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Never forget!
I ran for Idaho state senate in 2008--didn't win
I've written a number of history books, as well as scholarly and popular articles, (see my web page).
Sorry, high pressure isn't included.
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Other blogs you may enjoy:
My civilian gun defense use blog
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Pete Drum's Web Page
Gun Laws Don't Work
instapundit.com
Dissecting Leftism -- By John Ray
A courageous Briton arguing for relaxing Britain's gun control laws
Right Thoughts
Final Protective Fire
Amitai Etzioni's Blog
Scrappleface -- Dangerously Clever Satire
Michael Williams -- Master of None
Another Conservative Blogger
A Group Blog By Iraqis
THE MESOPOTAMIAN: TO BRING ONE MORE IRAQI VOICE OF THE SILENT MAJORITY TO THE ATTENTION OF THE WORLD
Specializing in discussions of discrimination and affirmative action
An Iraqi dentist
Promoting children being raised by their own parents
A federal law clerk opines about the law
Michelle Malkin's blog
Impearls: a blog as electic and interesting as mine
Proving that the United States military does more than kill people and break things.
May not agree with this group on everything, but stopping the ACLU is high on my list
A conservative/moderate black blogger.
Another sensible American
Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party
Music, Politics, Motorcycles
Maggie's Farm: Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
A blog dedicated to "Documenting Saddam Hussein's support of Terrorism"
The blog of one of my fellow bloggers on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog
J. Norman Heath's Blog--a circus rigger and Second Amendment scholar (really!)
Buckeye Firearms Association, for you Ohio gun owners and activists
Click here for a FREE NEWSLETTER on Ohio Gun Rights from Buckeye Firearms Association!
Another conservative.
Neocon Blues
Conservative Oasis
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Bubbleheads is a retired submariner
An Idaho State University student. A Democrat. Someday, she'll start paying income taxes and change.
A retired Las Vegas stagehand, of all things.
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North Korean: Friends of Mother Earth?
This photo has been given as an example of the relative economic development of North and South Korean. I prefer to think of it as evidence of what good stewards of Mother Earth the North Korean government is. Soon, if the U.S. doesn't give into North Korean blackmail, and provide more economic aid, the Mother Earth loving government of North Korean will be able to enrich the soil of their beloved land with the organic fertilizer of millions of starving people....
Where Ideology Unfettered By Reality Leads You...
Part of why I am no longer a pure libertarian is that there are a number of places where good intentions and pure ideology simply fail the most important test of all: what does it mean for a person who is injured and suffering? One of the most blatant examples is concerning mental illness. A whole generation of lawyers seem to have watched One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and let that define their understanding of the dangers of institutionalization. I can tell you one story; here's a speech I gave about my brother's descent into mental illness, and the failure of good intentions with respect to how mental illness is treated in the U.S.
There are a lot of these tragedies out there. The Portland Oregonian ran a three part series December 29, 30, and 31, 2002, about the failures of the Oregon mental health system. If you want to read these articles, do it now, because they are only free for 30 days from publication. The article on December 30, "Free to Die," is about a young woman who, unlike many who suffer from a sudden, obvious schizoprenic breakdown (as happened to my brother), seems to have suffered a much slower, less obvious decline:An investigation by The Oregonian has found that at least 28 people have died in the past 3 1/2 years in the state after doctors, county mental health workers and other officials unsuccessfully sought to send them to psychiatric hospitals without their permission. The problem is almost certainly more widespread. The Oregonian studied only those whose deaths were documented in Department of Human Services records.
Go ahead. Read the whole article. It is very sobering, and very well-written.
Judges, doctors and mental health workers say the laws intended to protect patients often work against them.
"I have had a number of cases in which I very much felt the people should be hospitalized," said Multnomah County Circuit Judge Lewis Lawrence, who hears more involuntary hospitalization cases than any judge in the state. "But they weren't committable under the law. And I felt terrible because I knew I was sending them to an unknown, perhaps horrific, fate."
The painful life and tragic death of Mary Boos, a Portland woman with paranoid schizophrenia, is one such case.
