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You are here: Home / Why Stupid Talk About Violence Matters (Up from the archives edition)

Why Stupid Talk About Violence Matters (Up from the archives edition)

by Tom Levenson|  November 18, 201112:48 pm| 52 Comments

This post is in: All we want is life beyond the thunderdome, Bring on the Brawndo!, hoocoodanode

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The story of the White House shooter John wrote about last night sent me digging into my archives to find a piece I wrote in the wake of the appearance of someone carrying a long gun at an appearance by President Obama.  Or rather, in the wake of old friend Megan McCardle’s attempt to deflate what she saw as excessive lefty concern at the rise in threat displays at such events.

I thought of this piece a lot in the wake of the Gabby Giffords shootings, and though, happily, no actual harm was done this time, I’m reminded again of the same basic point:  playing with the kind of rhetoric with which the right seems much too comfortable these days is simply dangerous.

So — and especially as my day job is making it almost impossible to come up with much useful original blogging, I offer what follows below the jump as a (to me) still on point response to those who think that it’s mere political correctness that decries this kind of talk these days.

…Pieces like this actually evoke more of a sense of wonder than anything else — not merely at the banality and evil so neatly conjoined in its content, but at the astonishing reality that anyone who routinely writes such…how to put this…bonecrushingly stupid; water-her-twice-a day dumb;* the wheel is spinning but the hamster’s dead** material, still has a job, much less an apparently appreciative audience.***

Actually, I think I have to credit McArdle with some cleverness here.  Her post is so full of different instances of nonsense, bad faith argument, sheer failure to understand what she seems to think she is talking about that she achieves a certain effect:  by seeding her post with so much to be debunked, she increases the odds that one whack-a-mole notion or another will slip past the defenses of rationality and real-world experience.

Life is, of course, too short to club every mechanical rodent that pops its head above the blissfully sunlit interior of McArdle’s mind, so what follows is an attempt at bullet-point fisking, a move towards a kind of blog-brevity that I have never executed successfully.  So let’s see, why don’t we:****

So is this guy a terrifying threat to democracy?  Or just a civic-minded citizen?

Species of logical fallacy?  False dichotomy.

If you think that his position on healthcare changes the likelihood that he will discharge that weapon…

Ditto.

is this a rational belief?

Species of logical fallacy:  Straw man.

I think carrying guns to protests is entirely counterproductive.

That’s one word for it.

Indeed, I’m not sold on the general virtues of protesting, which worked for Gandhi and the civil rights marcher, but has a dismal track record on other concerns.

Where to begin?  Oh yeah — keep it short.  I’ll merely glance at my usual rant about McArdle’s lack of actual acquired knowledge/experience out of which to base her claims.  I’ll only say that anyone who takes as dispositive of the topic that Ms. McArdle is herself “not sold” on what she curiously calls the “virtues” of protesting♦  is a suitable purchaser for that bridge in Brooklyn I managed to pick up last week….

…Let’s see:  I seem to recall that the aftermath of the Marcos instigated assassination of Ninoy Aquino demonstrated that protest has no power.  Lech Walesa must be merely a shipyard worker with a gripe, given that the protests he led were so desperately ineffective.  The South African case is enormously complicated, but if the business community in South Africa cut the underpinnings of the Boer cause in the eighties and early nineties, I’m sure it was because sustained, courageous, life-risking protest within the country and protest led pressure on international companies outside had nothing to do with it … it was all purely the milk of human kindness coursing through the veins of the NP that allowed Nelson Mandela to embark on that famous walk.  And so on…[This was written before the Arab Spring, of course…]

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In other words, protest may not satisfy the kool kid McArdle appears to imagine herself to be, but people have died in proving her wrong time and again within even her callow memory.  I’d add that he dismal track record of which McArdle writes exists, but should be sought in her own archives.

But I think people have a perfect right to do it, including with guns, though I also think the secret service is within its rights to ensure that they don’t have a sight line on the president.

That’s “Secret Service,” a proper name, not some generic function; and I’m sure its brave members sleep a little more soundly now that they know that Ms. McArdle has acknowledged her belief that they have the right to perform their duty.

But the hysteria about them has been even more ludicrous.  Numerous people claim to believe that this makes it likely, even certain, that someone will shoot at the president.

I call Inigo Montoya on her use of the word “ludicrous” in this context.

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And as for the “numerous people…” sentence…this is both a logical fallacy — the straw man again, in her assertion that the claim has been made that the presence of guns at rallies make it “certain” that someone will shoot President Obama — and the coward’s argument.  If numerous people have made this claim, name them, so that we may check and see if McArdle is reporting their claims accurately, and to see what arguments they might be making in support of whatever they assert.

