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In Spike Jonze’s new movie Her (trailer above), a man develops a romantic relationship with “Samantha,” a computer operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Liat Clark wonders if this premise isn’t such a stretch, asking, “In an age where we love to anthropomorphise our products — with the odd few even falling in love with dolls or marrying virtual girlfriends — is it really that unlikely someone might form a bond with a disembodied companion that sounds like a 40s pinup and can hold a conversation?”

“To be honest, I wouldn’t be surprised,” Mike Burns, CEO of Fuel Entertainment, the company behind the virtual world for 8-to-12-year-old girls SparkCityWorld.com, told Wired.co.uk. In October his service launched a virtual boyfriends feature where users experience the “developing of a relationship” — in the weeks that followed, engagement time doubled. “The fewer barriers between us and our computers, or the more we can employ instinctual communication techniques and emotions while creating, playing, consuming and interacting, the more difficult it will be to define the line between human and machine. Slipping into something like an Oculus Rift after a long day is going to look mighty enticing for many people.”

The adult world is already oversaturated with such offerings.

Invisible Girlfriend launched in November, promising to help you catfish yourself — the $49.99 Almost Engaged plan delivers custom characterisation and live phone calls. The romance factor isn’t exactly high, but it takes the hassle out of actually having to meet a girl while you retain the envy and respect of your peers (at least, we’re guessing that’s the pitch to the young and lonely). Meanwhile Nintendo DS game LovePlus continues to delight and amuse, with one 27-year-old marrying his virtual girlfriend Nene Anegasaki months after the game’s 2009 launch.

Meanwhile, Callie Beusman considers a recent report on the future of sex and relationships, concluding that “robot sex” is “on the horizon, guys!”

Several sex machines exist already — one example touted by leading robot sexuality lecturer Laura G. Duncan in an interview with Thought Catalog has been eloquently dubbed “Fuckzilla.” “Fuckzilla is basically designed like Johnny Five, she explained. “It has appendages, and one arm is a penetrating dildo. The other is a chainsaw that’s had the chain removed, and it’s been replaced with these silicon molded tongues that make a circular motion.” In a more traditionally romantic take on the matter, David Levy, the author of Love and Sex With Robots, speculates that people will be marrying machines by 2050.

A less drastic (i.e., more likely to be used by humans soon) representation of this same concept is teledildonics, or sex toys that can be controlled by a computer. “Sexual devices that you can remotely control already exist, but they’ll catch on more,” Young told me. “Within the next 2-3 years, stores offering devices of that sort will open up.” Frankly, I’m surprised that the proliferation of teledildonic apps hasn’t started already. It’s something that could easily sync up to any extant model of any sex toy, and it could very easily be monetized for long-distance relationships — or, eventually, long-distance casual encounters.

Tim Kreider explains why science fiction tends be our most politically engaged genre of literature:

Science fiction is an inherently political genre, in that any future or alternate history it imagines is a wish about How Things Should Be (even if it’s reflected darkly in a warning about how they might turn out). And How Things Should Be is the central question and struggle of politics. It is also, I’d argue, an inherently liberal genre (its many conservative practitioners notwithstanding), in that it sees the status quo as contingent, a historical accident, whereas conservatism holds it to be inevitable, natural, and therefore just. The meta-premise of all science fiction is that nothing can be taken for granted. That it’s still anybody’s ballgame.

The contemporary example Kreider holds aloft to make his point? Kim Stanley Robinson, especially his trilogy of “Mars” novels – Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars.  Kreider writes that “what’s most powerful about the Mars books as political novels is that they envision a credible utopia”:

The first wave of his Martian settlers are all scientists, who are no more perfect than any other human beings but have been rigorously trained in a kind of intellectual integrity. Robinson argues that, now that climate change has become a matter of life and death for the species, it’s time for scientists to abandon their scrupulous neutrality and enter into the messy arena of politics. Essentially, Robinson attempts to apply scientific thinking to politics, approaching it less like pure physics, in which one infallible equation-ideology explains and answers everything, than like engineering—a process of what F.D.R. once called “bold, persistent experimentation,” finding out what works and combining successful elements to synthesize something new. He scavenges ideas from the American Constitution, the Swiss confederacy, “the guild socialism of Great Britain, Yugoslavian worker management, Mondragon ownership, Kerala land tenure, and so on” to construct his utopias. … In his Mars novels, Robinson uses the Red Planet as a historical tabula rasa, a template for creating a saner, more sustainable, and more just human society.

