The Fail Whale

Okay, this is going to be my last post on politics for the month. I'm getting burned out on them and this is supposed to be a fun blog to read.

My friend Greg and I have a long running debate about whose governor is worse. I'm living in Jersey, and have Chris Christie and Greg lives in Louisiana and has Bobby Jindal. Greg reserves special animosity for Jindal because Greg teaches at a university down there and Jindal has eviscerated the state higher ed system.

I posted the following on Facebook (Dear Louisiana, I trust you saw Chris Christie's keynote speech last night? How does it feel to have only the second craziest governor in the union? Your move,New Jersey) and included a link to a blog post with a great title dissecting Christie's self-aggrandizing speech, and how he went off-script to promote himself rather than serve in his appointed role as Romney's designated fluffer. The title of the post was a riff on the famous Western, the Outlaw Josey Wales. It was called The Outlaw Jersey Whale.

Artist's representation

When I asked Jen if she had seen my post, she wasn't terribly amused, saying that it would be better to point out the flaws in his policies than it would be to make fun of the man. But here's the thing. No one cares. I could tell them how he's made teachers into villains in my state, how he's about half a step up from a mob lawyer, how he silences his critics through intimidation, how his policies on education (and everything else, really, but especially and specifically education) are short-sighted and destructive. But nobody cares. We're at a point in our discourse where the truth is not enough.

NPR is held to be politically liberal, but I only think that's true insofar as reality has a liberal bias. Meaning the media coverage in this country continues to skew rightward, but NPR has largely resisted that tendency, and, as its position has remained unchanged across the years, the country has shifted around it, much like how John Paul Stevens, appointed by Nixon to the Seventh Circuit and Ford to the Supreme Court, was considered liberal by the standards prevailing in the Court when he retired.

Now, they're certainly not perfect  and the Right has been working the refs for a long time, and NPR capitulates to the pressure more often than I'd like.  Our modern media are terrible. They are so enamored of the idea of themselves as neutral arbiters of the debate that they find it unseemly to call out blatant lies. Dear Nightly News: Abandoning any pretense of analysis,  throwing up your hands and bleating some mealy-mouthed apologia about how "both sides do it" is not reporting. I don't know if I agree with Anne Frank that people are basically good, but I do think we're fundamentally social animals and we don't like upsetting those around us unnecessarily. Of course it's important to be civil to one another. However, this civility should not come at the expense of honesty.  

As Paul Krugman put it: "If a presidential candidate were to declare that the earth is flat, you would be sure to see a news analysis under the headline ”Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.” After all, the earth isn’t perfectly spherical."

I think one of the most pernicious lies perpetuated by the media is that the truth can be calculated like the arithmetic mean, that it always lies smack in the middle, that if Democrats say the sky is blue and that Republicans say it's red, that we should just agree that it's purple and move on.  As they say, "It's good to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out." Not all claims are equal. Sometimes, people are mistaken. Other times, they lie.

Back to NPR.  They did do a good job dissecting Paul Ryan's speech. They played a sound bite,  the host interjected why this claim was untrue or misleading and then they continued on to next spurious claim.

Compare that to CNN's coverage:

Blitzer: So there he is, the republican vice presidential nominee and his beautiful family there. His mom is up there. This is exactly what this crowd of republicans here certainly republicans all across the country were hoping for. He delivered a powerful speech. Erin, a powerful speech. Although I marked at least seven or eight points I’m sure the fact checkers will have some opportunities to dispute if they want to go forward, I’m sure they will. As far as mitt romney’s campaign is concerned, paul ryan on this night delivered.

Burnett: That’s right. Certainly so. We were jotting down points. There will be issues with some of the facts. But it motivated people. He’s a man who says I care deeply about every single word. I want to do a good job. And he delivered on that. Precise, clear, and passionate.

What role are these people supposed to be filling? Are they emcees?! Was Ryan Seacrest unavailable?

Jesus wept.

(And while we're on the subject of Paul "Randroid" Ryan, this joke always makes me laugh: "There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.")

