Category Archives: Crime and Punishment

Not a good day for SC public officials (or ex-officials)

Today we saw a string of news developments of the sort that cause a lot of people to believe erroneously that all, or most, public officials are shady.

It was quite a run:

The internal affairs chief of the state Department of Public Safety, Bobby Collins, was fired, three weeks after being stopped on suspicion of drunk driving three weeks ago. Note that his job was to be the cop who watched the cops.
Elgin Town Councilman Norman Allen “Bubba” Ernst was charged with vandalizing a gun range. I don’t even know how a person would go about doing that, and the story doesn’t say.
Ex-Rep. Thad Viers was charged with burglary. Which, to my memory, is a first for a state legislator, even a former one. But I stand ready to be corrected.

Sheesh.

Graham plants himself squarely in pro-gun territory

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Lindsey Graham, widely expected to face a challenge next year from right out of the 1830s, has responded to President Obama’s gun proposals today with words that place him safely in NRA territory:

Graham Expresses Opposition to President Obama’s Gun Control Proposal

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) today made this statement in opposition to President Obama’s gun control proposal.

“The recent tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School is heartbreaking and beyond words. However, the gun control plans brought forward by President Obama fail to address the real issues and I’m confident there will be bipartisan opposition to his proposal.

“One bullet in the hands of a homicidal maniac is one too many. But in the case of a young mother defending her children against a home invader — a real-life event which recently occurred near Atlanta — six bullets may not be enough. Criminals aren’t going to follow legislation limiting magazine capacity. However, a limit could put law-abiding citizens at a distinct disadvantage when confronting a criminal.

“As for reinstating the assault weapons ban, it has already been tried and failed.

“Finally, when it comes to protecting our schools, I believe the best way to confront a homicidal maniac who enters a school is for them to be met by armed resistance from a trained professional.”

#####

But take heart, gun control advocates: At least he doesn’t want to arm teachers, right? Not unless that’s what he means by “trained professional.” I initially took it to mean “cop,” but can we be sure?

What should happen to teachers who have sex with students?

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Screen Shot 2013-01-11 at 8.29.24 AM

Boyd Brown picked at my friends at The State the other day over the above headline, which inevitably makes one think, “And in related news, Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim“… In The State‘s defense, they caught it and fixed it — I can’t find it anywhere online now. (That’s the awful thing about the 24-hour news cycle. Used to be, you had a chance to catch these things before anyone saw them. Now, even when you catch it, it’s already out there and somebody has preserved it.)

Of course, this is no laughing matter, however much our inner 8th-grader may snicker. There are serious issues at stake. I was intrigued by this angle, raised in a long letter to the editor yesterday:

Don’t prosecute Dreher teacher for having sex with students

The two young men whom a Dreher teacher allegedly or admittedly engaged in sexual intercourse were above the age of consent. There are no allegations of coercion, intimidation, payments or rewards offered or given in return for sex.

Had the teacher been a neighbor or a family friend, a Mrs. Robinson if you will, there would be no crime.

I believe it is unconstitutional to have one law for teachers and another one for everyone else. An act should either be a crime if anyone does it or it should not be a crime…

Of course the teacher should be decertified, fired and counseled. But she never should have been arrested, she should not face prosecution, and she should fight for the right of teachers to not be made criminals for what other women can do without a threat of prosecution…

What do y’all think? Should this be a criminal matter, or merely an administrative one for the district’s H.R. folks to handle?

Personally, I’m not a bit bothered, at least in theory, by the existence of a “double standard” whereby teachers are treated differently from other folks. They hold a special public trust, and should be accordingly accountable to the public.

I just don’t have a strong opinion one way or the other as to whether that accountability should extend to criminal prosecution. Perhaps some of y’all can clarify my thinking on that…

Biden says Obama will issue executive order on guns

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Wow. I don’t know whether Joe Biden is being — excuse the seeming pun — a loose cannon again, or whether the president is really considering this (or both), but I pass it on:

(Reuters) – Vice President Joe Biden said on Wednesday the White House is determined to act quickly to curb gun violence and will explore all avenues – including executive orders that would not require approval by Congress – to try to prevent incidents like last month’s massacre at a Connecticut school.

Kicking off a series of meetings on gun violence, Biden said the administration would work with gun-control advocates and gun-rights supporters to build a consensus on restrictions. But he made clear thatPresident Barack Obama is prepared to act on his own if necessary.

“We are not going to get caught up in the notion that unless we can do everything, we’re going to do nothing. It’s critically important that we act,” said Biden, who will meet on Thursday with pro-gun groups including the National Rifle Association, which claims 4 million members and is the gun lobby’s most powerful organization…

“There are executive orders, executive action that can be taken. We haven’t decided what that is yet,” Biden said, adding that Obama is conferring with Attorney General Eric Holder on potential action…

It this is true, this would be a stunningly bold move by the president on an issue of great concern to the nation that our Congress has demonstrated for decades that it is unwilling or unable to address.

But, wow: The reaction he would likely engender from the really serious pro-gun people out there hardly bears thinking about. On the one hand, this shouldn’t be a shock to them, since they (and only they) have believed all along that “That Obama’s gonna come after our guns” — even though, before Newtown and his pledge to do something in response to it, the president has shown little or no interest in their guns. Which is why they went on a gun-and-ammo shopping spree after he was elected.

But that doesn’t mean their reaction won’t be visceral to any unilateral action by the president, however limited. It would be, to them, the realization of their darkest forebodings.