Last weekend, the Dish featured three poems by Emily Dickinson – here, here, and here – alongside images of the “scraps” of envelopes or wrappers they were originally composed on. Hillary Kelly perceives an autobiographical dimension in the scraps, recently reproduced in the collection The Gorgeous Nothings:

The madcap pencil strokes, torn edges, and higgledy-piggledy line breaks are the work of a quick-thinking, passionate woman. But the carefully crossed through and reworked prose are the mark of a poet bent on perfection. The harmony between the content and use of space, most of all, reveals Dickinson’s self-awareness and inherent knack for poetic construction. One small triangle of paper reads, with the words forming an upside down pyramid, “In this short life/ that only lasts an hour/ merely/ How much — how/ little — is/ within our/ power.” That self-important word, “power,” is smirkingly wedged between a smudge and a tear. On another little rectangle, Dickinson merely wrote, “A Mir/ acle for/ all.” And on an envelope whose face bears a carefully calligraphed “Miss Emily Dickinson” and whose rear is covered with a more elaborate poem, Dickinson has gently pencilled, “To light, and/ then return —”

In a 1955 TNR essay, Jay Leyda defended Dickinson against rigid and confining interpretations of her life as “the poet no one knew”:

Richard Chase built a valuable critical examination of her work on a wobbly base of uncritical acceptance of biographical error. Thornton Wilder went further, allowing a fancied, arch, doll-like figure of the poet to show to him only arch and doll-like qualities in her poetry, and pushing most of her writing aside in the process.

The Dickinson critics who promoted flexibility in our attitudes to her have always been in the minority. It took the perception of Allen Tate to attack the legend: “All pity for Miss Dickinson’s “starved life’ is misdirected. Her life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.”

Conrad Aiken was right to call her choice “deliberate and conscious” (but wrong to believe that she chose to become “a hermit”). In Amherst itself, where the temptation was greatest to create a peculiar figure named Emily, George Whicher’s was a lonely voice of objectivity; the insights of his biography. This Was a Poet, will survive factual correction. In a following generation, Henry Wells studied Emily Dickinson’s poetry without noise and with an ear for wit and sharpness, qualities often obscured by the legend; and F. O. Matthiessen examined “the private poet” and her work with a healthy skepticism.

Stefansson has a wonderful term for our reluctance to revise set patterns: “the standardization of error.” We’ve so standardized our ways of thinking about Emily Dickinson that we tend to resent anything that disturbs the neat, cold shape handed us—our fable convenue, our fraudulent monument.

In a recent interview, the poet CAConrad discusses falling in love with Dickinson’s verse as a child, and how “a few years later, she came up in class for the first time and I was disappointed immediately with the teacher’s conversation around her”:

The teacher made Emily Dickinson into this frail, scared, wilting lily. But the true story really is: centuries of poetry came up to her doorstep and she didn’t like any of it. She said, I have to make something new. That’s courageous. You don’t do that if you’re some frail, frightened being. I think she was a real badass, actually. I think that we’re in love with that story because she didn’t participate in the world the right way. But how could she? She was a woman in Amherst at a time when women didn’t have a voice. Period. … Emily Dickinson has zero counterparts in my opinion. She’s completely on her own. She changed everything for us. And the thing is I found out the older I got that story that we were made to accept about Emily Dickinson—living this particular way that made her look kind of spooky in her house in Amherst. It was a prevalent story but I also think it was wrong.

Imraan Coovadia reads into the late leader’s appreciation for Tolstoy:

Mandela was not an intellectual reader, reading for the sake of reading, but he found books useful. He found novels useful. As President he would stop his driver so that he could buy some novel at the bookshop. “One book that I returned to many times was Tolstoy’s great work, War and Peace,” he wrote. “I was particularly taken with the portrait of General Kutuzov, whom everyone at the Russian court underestimated.” For Mandela, Kutuzov “made his decisions on a visceral understanding of his men and his people.” He was prepared to sacrifice the city of Moscow when it became necessary. Mandela even compared Kutuzov with King Shaka, who was also uninterested in making a stand to defend mere buildings. The real-life Mikhail Illarionivich Golenischchev-Kutuzov (1745–1813), field marshal of the Russian empire, was of no importance to Mandela, but Tolstoy’s character was. …