This is very silly, because the president is not anywhere most of the gun-toting protesters…

I’m glad to get a reading on what McArdle thinks is silly; it helps calibrate the rest of her stuff.  But while I guess worrying about the fate of the president is risible to some, the real kicker here, of course lies with the remarkable statement that it’s ok to bring a loaded gun to protest a presidential visit because “most” won’t be “near” President Obama himself.

It pains me to say something so utterly obvious and predictable but, if I may break the fourth wall for just a moment:  Ms McArdle.  Are you awake?  Sentient?  Even a little?  Remember, when it comes to bullets…It Only Takes One.

And as for “near.”  I’m guessing that McArdle’s upbringing/background is once again suckering her into the realm of unknown unknowns here; that relentless incuriosity of hers seems to keep her from grasping the fact that guns are not in fact solely short-range weapons.

The AR-15 rifle carried to the rally in Phoenix is a derivative of the military M-16.♥  It fires the NATO 5.56 round and while it has a number of variants, has an effective range of over 500 meters in its most common forms.  While I hope indeed that the Secret Service does indeed manage to control all the sightlines to the president, half a kilometer is not what I would call near…and McArdle, whatever she actually knows of modern firearms, certainly manages to convey in this post complete ignorance of the subject.♣ [I did not say this at the time, because I thought it was obvious, but there are plenty of rifles which in skilled hands achieve accuracy over significantly greater distances than 500 meters.]

Onwards:

It is, I suppose, more plausible to believe that they might take a shot at someone else.  But not very plausible:  the rate of crime associated with legal gun possession or carrying seems to be verylow.  Guns, it turn out, do not turn ordinary people into murderers.  They make murderers more effective.

Species of logical fallacy:  biased sample.  The relevant sample is not all those bearing guns legally, but all those bearing guns in a political context, and perhaps in the specific context of Presidential appearances.  However you might want to begin analyzing it, the group of those who consider it a form of acceptable democratic speech to bear a loaded gun at a political rally is a distinct subset of gun owners, and the assertion that their behavior will track that of the group at large is both bad statistical reasoning and bad-faith argument, all rolled into one.

So perhaps unsurprisingly, when offered the opportunity to put some money down on the proposition that one of these firearms is soon going to be discharged at someone, they all decline…

This is getting tedious:  the fallacies here include the ad hominem argument — because people don’t bet, what they say is wrong — and yet another straw man.  Who are these mythical non-gamblers.  I’ll take the damn bet.  Here’s a 100 bucks that says that some asshole fires a weapon at a political rally before the end of Obama’s first term. [I’d say, sadly, that the Giffords shooting/multiple murder incident settles this one.] I’d bet more but I just bought a house and haven’t got a dime to spare…and Mrs. Levenson raised her boy right, with the view that bet when you feel like it…but never your son’s lunch money.

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McArdle then approvingly quotes from that notorious bearer of bad-faith arguments in defense of faith, C.S. Lewis, to advance in someone else’s name the logical fallacy known as the slippery slope argument. It is certainly true that milk drinking leads to heroin addiction, but what’s even wierder about McArdle’s citation of Lewis’ Mere Christianity is that Lewis’s point, however flawed, has no discernable connection to McArdle’s argument.  This is what I mean when I see in McArdle the bored monkey style of argument:  fling enough faeces at a wall and perhaps something will stick, if only by oderiferous association.

Moving on:

I suspect that, like the notion that Obama is not a US citizen, or that George Bush either planned the 9/11 attacks or allowed them to happen, this is for most people what Julian Sanchez calls a symbolic belief.  They don’t really believe that these people are thugs intent on murder–not in the sense that they have, with careful thought, arrived at a conclusion that they are willing to defend vigorously.

Two quick points.  There is a false equivalence at work, to begin with.  Birther and 9/11 conspiracy beliefs do not derive from the same underlying logical or empirical structure that the argument that the repeated incidence of bearing loaded firearms within the context of purportedly peaceful protest increases the risk of violence in the future.

The prediction may be wrong — that is, we may go through an entire eight year Obama Presidency with nary a hint of gun violence in political contexts.  But the argument that such violence is a reasonable thing to fear is a qualitatively different one from that required to believe in the face of all evidence to the contrary that Barack Obama is not legally the President of the United States (or that George Bush evoked 9/11…or that FDR set up Pearl Harbor and all the rest).

Second:  once again, McArdle has recourse to a bad faith, logically flawed argument here.  She’s not that inventive, so she’s gone again to the straw man well.