So is the president really willing to go down that road? Maybe. And maybe Joe doesn’t know what he’s talking about…

Wait a second. That was the Reuters story. In The Washington Post, Biden sounds a lot more definite about this:

Vice President Biden vowed Wednesday that President Obama will use executive action where he can to help stop gun violence as part of the White House’s response to the mass shootings in Newtown, Conn.

“The president is going to act,” Biden said during brief remarks to reporters before meeting with victims of gun violence and firearm safety groups…

Questionable claims for the AR-15

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Just read an interesting piece over at Slate, by a guy who calls himself “a Second Amendment supporter” (although, living in NYC, he doesn’t own a gun — but I guess that’s as close to pro-gun as Slate gets), discussing the claims that the AR-15 is a great weapon for hunting and home defense.

Which seems doubtful to me on both counts. This writer, Justin Peters, cites most of the reasons I already thought that. If I were into hunting, I’d use a rifle (or for birds, a shotgun), rather than a weapon that, as Sean Connery’s Raizuli would say, “fires promiscuously.” A matter of sportsmanship. For home defense, a pistol seems far more practical than a long gun, even a carbine.

But then I’m not trying to sell “modern sporting rifle” to the public.

Here’s the core of the article’s argument:

But the AR-15 is not ideal for the hunting and home-defense uses that the NRA’s Keene cited today. Though it can be used for hunting, the AR-15 isn’t really a hunting rifle. Its standard .223 caliber ammunition doesn’t offer much stopping power for anything other than small game. Hunters themselves find the rifle controversial, with some arguing AR-15-style rifles empower sloppy, “spray and pray” hunters to waste ammunition. (The official Bushmaster XM15 manual lists the maximum effective rate of fire at 45 rounds per minute.) As one hunter put it in the comments section of an article on americanhunter.org, “I served in the military and the M16A2/M4 was the weapon I used for 20 years. It is first and foremost designed as an assault weapon platform, no matter what the spin. A hunter does not need a semi-automatic rifle to hunt, if he does he sucks, and should go play video games. I see more men running around the bush all cammo’d up with assault vests and face paint with tricked out AR’s. These are not hunters but wannabe weekend warriors.”

In terms of repelling a home invasion—which is what most people mean when they talk about home defense—an AR-15-style rifle is probably less useful than a handgun. The AR-15 is a long gun, and can be tough to maneuver in tight quarters. When you shoot it, it’ll overpenetrate—sending bullets through the walls of your house and possibly into the walls of your neighbor’s house—unless you purchase the sort of ammunition that fragments on impact. (This is true for other guns, as well, but, again, the thing with the AR-15 is that it lets you fire more rounds faster.)

AR-15-style rifles are very useful, however, if what you’re trying to do is sell guns. In a recent Forbes article, Abram Brown reported that “gun ownership is at a near 20-year high, generating $4 billion in commercial gun and ammunition sales.” But that money’s not coming from selling shotguns and bolt-action rifles to pheasant hunters. In its 2011 annual report, Smith & Wesson Holding Corporation announced that bolt-action hunting rifles accounted for 6.6 percent of its net sales in 2011 (down from 2010 and 2009), while modern sporting rifles (like AR-15-style weapons) accounted for 18.2 percent of its net sales. The Freedom Group’s 2011 annual report noted that the commercial modern sporting rifle market grew at a 27 percent compound annual rate from 2007 to 2011, whereas the entire domestic long gun market only grew at a 3 percent rate…

Just before that excerpt, Peters cited what I suspect is the biggest appeal of the AR-15: “because carrying it around makes you look like a badass.”

Indeed.

‘Demand a Plan’ actors part of problem?

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My favorite celebrity Twitter follower, Adam Baldwin, brings my attention to the above video, which is an answer to the below video, in which various Hollywood types demand a plan for ending gun violence.

Ouch. As a demonstration of just how pervasive gun violence is in our popular culture, the answering video packs a lot of punch…

The Jeffersonian notion of ‘militia’ didn’t work all that well out in the real world

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General Brock was mortally wounded, but his redcoats won the Battle of Queenston Heights.

On a previous thread about the Second Amendment, I promised to comment further on the notion that the Framers had of a militia made up of a well-armed citizenry.

I got to thinking about it because of this column in The Wall Street Journal on Friday. It’s purpose was to argue, on that conflict’s bicentennial, that the War of 1812 was more important than many people believe. It did so ably enough. An excerpt:

First, the war validated American independence. The new republic had been buffeted between the two great powers of the age. Great Britain had accepted the fact of American independence only grudgingly…

Thus historians have sometimes called the War of 1812 the second war of American independence.

Second, it called into question the utopian approach to international relations. As president, Thomas Jefferson had rejected Federalist Party calls for a robust military establishment. He argued that the U.S. could achieve its goals by strictly peaceful means, and that if those failed, he could force the European powers to respect American rights by withholding U.S. trade.

Jefferson’s second term demonstrated the serious shortcomings of his thinking… As a result of the War of 1812, American statesmen realized that to survive in a hostile world, the U.S. would have to adopt measures, including the use of military power and traditional diplomacy, that doctrinaire republicanism abhorred.

Third, the conduct of the war exploded the republican myth of the civilian militia’s superiority to a professional military. Thus, during the three decades after the War of 1812, the Army would adopt generally recognized standards of training, discipline and doctrine. It would create branch schools, e.g., schools of infantry, cavalry and artillery.

It’s that third item that I call y’all’s attention to in particular.