Key for Mandela was the strategy of retirement and passivity that Tolstoy’s Kutuzov applied so thoroughly as to surrender to the overwhelming force of collective and unplanned life. He saw that “circumstances are sometimes stronger than we are,” resembling Lincoln, who accepted that “events have controlled me.” His principal weapons were not military. “‘Patience and time, these are my mighty warriors!’ thought Kutuzov,” who “used all his powers to keep the Russian army from useless battles.” He accomplishes the destruction of the French invasion force, or rather allows it to be accomplished by objective historical forces, because he understands and incarnates the truth: “The source of this extraordinary power of penetration into the meaning of events taking place lay in that national feeling, which he bore within himself in all its purity and force.” When Napoleon’s Grande Armée was defeated, his fate is summary. “For this Russian man, as a Russian, there was nothing more to do. For the representative of the national war there was nothing left but death. And so he died.” Nobody could be so summary about Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela, 1918 to 2013, who bore within himself “national feeling . . . in all its purity and force.”

Despite the ominous hijacking of a truck filled with radioactive material earlier this month, The Economist reports that the chances of someone detonating a “dirty bomb” are slim and getting slimmer:

By many accounts, the most plausible dangers appear to be declining. For a start, an “overwhelming” number of buyers turn out to be undercover cops, says Mark Hibbs of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a think-tank. A sizeable network of informers helps Georgia’s interior ministry to keep a close eye on the four or five cells in the country currently trying to obtain or sell radiological material, says Mr Pavlenishvili. When one of them is lining up a potential deal, it is almost always because his or a foreign unit is preparing a sting operation, he adds. Mr Pavlenishvili’s unit has not got wind of a single profitable sale – Georgia’s underworld makes its money on other crimes such as drug-running.

Considering the growing risk and persistent lack of money to be made, it is amazing that smugglers continue to give it a shot, says Lyudmila Zaitseva, an academic working on a University of Salzburg database on nuclear and radiological trafficking.

Many traffickers no doubt reckon that terror groups will pay dearly for dirty-bomb ingredients. After all, counterterrorism officials citing seized al-Qaeda documents have said as much. Yet although a terrorist-made dirty bomb of mass destruction cannot be excluded, it remains unlikely. For one thing, rooting around to obtain dangerously radioactive material is a great way to attract the attention of the authorities. A bust could doom a painstakingly assembled terror cell.

In any case, most of the stuff being peddled is fraudulent rather than dangerous, says Adrian Baciu, head of the Romanian police’s nuclear and radiological unit until 2004 (he later worked for four years in Interpol’s counter-terrorism directorate). To hype their products, sellers typically describe it as material used in a nuclear bomb, a reactor, the Space Shuttle or the like. “Excuse my language … just bullshit,” says Mr Baciu. In one sting, he arrested four men trying to sell, for several hundred thousand dollars, material from a calibration kit for radiation-detection equipment. It could be safely handled with cotton gloves. Another cell tried to pass off as dangerously radioactive a piece of ordinary iron. Trafficking in Romania, he says, has tapered to almost nothing.

Rose Eveleth flags a treasure trove for American history buffs, a curious website by “Doctor Zebra” that allows visitors to “peruse the weird medical history of every single U.S. President”:

President are people, and they struggled with the same illnesses and bad habits as the rest of us. And this one website chronicles them all—the weird bodily ailments of every United States President. The site might not be the prettiest, but it’s got all the information there. From John Adams’s baldness to Herbert Hoover’s problem with performing his handshaking duties. Seriously:

The annual White House reception, in which Hoover had to shake hands with thousands of visitors, was a problem. His hand was at times so swollen that he could not write for days. Once he received a bad cut from a diamond ring that was turned inward; the reception was abruptly halted.

The list also has serious ailments like throat cancer, scarlet fever and sudden death. You can also sort by organ system, and see just which presidents had trouble with eyes, ears, hair and heart. Surprisingly, while 16 presidents are listed as having problems with alcohol (John Quincy Adams, Martin van Buren, William Harrison, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes, Chester Arthur, Grover Cleveland, William Taft, Franklin Roosevelt, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush), only two are listed as having liver problems (Zachary Taylor and John Kennedy).