But back to Christie. He's a thug. He's a bully.  Every one of his actions is calculated to make him more appealing as a candidate in 2016. His speech was empty rhetoric. I could point out all the lies, but he makes them faster than I can correct him. And in these circumstances, politicians deserve to be mocked. They deserve to be ridiculed They lend their claims credibility by cloaking them with gravitas, so how better to strip away that unearned legitimacy than by pointing out how ridiculous those making the claims really are?

I saw an interview with Mel Brooks  that explains my thoughts perfectly.

Q: On the surface, The Producers is simply good, silly fun. But do you take personal pleasure in the subversive element of making fun of Nazis? There are Nazi jokes in many of your movies.

A: Yeah. If you can make them seem foolish and silly, then you’ve won. But if you get on a soapbox and go head to head with Herr Hitler and Goebbels, you’re not going to win. They’re good at that shit. But they’re not good at comedy.

And before the Right-Wingers come crying about getting their fee-fees hurt, no one is calling Chris Christie a Nazi. He's a horrible human being, everyone in this state will be suffering the consequences of his actions for years to come (though mostly the poor), he's a coward, a thug and bully who revels in the very empty rhetoric he accuses his opponents of employing, but he is not, in fact, a Nazi*.

However, the same principle applies. You're never going to outshout someone like him. And while measured discourse has its place, if you can't even agree on basic, demonstrable facts,  it will never lead anywhere. So that leaves ridicule. I think it works best in conjunction with the facts, with the end goal of proving that Christie's platform is not merely wrong, but ridiculous, ludicrous, the product of a mind divorced from reality, to say nothing of humanity, and that those who espouse it should never be trusted with power over their fellow human beings again.

* I mean, there's no way he'd fit in to the uniform, for starters.

Video Games, Princesses and Kittens

Lily started kindergarten on Monday. It's not as big a deal as I thought it would be, because it mirrors the experience she had with pre-K so closely. They had half days the first two days, so she was already back when I called on my lunch break. There's nothing of the baby left in how she speaks. She talks like a little adult. We discussed her day and when she was done talking she said, "I'm going to give the phone back to Mommy now so I can do my homework. Bye! I love you."

We went to a party for her little cousin on Saturday, and we wandered away to a nearby park after a while. I had my t-shirt that says, "You read my t-shirt. That's enough social interaction for one day" and she looked at it and said, "You read," pronouncing it "reed" "my t-shirt," then paused and corrected herself, "No. You read," red, "my t-shirt."

She's very good with context like that. Occasionally she'll read whole sentences in her head before saying them out loud in order to get the correct pronunciation of homophones. So, based on how they're used, she can tell the difference between "live" and "live" and "tomato" and "tomato".


 I snapped a couple pictures of her reading old collections of Peanuts comics. I think these are becoming some of my favorite pictures of her. The books were mine when I was kid. I asked her if she would be interested in them, she accepted one, looked at the back cover, asked of Linus, "Where's his blanket?" and read for more than twenty minutes.



 We had to interrupt her so we could read her some bedtime stories and get her to sleep. This is the first time I've encountered this, but Jen, who drives Lily around more than I do, says that if Lily is enjoying a book on a car ride, she'll get so quiet that Jen will sometimes forget she's back there.

I'd like to take some of the credit for this. (Along with Jen, of course.) We try to be good parents and answer her questions. While we were taking a walk in the park, she asked if it would be possible to drill a hole in the center of the earth and come out the other side. I explained that the center of the earth was very hot and under a great deal of pressure, so it wouldn't be possible to do it. (Despite what the Total Recall remake would have you believe.) She then asked if it would be possible to drill beneath the surface, but go around the core of the earth. I told that we haven't drilled very far into the earth at all, but it might be possible in the future. I also suggested that we take a look at the Illustrated Atlas of the Universe, which has a cross section of the Earth.

We did this when we got home. I'm pleased that I remembered to follow through, because I like it when she looks at those kind of books and it made me feel like a good dad to have remembered.

Later on that day, it made me feel like a bad dad when she threw a fit when we wouldn't give her another hour of cartoons. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments and it was very disturbing to hear my five-year-old daughter insisting she "needed" another hour of cartoons. Not wanted. Needed!!! She sounded like nothing so much as an unrepentant heroin addict.