The Jeffersonians, among whom we for most purposes can count leading Framer James Madison, had an image in their minds of what government in general should be, which in a word one would say minimal. It was close to the ideal that libertarians still embrace today. We were to be a nation of independent yeoman farmers, each of whom looked after himself, and should the need for national defense arise, these doughty free men would come together spontaneously to drive away the invader.

Consequently, Jefferson opposed both a standing army and a navy, for anything other than coastal defense.

It is in that context that the Second Amendment makes the most sense. If those citizens were to be any use in a militia, they needed to be armed, and to have some personal experience with firearms.

But it didn’t take long at all for history to teach us the utter inadequacy of the Jeffersonian ideal of an armed citizenry being the only defense we needed. In Jefferson’s own time as president, he discovered the need to project power far beyond our coast, against the Barbary pirates. Our young Navy and its Marine contingent came in very handy in that instance.

But it took the War of 1812, “Mr. Madison’s War,” to demonstrate how useless untrained or lightly trained militia, with an unprofessional officer corps, was against the army of a superpower.

We got spanked by the redcoats, in one land encounter after another. The Brits burned Washington. Until the Battle of New Orleans — which unbeknownst to the combatants occurred after the war was over — the irregular American troops were humiliated time and again. If not for the occasionally sea victory, in single-frigate-versus-single-frigate actions (which, until Philip Broke’s big win off Boston Harbor, totally demoralized the Royal Navy, accustomed as it was to dominating the French), there would have been little to give heart to Americans during most of the course of the war.

Being reminded of all this led me to an interesting train of thought, as follows: The constitutional justification for universal gun ownership, a well-regulated militia, was shown within a generation to be a deeply flawed model of national defense.

From then on, American history saw a fairly steady march toward maintaining professional military forces, led by a professional officers. The notion of the citizen-soldier is far from dead, but it’s highly amended. We created a mighty force out of the civilian population in World War II, but they were trained up to effectiveness by a core of experienced professionals. And today’s National Guard contains some of the most thoroughly trained individuals in our overall defense establishment. Technology has made warfighting such a specialized enterprise that no one expects anyone to be an effective soldier just because he owned a rifle growing up.

Oh, one footnote, from that same column. I thought the South Carolina angle intriguing:

Many of these military reforms were the work of John C. Calhoun, who proved to be one of the most innovative and effective secretaries of war (which was the title of the cabinet officer before 1947, when it was changed to secretary of defense).

Early in the war, our only victories were at sea. Here, USS Constitution defeats HMS Guerriere.

Surprise! The NRA concedes nothing

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Earlier in the week, we saw this release from the NRA:

National Rifle Association of America is made up of four million moms and dads, sons and daughters—and we were shocked, saddened and heartbroken by the news of the horrific and senseless murders in Newtown. Out of respect for the families, and as a matter of common decency, we have given time for mourning, prayer and a full investigation of the facts before commenting. The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions to help make sure this never happens again. The NRA is planning to hold a major news conference in the Washington, DC area on Friday, December 21.

… which kind of made it sound like the gun lobby, sensing a change in mood in the country, even among some traditional allies, was willing to concede something, give some ground, agree to something it would never have agreed to before. I mean, that’s what “The NRA is prepared to offer meaningful contributions” sounds like to most people.

Fat chance.

Here’s what they came up with today:

WASHINGTON—The nation’s most powerful gun-rights lobby called Friday for armed security guards in schools, saying that children had been left vulnerable in their classrooms.

Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, said that “the monsters and the predators of the world” have exploited the fact that schools are gun-free zones. Other important institutions—from banks to airports to sports stadiums—are protected with armed security, he said, but this country has left students defenseless.

So basically, their response to the nation’s concern over all those guns out there is… more guns. That, and gun-lover buzz phrases: “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” It would never occur to the NRA that maybe, just maybe, an even better solution would be to keep the bad guy from getting a gun to begin with. There’s a whole lot less crossfire that way, for one thing.

Mind you, I’m not entirely against the idea of armed officers in schools. Mainly because, as I’ve said before, I think the likelihood of gun control measures that would really, truly keep guns out of the hands of bad guys is next to nil. It’s an economic problem. There are just too many guns out there chasing too many tragedies. Think chaos theory gone mad.

But I also think that’s not going to happen. For every extreme gun nut out there — the kind who sits up late oiling and stroking his weapons and whispering pet names to them, and thinks government exists to threaten his “freedoms” — there’s a corresponding gunophobe who goes weak in the knees at the very sight of anything that looks like a firearm, who gets chills down the spine at the idea of being within range of one, even in the hands of cops. And a lot of those folks in the latter groups have little kids in school, and would have an absolute stroke at the idea of any sort of firearms in the vicinity of their children. (And this week, it’s a little hard to argue with their emotional response.)

Beyond that, though, my real objection is this: The NRA’s utter unwillingness to say, “Here’s something we’re willing to give up.” This was a moment for doing that. Something, anything, however marginal or minimal in impact, that said “fewer guns” rather than “more guns.”

But the folks at the gun lobby seem to be genetically incapable of that. Or something.

A communitarian view on gun control

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I thought y’all might be interested in this perspective on gun control from Amitai Etzioni, who is sort of the godfather of the rather modest communitarian movement in this country. An excerpt:

We should not wait for our elected officials, in President Obama’s good words, “to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” We should do our share. One way to proceed is to mark our homes, apartments and condos, with a “gun free” sign. Parents should notify their friends that they would be reluctant to send their child over for a play date unless the home was safe from guns. Residential communities should pass rules that ban bringing guns onto their premises, clearly marking them as gun free.

