Month: April 2007

[Reihan] Ross wants you to read The Lords of Breakfast, and I respect that. Many years ago I went by the name “Hash Brown,” fully intending to start a brunch-oriented rap supergroup with members named FlapJaxx and Hardboiled and songs titled “Sippin’ on Maple Sizzurp,” “Only Built for Sausage Linx,” “Tata, Frittata,” and, my personal favorite, “Brown Ops.” It occurs to me that “The Lords of Breakfast” would have been a wonderful name for my non-existent ensemble. Alas, my lyrical skills, as evidenced by this ancient post, were never quite up to snuff.

That said, I have another candidate for comic of the year, namely the slightly smutty (I am a prude) anti-war agitprop graphic novel Shooting War. I can’t imagine I agree with the creators on much of anything (well, maybe some things), but they’ve created a vivid and disturbingly plausible portrait of Iraq’s near future. Then there are the delightful cameos.

[Reihan] Speaking of Jane Kramer, I was a little disappointed by her take on Pope Benedict XVI from a few weeks ago.  Mainly I was disappointed because of this brief aside.

It is well known that Benedict wants to transform the Church of Rome, which is not to say that he wants to make it more responsive to the realities of modern life as it is lived by Catholic women in the West, or by Catholic homosexuals, or even by the millions of desperately poor Catholic families in the Third World who are still waiting for some merciful dispensation on the use of contraception.

I actually think — and I’m no expert on the Catholic Church, so do take my words with a grain of salt — that this is almost the opposite of the truth. Recently, Civitas, a British think tank, released On Fraternity, an extraordinary pamphlet by Danny Kruger, a close advisor to British Conservative leader David Cameron. I really wish I could link to the complete text, but I’m afraid I’ll have to settle for this much-abridged version that appeared in Prospect late last year. Kruger opens his pamphlet with a brief discussion of Benedict XVI, and the kind of conservatism he represents.

John Paul’s main political concern in the 1980s, the time of his vigour, was with the wall which passed through Berlin and divided the free west of Europe from the communist east. His wish was to dismantle the dominating structures of communism, liberating individuals and nations from state oppression. His object was freedom. Twenty years on, Benedict sees a different problem: not a wall, but a desert. His concern is with the arid emptiness in Western culture, an emptiness which extends from private loneliness all the way to environmental desolation. ‘The external deserts are growing’, he said in his first papal pronouncement, ‘because the internal deserts have become so vast. His object is fraternity.

Kruger goes on to offer a brilliant and incisive interpretation of the twin failures of Conservatism and Socialism to reckon with and reverse the “social desertification” of British life, and he offers a tentative way forward. It’s the kind of argument that would drive a lot of American conservatives up the wall, I’m afraid, and it is very, very smart. Anyway, by taking on this social desertification, it seems to me (I like to think of myself as a Humanistic Muslim, though I suspect the mullahs would disapprove) that Benedict is indeed making the Catholic Church "more responsive to the realities of modern life, even if it’s not in quite the ways Kramer would like.

[Reihan] You know what else is striking about Jane Kramer’s insightful article on the French presidential election? Well, there are two things. The first is her conviction that France’s most obvious challenge is economic.

The country has stalled. Its growth is minimal.  Its protectionist policies are disastrously out of touch with global reality, let alone with the realities of the European Union, which it helped to found and enlarge (and then to undermine, in 2005, when it voted against an E.U. constitution).  Its business, beyond the realm of luxury labels and designer clothes that the rich will always pay for, is not competitive.

Now, this is a fairly conventional neoliberal reading of the French predicament, easy to imagine in the pages of The Economist or Forbes. It has the added virtue of being, in my view at least, mostly sound. (As Perry Anderson reminds us in a still-fresh essay from 2004, France actually has gone through a pretty wrenching period of economic reform. That’s not to say there isn’t room for more, but try telling that to hard-pressed workers.) But then, just a few sentences later in that same paragraph, she has this to say about the plight of France’s Muslim underclass.

(Part of the problem is education; the rest is simply French xenophobia and racism.)