But we got over that. She's a good kid. Mostly. I was mildly mortified to see that she listed her three favorite things for her teacher as video games, princesses and kittens, but Jen thinks that she only listed the first one because we do place time limits and close supervision on her video game time.

We had an initial meeting/orientation with her teacher and the classroom aide. Lily is already making a name for herself. Her spelling is very good for her age. (She spelled "my" for them "M-I", paused, said, "no, that's not right. M-Y", and black. She knows a lot of sight words, which is their term for words that are difficult to spell just by sounding them out.)

I tend to be very binary in my passions. Either I don't care at all or IT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT THING IN THE WORLD!! Lily is the same way, but she's five, so hopefully she'll grow out of it. An assignment on Tuesday was for the kids to draw a picture of themselves. Lily started a picture of herself, but gave herself too much hair, and she freaked out. It was ruined! And they told her maybe that she could make the hair into a ponytail, which is something we try to when she makes a mistake, incorporate the mistake into the picture. But, no, it was ruined. If she were at home, she probably would have ripped the picture in half, but I'm pleased she had the wherewithal to control herself in school. (Though if she's capable of such a feat, I'd like her to exercise it at home when she's frustrated at home too.) The word they used to describe her was paralyzed, and I can imagine it. She had tears streaming down her cheeks and just had no idea how to fix this. The teacher wouldn't give her another sheet of paper, which was absolutely the right move, but did allow her to draw a new picture on the other side. Lily worked all the way through free play, getting her picture just so.

And I'm torn. Wanting to do the best job you can do is certainly an admirable trait and one we want to encourage, but perfectionism can be a negative if taken to extremes. I've come to terms with my own issues in that regard, though it took me a lot of effort, but I'm managed to make my foibles work for me. I'm outside my area of expertise, but this excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on perfectionism summarizes my concerns: "Normal perfectionists pursue perfection without compromising their self-esteem, and derive pleasure from their efforts. Neurotic perfectionists strive for unrealistic goals and consistently feel dissatisfied when they cannot reach them."  I'm afraid Lily's perfectionism might be closer to the neurotic kind. I want her to be the best version of herself she can be, but I don't want her to destroy herself by adopting a "perfect or useless" dichotomy.

I was concerned that she would be bored at school. This was going to be her third years being taught her ABCs, and while I don't think she's a prodigy of any kind, I know she's a smart little kid who reads to herself, adds negative numbers and asks questions like "Who was Sun-Tzu?", and, as she missed the the cut off date by about 72 hours, I do remain very unhappy that she's not getting as much as she could from school. I've mentioned this before, but I still have the concern that she'll be bored by school and this will poison her impression of it for years to come. However, I'm somewhat mollified after meeting Lily's teacher and talking about her with a friend who works at the school and who speaks extremely highly of her.

She hasn't made any friends yet, though her friend last year is in the room across the hall and they see each other during the day. That's probably a good thing. She is one of those kids who gravitates towards adults and I'm happy that she's challenged to socialize outside of her comfort zone.

Three people who do their jobs better than Joss Whedon

It wouldn't be Josh's blog if we didn't have the occasional two minutes hate against Joss Whedon.

Joss Whedon is perceived as a writer friendly to women because he features a lot of women  in his properties. Sure, I'll buy that. What I don't quite buy into is the scuttlebutt on the internets that he's done more to advance woman's issues than any other human being who ever lived. And even I will admit that Whedon is pretty good in this regard. However, he's not perfect. Of note is that his brand of feminism involves a young woman getting punched in the face for seven years. When that is the gold standard, when all genre writing is measured by this yardstick, then I think there's a problem.


This piece sums up a lot of the problems with Whedon's brand of feminism.

See also, Strong Female Characters

Here's the list promised in the title:

The Writers on Scooby Doo, Mystery Inc
 

I don't hate everything Whedon's ever done. I think Seasons 2 and 3 of Buffy (Spike, Drucilla and Angelus and Faith and the Mayor, respectively and Season 4 of Angel were some of the best television that were ever broadcast, irrespective of genre.

Scooby Doo has come full circle in recent years with the kind of pop culture references, funny dialogue and clever plot twists that characterized Buffy back in its heyday. I think the most recent episode is better than Buffy.