Anyone who puts up such signs will become an ambassador for gun control, because they are sure to be challenged by gun advocates to explain their anti-gun positions. Here are some pointers they may wish to use against the typical pro-gun talking points.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”

• Tragically, it is the case that there will always be dangerous individuals, but they can kill a lot more with easy access to guns. On the same day as the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, a knife-wielding man targeted a primary school in a Chinese village. Twenty-two children and one adult were wounded, but none were killed.

“Guns deter crimes and save lives.”

• Of the 30,000 gun deaths in America every year, only 200 are caused by self-defense. Studies have shown that a higher rate of gun ownership is correlated with higher rates of homicide, suicide and unintentional shootings. The U.S. has a firearms homicide rate 19.5 times higher than the combined rate of 22 high income countries with similar non-lethal crime and violence rates…

Note the emphasis on community-based solutions — starting in one’s home and workplace, engaging one’s neighbors in debate. Very much based in faith in engaged communities.Very different from the “50 percent plus one” forced solutions that left and right tend to jockey for…

Not that a communitarian would object to more reasonable laws regarding guns. As Etzioni says, “No right is absolute. Even the right to free speech, considered the strongest of them all, is limited. You cannot shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theater — precisely because it endangers life.”

The hopelessness of discussing school shootings

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OK, so we have another mass shooting in a school, and this one may be a record-breaker, in the K-12 category. Twenty children dead, several adults.

We’ve had the obligatory statement from the president. There’s no reason for the president of the United States to comment on such things, as it has nothing whatsoever to do with his job description. After the Columbine shootings, I wrote about the absurdity of reporters standing outside the White House for hours waiting for the president to say something. But it’s expected now. People don’t think about what the president’s job is and isn’t; he’s expected to be emoter in chief.

So he said something, and he shed tears. He might as well. I mean, what do we expect him to do? He indicated his intention to do something:

President Obama, in one of his most emotional speeches as president, wiped away tears as he spoke about the shooting from the White House’s briefing room. “Our hearts are broken today,” Obama said. He promised “meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this,” but did not say specifically what he might do….

What would he do, indeed?

I don’t normally post about stuff like this because there’s really nothing helpful to say. These things fill me with hopelessness. The only thing that would do anything to prevent such events in the future would be a level of gun control that would mean changing unshakable reality in this country by 180 degrees.

Understand me — I’m not proposing anything, because I don’t know of anything that would both solve the problem and also be achievable.

Here’s why it’s so hopeless: Even if, by some miracle, we bypassed or reinterpreted the Second Amendment so as to allow for the strictest laws in the world regarding gun ownership, we still would not have solved anything. Which is why you don’t see me going around advocating gun control.

That’s because the guns would still exist. And the gun-rights people are right: If you outlaw guns, outlaws will still have guns. The problem is that there are just so many firearms out there in this country. Even in the most repressive, worst jackbooted nightmare for the gun rights people, with police rounding up all the guns they can lay their hands on, there would still be so many left that you would see incidents such as this school shooting still happening from time to time.

It’s an economic problem — too many guns chasing too many potential shooting victims. There are at least a couple of hundred million guns in the country — I’ve seen statistics suggesting there are 90 for every 100 people. And of households that have one firearm, more than 60 percent have multiple guns.

You know what this situation reminds me of? Slavery before 1860, and why it was such an intractable problem for the country. No, gun lovers, I’m not saying it’s the moral equivalent or anything like that. I’m saying the dynamics of the political challenge are similar.

There were about 4 million slaves in the country when South Carolina seceded. Here in SC, there were more slaves than free people. Slaveholders were so invested in the institution that there was no possible political or legal solution that would have induced them to give up their slaves. The position of white elites in this and other states (but most especially this one; SC had always been the most extreme on the issue) was essentially that you’d have to pry their slaves from their cold, dead hands. And that’s what happened. It took a war that killed more Americans than ALL of our other wars, from the Revolution through Iraq and Afghanistan, combined, to end slavery. And we’re still wrestling over the repercussions.

For Barack Obama, if he wanted to address the gun issue meaningfully, the political obstacles are very similar to those that faced Lincoln dealing with slavery. Lincoln had to spend the early months of his administration, the early months of the war, insisting to the world that he was NOT the abolitionist that the Southerners depicted him as. It’s not that he was pro-slavery; he was always opposed to it. But even well into the war itself, he saw abolition as a political impossibility. He and others saw the fact of those 4 million slaves as something they didn’t know how to deal with. It seemed unimaginable to many anti-slavery pols then that former slaves could just co-exist with former slaveholders in the future.

Obama is to gun-rights people, in a way, what Lincoln was to the slaveholders. He didn’t run on a gun-control platform, and has never made any serious proposals to limit gun rights, that I can recall. And yet I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that there has NEVER been a president of the United States as distrusted by gun-rights people — and I mean serious gun-rights people, the sort who would list the 2nd Amendment as a top concern.

For Barack Obama to step out and advocate anything that would put a serious crimp in gun availability in this country would create a political backlash that — while it wouldn’t be the same as secession (and the reaction would be more individualized than a state-by-state thing) — would probably outstrip anything sense, in terms of the sheer passion of the response.

It would be the most politically (and, frankly personally — the Secret Service would have a horrific new challenge on its hands) risky thing I’ve ever seen a president do in my adult lifetime.

Which is why I kind of doubt we’ll see it.