There you have it, a sharp assessment in a neat parenthetical. What is it that these quick takes have in common? On the surface, not very much: one is commonly associated with the right (France needs a healthy dose of market economics), the other with the left (education is the solution). But both quick takes reject narratives embraced by the French working class, who voted overwhelmingly against an E.U. constitution that at least seemed to threaten a new wave of neoliberal reform and who’ve turned in ever larger numbers to anti-immigration rejectionist parties of the far right and left.  Right or wrong, I doubt struggling French families who feel besieged by gang violence are likely to buy Kramer’s characterization of France’s cultural dilemma. Sarkozy, the alleged Thatcherite, has made a play for Le Pen’s voters by talking about "national identity." (Keep in mind, of course, that Sarkozy has also been willing to experiment with positive discrimination and other policies designed to advance the interests of the neo-French.) And Royal has embraced the "left-nationalist" Jean-Pierre Chevènement. France is only the latest example of Europe’s left-right spectrum decomposing from below, as the lower-middle (heirs to the Poujadists and the Trotskyists) revolts against the orthodoxies of the upper-middle.  The mostly shallow fusionism of Ségo and Sarko marks a clumsy attempt to reconcile with the new political reality.  European politicians, at least, "Are All Pim Fortuyns Now." I think it’s only a matter of time before a similar political landscape emerges here in the United States. We have the considerable advantage of a large and growing economy, and yet we also have a sky-high rate of incarceration that might soon become for us what tension over assimilation and immigration has been for Europe — and then some.

[Megan]  Radley Balko on Jon Corzine’s car accident:

As you might guess, I’m not going to criticize New Jersey Gov. John Corzine for choosing to not wear a seatbelt. And I find the suggestion from one of his aides that he be issued a citation for not buckling up back when Corzine was fighting for his life mind boggling.  Who thinks like that?

I do wish Corzine the best, and I hope he recovers in full.

But there is a legitimate public safety issue, here.  And it’s this:

he SUV carrying Gov. Jon S. Corzine was traveling about 91 mph moments before it crashed, Superintendent of State Police Col. Rick Fuentes said Tuesday.

The governor was critically injured when the vehicle crashed into a guardrail on the Garden State Parkway just north of Atlantic City last week. He apparently was not wearing his seat belt as he rode in the front passenger’s seat.

The speed limit along that stretch of the parkway is 65 mph.

The state trooper-driven sport utility vehicle was in the left lane with its emergency lights flashing when a pickup tried to get out of its way. Instead, it set off a chain reaction that resulted in the crash.Corzine was late for a meeting (between–guess who!?!–Don Imus and the Rugters women’s basketball team). So his driver rushed him through traffic. At ridiculously high speeds. And caused a serious accident.

When you live in the D.C. area, this kind of thing happens all the time (not the accident, the VIPs taking over the road), and just from personal observation, I’d say it’s happening more frequently. There seems to be an increasing feeling among many politicians that their meetings, their business, and their appointments are somehow more important than everyone else’s. Therefore, they can fly down highways, ignore red lights, and purge everyone else to the side of the roadway. If they can get their own police escort or caravan, even better.

I get caught in a caravan in D.C. about once every two weeks. When it’s the president or vice president, it’s merely annoying. They shut down all the streets on the route a good 3-4 minutes before the caravan arrives. And I’ll concede that there are probably good security reasons for the president and vice president to travel like this, though they do tend to abuse it (Bush has shut down cities in the past during rush hour in order to attend political fundraisers). 

When it’s not Bush or Cheney, it can be downright scary. You glance in your review mirror to see a limo or three or four barreling up at you, flashing their lights. When you’re already in freeway traffic moving at freeway speeds, everyone scrambling to get out of the way, it’s not difficult to see how this can be pretty dangerous.

Increasingly, lesser-ranking public officials seem to think they shouldn’t have to obey traffic laws, either. Why was Gov. Corzine’s meeting that day more important than the meetings of everyone else on the road? Why was it so important that he had to endanger everyone else on the road?  Because he’s an elected official?  Posh.

He’s absolutely right.  Still, you really should wear your seatbelt:

Did you ever notice how often the words “unrestrained passenger” turn up in Trauma: Life in the ER just before something Really Messy rolls in the door? In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That’s the second collision. That body’s internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments—and that’s where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when the bowling ball you left on the rear deck hits you in the back of the head, because that continued at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.

There are two major routes that unrestrained persons take in a front-end MVA (Motor Vehicle Accident). Up-and-over or down-and-under (AKA “submarining”). With up-and-over, the upper body launches forward and up. The head strikes the windshield. (This produces the classic “windshield star”) Your injuries here include concussion, scalp laceration, and various brain bleeds. You can suspect fractured cervical vertebrae (and if you have a fracture with compromise to the spinal cord at C-4 or higher, you’ve lost the nerves that control chest expansion and the diaphragm. “C-4, breathe no more,” as the saying goes).

