry Goldwater. In the pitch, conventionally known as the “A Time for Choosing” speech, Reagan fixated on one word and theme above all else.

Freedom.

The Cold War, in his telling, was about whether we “lose this way of freedom of ours.” He wondered if Americans “still know the freedoms that were intended for us by the Founding Fathers.” For Reagan, America was apparently the only place with liberty on the entire surface of the Earth: “If we lose freedom here, there’s no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.” Maybe he hadn’t traveled much. He extolled “individual freedom consistent with law and order” and bemoaned “the assault on freedom” and worried that “freedom has never been so fragile.” He derided “those who would trade our freedom for security.”

The pitch for Goldwater didn’t work, but the pitch man outperformed his own product. A decade and a half later, Reagan would be elected president on a similar rhetorical platform of freedom, freedom, freedom, and freedom. And the frame of freedom that he insisted on would become the mantle of the right. Every strand of the right’s project — from deregulating the economy to busting unions to lowering taxes on the rich and corporations to imperially adventuring in foreign countries — all of it could be justified by the “freedom” pose.

And in those years, the left committed a blunder, largely accepting the right’s dubious claim to ownership of the concept of freedom. The left pursued other themes. It pursued justice, equality, solidarity, coming together, hope, change, the future. But it somewhat accepted, often unconsciously, that freedom was the right’s thing.

So it was significant that on January 20, 2017, as Donald Trump, in many ways an heir to the Reagan Revolution and in other ways a departure from it, delivered the darkest inaugural address in American history, he used the word “freedom” once. Even that was boilerplate, not substantive: “We all enjoy the same glorious freedoms, and we all salute the same, great American flag.”

That was it.

If Reagan had conjured the image of thriving, effervescent Americans bursting to do things, build things, raise families, chase dreams, but for the threat of government encroachment, Trump told a different story. Americans in this new story were victims of entropy: "trapped in poverty in our inner cities,” surrounded by “rusted out factories, scattered like tombstones across the across the landscape of our nation,” “deprived of all knowledge” by a broken education system, threatened by “the crime, and the gangs, and the drugs that have stolen too many lives.”

The kind of freedom the right had traditionally emphasized — negative freedom, the freedom to be left alone — wasn’t really the solution if this was the problem. If Reagan had emphasized the moral imperative of leaving free and vigorous people alone, Trump spoke of people who needed a powerful protector — a.k.a. him.

Of course, many of the actual, underlying policies Trump proposed would be quite similar to those proposed by Reagan, but the departure of the 2017 pitch from the long-reigning orthodoxy of the 1964 pitch was revealing: the party that once saw people as full of agency, threatened by government constraint, now saw people as naturally weak and vulnerable, threatened by forces beyond their control which only strong leaders could defeat. The libertarian Republican Party was now the authoritarian one.

The Republican retreat from the frame of freedom is a tectonic, under-appreciated shift in American politics. And it may be the start of a profound political realignment. For the first time in a generation, the idea of freedom is not an especially important animating principle for the right. They use the word still, but they are fundamentally about something else now, fundamentally about protecting people from supposedly menacing forces like demographic change and changes to M&Ms and children’s books and “woke” corporations. This is the pitch not of freedom but of the strongman.

To quote Miley Cyrus, the libertarian right of previous generations conceived of citizens as having the attitude “We run things, things don’t run we.” Today’s Republicans tell their adherents that they live in a world of forces that do run them, and only a powerful ruler can interrupt that.

The right’s desertion of freedom creates a historic opportunity for the left to reclaim what should never have been conceded. In reporting my book “The Persuaders,” I saw research showing that freedom is the most highly ranked value by people on the far right, far left, center right, and center left. There aren’t a lot of values like that left.

And it’s not just rhetoric: the actual program of the diverse camps of the political left is consonant with a freedom-centered pitch. What is the fight for reproductive rights but a fight for the freedom to control one’s body — and to have sex without fear that you are making a lifelong commitment some Friday night? What is the fight against book bans but a fight for the freedom to read and think? What is the effort to pursue justice for the January 6, 2021, insurrection but a fight to enshrine and defend the freedom to vote? What is the fight against climate change but a fight for the freedom of our children and grandchildren (and us) to drink clean water and breathe clean air and live in the mental peace of not constantly dreading floods and fires? What is the fight for truly universal healthcare but a fight for the freedom from illness — and for the freedom to pursue your business ideas and not have to cling to your awful job? What is the quest for free daycare and college but a fight for the freedom to learn and pursue your dreams regardless of whether you happened to be born into wealth?