Which is why waiting for the president to say something about such things seems so hopelessly pointless…

First the DOR breach, now this

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My friend Paula Harper Bethea, who runs the state lottery, disclosed the following today to WLTX, which is billing this story as an exclusive:

Columbia, SC (WLTX) — News19 has learned SLED is investigating funds taken from at least one South Carolina Education Lottery account.

SCEL’s executive director Paula Harper Bethea, tells News19 that accounting discrepancies have been found and an investigation is underway.

Sources tell News19 the dollar amount is six figures. We’re told that the money has since been returned, but charges are still likely to be filed.

Bethea stressed to News19 that this involved the finance side of the lottery and that “at no time was the integrity or the security of the central gaming system or any of our games affected.”

SLED would only confirm that an investigation into the accounting discrepancies is underway and would not release any other information.

First somebody gets into our private data at DOR, now somebody (else?) gets into the lottery till. What next?

Mayor, chief address violence in Five Points

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John Monk had the right idea with that hat. I realized I had a sunburn in the part in my hair when I got back to the office.

That picture of cops lined up in front of the Five Points fountain, which you see as the new header on my main page, was the backdrop for the news conference that Mayor Steve Benjamin and Police Chief Randy Scott held this afternoon to address violence in the neighborhood.

The headline, which news outlets Tweeted right away: One Stanley McBride, 21, has been arrested and charged with second-degree assault and battery in an incident over the weekend. I believe it’s the same incident as on the video, but not 100 percent certain. The way the incident was described certainly sounded like it.

Being sought are two others, Michael Jermel Kendrix, 21, and John Cornelius Sumner, 21. Both are described as Benedict College students. The release I got from the chief doesn’t describe him as a student, but says police first spoke with McBride on the Benedict campus.

Beyond that, the mayor and chief used the presser — where they took questions from the small crowd of citizens assembled as well as the media — to try to assure Columbians that they’re dealing appropriately with a series of incidents with not only public safety implications, but some pretty ominous racial overtones.

Some highlights from the event:

More than one reference was made by the mayor to “more boots on the ground… as you see in evidence behind” him, referring to the officers lined up before the fountain. We can expect to see “more aggressive enforcement.”
“Five Points is safe, but it can be safer,” said the mayor.
Sensitive to criticism from those who would complain about resources being used on Five Points at the expense of the rest of the city both mayor and chief stressed their commitment to enforcement citywide, saying we should expect more “aggressive enforcement” everywhere.
Both men said the blame wasn’t all on the kids; indicating there were some bad actors — a “small number” among bar owners, who have overserved the underage. I asked whether he was speaking of specific proprietors, and whether they knew of the city’s displeasure. Yes and yes, said the mayor. “We’re gonna shut you down,” he said.
The mayor’s message to “anybody who wants to make trouble: CPD is here and we’re ready for them.”
The mayor had a complaint, however — if you want enforcement, you have to communicate with the police. He said he didn’t know how many video phones there were trained on that one beating the other night, but he knows there were only two calls to 911 — and the police were on the scene before they were received.
The mayor added a caveat to the tough talk: Even with 100 officers on the scene, they’re not easily able to contain 10,000 revelers after a football game.
Asked about loitering, the mayor said, “we will move people along,” but indicated there’d be no arrests unless crimes were committed.
A number of references were made to the involvement of the CPD’s gang unit — but rather than that being a response to a known gang problem, it was presented as a way of determining whether there is gang involvement, and if so, the extent of it.
One nicely dressed young white guy who lives in the neighborhood indicated he needed more assurances, saying, “I need to be able to tell my wife that we don’t have to move to Lexington.” The man added that there was a definite difference since he’d moved in from Shandon 18 months ago.
Noelle Phillips of The State asked about race. The mayor said the things one says, as a lawyer, to that: That “crime knows no color” and “We are going to enforce the laws equally and fairly.” Beyond that, the racial buzz that’s been underlying this thing all week was not outwardly expressed.

I spoke with a couple of Five Points merchants who were there before the mayor arrived. James D. McCallister, owner of Loose Lucy’s, made an interesting point that I later heard echoed by another in the crowd. He said he was an advocate of the ban on indoor smoking, but it’s had an unintended consequence: The creation of a permanent sidewalk party, which is large and unstable, especially on big football weekends. Adding to the problem is that kids who are too young to get into the bars are joining that sidewalk crowd, adding to the volatility.

Debbie McDaniel, owner of Revente and Sid and Nancy, said she is just “sick at heart” over the violence. Debbie, you may remember, has shown her support for the police in the past by purchasing two state-of-the-art flak vests for officers who patrol the district. Debbie lamented that we didn’t have these problems, to this extent, when she and I were young. That sort of led to a free-association suggestion: “Make weed legal. Let these kids smoke dope and not drink.” She immediately told me not to use that, then laughed and said what the hell, go ahead…

This was about 10 minutes before the presser. The crowd got bigger.

‘It’s a word. That’s it. That’s all…’

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Speaking of words, I need to warn you of the use of offensive language in this video. Which, like the one I posted earlier, I cannot embed. (All together now: I. Hate. Facebook.)

But since all sorts of strong opinions are being expressed back and forth on the violence in Five Points, I thought I’d share this one, which is… very passionate, to say the least.

I’d not agreeing with this guy, and I’m not disagreeing with him. I just thought this was one of the most interesting comments I’d heard so far. I like it because it’s idiosyncratic. It doesn’t fit into any boxes, at all. Just a man with a very strong opinion.