Go a little farther through the windshield, and it isn’t unexpected to leave some or all of your face behind stuck in the broken glass. You’d be surprised by how easily faces come off the facial bones. You can also expect fractured wrists, arms, and shoulders, from folks trying to brace themselves. A little farther through the windshield, all the way out of the vehicle (a situation we call “pre-extracted for your convenience”), and in addition to whatever damage you took on the way through, you get the damage from hitting the ground, trees, and metal poles at however-many-miles-an-hour.

Sure, you hear people talking about wanting to be “thrown clear” in the event of an accident. If you want to simulate being “thrown clear,” go to the fifth floor of a building and jump out the window. Let’s talk briefly about being thrown clear, because it happens more often than you’d think. Unrestrained driver: side impact. Vehicle spins. Driver goes out the window. In one case I recall, the driver was half-way out his window when the vehicle rolled over on top of him. That was the second-most grotesque scene I’ve ever been to. Another scene, the driver went out the window when it spun. The vehicle went into a snow bank and was drivable from the scene. The driver went into a river and drowned. Any time you go to an accident and the windows aren’t rolled all the way up and unbroken, look 200 feet in all directions for the other patients. It’s pure heck finding them three days later when someone wonders why all those birds are over there, or when someone at the hospital wakes up enough to ask “Where’s Joey?”

Okay, let’s look at down-and-under. In this one the patient goes forward and down, under the dashboard. Here’s where you’re going to find fractured femurs, broken knees, and compression fractures to the lower spine. If you’re asking “Is it possible for a human femur to be pushed through the floor of the pelvis?” the answer is “Yes.” If you ask me how I know that, the answer is: “Seen it done.” Unrestrained driver, 40 MPH impact. As the legs collapse accordion-style, the patient’s chest hits the dashboard. This can give you rib fractures, a fractured sternum, cardiac bruising, or that ruptured aorta that we all love so well. The nice thing about going submarining is that there usually isn’t any brain damage (unless you got clonked on the knob by that bowling ball, and seatbelts won’t help with that). On the other hand, femur fractures can be, and frequently are, fatal.

I think I’ll leave Traumatic Asphyxia, Hemo/Pneumothorax, and Flail Chest for the Trauma and You post that I’m going to do one of these days. Let’s just say that they’re associated with having your chest hit the dashboard or steering wheel, and they Really Suck (and not in a good way).

                   

[Megan] Ezra Klein had a very good comment on the rush to push policy prescriptions:

The desire to segue instantly into an argument over gun control reflects, I think, the human ache to establish control — however illusory — over a tragic and senseless event. In the same way we’re vaguely comforted by knowing that a horrific car accident was the result of an unbuckled seat belt and a lung cancer came from a lifetime of chain smoking, we want to be able to say that if we only change this law, tweak that policy, we can prevent this awful killing from ever being repeated. Sadly, I’m largely with Atrios on this: " if people want to kill people and don’t care if they get killed or caught they’re going to kill people." Thankfully, most humans are decent and very few are murderous, and so despite the countless firearms and cars and gasoline cans laying around this nation, mass killings remain blissfully rare.

[Megan] Virginia’s governor calls for a cease fire in the gun control wars:

Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine said he wasn’t interested in arguments about gun control.

"People who want to take this within 24 hours of the event and make it their political hobby horse to ride, I’ve got nothing but loathing for them," Kaine said at a Tuesday evening news conference.

"To those who want to try to make this into some little crusade, I say: Take that elsewhere. Let this community deal with grieving individuals and be sensitive to those needs."

[Megan]  Greg Mankiw suggests that perhaps we should tax height:

Should the income tax system include a tax credit for short taxpayers and a tax surcharge for tall ones? This paper shows that the standard utilitarian framework for tax policy analysis answers this question in the affirmative. This result has two possible interpretations. One interpretation is that individual attributes correlated with wages, such as height, should be considered more widely for determining tax liabilities.

 

Alternatively, if policies such as a tax on height are rejected, then the standard utilitarian framework must in some way fail to capture our intuitive notions of distributive justice.

Obviously, we need to reconsider the standard utilitarian framework.