Mental health workers, her parents and two court psychiatrists agreed that Boos, 40, was in grave danger and should be hospitalized. A judge, not Lawrence, refused, saying her case didn't meet Oregon's standard, under which a person must be a danger to herself, others or unable to provide for her basic personal needs. The Oregon Court of Appeals has told judges not to force patients into treatment unless they are unable to "survive in the near future."
Boos lived 10 more months. But without treatment, she sank so deeply into her delusions that she would not leave her apartment. She would not eat the food her parents faithfully and frantically set outside the door no law could make her open. Her decomposing remains were found almost a year later on Oct. 20, 1997. The medical examiner ruled she died of "natural causes probably related to schizophrenia." In other words, she starved to death.
This could have been your sister. It could have been you. In some pure sense, there is something very unfortunate about forcing an adult into mental health treatment, but consider what happens--and happens often in the U.S.--when this pursuit of ideological purity causes someone to die, often after enormous suffering and torment. In the case of Mary Boos, she starved herself to death because of paranoid delusions. A real human and her suffering trumps clever theories about how things ought to work.
It's Always Nice To Be Quoted in a Newspaper
The Washington Times covers the continuing Arming America scandal:Despite Knopf's decision to stop publication of "Arming America," officials of the company continued to defend Mr. Bellesiles.
"I don't think there was any malice on Michael's part," Mr. Bogaards said.
Mr. Bellesiles' editor at Knopf, Jane Garrett, told the Associated Press, "I still do not believe in any shape or form he fabricated anything. He's just a sloppy researcher."
Those remarks angered one of Mr. Bellesiles' most persistent critics, author Clayton Cramer.
"I am very disappointed that Knopf is still pretending that Bellesiles's problem is just that he's a sloppy researcher," said Mr. Cramer, who exposed alterations of historic texts in the Bellesiles book. "He has told too many different, contradictory stories. He is a liar, and Knopf should feel real shame about allowing this fraud to continue as long as it did."
The Lott Controversy
There has been discussion of late about a survey that John Lott did concerning defensive gun use in 1997. His hard disk crashed, and he can't seem to find any written documentation to establish that this phone survey actually took place. Why this has become an issue of importance:
1. Tim Lambert, a computer science professor in Australia, and a gun control advocate, has asserted that Lott didn't do such a survey at all, but fabricated it.
2. Lambert wants to do to Lott what I have done to Bellesiles.
The comparison at first glance is worrisome. Lott's explanations for the lack of evidence for this phone survey are not terribly persuasive to those that are skeptical that the survey took place. Lott's explanations are at least possible, however. Where the comparison falls apart is that this survey is the only such example that Lambert can find of a non-reproducible claim, and were this single survey demonstrated to be a Bellesilesism, it would not significantly impact the conclusions of Lott's book More Guns, Less Crime, being only a question about what percentage of defensive gun uses involve shots fired. (It would, however, raise serious credibility questions about Lott.) There are disputes that Lambert has with Lott's work in other areas, but these are fairly arcane questions of statistical analysis where it is impossible to say (at least for me) that Lott is wrong and Lambert is right.
James Lindgren has weighed in publicly on this question, clearly troubled by the lack of evidence for this phone survey that Lott says that he ran in 1997. Lott has recently written a letter to Lindgren on this subject, which Lott has given permission to publish, so I am doing so.I received this email from John Lott on Dec. 26 and he gave me permission to post it. In point 3 of his email below, Lott refers to a new study he did this fall. Dan Polsby inquired into this and confirmed that this 2002 study was done, talking and corresponding with people who did the fall 2002 study, as well as perused extensive phone calling records.
This new survey may not resolve the question about the 1997 survey, but if it gives roughly similar results, it would at least raise the possibility significantly that the 1997 survey did take place, though without leaving any written evidence.
Jim Lindgren
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dear James:
My survey never had the ambition of yielding precise numbers. Rather the main intention was to check the general accuracy of the claim that there were 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.
1) You are of course right that the sample of people using guns defensively is very small and has an obviously large 95 percent confidence interval associated with it. The estimate provided was a point estimate, nothing more and I have never made any pretense to it being more than that. I am sure that you can provide the confidence intervals for the subgroups estimates.