Look, I'll even say something nice about Whedon. It's hard to write smart someone smarter than yourself. Larry Niven said that it would take him months to write the parts of his Protector books where the superhumanly intelligent protagonist was doing something. Plus, make it too smart and you run the risk of losing your audience. So, a trick that writers often use is to make the antagonists kind of stupid so that the heroes can seem smart when they run circles around them. Yeah, it's a bit of a cheap trick, but often it's the lesser evil, so we live with it.

Whedon's writing appears clever at first glance, but falls apart when you think about it. TV tropes has a term for it. Fridge Logic.

I think the scene that best exemplifies this is the part in the Avengers when the Black Widow speaks to Loki in his cell. He taunts her and she draws him out, and he mentions the Hulk in passing, so she's like "We've got you now!" and drops the whole charade right then and there. Except. they know he's seen Banner, and indeed, his whole conversation with Fury was about the Hulk.

Which part was clever, Joss? The part where the Black Widow acquires information they already through Fury's earlier conversation had or the part where she radios in a juvenile fuck you mission accomplished to Nick Fury in front of Loki, squandering the asset?


And then there's the stuff that's just dumb, like Saffron calling Mal by his full name when she's claimed she doesn't know him, thereby revealing her deception. That's the kind of mistake that tripped up Bugs Meany in the Encyclopedia Brown books. (Also, those books had Sally Kimball, who is a more fully realized character than any of the women on Firefly. (Or the men on Firefly, for that matter.))

But Scooby Doo manages to weave together a complicated narrative that makes sense, with both sides outsmarting the other at certain times.

James Cameron

Cameron didn't give us Ellen Ripley, as she was introduced in the first movie, but he gave us Sarah Connor, who was cast from the same mold. I'm going to focus on Ripley, however, because it allows us a direct point of comparison. Cameron gave us Aliens, for many fans the high point of the series, and Joss Whedon, when asked to write an Aliens movie, gave us Alien: Resurrection.

To hear his fans tell it, Whedon wrote Toy Story all by his lonesome, instead of being one of many screenwriters who contributed to the script. And as quick as he is to claim ownership of that, he's equally quick to blame other people for his failures. Whedon was all like "This is everyone's fault but mine!" about A:R. . ("It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.") Oh, the movie sucks because the actors said their lines exactly as I wrote them down, said Joss "Do you know what happens to a toad when it's struck by lightning? The same thing that happens to everything else" Whedon. I read an interview with Wired where he insists Dollhouse was brilliant (Dollhouse was the series, you may remember, where a bunch of pretty women are mindwiped and imprinted with whatever personality their clients want. Empowering!) but people were just too dumb to appreciate it.


And feminism is really only half the story about the Aliens series. The second one was awesome and influential and gave us lines that are still being quoted now. Resurrection...was a punchline.

Hayou Miyazaki:

I'll start with the first runner-up. Honorable mention goes to Avatar: The Last Airbender. The heroes are leading an invasion to stop the villains by defeating the Fire Nation leadership during the brief period of a solar ecclipse when Fire Benders will be unable to use their powers, and and their commander, the father of two of the kids gives a speech and says, "If we do this, this war is over." Not we win, not some dead-ender brownshirt "The Space South shall rise again!"  BS but the war is over, and we get to go back to our families.

Miyazaki began work in 1963, the year before Whedon was born, back when Whedon's father and his father were churning out sitcom scripts. Joss Whedon, as you may know, is a third generation sitcom writer, a factor that played an enormous role in his success. Plenty of geeks write well. Few of them have the connections he did.

My daughter returned to school today. She suggested a movie marathon the night before to celebrate the last day of summer. We eventually went with Teen Titans (which is another show that does a good job with its female characters), but we considered any number of things.  At one point she asked, "Can we watch the movie about the super strong princess?"

I felt the temperature rise as Jen turned her gaze on me.

"What movie is that?", I asked.

"The one where she's friends with the giant pill bugs."

"Oh," I said. "Nausicaä." Then I added, "They're not pillbugs, they're Ohmu."
 

Back before she was born, we decorated Lily's room with an underwater theme. We didn't want to go pink, because neither of us is thrilled about the whole princess culture (There's a great book with a great title called Cinderella Ate My Daughter about it), but if she has to be in to princesses, I think Nausicaä is just about the best one out there.