Those who suggest that the presence of guns openly carried implies a series of risks — how many concealed weapons might be present; how much organization there might be in the insertion of armed protesters into the fabric of peaceful protest; how long it will take for over-the-top violent rhetoric to find a truly receptive ear amongst all these “patriots” — are not saying that any individual gun-toting asshole is a thug bent on murder.

They are saying that the more useful idiots like McArdle legitimize the presence of guns in political discourse, the greater the risk we take that the guns will stop being symbols, and will reappear as the tools they are…tools that are capable of dealing deadly violence at a distance.

McArdle would rather not dwell on that ugly fact of guns.  They are not toys.  They are not megaphones.  They do not utter cute or funny or pointed commentary on the state of American polity today.  They dispatch useful weights of metal at high speeds across considerable spaces with an accuracy restricted by the quality of the machine and the skill of its operator.  Reality matters.

But it is pleasurable to tell yourself you believe terrible things about your enemies, and so you don’t examine the thought until someone says, “Well, how about $500 on it, then?” and you think about how much it would hurt to lose $500 on, and realize that you don’t actually have any reason to believe it’s all that likely.

Back to that again:  the validity of the argument that bringing guns to political rallies is (a) dangerous and (b) if unchecked, likely to increase the risk of an act of political violence turns on whether or not someone will lay a bet with Ms. McArdle.  See above for the fallacy involved, and then pause to consider McArdle’s framing of the argument as a whole.

Here she says, as the concluding thought of her attempted chain of argument, that the actual claim being advanced is that the presence of guns among anti Obama protesters is evidence of the evil of opposition to Obama and not, as stated by those who make real arguments on this matter, that the increase in the threat of violence is likely to lead to an increase in violence itself.

This is a predictive argument, and I hope that is wrong — or rather that the making of it helps create the conditions that will prevent it from becoming right.  Were civilized people to say that whatever one’s legal rights to bear arms might be, it is socially unacceptable to do so at a political rally, especially one at which an elected leader is present, then the risk of violence would be reduced, I hope to the level that the Secret Service could manage without breaking a sweat.

[Can’t embed this anymore, so check out the link for the required pop-culture video comment]

But the point I’d finish with here, to counter McArdle’s attempt at a conclusion, is to remind everyone of the intellectual and emotional poverty of McArdle, along with that of those on the right who like her are trying to turn our politics into a game of high-school debate, unanchored in lived experience.  She asserts, in effect, and almost in so many words, that the fear of political violence is a mere abstraction — her “symbolic belief.”

She is, of course, totally, utterly, and almost painfully wrong — as everyone knows who can remember back just a few years, read a book, perhaps, …or even managed to recall the fate of a couple of people who shared a last name with someone else famous who died on Tuesday.

Specifically:  I was born in 1958.  Since then, there have been ten presidents who have served before the current incumbent:  Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II.  Of them, one was killed by a rifle.  Another had guns drawn on him twice in two weeks.  A third was shot outside a Washington DC hotel by a deranged celebrity hound.  Three out of ten.

More:  Over the history of the presidency, ten out of the first 43 presidents were subject to attempted or successful assassinations.  Political violence is a fact of American history.

Taking note of that risk is not mere mental masturbation, pleasuring ourselves in the contemplation of the demonic nature of the opposition.

It is simple prudence.

Let enough people with guns get close enough to powerful people, and the American experience is that something bad will happen…at a rate approaching (and in recent times exceeding) one time out of four.  (And yes — I know about the sample size and so on…)

Let’s add to that.

You may have noticed that the current President doesn’t look like his 43 predecessors.  He is, not to put to fine a point on it, black, African American.

McArdle may not wish to dwell on the subject, but there is something of a history of violence imposed on African American leaders in this country.  There is as well a hint of a racial overtone (ya think?– ed.) to at least some of the commentary around the Obama administration from the right.

Put that together:  Obama is in an office that is historically a target; he is a member of a group that has been preferentially selected for deadly force in the context of political action; and there has been a demonstrable escalation of rhetoric against his policies and his person.

And thus the ironic (and that’s putting it nicely) grotesquery that is McArdle’s last line, a castigation of people like me who are, in her view, merely enjoying our fantasy of potential assassination:

Unfortunately, these sorts of fun pastimes are horribly corrosive to civic society.

Well, so they are, in the form committed by the disastrous McArdle.

[Last thought:  I see via TBogg that McArdle has committed a second atrocity to compound the one fisked above — but I’m too tired, and so must you too be if you’ve read this far, to bother with more of the same.  I guess this is yet one more example of the monkey poop approach to political argument.  Keep flinging the shit long enough, and some of it’s bound to hit something.  But still, McArdle’s not worth the attention her relentless awfulness earns her…a fallacy I’ll leave to you to name.]