2) The overwhelming majority of the survey work was done at the beginning of the period over which the survey was done. It has obviously been a while, but my recollection is that the small number of people surveyed after the first four or five weeks (mainly January 1997) did not include any more defensive gun uses.
3) Unfortunately, the documentation and results for the survey was lost. However, concerns about the accuracy of the survey can be addressed through replication. I did another survey over 10 days this past fall and it will be discussed in a book coming out in a couple of months. The results of the survey are very similar to those previously reported. All the documentation and the results will be made available to anyone interested in examining it after the book is released.
4) Just a note on your discussion of the timing of things. The University of Chicago Press is not particularly fast. It took them over nine months to publish the second edition after receiving a finalized manuscript. For them,that was an incredibly fast turn around. I am sure that the Press is happy to confirm these types of time lags for you if you are interested. The time lags are much longer than for other types of publications, but you should consider it when putting together your time line.
5) I am not sure that I understand why things should be weighted by household size since I was asking questions about individual experiences.
Sincerely,
John Lott
UPDATE: Dr. Lott called me today, by coincidence. The survey to replicate the 1997 survey has been completed. While it has not yet been published, it is close enough to the 1997 survey results to be considered replicable.
Taking Professional Standards for Historians Seriously
From historynewsnetwork:The Society of American Historians has passed a resolution giving the organization the right to terminate the membership of any historian who fails to meet professional standards.
The resolution was drafted by Stanley Katz, one of the three historians who wrote the Emory Report that resulted in the resignation of Michael Bellesiles as a professor of history at Emory University.
The resolution was approved following a vigorous debate.
Do You Know A Deaf Person in Boise Who Needs a TV?
Or even better, a non-profit that provides services to the hearing impaired? I have a 27" RCA color TV that has lost the ability to make sound. It doesn't seem to be repairable (increasingly, TVs this size and price are disposables), but it works great other than that, and if you can't hear, or can't hear very well, using it in caption mode makes no difference. It's free to the first person who emails me and asks to pick it up.
I would prefer to give it to a non-profit for the tax write-off, but an individual who wants is welcome to it as well.
For those that are thinking this way: it's not the speakers (I tried to get it to work with the external audio jacks feeding external speakers). This, plus the clicking noise when you adjust volume, suggests a failure in the audio circuits upstream from the speakers.
Every Multimillionaire Needs One Of These...
A company called Solotrek is developing what is essentially a personal aircraft. They are apparently a bit short on development funds, and so:It's a bird! It's a plane! It's a strap-on flying machine. And it could be yours on eBay for $1 million with just one catch -- you have to agree not to use it.
Designers of a personal aircraft that they hope might one day transport soldiers over land mines or zip commuters above rush hour traffic are putting the one-of-a-kind device up for auction on Friday to help raise cash for further research.
Michael Moore (Continued)
This item from http://us.imdb.com/ was too good to pass up:American satirist Michael Moore has stormed out of Britain after a bust up with the London theatre hosting his one-man show. The Bowling For Columbine moviemaker performed Michael Moore - Live! to packed audiences for two months before Christmas at The Roundhouse in Camden, North London. But on the penultimate night he reportedly flew into a rage, verbally attacked everyone associated with the theatre because he thought he wasn't being paid enough. During the performance he complained he was making just $750 a night. A member of the stage crew says, "He completely lost the plot. He stormed around all day screaming at everyone, even the £5-an-hour bar staff, telling them how we were all conmen and useless. Then he went on stage and did it in public." Staff retaliated by refusing to work the following night, which led to the show being held up for an hour. Eventually he made a groveling apology to staff and the angry audience finally took to their seats. A source reports that Moore then packed his bags and flew to New York the next day without saying thank you or goodbye to anyone.
Nice to see Michael Moore showing his sympathy for working people like that. I must say--only $750 a night--what a tragedy for a millionaire.