The name of the character comes from the Oddessy. She's the young woman who helps Odessyeus one of the seven or eight times he washes up on shore over the course of the story. I found this account while I was researching this piece:

Miyazaki's impression of Homer's Nausicaä came through an account of her in a translation of one of Bernard Evslin’s handbooks of Greek mythology. From Evslin’s description Miyazaki imagined a fearless, compassionate, beautiful, and spirited girl who delighted in nature and spurned convention—an image he admits being somewhat disappointed to see did not seem so splendidly displayed in the Odyssey

Other Nausicaa

 

She's such a great character. She's not super-strong either, but Lily was referring to my very favorite scenes in the movie and one of my favorite scenes in any movie.  Nausicaä  is out at the periphery of the village and when a bunch of airships land and start disgorging troops. She sees that they're heading for her father, so she starts running to his room. The scene cuts to him, an old man, sitting up in his bed. He unsheathes his sword and lays it on his lap. He tells his advisor to hide and she tells him that she'll be staying. We see the troops enter the room, and then the scene cuts to the outside, where we hear the sound of a gunshot. Nausicaä  hears it too, and she sprints up the final flight of stairs and when she bursts into the room and sees her father's body, she completely flips the fuck out and demolishes the squad with nothing more than the small staff she was carrying. When more troops arrive, these in full plate armor, she picks up a fallen sword and sets on them too. She's about to kill one of them when Master Yupa, her mentor, leaps into the room and intercepts thrust the blade of the sword with his arm. He has his knife ready to go through the neck slit of the commander's armor, and as his blood drips down the blade, he lectures the commander for violating the rules of engagement, then says to Nausicaä that if they fight here and now, the invaders will massacre the people of the village in retaliation.

It's not an attitude often found in American movies, where only quislings cooperate with the enemy and naked defiance and open violence are the only avenues to victory. It reminds me of two quotes I like:

At fifteen life had taught me undeniably that surrender, in its place, was as honorable as resistance, especially if one had no choice. - Maya Angelou

Be patient. You are not winning a game called justice, you are living a life called justice. Bertolt Brecht tells the story of a man living alone who answers a knock at the door. There stands Tyranny, armed and powerful, who asks, "Will you submit?" The man does not reply. He steps aside. Tyranny enters and takes over. The man serves him for years. Then Tyranny mysteriously becomes sick from food poisoning. He dies. The man opens the door, gets rid of the body, comes back to the house, closes the door behind him, and says, firmly, "No."

It's certainly a more mature work than anything Whedon's ever produced. My other criticism of him is that his characters seldom have to make hard choices like that. They just do what they want to do and that coincidently turns out to be the best course of action. 
 

And just about all of Miyazaki's films have strong female leads, Kiki's Delivery Service, My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke (who, while great, is not actually a princess). Miyazaki also manages to write strong female characters without the rage against the machine anti-authority I'm a thirteen year old and I'm smarter than the grownups vibe. He even features a couple female villains, something that Whedon's never been able to pull off. In fact, best of Joss Whedon's work is not as feminist as the weakest of Studio Ghibli's.

Mmm...Maybe not Pom Poko.




 

Gaiman was right!

Let this post serve as a coda to American Gods week. I got bored at a birthday party and wandered away to a nearby park, where I saw this sign.

Neil was right, goddamnit! I'm going to travel to England and write a book about how weird his country is. The hero will be chased by Benny Hill on a Dalek.

Guns, lots of guns

I'm a slow writer sometimes. I started this post in response to the Aurora shootings a couple weeks ago and then back-burnered it. And since then, we've had another mass shooting, this time at a Sikh Temple, and yesterday we had an execution outside the Empire State Building.

I used to write about politics on the blog back when I first started, but that kind of trailed off as I erupted into full fledged geekery. No one particularly gave a shit about what I thought about the latest Supreme Court decision and they were a downer to write besides. And not all of my friends share my opinions, and as I'm sometimes...passionate about certain subjects, worrying about upsetting them was certainly a factor in moving away from that.