I apologize again, in advance, for his language, which is of a sort that I don’t normally allow here. But I thought I’d point you to a part of the dialogue you might have missed…

Video of beating, apparently in Five Points

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At least, that’s what this is reputed to be. Sorry I can’t seem to imbed it here, but just click on the image at right and you’ll get to the clip (I love YouTube; I hate Facebook).

What you’ll see is an incident that may be the one described in this excerpt from the news story:

An assault that happened about 45 minutes after the gunfire also has received attention on social media.

At 2 a.m., a man was assaulted by a group of seven to 10 other men in the 700 block of Harden Street near Pop’s N.Y. Pizza and Bey’s, a bar. In that report, witnesses told police that the man walked out of one of those establishments when the group of about 10 men attacked him.

The group pushed the victim against a door and punched him until he fell, according to the incident report. Once he was on the ground, one or two of the attackers continued to kick him in the head and chest. All of the attackers ran away just before police arrived, the report said.

The victim had severe cuts and extreme swelling on his face and possible damage to his skull, the report said. He was taken to Palmetto Health Richland.

That was not the first group assault of the night…

That story dealt with violence getting out of control late in the evening in Five Points — two such beatings and a shooting the same night.

The good merchants of Five Points would like the local constabulary to put a stop to it. I heartily second that. No, the police can’t prevent everything, but it occurs to me that attackers can’t “run away just before the police arrive” if the police are already there.

The Boy Scout abuse report

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Slatest brings this LAT report to our attention:

Hundreds of alleged child molesters were not reported to police by Boy Scouts of America officials over two decades, often giving the abusers a chance to quietly resign rather than risk a hit to the organization’s reputation. The Los Angeles Times reviewed 1,600 of the Boy Scouts’ confidential “perversion files” dated from 1970 to 1991 and found more than 500 cases in which officials learned about abuse directly. In around 80 percent of those cases, there is no record of the Scouts reporting the claims of abuse to authorities and in more than 100 cases there seems to be clear evidence of efforts to hide the abuse. Worst of all, there are clear signs that some of the abusers went on to hurt other children.

Lawyers for the Boy Scouts have been working hard to keep the “perversion files,” which the organization has used since 1919, out of the public eye. Yet as more of them become public, the Boy Scouts could soon face a wave of litigation across the country, although in many states statutes of limitation will prevent the victims from suing. Boy Scout officials insist they’ve improved their internal process to protect children, noting that since 2010 they require officials to report even the suspicion of abuse to authorities.

Which suggests several things:

Golly, I didn’t know so many Boy Scout leaders were Catholic priests! Because, you know, to hear some people talk, that’s the only group that engages in this sort of behavior — even though the evidence indicates that this perversion is no more prevalent among Catholics than among any other group.
I had always sort of supposed that the failure to take prosecutorial action on the part of the Church was because of the nature of the organization — that it simply isn’t geared toward punishment of wrongdoing, that it is oriented toward hearing confessions and then granting absolution, however heinous the sin. The Scouts’ failure to report these cases indicates that the problem of letting abusers go free is a more universal problem.
Social conservatives will no doubt respond that the mean ol’ media are picking on the Scouts, as they do the Church, on account of it not being on board with this or that “liberal agenda.” And we’re off to the Kultukampf races…
And then there’s my own difficulty in ever believing such statistics, which “realists” will scoff at. But I just have always found it difficult to believe that there’s even one person on the planet that would want to sexually abuse children. Much less 500 of them in one organization. I’m not saying it’s not true. I’m just saying it’s kind of mind-blowing.

‘So remember, guys: Don’t use your phones…’

What’s really wrong with Todd Akin

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All the moralizing on this previous post about the work Wesley Donehue is doing for this month’s pariah, Todd Akin, goads me to share what I actually think of Mr. “Legitimate Rape.” Even though I know it’s going to make pretty much everybody mad at me.

Well, here goes…

To begin with, Akin is one of those people who makes you furious because he’s on your side of an issue (if you’re me), and he’s giving people on the other side of the issue more than enough excuse to dismiss you and all who think like you (or, once again, to be more accurate, me) as idiots or evil or both.

The issue here being abortion, not rape. The thing (I think) I agree with him on, that is.

As for being an idiot or evil, well, I reject both with regard to myself, although of course I’m not perfect. With regard to Akin… I don’t think he’s evil, although he possesses a certain very common character flaw (which will be my point, when I get to it) in an extreme form. And as to the idiot part… well, my wife often calls me down for calling people idiots, which is one of my character flaws — and after all, we are specifically enjoined from doing so, and very sternly warned about it, in the Bible.

But… confession time here… when I heard about what Akin said, and then saw a picture of him, one of my first thoughts was, Yes, he looks stupid enough to have done that. Which I know is wrong, to leap to such a conclusion just from looking at someone. I am in fact quite embarrassed to confess it. But there it is.

Basically, Akin tried to make a point that would have been extremely objectionable to most people even if he had put it in the most diplomatic way possible. And then, he managed to put it as offensively as possible. This suggests a sort of genius for offending, but again, I look at him and I think he only stumbled on this perfect combination by accident.

Neither I, nor I suspect his most vehement political opponents (although I could be wrong here) thinks that Akin meant to say that any sort of rape is “legitimate,” in the sense of being licit, or a good thing. So we can set that aside. (And yes, I know I’m setting aside a whole, complex discussion about how some people reject that all cases of rape are “real” rape, but I’m trying to address a separate point, and believe me, this post is going to be long enough.)

And of course, I think he was just trying to defend a political position that I share — the notion that if one truly believes that abortion takes a human life, one cannot defend exemptions for rape or even incest.