And here's another gem, in this case, from an article in The American Prospect, a distinctly progressive magazine. And they take apart Bowling for Columbine from a different perspective, one that shows considerable intellectual honesty and integrity:My beef with Moore is this: He has managed to make a movie about gun violence in America -- where 53 percent of the gun murder victims are black -- without interviewing a single black victim of gun violence, or even asking black community leaders, who have spent decades successfully trying to combat the problem, for their insights. Instead, to explore a phenomenon that has devastated inner cities and is a horror primarily in urban areas -- nearly 70 percent of gun murders take place in cities, according to U.S. Deaprtment of Justice statistics -- Moore has made a movie that takes as its focal point the Columbine High School massacre in Littleton, Colo., a type of crime (five or more victims) that represented one-tenth of 1 percent of murders that year and that occurred in a white, prosperous, suburban community.
Well worth reading. Michael Moore isn't a progressive intellectual--he's a buffoon, who progressive intellectuals seem to rightly abhor.
For his movie, Moore returned to the scene of a number of high-profile crimes, in addition to Columbine. He went to South Central in Los Angeles, to the very corner where the Los Angeles riots started in 1992 -- but didn't bother to ask that neighborhood's black or Latino residents about their lives. Instead, he stood on a street corner, accompanied by Barry Glassner, author of The Culture of Fear, who is also white, and said, in effect, Look how brave I am for coming here, and man, isn't there a lot of smog? He spoke to a white Los Angeles Police Department officer. He spoke at length with a young white teen in Oscoda, Mich., who openly admittedly to selling stolen handguns to the folks in Detroit (where 395 people were murdered in 2001) but did not interview any of the people who were on the buying -- and shooting -- end of the transactions. How can you make what is essentially a movie about murder without speaking to murderers?
It Sounds Like HBO Is Planning to Rehabilitate Hitler
From Yahoo News:HBO is developing a documentary based on a controversial book that claims Adolf Hitler was gay.
Scheduled to air next year on either HBO or Cinemax, the documentary will draw from "The Hidden Hitler," a biography released in 2001 to heavy criticism from historians who disputed its allegations. One academic who reviewed the book for the Washington Post chastised the author, German history professor Lothar Machtan, for coming "perilously close to blaming the entire Holocaust on Hitler's alleged sexuality."
"Orwellian Tactics" About Public Drunkenness
Instapundit is again talking about the public drunkenness checks in bars in Virginia, calling them "Orwellian." So I read the article that he linked to, and there are some...problems."We're not talking about someone who was enjoying a cocktail or two and enjoying a nice evening out," Bennett said, noting that the nine men arrested had blood-alcohol levels ranging from 0.14 to 0.22. "They drew attention to themselves by their actions."
Hmmm. BAC of 0.14 to 0.22. How do you get a level that high from "enjoying a cocktail or two" unless you weigh 30 pounds? To get BACs that high is not the result of a drink or two. Unless you have a very high alcohol tolerance, those sorts of BACs are usually associated with sleep, giddy stupidity, or belligerence.
But civil libertarians, restaurateurs and many of their customers who were either questioned or arrested have decried the police tactic. They said many people who were drinking responsibly and causing no commotion now have the Class 4 misdemeanor of public intoxication on their record, and many more potential customers were scared away for good out of fear that a drink or two could get them arrested.
Maybe there is something wrong going on there in terms of random inspections (which is not constitutional), but even this article trying to make the police sound overzealous suggests that the people they arrested were well and thoroughly blasted. Maybe they were quiet, well-behaved drunks, but I'm going to need to see a bit more evidence of this than just whining from bar owners and people questioned by the police.
Absolutely Devastating Analysis of Canada's Current Gun Control Program--By A Canadian Gun Controller
This column by John Dixon in the Globe and Mail, who played a key role in creating the gun control laws passed in the aftermath of the Montreal Massacre, explains why the current insanely expensive program exists, and for the wrong reasons. Just so that you don't think he's one of us:We now know that the government's gun-control policy is a fiscal and administrative debacle. Its costs rival those of core services like national defence. And it doesn't work. What is less well known is that the policy wasn't designed to control guns. It was designed to control Kim Campbell.