I remember in the dark days of the Internets, before google was a verb and before Wikipedia existed, I used Alta Vista as my search engine. I was trying to look up the meaning of the word decimation, and I came across it in a list of definitions written by a gun enthusiast. Decimation was there, but it was an interesting site, so I looked around. Even though I've seen it many places since then, this is the first place I saw Gun Control defined as "Hitting what you shoot at. For the definition of liberal euphemism by this name, see instead unilateral personal disarmament", so it sticks with me.

While use of such straw men in this debate is not uncommon, it gives us a way to frame the discussion. So, let's put abolishment of private gun ownership at one end of the continuum and unrestricted access to to personal firearms at the other. I'm in favor of stricter gun laws, and more aggressive enforcement of existing ones. Guns certainly have a place in society, but in that continuum I mentioned, our society is much, much closer to unrestricted access than we are to abolition. My opinons are very similar to those Mark Evanier has expressed very neatly in his blog.

He thinks [my position] is that all firearms should be banned. That's not my view at all. I mean, even if it were possible, which it's not, that's not the ideal situation. There is a place for private gun ownership and even use. Roger is making the mistake which too many firearms owners make, which is to assume "Gun Control" means "Gun Confiscation." It doesn't, any more than licensing cars has led to banning cars. As long as a lot of folks think those are the same thing, nothing will change. Which is why nothing will change.

I thought it after the the Aurora shooting, and now I'm sure of it: We're never going to have a real debate in this country about gun control. You know why? Because at the national level, both sides are saying the same thing. The gun advocates were saying "You're not going to take our guns away!" and the gun control advocate were saying, "We're not going to take your guns away!"

I'm convinced that there is nothing so horrible that that the NRA will not use it as a fundraising tool. 

"Oh hey, it's shitty that bad things happen. But guns don't kill people, people do, and while we're on the subject of guns, the White House is going to use this as an excuse to take yours away, so send us money."

Background checks for gun ownership were up 40% in Colorado, compared to the week before the shooting. The rifle the shooter used jammed after firing thirty rounds. I wonder if the manufacturers saw a decline in sales of that model because of that, and I wonder if they regret not building a more reliable model so as to avoid that drop.

The murders themselves were shocking and appalling, but they were far away. They didn't affect me personally.  There were probably more fatalities due to traffic accidents or medical errors on that day than there were to that shooting. Terrible things happen every day, but they'll kill if you dwell on every one of them.

The thing that really bothered me was the jingoism after the shooting. I saw facts and figures from those in favor of gun control and quips ripped from bumper stickers from those against.

And the thing that kills me is that the jingoism is beating the facts.

A crime generally requires two components, mens rea, the guilty thought, or intent to commit the crime, and actus reus, the actual criminal act. Have you ever seen a toddler throw a tantrum? Kids that age have no emotional control. When they're mad, they're really mad. They're so mad, they would kill you if they could, but unless they're Billy Mumy in that episode of the Twilight Zone, they lack the capability to realize their ambitions. They have the mens rea but are unable to perform the actus reus.

And there is a similar dynamic at work with gun violence. Mass murders have been happening for as long as humans have been congregating in groups of sufficient size to be murdered en masse. However, most people are not capable of killing more than one of their peers at a time, even if they are so inclined. They have the mens rea, but lack the capability to perform the actual act. Now hold that thought.

Mom said I was average, but she was just being mean

Most people have a poor understanding of statistics. I saw this image a lot in the aftermath of the Colorado shootings.

As Maude Lebowski famously said, "Don't be fatuous, Jeffrey." No one thinks that outlawing guns will stop criminals from owning them. That's a straw man. However, reasonable barriers will, on average, reduce the number of criminals who own guns and use them to commit crimes.

According to this chart, they do!

This chart was compiled by Mother Jones with information collected in their copiously researched piece. (Linked below). Over 80% of guns used in mass murders were purchased legally. Criminals do obey gun laws. The shooter in Aurora broke no laws until he started murdering people.