[Megan] Shockingly, the television is chock full of politicians and advocates of various stripes claiming that the disaster at Virginia Tech is a vindication of . . . whatever they already believed.  If only we had had [more gun control/less gun control/better mental health treatments/tougher law enforcement/colleges that acted more like parents/tighter immigration rules/whatever] then this never would have happened.

Personally, I think that the only thing this really illustrates is that we need some stiff legal enforcement against people who think that large numbers of bodies were delivered by the Almighty for the express purpose of providing publicity for their pet cause.  And I’ll say so, publicly, if only CNN will ask me . . .

At any rate, I guess it’s time to revisit the gun control issue, though with the express caveat that I have no idea what modifications to our existing gun laws, if any, in either direction, would actually have prevented this tragedy (rather, than, say, encouraging him to use a rifle).

Does gun control result in more or less crime?  I wrote a long post on this, years ago, in which I attempted to provide a theoretical framework for evaluating whether gun laws resulted in more, or less, violence.   Caveat:  my empirical assessment depended on the work of John Lott, whose reputation has been pretty thoroughly tarnished by some questionable data, plus an unfortunate habit of sock-puppetry. But the theoretical point is still valid:  the obvious intuition that if we could just get rid of guns, we’d have less violence, is far too simplistic. 

Gun control arguments make a logical progression from a false premise. They start with an imaginary world in which there are no guns. Yes, in that world, there would probably be fewer homicides. (There would probably not be fewer suicides — the data’s awfully bad)  It’s hard to kill someone with a knife or some such.

So gun control advocates imagine a straight line trend: more guns, more crime. If we imagine it as a graph, it would be a straight, upward sloping line.

This is based on a logical fallacy, which is that the population of those who would own guns if they were rare is a representative sample of the population who would own guns if they were plentiful. In other words, that if there are 1 million gun owners in the US, this group will be composed of the same percentages of different types of people as if there were 100 million gun owners. So that if there is a percentage of gun crime in the larger group, say one per thousand, the same percentage of crime will be found in the smaller group. Gun control thus cuts the number of crimes by whatever factor it by which it cuts the number of guns. This produces that straight line we graphed. However, this is demonstrably untrue.

There are three ways, in America, that we can imagine that guns would become rare: first, that they became very expensive for some reason; second, that they became illegal; and third, that they became extremely stigmatised.

In that case, assuming that the number of guns in the country will still be non-zero (and if you think it wouldn’t, go take a look at Great Britain, with its near-total ban and relatively non-porous borders), who will own guns if they are expensive, illegal, or stigmatized? The answer in all three cases is the same: criminals. Criminals have a very high value for guns, because of their extreme usefulness in committing crimes. They have a demonstrated willingness to break the law. And they are (clearly) relatively immune to the kind of middle-class social stigma that would make guns unpopular.

Thus, there would be a very high initial rate of crime. However, as price, illegality, or stigma decreased, the population would change. Mixed in with the criminals would be non-criminals. So we would actually expect to see a curve that looks more like this:

But that’s not the entire story either, because guns have both a crime-increasing and crime-decreasing effect. The possibility that their victims might be armed demonstrably has some effect on the propensity of criminals to commit violent crime (those who argue it doesn’t are simply being stupid. If you were a criminal, would you respond to the probability that your victims might be armed? Of course you would. Criminals may not be the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, but they aren’t immune to threat. For example, they avoid the police. The extent of the deterrance is a different question. But there is a deterrant effect.).  This countervailing effect would put downward pressure on the curve. 

Imagine the scenario. The criminals arm themselves early in the process, resulting in a crime spree. But as guns become more widely owned, the number of law-abiding citizens who have guns is increasing, while the number of criminals who have them is remaining fairly stable. As the curve moves to the right (increasing numbers of guns in the population), there is downward effect on the curve from the law-abiding citizens, whose guns criminals fear, while the upward effect is flat. So the curve starts moving downwards again. In other words, the curve will peak near the point where the majority of criminals who want guns have them, and the majority of law-abiding citizens do not.  It will therefore look more like this:

So the question of whether gun control will decrease gun deaths relies on where we are in the curve: to the left of the peak, or to the right of it? If we’re to the left, making guns harder to get will decrease homicides and other violent crime. If we’re to the right, we’ll largely take guns out of the hands of the law-abiding, and gun deaths will go up.