Explore more of the site here.

Jack Hamilton gives a rave review of the new Coen brothers movie:

Inside Llewyn Davis is easily the best film ever made about the folk revival, and it’s also one of the very best films ever made about music, period. For a movie about authenticity obsessions that recreates its place and period with exacting detail, its soundtrack isn’t much for slavish verisimilitude: [lead actor] Oscar Isaac’s singing voice is far more indebted to Jeff Buckley (still a twinkle in his folksinging father’s eye in 1961) than [folk legend Dave] Van Ronk or even Bob Dylan. These anachronisms strangely work, making the music feel newly vital while honoring the spirit and conviction of the period. And the film’s performance sequences are luxurious and fully real: they’re not cut short by impatient edits, hitched to montages, or bludgeoned into bold-faced Turning Points.

Tomas Hachard appreciates that the film shows that “some people faced private tragedy and inner turmoil even in the open-minded, happy-go-lucky 1960s, and many came out just as lost as when they entered”:

Inside Llewyn Davis’s main character is not destined to lead an artistic movement, even if he has the views for it: Though he’s secure in his convictions, Llewyn is insecure in life. He wanders from couch to couch in New York like a man in permanent limbo. The characters around him can seem archetypal and cartoonish at first, until you realize that we’re seeing them through Llewyn’s eyes, filtered by his preoccupations and rigid determinations of how the world should work. For example, when Jean (Carey Mulligan), his friend, fellow musician, and sometime lover, shares that she might one day like to settle down in the suburbs with kids and that playing music may just be a way to get there, Llewyn tells her, “It’s a little careerist, it’s a little square, and it’s a little sad.”

Eileen Jones finds that the movie’s “themes of hardship, joblessness, pinched resources, scarce opportunities, and swiftly lowering expectations” still resonate today:

Though the film is set in 1961, it’s not a 1961 we’ve ever seen posited in any other period film that readily comes to mind. Here is no vision of the “Camelot” presidency of JFK, of martini-drinking advertising executives in sleek suits, or even of the comparatively flourishing folk music scene in its Bob Dylan heyday. Here is an alternate vision of America in its great era of prosperity. The Coens have made a movie about failure in an era when, the standard pop-histories tell us, nobody really failed. They continue to look at the struggle of those on the margins, at failure among bungling strivers with grandiose dreams. The directors somehow maintain their faith that we’ll actually be interested enough in our own lived experience to appreciate their black comic vision of it.

In spite of its main character’s hardships, J. Hoberman calls the movie “certainly [the Coen brothers’] warmest film in the 16 years since The Big Lebowski“:

Crashing on couches, mooching meals, and obtusely refusing to “sell out,” poor Llewyn is one more hapless Coen protagonist. The folk singer is alternately sullen and pugnacious; having just put out an album titled Inside Llewyn Davis that no one seems interested in buying, he doggedly pursues an apparently hopeless career in a dead-end scene, amply stocked with colorful grotesques. … The Coens have characterized Inside Llewyn Davis as an exercise in futility, “an odyssey in which the main character doesn’t go anywhere.” The movie is in fact a prolonged flashback to the protagonist’s moment of triumph and the ignominious defeat that inevitably follows.

S.T. VanAirsdale reports from Stockton, California, where the first mass school shooting of the cable-news era took place a quarter century ago:

Much else has faded about the Cleveland [Elementary School] shooting since it seized the American imagination – since Time grimly proclaimed “ARMED AMERICA” in a cover story three weeks after the massacre and, later in 1989, Esquire painstakingly deconstructed the last days of Patrick Purdy. No less a pop cultural eminence than Michael Jackson invited himself to Stockton on Feb. 7 of that year, where his attempts to cheer up the Cleveland community only meant more emergency vehicles, more police, more helicopters and more campus bedlam that just recalled the panic that Jackson had sought to assuage in the first place.

A reader reflects on last year’s massacre in Connecticut:

Saturday marks one year since 20 first-graders – 20 six- and seven-year-old kids – were slaughtered in their school with six of their teachers and protectors, as well as the mass-murderer’s own mother. Since then, the United States has responded decisively and deafeningly: we’ve done approximately nothing. We’ve heard a stupid comment or two from Congress suggesting we arm our teachers. And The New York Times just published a startling infographic documenting the 109 pieces of state-level gun legislation passed in 2013 -two thirds of it loosening restrictions, not tightening them, and a few in outright defiance of federal law. It seems no serious gun-safety legislation is weak or toothless enough to survive our more extremist impulses.