*with thanks to the late great Molly Ivins — who would have devoured McArdle for lunch (w. barbecue sauce) and used her metacarpals for toothpicks.

**and thanks to Herb Caen, whose column over the years provided a constant lesson on the joys of the English language and the extraordinary peculiarities of which the human species is capable.

***though I suppose the bulk of her readership may be, like me, those drawn to intellectual trainwrecks, who cannot turn our horrified eyes away…

****I failed.

♦by virtues she means here, apparently, effectiveness, which is a virtue only in certain, deeply unlovely philosophies.  Which is, I guess, what one would expect from this source.

♥Just to forestall the predictable flames:  I do know that the Phoenix assault rifle bozo was in fact kept well out of sight and range of the President.  The point is not that he could have shot Barack Obama.  It is that the weapons being used as symbols of speech and liberty by McArdle and others are in fact tools that in properly trained hands can impose deadly violence from a great distance.

♣Just to play w. wingnut stereotypes, I, a child during the ’60s (not, note, a child of the 60s), raised in Berkeley, have — as do many of my peers — plenty of exposure to firearms.  My family were literally gunners — grandfather a colonel in the Royal Horse Artillery and my uncle a major in the Royal Artillery, and I in my California youth spent a fair amount of time in real ranch country, where guns were in fact tools.

I got taught proper gun safety, and handled first the usual kids’ guns, single shot bolt-action .22s, and then more powerful ones, both hand and long guns.

Berkeley itself was hardly ever the pure hippie-dippie pacifist sheep zone of popular right wing fantasy.  Just to admit my own idiot youth:  among my least proud memories of my childhood in Berkeley itself was with another faculty-brat lefty friend, peering out of a window across the street from a Buddhist meditation center, plinking soda cans off their wall with my air rifle.  I don’t know if adolescent boys are always assholes, but I sure had my moments.

And lest any folks on the far side of the political spectrum with more rage than sense think cracking loud in Berkeley might be a good idea, I’d just think back on a number of friends I had — left to the core refugees from special forces.  Don’t ever make the mistake that because someone is quiet and maybe has a mellow hair style they are unarmed and safe to mess with.

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52Comments

  1. 1.

    TooManyJens

    November 18, 2011 at 12:53 pm

    Actually, I think I have to credit McArdle with some cleverness here. Her post is so full of different instances of nonsense, bad faith argument, sheer failure to understand what she seems to think she is talking about that she achieves a certain effect: by seeding her post with so much to be debunked, she increases the odds that one whack-a-mole notion or another will slip past the defenses of rationality and real-world experience.

    Perhaps she’s been watching creationist debaters. This is a technique the “best” of them have mastered.

  2. 2.

    The Republic of Stupidity

    November 18, 2011 at 12:53 pm

    … playing with the kind of rhetoric with which the right seems much too comfortable these days is simply dangerous.

    By and large, I try to avoid dealing w/ hypotheticals, but just once…

    Just take ONE of these situations… just ONE… and turn it around – have an avowed liberal walking around w/ an open carry at say, a Bush campaign event… or ANY of a number of right wing politicians… your choice… or even an Occupy protest…

    And just stand back watch the shrieks of indignation… the rending of the garments… the soiling of the selves…

    I guarantee it…

  3. 3.

    Mike Goetz

    November 18, 2011 at 12:56 pm

    “This is getting tedious.”

    No shit.

  4. 4.

    trollhattan

    November 18, 2011 at 12:56 pm

    Good lord, man, I have to set aside time and return to the McArdling. Have a meeting to attend–luckily with somebody in possession of an actual functioning brain, not a McArdle Noggin Device(tm).

  5. 5.

    Mike Goetz

    November 18, 2011 at 1:00 pm

    The person to worry about is not the one openly carrying the gun to a political event.

  6. 6.

    Yutsano

    November 18, 2011 at 1:06 pm

    Why do you do this to yourself man? Put down the McSuderman and walk away slowly…

  7. 7.

    The Moar You Know

    November 18, 2011 at 1:09 pm

    Both sides do it.

  8. 8.

    Catsy

    November 18, 2011 at 1:10 pm

    @The Republic of Stupidity: It wouldn’t even get that far. We’re talking about assholes so insecure and authoritarian that they try to eject anyone wearing a t-shirt they don’t like. Does anyone with a functioning brain even need to spend more than a moment contemplating what would happen if a liberal brought a gun to a Republican event of any kind?

    Please.

  9. 9.