Today, as President Biden announced his re-election campaign, his choice of approach struck me as a sign that this great political realignment may be upon us. As Politico summed up the campaign’s opening pitch: “Biden's 2024 choice: ‘More freedom or less freedom.’” In the campaign’s three-minute opening ad, Biden uses the word “freedom” six times. That is approximately five times the frequency of Reagan’s 11 uses of the word in his 27-minute speech in 1964. The ad frames all kinds of present-day issues as battles for freedom: protecting Social Security, beating back insurrection, defending democracy, safeguarding the vote, preserving abortion rights, preserving marriage equality, resisting book bans, shoring up civil rights, and more.

As Anat Shenker-Osorio, the progressive messaging guru whom I write about in “The Persuaders” says, the thing about freedom is that you can feel it. It’s corporeal. It’s not abstract. People know what it feels like to be free. And not to be free. This is a theme, a concept, a frame, a word that the left can no longer afford to hand to the right, and the good news is it seems like it no longer is.

Original.

Maureen Dowd

I have not checked in with Maureen Dowd in quite a while. She is often so caustic and cynical that it turns me off. But, as they say, even a clock...

Supreme Arrogance

by Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist for the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court is still great.

It’s the greatest gathering of grievances we’ve ever seen on the high court. The woe-is-me bloc of conservative male justices is obsessed with who has wronged them.

It might be an opportune time to hire a Supreme shrink so these resentful men can get some much-needed therapy and stop working out their issues from the bench.

Neil Gorsuch is settling a score for his mother.

In her memoir, Anne Gorsuch Burford wrote that when she was forced out as Ronald Reagan’s Environmental Protection Agency administrator in 1983, her 15-year-old son, Neil, “was really upset.” He told her: “You should never have resigned. You didn’t do anything wrong. You only did what the president ordered. You raised me not to be a quitter. Why are you a quitter?”

The scar from that trauma flared as he prepared a moot court brief with classmates at Harvard Law School and “tried to add material concerning the E.P.A. that did not fit,” according to a classmate who talked to The New York Times.

Burford was attacked during her tempestuous tenure as an enemy of the environment who slashed rules and spending to gut the E.P.A. The last straw, even for Republican lawmakers and Reagan officials, was when she rejected calls to turn over documents about a toxic-waste cleanup program that her agency had corrupted. She received a contempt citation from Congress.

The Times wrote in an editorial back then: “On becoming the head of the E.P.A., Anne Gorsuch inherited one of the most efficient and capable agencies of government. She has turned it into an Augean stable, reeking of cynicism, mismanagement and decay.”

Last year, her son moved to complete her toxic mission. He enthusiastically joined the 6-to-3 vote to severely curtail the E.P.A.’s ability to regulate power plant emissions. The activists who pushed for Gorsuch to be nominated to the court are finally getting to their real goal: the dismantling of their despised administrative state.

On Monday, the court agreed to review its unanimous decision in Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council from 1984. As Charlie Savage wrote in The Times: “If the court overturns or sharply limits the Chevron precedent, it would become easier for business owners to challenge regulations across the economy. Those include rules aimed at ensuring that the air and water are clean; that food, drugs, cars and consumer products are safe; and that financial firms do not take on too much risk.”

The Chevron ruling arose from a challenge to a decision by Gorsuch’s mother to lower power emission standards. By overturning the ruling, he would be approving his mother’s lax stance on regulations.

Samuel Alito also feels maltreated. In writing the opinion that overturned Roe v. Wade, this brazenly political justice who doesn’t distinguish between his legal and religious views mercilessly stripped women of the right to make decisions about their bodies. But somehow, he whines that he is the victim.

Last month Alito told The Wall Street Journal that he did not like the way the court’s legitimacy was being questioned. “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

Funny. That’s how many women feel about this Supreme Court.

Clarence Thomas, who is still bitter over being outed as a porn-loving harasser of women who worked for him — even though Joe Biden did his best to sweep the corroborating evidence under the Senate rug — was slapped with more revelations of ethics derelictions this past week.

ProPublica broke the news that Thomas’s billionaire benefactor for luxury trips and family property, Harlan Crow, had also secretly paid the private school tuition for Thomas’s grandnephew.