But why believe me, since I’m just some classical liberal wack-job?  Don’t take my word for it; listen to impeccably liberal, pro-government intervention public policy professor Mark Kleiman:

Nothing we discover about Lott can take away the fact that years of experience with liberalized concealed carry have provided little or no evidence of increased firearms-using crime as a result.  The Violence Policy Center’s report License to Kill, which details every single recorded crime committed by anyone who obtained a concealed-carry permit in Texas from 1996 to 2001 in an attempt to show that the policy had bad results, in fact demonstrates the contrary. (Someone ought to tell the VPC that it’s not necessary to have a concealed weapon, or even a permit for a concealed weapon, in order to drive drunk, so that the finding that some permit holders were arrested for DUI tells you precisely nothing about the merits of the policy.)

That finding seems to me to be a very strong argument for "shall-issue" laws: they give some people a right they value, at very little apparent cost to anyone else. Not everyone will be convinced by that argument; for example, it’s at least conceivable that concealed-carry laws increase the level of fear without increasing the actual rate of armed assault. If I were writing a law about concealed carry, I’d like to tighten up a little on who gets to have a gun, and I’d like a law against possessing a loaded firearm (concealed or not) while under the influence of alcohol or other intoxicants. Still, the case seems like a strong one even without the Lott claim to back it up.

And again here:

Lots of my liberal friends are like me:  they may not disapprove of target-shooting, but they really don’t get hunting on an emotional level (I suspect that much hunting is actually a "guy" form of nature-meditation). They (we) think having guns for self-protection is sort of weird and primitive, and regard the "armed citizenry against tyranny" stuff as utterly nuts. Having guns around makes them (us) very uncomfortable. (I’ve asked gun-carrying houseguests to leave their guns in their cars.)

OK, fine. I don’t like having guns around me, and try to arrange my own environment accordingly. The problem is that lots of liberals are willing to write that prejudice into law, using largely spurious claims about crime control as a justification.

Keeping guns out of the hands of criminals — meaning those who have been convicted of crime — is demonstrably valuable in reducing crime. There is no adequate evidence that keeping guns out of the hands — or the shoulder holsters — of non-criminals has any such benefit. And yes, that includes the famous "assault weapons."

Requiring everyone who wants to have a gun to apply for a discretionary permit, making that person subject to the whim of local legislatures or officials about whether he may have a gun, serves no good purpose that I can see. The same is true of making a national registry of firearms and their owners. Those are just nasty versions of identity politics, making gun-owners jump through hoops just to show how little regard we have for the weapons culture.

The NRA slogan that we need, not more gun laws, but enforcement of the laws we have is substantially correct. We don’t need individual permits for gun ownership. We can, without increasing crime noticeably, allow any individual not disqualified by prior criminal record to obtain a permit to carry concealed weapons. (Forget the silly "More guns, less crime" stuff; as long as "More guns, no more crime" is true, which it is, then there’s no substantial basis for trying to reduce the number of guns in law-abiding hands.)

A reader writes:

I just read your post comparing the tragedy at VT and the daily terror in the lives of ordinary Iraqis. This kind of observation seems to summarize a lot of my anxiety over the future of our involvement in Iraq.  Along with many Americans I wish that we could extracate ourselves from Iraq and get our men out of the way of an inevitable civil war. At the same time I hear the words of men like John McCain and am forced to remember that the cost of leaving Iraq would be an increase in the chaos within Iraq. I also know that our absence from Iraq wouldn’t remove our responsibility for the violence that we helped seed in 2003.

What if a Shia vs. Sunni civil war were to progress unchecked in our absence were to progress into genocide? One of America’s great sins is its blind eye to the kind of terror that is occuring in Darfur today. Thoughts like these often lead me to think that the only morally right move in Iraq is to commit ourselves totally to the future peace of that nation. I want so much to wash my hands of Bush’s war, but in a democracy all the people must take responsibility for the actions of our government. It is our responsibility to restore the peace that we stole from the children of Iraq, even if it costs us even more than it already has.

(Photo: An Iraqi girl gets embarrassed after offering flowers to a US female soldier from Alpha Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment during a joint house-by-house search operation between Iraqi and US forces, in the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, 16 April 2007. Insurgent gunmen attacked an Iraqi army checkpoint and killed 13 soldiers on a road in northern Iraq, in an area where Iraqi security forces often clash with Sunni insurgents linked to the Al-Qaeda network. By Mauricio Lima/AFP/Getty.)

[Ross] It’s the press’s fault. (But then, what isn’t?)