And yet, I, too, am deeply offended by what he said. I see it as both foolish and wrong. But then, I think his sin is a very common one.

Finally I get to my point: Like many, many people across the political spectrum, Akin sought to rationalize away any human cost of his own political position. What he did reflects both sloppy thinking and a sort of moral cowardice. And it’s a function of the absolutism that infests our politics today.

Akin and I agree that you can’t have exemptions for rape when you’re talking about a human life. That innocent unborn human didn’t commit the rape, and condemning him or her to death for it is unjust in the extreme. I’m deeply opposed to the death penalty even for murderers, but I can certainly see more justice in that than I can in this.

But here’s where Akin and I diverge: He wants to explain away the consequence of this position. He wants to say, well, if it’s really rape, then the woman won’t get pregnant. Which is amazingly foolish and ignorant, but which seems to arise from a very human desire to believe that no innocent human being will suffer because of the position I’m taking.

I know better. I’m not going to shy away for a moment (I hope) from the fact that the human cost to a woman caught in this kind of situation is horrific, beyond even imagining. I can’t even begin to think of what to say or do that would ease the suffering of a woman in such a situation (aside from such weak expedients as providing material support). I don’t want her to be in that situation, any more than the pro-choice person does. It awakens in me powerfully strong protective impulses, and vindictive ones, including a determination that the person responsible for it must be punished to the fullest extent of the law (while, at the same time, knowing that no amount of punishment could possibly erase this woman’s pain). I am fully aware of the terrible odds her child will face — not only not being wanted by his or her mother, but being the material embodiment of the most horrible moment in her life.

But none of that justifies killing the child, either before or after he or she is born. Not in any truly moral balance that I am capable of conceiving. As much as I understand the pro-choice advocate’s desire for a magic solution that makes at least this one facet of the crime go away for the woman, I can’t see any way that that expedient is justified in a society that is just. It in fact adds another moral horror to that which already so unjustly exists.

It’s not comfortable to face and acknowledge the additional pain to which having to bear this child would condemn a rape victim, but I see no moral alternative to doing so. Akin? He wants to cop out on it.

But that’s a common impulse. Too seldom do any of us face up to the very real consequences of the positions we take. We like to believe that our attitudes are all to the good, that nothing bad would happen if only the things we believe were acted upon. And in the take-no-prisoners absolutism of today’s politics — in which each side wants to see itself as all good, and the other side as all bad — people regularly paint themselves into corners trying to make their positions look as good as possible. And to make themselves feel good about those positions. There are a lot of Todd Akins out there.

For instance… and here’s where I make everybody mad… there are those on the opposite side of the abortion issue who rationalize away the human life that is destroyed by abortion. They say it isn’t a human being at all, even that it’s nothing more than a random collection of cells, and ridding oneself of them has no more moral weight than sloughing off dead skin.

(Not all do this, of course. Right off the bat, I can think of pro-choice friends who have persuaded me that they are fully cognizant that abortion takes an innocent human life and that it is deeply wrong — but that the imperative of choice overrides it. This chills my blood — just as my antiwar friends are chilled by my advocacy of some military actions in spite of my pro-life beliefs — but I can’t criticize them for failing to face reality.)

They say this — that the fetus is not a human being — because they would find the moral burden of believing their position results in the destruction of innocent human life even more unbearable than Akin would find it to contemplate the suffering of a rape victim. (Now, before all my pro-choice friends shout that they say it because they believe it, let me quickly interject that I know you believe it. I just, personally, find it very hard to believe that you would believe such an unlikely thing without a powerful human need to rationalize, which is related to the fact that you are a good and caring person.)

Now to an empiricist, of course, there’s a difference between Akin’s rationalization and the it’s-not-a-human-being rationalization — one that I readily acknowledge. After all, you can physically, scientifically prove that Akin is wrong in his fantasy about true rape not leading to pregnancy. Whereas science can’t prove or disprove that a fetus is human — no matter how strongly I believe it unlikely that smart people would assert that it isn’t, in the absence of this powerful cause for rationalization. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that similar mechanisms are at play.

This dynamic translates to other issues, of course. There are those who advocate war, and blind themselves to the worst aspects of the human cost — such as the deaths of noncombatants, at the most extreme end of that spectrum. On the other side are those who are so opposed to war and its horrific human costs that they try to rationalize away the cause for war — minimizing the evils of the Saddam Hussein regime (how many times have I read that we invaded an inoffensive country that wasn’t doing anything to anybody, as though it were Switzerland?), or the costs of a precipitate withdrawal from Afghanistan, allowing the Taliban to rise again.

There are costs both to acting militarily and not acting militarily, and it’s wrong to blind yourself and try to wave them away. For my part, seen as I am here as the bloodthirsty warmonger, I try never to turn my mind from the horrors of war, and I recoil from efforts to make war seem costless just as much as I reject attempts to paint it as never worth engaging in. And for me, the horrible thing about war is not just that innocent civilians, or one’s own soldiers, get killed and maimed. Every armed enemy’s death also diminishes us. (I’m reading right now a phenomenal book about the cost of killing in war, Dave Grossman’s On Killing. It powerfully reinforces something I have long believed — that the greatest price we ask of a soldier is not that he die for his country; the most awful thing we ask of him, the thing that costs him the most, is expecting him to kill for his country.)