After explaining that the imposition of the Firearms Acquisition Certificate was creating, slowly, a comprehensive gun registry for Canada, Dixon explains that this system didn't work quite as expected, because the police had real work to do:
When Ms. Campbell was enjoying a brief season of success in her re-election bid in the summer campaign of 1993, Mr. Chrétien was kept busy reassuring what he called the "Nervous Nellies" in his caucus that Ms. Campbell's star would soon fall. To bring her down, the Liberals planned to discredit her key accomplishment as minister of justice, an ambitious gun-control package.
Those measures -- enacted in the wake of the Montreal Massacre -- included new requirements for the training and certification of target shooters and hunters. We got new laws requiring: the safe storage of firearms and ammunition, which essentially brought every gun in the country under lock and key; screening of applicants for firearms licences; courts to actively seek information about firearms in spousal assault cases; the prohibition of firearms that had no place in Canada's field-and-stream tradition of firearms use.
I was one of the department of justice officials involved in that earlier gun-control program. When the House of Commons passed the legislation, Wendy Cukier and Heidi Rathgen of the Coalition for Gun Control, which had been part of the consultation process, supplied the champagne for a party at my Ottawa home.The FAC system was a very Canadian (i.e. sensible) approach to the registration of ordinary hunting and target firearms. If you were a good ol' boy from Camrose, Alta., and didn't want to get involved, you didn't have to -- as long as you didn't buy more guns. Good ol' boys die off, so younger people in shooting sports would eventually all be enrolled in the system.
This is why, by the way, the New Zealand police ended mandatory registration of long firearms in 1983--the records were always 25% out of date, and they had work to do solving crimes, not registering guns.
After the Montreal Massacre, the then-deputy minister of justice, John Tait, asked me to review the gun-control package under development. One thing I immediately wanted to know was how many Canadians owned Ruger Mini-14s (the gun used by the Montreal murderer). The Mini-14 came into production about the time the FAC system was introduced, so the FAC should have a good picture of the gun's distribution.
But when our team asked the RCMP for the information, we couldn't get it. Computers were down; the information hadn't been entered yet; there weren't enough staff to process the request; there was a full moon. After a week, I said I didn't want excuses, I wanted the records. Then a very senior person sat me down and told me the truth.
The RCMP had stopped accepting FAC records, and had actually destroyed those it already had. The FAC registry system didn't exist because the police thought it was useless and refused to waste their limited budgets maintaining it. They also moved to ensure that their political masters could not resurrect it.
Such spectacular bureaucratic vandalism persuaded my deputy and his minister to concentrate on developing com- pliance with affordable gun-control measures that could work. A universal gun registry could only appeal to people who didn't care about costs or results, and who didn't understand what riled up decent folks in Camrose.
Dixon goes on to explain that because the previous gun control laws--stricter than most Americans would tolerate, I suspect--had been the accomplishment of Justice Minister Kim Campbell:Which is precisely why it appealed to those putting together the Liberal Red Book for the pivotal 1993 election. If the object of the policy exercise was to appear to be "tougher" on guns than Kim Campbell, they had to find a policy that would provoke legitimate gun-owners to outrage. Nothing would better convince the Liberals' urban constituency that Jean Chrétien and Allan Rock were taking a tough line on guns than the spectacle of angry old men spouting fury on Parliament Hill.
Powerful stuff. Thanks to instapundit for pointing me to it.
The supreme irony of the gun registry battle is that the policy was selected because it would goad people who knew something about guns to public outrage. That is, it had a purely political purpose in the special context of a hard-fought election. The fact that it was bad policy was crucial to the specific political effect it was supposed to deliver.
And so we saw demonstrations by middle-aged firearm owners, family men whose first reflex was to respect the laws of the land. This group's political alienation is a far greater loss than the $200-million that have been wasted so far. The creation of this new criminal class -- the ultimate triumph of negative political alchemy -- may be the worst, and most enduring product of the gun registry culture war.
Finally! Knopf Pulls Arming America
Publication has been halted on a disputed book about the history of guns in the United States. Questions about Michael Bellesiles' "Arming America" had already led Columbia University to rescind the prestigious Bancroft Prize for history.