I’m not sure what we should do about guns. But I’m pretty sure we need serious therapy.

If we as a nation could spend a session on the couch, our analyst might conclude that on some level, we must enjoy this repeated horror. We’re a society that tolerates and even kind of expects the occasional massacre – even when it means the slaughter of six-year-old children. Because we keep letting it happen, and we refuse to make any changes to prevent it from happening again.

A few weeks ago, a friend down the street took me trap shooting – a little like skeet for beginners, maybe: you say “pull” and, if you do it right, you blast the shit out of a soaring clay disk with a shotgun that, because I was holding it wrong, turned my bicep all kinds of bizarre colors for the following two weeks. It was a hell of a lot of fun, even a little zen, in a funny way. It’s not hard for me to see the appeal. But it’s very hard for me to see how better licensing could threaten our Constitution. The only friend I’ve ever talked about guns with in a more personal sense keeps his father’s firearms locked in a cabinet, with the bullets in another locked cabinet on another floor of his house. “But what if you really did need it?” I wondered, and he admitted to me: “Trying to square that circle is something I’m still trying to figure out.”

I have to wonder what our reaction over the past year might have been if the murderer could have been tarnished by a more convenient ethnicity or faith, by something “other.” Just imagine the government and talking-head response if he’d been Muslim. Or suppose the Boston Marathon bombers in April, with their difficult Chechen names, had used firearms on Boylston Street instead of pressure cookers. I don’t think there’s much serious doubt that our representatives and talk-show hosts would have gone completely apeshit. (Actually, I know exactly what the reaction would have been: “Get the Muslims.”) But this was one white kid – one creepy, psychotic white kid – and so this mass-murder of teachers and tiny children was just a terrible aberration, a “tragedy,” and a mental-health issue, not a gun-safety issue. (And when I say “gun safety,” obviously I’m talking mostly about guns that can only be used to kill people.) And we’ve permitted ourselves, again, to put this “tragedy” behind us.

And who decided on that passive word, anyway? Calling this a “tragedy” is an insane perversion of language. English has any number of honest, accurate words to describe what actually happened. “Massacre.” “Slaughter.” “Mass murder of children.” But “tragedy” suggests that what happened was unavoidable. It lets us off the hook. It sets the stage for the next “tragedy.”

Grief and mourning and rage all feel right. So do nausea and sickening familiarity. I also feel chest-tightening parallels to September 11, 2001. Witnessing that massacre from uncomfortably close range has made it impossible for me ever to refer to that day as “9/11”: a term far too neat, too abstract and political, too simplistic and reductive to encapsulate its colossal horror. “9/11” is a term that has allowed our collective memory of that mass-murder to be symbolically debased and abused, easily and endlessly. Same with “Katrina.” When we talk about the many degrees of social, environmental and political failure we witnessed in response to the flooding of New Orleans, we don’t always seem to remember that we’re not talking about a symbol but about an actual cataclysm that erased the most marginalized neighborhoods of an already neglected metropolis—and one that real people actually experienced and lived through, or didn’t. “Katrina” lets us shrug and forget that we’re supposed to have a heart. We’re supposed to be better than this.

So as I’m trying to keep its victims and its survivors in my thoughts, I’m also trying to keep in mind that “Newtown” can never encapsulate an absolutely unthinkable massacre of very young children and teachers that happened to real people in a real place. For the families, the neighbors, the first responders, “Newtown” is not that day in hell, and “Newtown” is not the anniversary. “Newtown” is not gun debate. “Newtown” is not future mass murder. “Newtown” is not the heartless cowardice of our elected officials. Newtown is a real place in terrible anguish. I’m still not sure what we should do about guns, but I’m still angry, and today I’m trying to keep my mind on the pain of real people who might never escape it.