The Washington Post revealed that Leonard Leo, an executive vice president at the Federalist Society — the cult that has transformed the courts in its own right-wing image — surreptitiously funneled tens of thousands of dollars to Thomas’s wife, Ginni, for “consulting work” a decade ago.

The Post reported that Leo told the G.O.P. pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Mrs. Thomas, but stipulated that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

“The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case,” the paper said.

John Roberts cannot accept that these justices are incapable of policing themselves. Despite all the slime around him, he refusedto testify before Congress about a court that blithely disdains ethics.

One reason may be, as The Times reported, that the chief justice’s own wife, Jane, has made millions of dollars as a legal recruiter, placing lawyers at firms with business before the Supreme Court.

Even though I’ve been writing since Bush v. Gore that the court is full of hacks and the bloom is off the robes, it is still disorienting to see the murk of this Supreme Court.

A correction was made on 

May 8, 2023

: 

An earlier version of this column referred inaccurately to the origin of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. It arose from a challenge to a decision by Anne Gorsuch to lower power emission standards, not automobile emission standards. The column also referred imprecisely to a possible Supreme Court reversal of the ruling in relation to her stance on government. Overturning the ruling would support her lax stance on regulation; it would not vindicate her position in the Chevron case, which she won.

Original. Hey, what about Kavanaugh? Who paid off all those loans of Kavanaugh's, for instance? Harlan Crow?

Mass shootings

This country has gone insane over guns. Large majorities of Americans want some basic laws applied to gun, like universal background checks, banning of assault weapons, locking devices on guns. Thom has a pretty good idea below.

We Already Have he Law to Get Weapons of War Off Our Streets

We've done it before...

Thom Hartmann

Steven Spainhouer’s son worked at one of the stores in the Allen, Texas shopping mall chosen by America’s most recent mass shooter (as of Saturday: there were seven this weekend). 

He arrived at the mall just after the neo-nazi murderer had slaughtered several people, sometimes ripping their bodies and faces into an indistinguishable mass of flesh with his military style ammunition. 

The killer had moved on into the mall, Steven Spainhouer was probably thinking, when he saw a 5-year-old child.

“The first girl I walked up to was crouched down covering her head in the bushes, so I felt for a pulse,” Spainhouer, who is trained in CPR, told CBS News, adding that he then “pulled her head to the side and she had no face.”

Next, he found a dead woman who appeared to be lying across a young boy.

“When I rolled the mother over, he came out,” Spainhouer told CBS reporter JD Miles. “I asked him if he was OK and he said, ‘My mom is hurt, my mom is hurt.’ Rather than traumatize him any more, I pulled him around the corner, sat him down, and he was covered from head to toe.”

The child looked, Spainhouer said, “Like somebody poured blood on him.”

His mother’s blood. His dead mother who will never again hold or comfort that little boy for the rest of his life.

All because a white supremacist with a “Right Wing Death Squad” patch — commonly worn by Proud Boys — across his chest decided to shoot up a Texas shopping center with a mass-market version of the rifle the Army developed in the 1960s for hunting people in Vietnam.

In response to the unimaginable horror that weapon of war inflicted on these humans, Republican Congressman Keith Self — who represents Allen, Texas in the US House of Representatives — stepped up to a microphone and explicitly refused to say he’d do anything about the American slaughter:

“Our prayers are with the victims and their families and all law enforcement on the scene.”

Other Texas Republicans offered similar sentiments. Not even one of these cowards mentioned the word “gun” or promised to do a single damn thing. 

 

Republican Governor Abbott minimized the tragedy, saying, “Our hearts are with the people of Allen, Texas tonight during this unspeakable tragedy.”

Republican Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick might as well have spit on the corpses, asking Texans to, “Please join me in mourning the victims of the unspeakable tragedy in Allen.”

Republican Senator John Cornyn, as he has so many times before, ignored the AR15 that made such a quick and complete slaughter possible, saying instead,“I am grieving with the Allen community tonight…”

Republican Senator Ted Cruz slipped into his usual sanctimonious acceptable-to-the-NRA word salad: “Heidi and I are praying for the families of the victims of the horrific mall shooting in Allen, Texas. We pray also for the broader Collin County community that's in shock from this tragedy.”