    Trentrunner

    November 18, 2011 at 1:13 pm

    Let’s remember, professionals in psychology have already told us that atmospheric rhetoric gives the mentally unbalanced a superstructure to hang their nuttiness on.

    So we get Loughner trying to kill a Democratic rep Giffords and Democratic citizens, and now we get a nutbag trying to kill “anti-Christ” Obama. (Obama as the anti-christ is another extreme right-wing meme.)

    THIS is why their eliminationist rhetoric is dangerous.

  10. 10.

    mamayaga

    November 18, 2011 at 1:24 pm

    @Catsy: Exactly. Somehow the First Amendment protects right wing speech but not left wing speech. Interestingly, this appears to be a function of what individual cops believe to be acceptable speech, and in this the cops are the right’s ultimate useful idiots. The people carrying firearms to Dem events (by and large people who advocate abolishing public employees’ collective bargaining rights and slashing their jobs and benefits) are left alone. Protesters against the prevailing power structure (by and large people who would fight to preserve cops’ collective bargaining rights and benefits) are beaten up.

  11. 11.

    nastybrutishntall

    November 18, 2011 at 1:24 pm

    @Mike Goetz: Why so much fail? You can do better. Like this: “The guy pointing a gun at you is not the guy to worry about. The guy who says you shouldn’t have a gun is the guy you should worry about. Because freedom, or something.” There. Try that!

  12. 12.

    geg6

    November 18, 2011 at 1:25 pm

    @Trentrunner:

    Could you, please, try to explain this to one John Cole? He seems to think it’s not a big deal or a very serious thing when someone tries to pepper the White House with bullets unless Obama himself is there.

  13. 13.

    soonergrunt

    November 18, 2011 at 1:25 pm

    @Tom Levenson, top:

    and though, happily, no actual harm was done this time,

    I pick a nit with an otherwise excellent posting–quite a bit of damage was done.
    Leaving aside the material cost of bullet-resistant glass, which is very fucking expensive–in the neighborhood of $10k/window since it’s a custom job with impact sensors and all kinds of stuff, to say nothing of however much it costs to repair the limestone fascia of the White House, and all of the overtime that maintenance and Secret Service personnel and other law enforcement people are running up, and the lost productivity when the White House went into lockdown–by this point we’re talking several hundred thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ money.
    There’s also the issue of what the security mindset does.
    There will be, if not already underway, a review of the security procedures and capabilities involved. That review will lead, as they all inevitably do, to tighter restrictions in the Capitol city. Those big open parkway greens, across which that yahoo fired his weapon so ineffectually, will considered for closure or limited access, as will the roads that cross and border the National Mall. It won’t be just families out for a picnic that get turned away either. It will become even harder still for people to get into places like the Capitol building and the associated office buildings and the White House complex. This will occur because nobody ever had their career ended by suggesting that government facilities are not secure enough, and everyone will go along with it, all the while shaking their heads at “the cost of doing business in today’s world.”
    The very real salutary effect will be to again decrease access to government for everyone, but most especially for the poor and middle classes who do not have the resources, especially time, to deal with the added hassle. Meanwhile, the heads of Bank of America or Goldman Sachs will still get the President or the Senate Majority Leader on line 1 whenever they want.

  14. 14.

    Special Patrol Group

    November 18, 2011 at 1:29 pm

    McMegan is so horrible.

  15. 15.

    redshirt

    November 18, 2011 at 1:31 pm

    Funny. I just wrote a long post about this, here.

    It seems without a doubt that this is an intentional phenomena: The various Right Wing blowhards egg on their followers to violence, always having an excuse built in if something happens – “I never said go and shoot up Congresspeople!”

    Sick.

  16. 16.

    Schlemizel

    November 18, 2011 at 1:34 pm

    Its been mentioned here before and bears repeating:
    Imagine a photo taken at an OWS camp like several we saw from the tebaggers. Some gumby carrying a sign the reads, “We com unarmed THIS time!” The pants wetting and poutrage on the right would be unbearable. This in itself would be reason for the cops to jail every OWS attendee in the nation.

  17. 17.

    kindness

    November 18, 2011 at 1:35 pm

    It’ll become an issue for conservatives when some one finally kills one of their own. I’m hoping it won’t happen but pretty much accept it will. Without being too morbid, I can only pray it’s someone who deserves it and I’m not about to suggest anyone by name, excuse me I have to cough, Koch, Koch…

  18. 18.

    brantl

    November 18, 2011 at 1:37 pm

    @Mike Goetz: I think you can justifiably worry about both him (he obviously lacks judgement enough to carry a gun into a crowd, that easily might be stirred up, to say the least, probably a hostile crowd; stupid at best), and anyone who might knock him ovdr the head, take his gun, and maybe shoot him, if nobody else.
    You simpleton.