(Hat tip: Slate)

A reader writes:

I saw your post on Bernstein, and Gottlieb’s remarks, which could not have been more incongruent with the video. I have a doctorate in orchestral conducting from the #1 ranked conducting program in the nation, so I’m not a layman on this topic. Watch the video again. And notice the camaraderie. The respect. The ease with which he rehearses them. This kind of rapport doesn’t exist anymore, except at off-the-radar orchestras in mid-level locales and certain lucky academic institutions. The top-level orchestras have become sanitized from this kind of warm, collegial, sometimes jocular style of rehearsing, partially because of the extreme reaction to the angry dictator-conductor (think crazy hair, and the yelling white European male). But also because now, the skill level of professional orchestral musicians is so ridiculously high. You’d have to look to Navy SEALs or brain surgeons to find the same level of expertise nowadays. That’s not hyperbole.

Yes, Bernstein was a narcissist, in his own right. But don’t throw out the baby with the bath water. Seriously. The cure for our sustained disinterest in anything requiring more than seconds of our time is the depth and richness of classical music, literature, film, and dance. Just spend two minutes watching this upending performance of Bernstein conducting Vienna in Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2, which will never be rivaled.

Another:

I was lucky to do copying and editing work for Bernstein late in his life and spent a good deal of time at his apartment at the Dakota as well as his house in Fairfield.

I have stories, but would prefer not to air dirty laundry. Yes, not surprisingly, he was sometimes childish, inappropriate, and self-centered. But he was also kind and learned, and loved teaching. Unlike some other men who liked to claim how he hit on them, he always treated my like my nice Jewish grandfather. Perhaps he knew I wasn’t interested. Perhaps he wasn’t interested. But I’d also like to point out that as a conductor, specifically when he was doing his later Mahler cycle, he was fucking brilliant. The moments when handlers disappeared and we talked, or simply watching him in rehearsal with the NY Phil are some of my most treasured memories. Getting a bit choked up while telling me which works he wrote at his studio desk in Fairfield is hard to beat at a moment, especially when those works include Chichester Psalms.

For all of his compositional unevenness he was incredibly skilled and sometimes devastatingly hit the mark in his work. That he never received the Pulitzer I believe irked him to no end and probably was due to a combination of his fame and their jealousy, his ability to suck all of the air out of a room, and – worst of all – being looked down upon by the establishment because he also wrote musical theater. He lived through a “Cold War” in composition, the ascendancy of the modernist and serialist composers and a near-total separation between pop and classical music. It was not easy being Bernstein then. He was always told he did too much and wasted his talents, as opposed to how amazing it was that he did so many things brilliantly. When I look at the number of composers who have received the Pulitzer in the last 3 decades since he died I have to wonder. It’s crazy that he did what they are doing now – combined high and populist art, kept the tonal tradition alive – in a far an earlier time, when it was more detrimental to your reputation, and often with far more skill and sophistication they they did. And yet… they have the award, not him. This goes for both concert and theater music. The score to West Side Story not better than Rent? Are you kidding?

I do agree that later in life, after his wife’s death, he did lose his moorings a bit. There weren’t enough people around him to tell him no. That always left me profoundly sad. That he was difficult and narcissistic isn’t a trait unique to him. Ever meet a rock star, a conductor, or – worse – a politician?

Some advice from Justin Peters:

There are a few simple rules that, if followed, would almost entirely eliminate unintentional child shooting deaths. Always keep your gun on your person or at arm’s length. If it is not on your person, it should be in a gun safe, preferably unloaded. When you are unloading the gun, check to see if the chamber is clear. Never let your children use a gun unsupervised.

These are not controversial rules. They’re common sense. But rather than make them explicit, we tend to assume that gun owners understand them. That’s the first faulty assumption. It begets others.

He wants to pass child access prevention (CAP) laws to enforce those rules:

CAP laws provide criminal penalties for parents and guardians who unlawfully allow children to access their guns without supervision, either under direct permission or through unsafe gun storage practices. These laws vary in scope and severity from state to state. In Massachusetts, for instance, a person can be held liable for negligent firearm storage even if the gun is unloaded. In Mississippi the law is only triggered if a parent or guardian “knowingly” allows a minor to possess a restricted weapon.

CAP laws get little attention from gun control advocates. They are no one’s top legislative priority. As far as I can tell, there are no organizations exclusively devoted to lobbying in their favor. And yet they still manage to attract a surprising amount of support. Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have some form of CAP law, and some of these states—including Oklahoma and Utah—are among the reddest on the map. In a nation where it is difficult to pass any firearms restrictions whatsoever, CAP laws are among the most palatable gun policy solutions around.