Indicted bribe-taker and fraudster Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton also talked like this slaughter was the result of some sort of bizarre natural disaster, saying, “Pray for Allen, Texas. Pray for these families and law enforcement…”

Thoughts and prayers won’t do a damn thing. Coming from these mealy-mouthed Republicans, they don’t even comfort the families. All they do is prepare Texas for the next massacre.

Representing the rest of America, singer-songwriter Ricky Davila tweeted a list of Republican politicians and the money they took from the NRA, adding: 

“Fuck their thoughts and prayers.”

It turns out this slaughter isn’t really all that new or unique to the 21st century.America was once before awash in weapons of war, sparking a national fad of robbery and murder much like today’s trend of mass shootings. 

We still remember their names:

— Bonnie and Clyde gunned down civilians and cops as they cut a bloody swath across the Midwest with their full-auto .30-06 fire from M1918 Browning Automatic Rifles, semiautomatic shotguns, and .45 ACP rounds from full-auto M1911 handguns.
— Machine Gun Kelly preferred  the Thompson machine gun to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible.
— So did John Dillinger, who’s famous “Tommy Gun” has been recreated and is sold online today. 
— Baby Face Nelson liked to kill FBI agents with his fully automatic .45 pistol.  
— Pretty Boy Floyd’s famous weapon was an automatic Colt pistol.
— Ma Barker, who as a child was devastated when her hero Jesse James was killed in 1882, couldn’t hold a rifle (she was only 5’ 4” tall) so also used an automatic handgun.
— Al Capone preferred to carry a .38 Smith & Wesson handgun, letting his gang do the really bloody work with their automatic rifles and shotguns.

Collectively, through the late 1920s and early 1930s, these and hundreds of other less-well-remembered killers used weapons developed for the battlefield around the time of the Civil War and World War I to spill blood all across America. Weapons the Founders of America and Framers of the Constitution couldn’t have dreamed of.

And then America said, “Enough!”

In 1934, Congress passed and President Roosevelt signed the National Firearms Act (NFA), which didn’t outlaw even one single gun. Instead, it put a tax on automatic weapons, sawed-off shotguns, and a variety of other weapons of war. That’s all it took to stop the slaughter.

None of the weapons listed in the NFA are “illegal.” But they are under control.

I’ve legally held and fired the same fully automatic Thompson Machine Gun like Machine Gun Kelly and John Dillinger used, among others. 

Many gun ranges offer rentals if you want to try target practice with them: I shot them at a public gun range in Marietta, Georgia when, back in the 1980s, I was working on my Georgia private detective license (which I held for 2 years while writing some pretty awful novels about a PI) and running an advertising agency.

Most of the people shooting those fully automatic weapons, in fact, looked pretty average, generally middle-class; there was even racial diversity and a lot of women.

It was perfectly legal because the owner of the shooting range had paid the tax to get the federal license.

And that’s where we can do something today by simply expanding the scope of the weapons covered by the NFA.

To be eligible to pay the tax, you must first acquire a Federal Firearms License.

Step one is to fill out an application with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, which you can find here. You pay a fee that can range from $30 to $3000 (most are $200 for fully automatic weapons, a number that hasn’t changed since 1934), provide a photo, and submit your fingerprints.

After you’ve been checked out, you’ll be called in for an in-person interview with an ATF Industry Operations Investigator, who will vet you for ownership of your very own fully automatic machine gun.

There were no gun buy-back programs back in the 1930s, and nobody went door-to-door confiscating guns.

But once everybody understood that it was illegal to sell or possess an automatic or sawed-off weapon of war without first getting a license and paying the tax, they simply started to disappear from the American scene (outside of licensed shooting ranges like today).

Which brings us to a simple proposal. When enough ethical politicians hold office to pull it off (hopefully after the 2024 election), simply amend the National Firearms Actto include semiautomatic weapons along with the existing category of fully automatic weapons and sawed-off shotguns.

After all, most semiautomatic weapons were originally developed for warfare: they are, pure and simple, designed to kill as many people as fast as possible, whether they be handguns or long rifles. (There are a handful of “sort of” semiautomatic low-capacity rifles commonly used for hunting; they could be exempted.)

This would not conflict with the 2^nd Amendment or even the Heller decision, as bizarre and twisted as it was, as I document in The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment. It’s perfectly legal.

And it could take us back in time to a less deadly America.