  19. 19.

    Tom Levenson

    November 18, 2011 at 1:40 pm

    @Mike Goetz: Can’t say you weren’t warned…

  20. 20.

    pragmatism

    November 18, 2011 at 1:42 pm

    apparently she “spends a lot of time around people who are familiar with guns” so she is a gun expert. yay appeal to authority!!!

  21. 21.

    Chris

    November 18, 2011 at 1:44 pm

    @kindness:

    It’ll become an issue for conservatives when some one finally kills one of their own.

    You’re far too optimistic. They’ll just blame it on us, take it as an excuse to immediately shut down all OWS and similar protests across the nation for good and by any means necessary, militia/NRA nuts around the country will double their already massive armament program and there’ll be an underlying sense of “we won’t be even until we’ll have gotten one of theirs.” Those people don’t think in terms of “oh, now that it’s happened to us, we understand and empathize.”

    (As a sidenote, ever wonder what the 1960s would look like if it was the right wing who’d taken all the political shootings instead of the left? Imagine the backlash if Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley were the ones who’d all gotten assassinated in the same decade, and it had been capped off with the Kent State dudes shooting into a crowd of Birchers…)

  22. 22.

    Loneoak

    November 18, 2011 at 1:44 pm

    Meanwhile, Bad Lip Reading does Ron Paul and makes him sound more sane.

  23. 23.

    deep

    November 18, 2011 at 1:46 pm

    @Schlemizel: Someone should duplicate that sign just for the irony.

    Of course, pants would still be shat.

  24. 24.

    dave

    November 18, 2011 at 1:51 pm

    What, no enormous rococo art?

  25. 25.

    Tom Levenson

    November 18, 2011 at 1:57 pm

    @dave: Nah. The original piece ran only with youtubes, and my current work crisis is so overwhelming I didn’t have the energy to add more stuff.

    Sorry; won’t happen again. ;)

  26. 26.

    geg6

    November 18, 2011 at 2:06 pm

    @Schlemizel:

    Hell, those yahoos seem to think someone (maybe OWS and maybe just some asshole) who poops in proximity to OWS is the equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb in the middle of Manhattan. Can’t imagine what they’d say if a 99%er was lugging around an assault rifle.

  27. 27.

    Gex

    November 18, 2011 at 2:09 pm

    @brantl: Nope. You can only pick one. worry about the gun in view or the hidden gun. Someone learned to argue at the McArgleBargle school of logic.

  28. 28.

    Samara Morgan

    November 18, 2011 at 2:13 pm

    you know Dr. Levenson….the maths show a dramatic uptick in death threats to President Obama as they did to President Clinton.
    Dr. Tiller was shot during Clintons presidency and killed during Obamas.
    Megan McCurdle and Douchehat blamed liberals, because we wont overturn Roe and that makes the GOP base crazy….well….craziER.

    and the juicers here think there is no organic difference between conservatives and liberals and im a racist bigot for even suggesting it.
    Neuropolitics and the Biological Difference Between Conservatives and Liberals…. Is that taught at MIT yet?

  29. 29.

    Brachiator

    November 18, 2011 at 2:15 pm

    @Chris:

    As a sidenote, ever wonder what the 1960s would look like if it was the right wing who’d taken all the political shootings instead of the left?

    Too morbid for my tastes. It is enough to consider some of the reaction to John Hinkley’s attack on President Reagan and others. Many on the right were anxious to portray Reagan as a tough cowboy. And although there were attempts to pass gun control legislation, there was also this, in the aftermath of Hinkley’s trial.

    The not-guilty verdict led to widespread dismay, and, as a result, the U.S. Congress and a number of states rewrote laws regarding the insanity defense. The old Model Penal Code test was replaced by a test that shifts the burden of proof of insanity from the prosecution to the defendant. Three states have abolished the defense altogether.

    Some conservatives will stick to their guns, no matter what.

  30. 30.

    RosiesDad

    November 18, 2011 at 2:49 pm

    Tom: I think there are some times when you have to gird your loins and just say no.

  31. 31.

    trollhattan

    November 18, 2011 at 2:52 pm

    Sort of on topic: White House shooter-atter made an audition tape for Oprah. Methinks we can stop looking for co-conspirators, but somebody needs to smack the shit out of whoever sold him that rifle.

    http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2011/11/assassin-video-jesus-ortega-hernandez.html

  32. 32.

    rikryah

    November 18, 2011 at 2:57 pm

    you tell the truth

  33. 33.