Well, I could go on and on. Actually, I have. There are other places I could go with this, carrying this phenomenon out of the realm of life-and-death issues. I could get into how, for instance, in this absolutist political atmosphere, neither those who want more government spending nor those who advocate shrinking government small enough to drown in a bathtub like to face that there are tradeoffs to their positions… but I think this is enough for how…

From ‘legitimate rape’ to the Country Club

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Just a quick post to give y’all a chance to comment on today’s two main trending stories. First this:

Rep. Todd Akin said Monday that he will not give in to calls for him to end his Missouri Senate campaign after his controversial comments about “legitimate rape.”

“I’m not a quitter. My belief is we’re going to move this thing forward,” he said during an appearance Monday afternoon on Mike Huckabee’s radio show. “To quote my friend John Paul Jones, I’ve not yet begun to fight.”

Akin also said he still sees himself as the right candidate to take on Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), even as many Republicans have begun to doubt it. He apologized for his remarks but said it doesn’t mean he should end his campaign.

“I feel just as strongly as ever that my background and ability will be an asset in replacing Claire McCaskill and restoring some sanity in government,” Akin said. “Just because someone makes a mistake doesn’t make them useless.”

Akin has found himself in hot water after saying in an interview airing Sunday that “legitimate rape” rarely causes pregnancy. Akin was explaining his no-exceptions policy on abortion…

And then this:

The Augusta National Golf Club, home of The Masters tournament, said Monday it had admitted female members for the first time, following years of criticism both public and private over its stubbornly-held policy of admitting only men as members.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and South Carolina investment banker Darla Moore were both invited and accepted membership, golf’s most prominent club said in a statement. The club’s next season opens in October.

The step breaks with the 79-year-old private club’s practice of admitting only men, who make up a veritable who’s who of corporate America. The club has been under pressure from corporations, some members, a prominent women’s organization, and most recently President Barack Obama, who said through a spokesman before this year’s Masters tournament in April that he thought women should be invited to join….

I congratulate Darla and Ms. Rice, assuming of course that they wanted to join. If they invited me, of course, I’d have to refuse in light of the Marx rule (that would sound so much better than admitting I couldn’t afford the dues). I’m not sure whether this changes anything in the larger picture, unless they didn’t have ladies’ tees before. But as I said, I’m happy for the new members, especially since I know one of them.

I am not capable of thinking like a feminist or anyone else who is into Identity Politics, but I’m imagining that if I were a feminist, I’d be looking at today as sort of a mixed bag. You win some ground, you lose some ground.

No, scratch that. Given the general reaction to Akin, it looks more like a win-win.

One last thought — someone needs to break it to Nikki Haley that Darla got in and she didn’t…

Homicide continues to be intraracial

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There will always be those who perceive violence in racial terms, from whites who are angrily convinced that the media underplay what they perceive as an epidemic of black-on-white violence to blacks who immediately call a protest rally when a Trayvon Martin is killed by a man with light complexion.

So it’s helpful now and then to take another look at the actuality:

Bureau of Justice Statistics data show that from 1976 to 2005, white victims were killed by white defendants 86% of the time and black victims were killed by blacks 94% of the time.

Then there is the matter of who is dying. Although the U.S. murder rate has been dropping for years, an analysis of homicide data by The Wall Street Journal found that the number of black male victims increased more than 10%, to 5,942 in 2010 from 5,307 in 2000.

Overall, more than half the nation’s homicide victims are African-American, though blacks make up only 13% of the population. Of those black murder victims, 85% were men, mostly young men…

The carnage is rendered more tragic, although not in the Greek sense, by the fact that most killings are over “nonsense,” as Hillar Moore, the district attorney for East Baton Rouge Parish, put it in the above-referenced story.

Did video poker kill Tom Sponseller?

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Judge Joe Anderson (my fellow Rotarian) says Rachel Duncan can’t be held responsible for Tom Sponseller’s suicide. And I think he’s probably right. A good, dispassionate ruling.

Was the 2½-year sentence adequate? I’m sort of torn about that. On the one hand, I have a problem with crowding our prisons with anyone who isn’t violent, for any amount of time. Far more to the point is the restitution she’s been ordered to pay when she gets out. If I wanted anything to be harsher, it would have been upping that $100-a-month minimum, seeing how at that rate it would take her 306 to pay back what she stole. This sort of case poses the question we so often face — aside from prison, how do we punish people who can’t afford to make monetary restitution?

But set that aside. Today I want to talk about video poker, which Ms. Duncan blames for her gambling addiction.

Make no mistake, I hold her responsible for what she did. But I do wonder whether she would have decided (over and over and over again) to do it had she not been in South Carolina in late 90s.

I had occasion to read up on gambling addiction a good bit back when that was one of our state’s hottest topics, and the thing about video poker is that it tended to ensnare people, particularly women, who would not have become gamblers through other forms of gaming. It was a combination of factors. First, if women are going to gamble, then tend to go for the more solitary forms that have a minimum of social interaction — which means they have less social stigma to overcome as they’re getting hooked. Then, there was something hypnotic and seductive about the electronic form of the game — the flashing lights, the instant gratification.

That would explain why such an addict might move from video poker, when it was no longer easily available, to online gambling. As did Ms. Duncan. No sports betting or poker night with the guys. Just a personal, private dive down the rabbit hole.

Now, you have to seek out video poker or its close relatives. Back when she got started, it was everywhere. In convenience stores, bars, restaurants — all over the place, just waiting for people with the right weakness.

As I said, she stole, and that is entirely her fault. But I do wonder whether she would have ever wanted to steal if it hadn’t been for the ubiquity of video poker at that time…

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