Read it here.
Britain, Gun Control, and Michael Moore
In which Michael Moore demonstrates this book titled Stupid White Men describes himself. This column by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in the British newspaper, the Independent, both shows what a shallow person Michael Moore is, what a tragedy is going on in Britain, and how Political Correctness has prevented the British government from facing squarely that gun control isn't a solution to a problem that is primarily cultural:I took my son to see Michael Moore live at the Roundhouse, in north London, before Christmas. The US radical and author of the best-selling book Stupid White Men was (mostly) clever, funny, angry, sharp, iconoclastic and sceptical about the lies and humbug processed by the US government and big business. Sure there were some flunked bits – you expect that, the troughs are part of the adventure, an evening with a well-worn rebel.
What we did not expect was to feel so enraged at one point that we almost walked out. It was when Moore went into a rant about how the passengers on the planes on 11 September were scaredy-cats because they were mostly white. If the passengers had included black men, he claimed, those killers, with their puny bodies and unimpressive small knives, would have been crushed by the dudes, who as we all know take no disrespect from anybody. God save us from such stupid white men, especially now, when in the US and the UK, black people's lives are being ripped to shreds by drugs, lawlessness, fear and frightful violence plus the endless circle of racism, exclusion and incarceration. This is not awesome, Mr Moore; it is a calamity, for descendants of slaves unimaginably more so.
Remember this as we mourn the murders of two young Caribbean women, victims, it is believed, of tough black men who control some streets of Birmingham and London and Manchester and who kill because they feel like it and they can. "Young, Gifted and Dead," Metropolitan Police anti-gun crime posters in 2001. They showed real pictures of young men in pools of blood. Nobody took any notice.
The maiming and killing goes on and on. Blood is freely spilled in clubs, schools, streets, shops, the privacy of a balcony and a small garden. Orchestrated feuds between gangs became more thrilling as guns took over from knives and knuckles. Michael Cabey was shot as he sat on a wall; Wayne Henry and Corey White were felled as they sat in their BMW; Godfrey Scott was shot in the neck and his flatmate Ray Samuels was found skinned and his tongue sliced off; the brother of the soul singer Mica Paris was shot dead in Croydon. In parts of London,14-year-old boys carry weapons and show them off. A black youth worker too frightened to be named tells me: "These kids are vicious. They think bullying and beating each other up is what sissies do. They talk about killing. They are kings when they kill. One even brought me a cat he had shot to show the others they are in command. They love it that everyone is afraid of them, even their own parents."
History News Network Publishes A Piece By Me...
This is about the need for political diversity in the history profession, so that embarrassments like the Bellesiles scandal get caught early.
Finally! Blue Sky Over Boise!
Dark skies at night, and blue sky in the day time. The constant gray was getting a tad depressing.
(Shot with my HP PhotoSmart 812 camera in the lowest resolution mode a couple blocks from my house.)
The Failure of British Gun Control
A great column by Mark Steyn in the Telegraph:You would think if "gun control" was going to work anywhere it would be on a small island. Particularly a small island at whose ports of entry the zealots of HM Customs like nothing better than performing intimate cavity searches on the off-chance you've got an extra bottle of duty-free Beaujolais tucked away up there. Surely, if you also had a Walther PPK parked out of sight, these exhaustive inspectors would be the first to notice.
Go ahead--read it. It's worth doing.
But apparently not. Since the Government's "total ban" five years ago, there are more and more guns being used by more and more criminals in more and more crimes. Now, in the wake of Birmingham's New Year bloodbath, there are calls for the total ban to be made even more total: if the gangs refuse to obey the existing laws, we'll just pass more laws for them not to obey. According to a UN survey from last month, England and Wales now have the highest crime rate of the world's 20 leading nations. One can query the methodology of the survey while still recognising the peculiar genius by which British crime policy has wound up with every indicator going haywire - draconian gun control plus vastly increased gun violence plus stratospheric property crime.
Shocking! Phyllis Schlafy and Instapundit on the Same Side of an Issue!
See Schlafly's column about "copyright extremists," here.