    The Spy Who Loved Me

    November 18, 2011 at 2:57 pm

    Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see political ideology in mental illness. Sometimes, crazy is just crazy.

    The shooter in Arizona had no particular political ideology, if evidence to date is to be believed. Hinkley had no ideological ax to grind when he shot Reagan. This latest crazy is said to hate Obama and government, and apparently thinks he is Jesus, but no evidence of right or left ideology has presented itself yet in the reporting on him.

    As interested in politics as we all are, given the type of site this is, the vast majority of the public doesn’t share our interest, and they don’t ascribe every event that happens on a right/left basis.

    Sometimes, it’s just best to accept there is sometimes crazy in our society and not try to paint it with a political brush.

  34. 34.

    Another Bob

    November 18, 2011 at 3:11 pm

    All I’d say is that McArdle’s intellectual dishonesty is not just the unfortunate by-product of shoddy reasoning or insufficiently rigorous editorial standards. It’s her damned job, she does it with deliberate intent and her employer pays her to do it. If she wasn’t willing to do it, they would have found someone else to do her job.

  35. 35.

    Tony J

    November 18, 2011 at 3:21 pm

    @Chris:

    As a sidenote, ever wonder what the 1960s would look like if it was the right wing who’d taken all the political shootings instead of the left? Imagine the backlash if Barry Goldwater, Richard Nixon and William F. Buckley were the ones who’d all gotten assassinated in the same decade, and it had been capped off with the Kent State dudes shooting into a crowd of Birchers..

    It’s one of the great Third rails of ‘moderate’ American political discourse (and I say this as a foreign-johnny) that the scenario you describe just isn’t believable. The Right does shit like that and gets away with it, the Left never has but somehow gets tarred with the ‘violent’ brush. Ignoring that point is one of the major hurdles anyone has to jump if they want to be considered ‘serious’ and make the moolah. They’ve had to reinvent the 60’s as an era when ‘The Left’ went wild and stored up a balance of outrage that justifies every ‘both sides do it’ dismissal of Right wing violence.

    And every year you get further away from the 60’s the harder they have to work to ignore the fact that America’s violent streak is partisan in nature and one side is always the victim.

  36. 36.

    Ecks

    November 18, 2011 at 3:27 pm

    Just did a quick wiki search. America has had 44 presidents, of which 4 have been shot to death, and 6 more have been shot at. So historically presidents have roughly a 25% chance of being on the wrong end of incoming bullets, and roughly a 10% chance of being hit and killed by them.

    England, in contrast, has managed to go through 50 or 60 prime ministers and only had 1 of them assassinated. And that was Spencer Perceval in 1812.

    But remember, guns don’t kill people, people kill people. What are you gonna believe.

  37. 37.

    trollhattan

    November 18, 2011 at 3:34 pm

    @Ecks:

    Amazingly, it’s safer to be a Shuttle crewperson than president. I wouldn’t have the nerve for either.

  38. 38.

    Ecks

    November 18, 2011 at 3:39 pm

    Oops, LOL. That’ll learn me to read all the way to the end of an article before posting comments.

  39. 39.

    geg6

    November 18, 2011 at 3:52 pm

    @The Spy Who Loved Me:

    I’m thinking you may have missed the point.

    The point isn’t that any of the particular assassins or would-be assassins are wingnuts (though there are plenty of very violent, murderous assholes who are…don’t believe me, ask the Unitarians, Dr. Tiller’s family, or the people at the Holocaust Museum, for starters). It’s that the violent rhetoric and meant-to-be-threatening carrying of weapons to political events employed by the right wing encourages unbalanced nutters to act out. Where do you think this most recent guy got the idea that Obama was the anti-Christ? Doesn’t seem that he felt that way about W (that we know of), so why would he suddenly feel that Obama was the anti-Christ and not every president?

  40. 40.

    Ecks

    November 18, 2011 at 3:55 pm

    When Giffords was shot I heard from my righty friends “there should have been more guns there. If more bystanders had had guns this wouldn’t have happened.” Let’s lay aside for the moment ACTUALLY happens when you have a bunch of confused scared people with guns in the middle of a crowd who aren’t sure which of the other people with guns are the deranged killers, and which are the ones trying to shoot deranged killers. Let’s consider Reagan instead. He gets shot despite being literally SURROUNDED by well armed men who knew how to use those guns, and were extremely intent on being alert to anyone who would try to shoot the specific person of Ronald Reagan. And STILL he was hit. If that’s safety, sign me up for a bit more danger.

  41. 41.

    Roy G.

    November 18, 2011 at 3:58 pm

    So, it’s apparently kosher to bring a gun to a protest, but not a tent.

  42. 42.