Fire up Netflix or Amazon Prime and watch a few cop shows from the 1970s and early 1980s. McMillian and Wife, Adam 12, Hill Street Blues, Cagney and Lacey, etc. 

Semiautomatic weapons were few and far between back then because they were so hard to get and expensive: they were widely acknowledged as purely for the battlefield.  Cops carried revolvers, as did criminals. Rifles were mostly bolt-, lever-, and pump-action.

And mass shootings almost never happened.

Semiautomatic weapons are very profitable for their manufacturers, and they’re the weapon of choice for mass- and school-shooters. Most are designed specifically to hunt and kill human beings.

Which is why we shouldn’t allow them to stay on our streets without restrictions. Let’s take them out of general civilian circulation, just as we did machine guns back in the day.

If you’re buying a gun to protect yourself or your home (a bad idea: guns in the home are far more likely to be used against a resident than a bad guy), a simple handgun is convenient and works just fine. 

And any idiot who walks into the woods with an AR-style rifle will be laughed out of the forest by actual sportsmen: there’s nothing “sporting” about mowing down deer or rabbits with a giant magazine and .223 ammo. (Not to mention what it does to the meat and hides.)

In fact, the groups calling for continuing the unregulated status of semiautomatic weapons of war are mostly made up of people actually planning seditious warfare against the United States.

Members of the so-called “militia movement” and other crackpots believe the BS story the NRA started peddling in the mid-1970s that the 2^nd Amendment was written so average citizens could kill “tyrannical” politicians and American police enforcing their laws.

The reality is the exact opposite: the Constitution itself contains numerous references to the requirement of the government to put down insurrections and rebellions by people like today’s Proud Boys and Three Percenters.

Every one of the 50 states today explicitly outlaws unregulated civilian militias, either by constitution or law or both. Virginia, the home of Madison, Jefferson, Henry, Mason, Washington, etc., was the first, putting into their constitution in 1776:

“That a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state; that standing armies, in time of peace, should be avoided as dangerous to liberty; and that in all cases the military should be under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.” [emphasis mine]

Forty-eight of the 50 states have similar clauses in their constitutions requiring any militia in the state to be subordinate to civilian authorities: typically the governor, occasionally the legislature, or both. (Georgia and New York are the exceptions.)

Twenty-nine states have specific laws outlawing private militias altogether (Alabama, Arizona, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New York, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Texas, Washington, West Virginia, and Wyoming).

Twenty-five states, as the Brennan Center for Justice notes:

“[H]ave laws that generally prohibit teaching, demonstrating, instructing, training, and practicing in the use of firearms, explosives, or techniques capable of causing injury or death, for use during or in furtherance of a civil disorder.”

(They include Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Jersey, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, Washington.)

As you can see from this history, the last thing the Founders — and politicians in every state over the past 200+ years — thought was that Americans should be armed with weapons of war to fight against the government that they themselves created.

And it’s not like this is a new issue: back in 1886 the US Supreme Court ruled, in Presser v Illinois (upholding state anti-militia laws), that:

“It cannot be successfully questioned that the state governments … have also the power to control and regulate the organization, drilling, and parading of military bodies and associations, except when such bodies or associations are authorized by the militia laws of the United States.

“The exercise of this power by the states is necessary to the public peace, safety, and good order. To deny the power would be to deny the right of the state to disperse assemblages organized for sedition and treason, and the right to suppress armed mobs bent on riot and rapine.”

Back in 1907, when the Klan was the main white supremacist militia of the day (although it operated under multiple different names in various states), the Washington Supreme Court ruled that:

“Armed bodies of men are a menace to the public. Their mere presence is fraught with danger, and the state has wisely reserved to itself the right to organize, maintain, and employ them.”

In other words, there is not one single legal rationale to keep weapons of war on the streets of America; if anything, doing so is antithetical to our Constitution and over 200 years of law, both state and federal.

It’s time to get these weapons of war off our streets, and we have the tool to do it in the National Firearms Act.

For years I’ve suggested we should treat guns like cars: require registration, a shooter’s license, and liability insurance. That’s still a good idea, but we must also figure out how to rid our towns and cities of these ultra-deadly weapons of war. This could do it.

We already have the law in place, and a sweeping change could come across our nation with a single tweak.

Had we done this a year ago, a little boy in Texas would still have his mother, and a five year old girl would still have her face.

Let your members of Congress know.

Original.