If the Guns Right advocates are to be believed, these mass murders are just things that happen from time to time. Restricting gun access would do nothing to stop them, because in the absence of automatic weapons, crazy people would simply substitute sledgehammers and the results would be pretty much the same. Sun goes up, sun goes down, somebody buys 6,000 rounds of ammo and the internet and uses it to kill a bunch of people, and there's nothing anyone can do about any of it:

Since 1982, there have been at least 36 mass murders* carried out with firearms across the United States. We have mapped them below, including details on the shooter's identity, the date of the event, and the number of victims injured and killed. We do not consider the map comprehensive (and there are countless incidents of deadly gun violence in America, of course). We used the following criteria to identify incidents of mass murder:

• The killings were carried out by a lone shooter (except in the case of the Columbine massacre, which involved two shooters).

• The shootings happened during a single incident and in a public place (except possibly in the case of a deer hunter in Wisconsin who killed his victims after a trespassing dispute).

• The shooter took the lives of at least four people (an FBI crime classification report identifies an individual as a mass murderer—as opposed to a spree killer or a serial killer—if he kills four or more people in a single incident, and typically in a single location).

• If the shooter died or was hurt from injuries sustained during the incident, he is included in the victim count.

One cannot say ahead of time if a specific piece of legislation would have prevented another specific event. As I said before, statistics are only meaningful in the aggregate.  It is eminently reasonable to conclude that stricter gun control laws would result in fewer massacres of this type over time, however. A socially stunted  25-year graduate student is not going to know where to begin to buy a black market assault rifle. If that makes it harder for law-abiding citizens to buy a automatic weapons, well, that's the price we pay for living in a civil society.

Remember how I mentioned that spike in gun applications that follows every shooting? It was not uncommon in the days that followed to hear the cry of the Internet Tough Guy.  If he had been there with his concealed handgun, he would have stood up tall in the theater, peered through the cloud of tear gas with his eagle eyes, and just like Bruce Willis, would have sight-acquire-fired and bullseyed the body-armor wearing shooter before he could bring either the rifle or shotgun to bear and ended the whole thing before anyone got more than their feelings hurt.

Every time someone makes a claim like that, I think of Joe Zamudio, who was on the scene when Gabby Giffords was shot.

 Zamudio was in a nearby drug store when the shooting began, and he was armed. He ran to the scene and helped subdue the killer. Television interviewers are celebrating his courage, and pro-gun blogs are touting his equipment. “Bystander Says Carrying Gun Prompted Him to Help,” says the headline in the Wall Street Journal.

But before we embrace Zamudio’s brave intervention as proof of the value of being armed, let’s hear the whole story. “I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends. “I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. “And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!’ ”

But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter.

The point of that story is that having more participants in a gunfight is probably going to result in more fatalities, not fewer. If you hear gunshots and see two people blazing away at each other, how exactly are you going to identify the bad one?

Look at the footage of when the police catch the shooter from the Empire State Building yesterday.

It's over in seconds. Even though the suspect must have known that he would be pursued, even though he was as wary as he could possibly be in such a situation, even though he was armed with a gun with the safety off, even then, he gets shot dead and no action he could have performed would have changed that. (And to tie in my secondary point, even though the shooters were trained police officers and I believe they handled things absolutely as best they could, nine bystanders were hit by bullets or bullet fragments.)

That's the thing. If someone gets the drop on you with a modern firearm, you're almost certainly going to die. Just as you're probably going to die if you're struck by lightning or hit by a truck or fall from a great height. It's possible to survive any of these situations, but the circumstances that dictate your survival are largely out of your direct control. Having a gun only provides an illusion of control.

It reminds me of my father-in-law. He was in a car accident as a young man where he was trapped by a seatbelt, in those one in a million accidents where that kind of thing happens, and to this day, he refuses to wear one. And sure, there are situations where having a gun will be to your advantage, but the vast majority of the time, it won't make a difference. Not to get all Prisoner's Dilemma on you but if you're going around with a concealed gun ready to use, you're making the world around you more dangerous for everyone else for a possible marginal benefit to yourself.

I suppose I'll wrap up with this:

A 2007 survey by the U.N's Office on Drugs and Crime found that the United States, which has 5% of the world's population, owns 50% of the world's guns.

The number of households owning guns has declined from almost 50% in 1973 to just over 32% in 2010, according to a 2011 study produced by The University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center. The number of gun owners has gone down almost 10% over the same period, the report found.

I don't think this level of polarization is a healthy thing for a society at all.