    Brachiator

    November 18, 2011 at 4:37 pm

    @Ecks:

    But remember, guns don’t kill people, people kill people.

    And sometimes arrows. You omitted British monarchs from your comparison list. For example, William Rufus.

    On a bright August day in 1100, William organised a hunting trip in the New Forest….On the subsequent hunt that afternoon, the party spread out as they chased their prey, and William, in the company of Walter Tyrell (or Tirel), Lord of Poix, and many other magnates. An arrow, perhaps grazing a stag, lodged in the breast of the king, who, falling forward drove it through his lung and died on the spot, without, the chroniclers note with grim satisfaction, time to confess his sins.

    And of course Guy Fawkes sought to blow up the House of Lords.

    @The Spy Who Loved Me:

    Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t see political ideology in mental illness. Sometimes, crazy is just crazy.

    As poster geg6 notes, there are right wing pundits who, with the manifest approval of the GOP leadership, who gin up perpetual hostility against Obama and the Democrats, and who do nothing to temper ill feeling. And although no one can point to any clear mechanism by which this happens, I wonder why it is that crazies pick up the cues and make the White House a focus for their nuttiness.

    By the way, I know that there is no easy way to control this kind of thing. I don’t understand how stalkers and dangerous nutcases focus on particular celebrities, or how their fascination sometimes becomes mixed up with love and outpourings of rage. But it certainly appears that the over saturation of celebrity media coverage feeds into this for some segment of excitable mentally ill people.

    ETA: poster geg6 does not specifically point at right wing pundits. I do. But the poster notes the poisonous political atmosphere.

  43. 43.

    Robert waldmann

    November 18, 2011 at 4:47 pm

    As 15<16 suggests m16 = modified AR15.

  44. 44.

    Robert waldmann

    November 18, 2011 at 4:47 pm

    As 15<16 suggests m16 = modified AR15.

  45. 45.

    Ruckus

    November 18, 2011 at 4:57 pm

    You guys, you’re making way too much out of this.

    In McGargle’s case it is just a hat rack.

    (You know that roundish thing on top the shoulders)

  46. 46.

    Elliecat

    November 18, 2011 at 5:00 pm

    @Ecks:

    When Giffords was shot I heard from my righty friends “there should have been more guns there. If more bystanders had had guns this wouldn’t have happened.”

    I guess they missed the account of the guy who had a gun and almost shot the man who disarmed the shooter. The Reagan example is a great one—in fact, I assume that two of the victims were themselves actually armed—the cop and the Secret Service agent—and it didn’t stop them getting shot.

    I wish someone would do some kind of simulation—not sure how you’d do it, people shooting paintball guns or some kind of electronic things where it could be traced who shot whom—to test out this great theory that “If only more people had been armed, fewer would have been shot.”

  47. 47.

    Ecks

    November 18, 2011 at 5:58 pm

    @Brachiator: Oh sure, England has a long loooong history of Brutally murdering its top leaders. I’m just not sure how good of a defence “well you did it too, in medieval times” is ;)

  48. 48.

    TenguPhule

    November 18, 2011 at 6:12 pm

    We could reduce the risk by some mass extermination of the Right. Soylent Green, they’re finally good for something after all!

  49. 49.

    AA+ Bonds

    November 18, 2011 at 7:14 pm

    To me, the difference is that the right wishes to engage the government to kill us all

    There are times in history when the left did the same but this is not one of those times and acting like it is, well, that’ll also kill us all

  50. 50.

    AA+ Bonds

    November 18, 2011 at 7:16 pm

    @Ecks:

    One issue there is that by the time someone plans to take out a Prime Minister he may already have been drummed out of office

  51. 51.

    Ecks

    November 18, 2011 at 8:10 pm

    @AA+ Bonds: Prime Ministers aren’t around for an appreciably different one than presidents. They tend to have terms of about 5 years at a go (though they can be shorter, they can call an election earlier if they want to), and they often win more than one. Maggie Thatcher had 3 in a row, and if you go back to the 19th century you’d get the same guy being PM twice, then doing it again and again after other people had taken terms. Presidents aren’t even allowed to do that.

  52. 52.

    Chris

    November 18, 2011 at 10:39 pm

    @Tony J:

    It’s one of the great Third rails of ‘moderate’ American political discourse (and I say this as a foreign-johnny) that the scenario you describe just isn’t believable. The Right does shit like that and gets away with it, the Left never has but somehow gets tarred with the ‘violent’ brush.

    Well, technically, JFK and RFK were done by left wingers, no? Not that there was ever a shortage of right wing violence, I’m just saying. And I agree completely with the overall point.

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