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David Harcourt
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| Joined: | 12 Jul 2006 |
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Posted: 19 Apr 2007 01:08 am |
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Commentators, both inside and outside America, are united on one point: the murders of 32 students and staff at Virginia Tech are going to make no difference whatsoever to American attitudes towards gun control.
Apparently this student was able to purchase his handgun without difficulty. No one asked - either themselves or the student himself - why a 23-year-old student needed a powerful concealable weapon. To have done so would have infringed on his civil liberties, just as any proposal to restrict the sale of such weapons would infringe the civil liberties of all Americans.
As one (non-American) observer remarked, the problem is that Americans see their unfettered access to guns as a right whose value is infinitely greater than the negative consequences of such a right. Those negative consequences are, after all, occasional. Of necessity, they involve someone else. Most of the time they are theoretical, whereas guns are actual, real, visceral. Those who advocate gun control are trying to trade a bird on the bush for two birds in the hand: the unreal for the real. They have no chance.
Are Americans strange, or what? Almost universally, they sincerely believe that theirs is the finest country on earth - the finest country which has ever existed on earth, come to that - and yet they make these extravagant claims while living in a country where:
* state murder (capital punishment) is carried out on a scale equalled only in China
* illegal drug use is so pervasive that it has become invisible, in the sense that it is something which Americans have decided they can no longer see (because they no longer wish to see it)
* fantastic personal wealth coexists with third world poverty (how, for example, would any other country in the world have responded to a disaster within its borders like New Orleans? could the obscene farce which has followed possibly have occurred anywhere but in America?)
* a majority of Americans apparently believe that their country has the right to pursue its international interests by any means available to it, including:
- the invasion of foreign countries
- imprisonment without trial of foreign nationals
- and prisoner abuse including the more or less indiscriminate use of torture
I am reluctantly coming around to the view that Americans have got themselves into an ideological lock from which they may never be able to extricate themselves; a lock in which the fantasy world which they have constructed over 140 years or so has become more real than life itself (140 years because I date most of America's current ills from the end of the Civil War, since which period its governments and citizens have been unable in their own eyes to do wrong in their pursuit of individual and collective excellence).
Here is how James Alan Fox, a "professor of criminal justice", concluded a piece for the Los Angeles Times following the Virginia Tech murders:
It should give us some degree of consolation to know that these events are exceedingly rare. But they still occur, and they are among the sad and tragic prices we pay for the kind of open, modern, democratic society we live in.
In other words, Mr Fox is saying, it is inconsistent with openness, modernity and democracy to ask why a 23-year-old student should have the right to purchase a powerful handgun.
Yeah, right.
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rupert-bear
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| Joined: | 15 Jun 2006 |
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Posted: 21 Apr 2007 11:07 am |
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The powerful (and foolish) gun lobby claims the right to carry guns to defend themselves is enshrined in the constitution. However, I understand it was part of the 2nd amendment to the constitution. That means the constitution can be changed, and one assumes such changes occur when changes in society dictate that the majority of people vote for such a constitutional change.
Bearing in mind that the majority of guns are held by a minority of people, the reason an amendment is never seriously proposed by the Democrats is because the "democracy" in USA gives significant power to minority / fringe groups as opposed to the majority of normal people.
So is USA really a democracy? And is it that style of democracy they wish to impose on the rest of the world?
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 22 Apr 2007 01:17 am |
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rupert-bear wrote: ... the constitution can be changed, and one assumes such changes occur when changes in society dictate that the majority of people vote for such a constitutional change...
I read an article last week which stated that two-thirds of adult voters in the US are in favour of tougher gun control laws. It seems that what the majority wants in America is not always what the majority gets.
But is this very different from New Zealand? There have often been instances here where legislation has been passed, or proposed legislative change resisted, where the fact that the majority view was directly contrary to that of our legislators was perfectly plain. For example:
* For many years after capital punishment was abandoned as a practice here (which was some years before it was removed as a penalty from the Crimes Act), there was majority support for its use.
* Most New Zealanders opposed homosexual law reform in the 1970s. A signifcant minority today - led by the Catholic Church and small fundamentalist sects - advocates the recriminalisation of homosexuality.
* Most New Zealanders opposed the decriminalisation of prostitution. If anything, the proportion of those opposed to many aspects of this law change has increased since the law was changed.
* Most New Zealanders favour more liberal shop trading hours, believing that shops should be permitted to open when they consider it to be profitable to trade. In sharp contrast to its attitude towards many other attempts at significant social engineering, the Labour Government has been very conservative on this issue, because of its trade union connections.
And so on. Does this mean that New Zealand is any more or less democratic than America? I don't think so. A perfect democracy would be one where interest groups were unable to distort the political process to their advantage. It is very difficult to imagine what such a society would be like, but I can't help feeling that there is a real risk that we might not like it very much if we got it.
This doesn't mean that I support government by lobbies; just that a satisfactory alternative isn't immediately obvious to me.
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 22 Apr 2007 01:25 am |
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Another question which interests me is why some people invariably press for change, and others invariably oppose it.
We are all familiar with the kind of person who perceives all change as bad. There are lots of pejorative names for such people: stick-in-the-mud, bigot, zealot and so on.
But where are the pejorative names for people who believe that all change is good? Such people exist, believe me, and are particularly common in government in New Zealand, which is where I worked for twenty long years.
By the time I reached the end of my (highly undistinguished) career I was firmly convinced that most change is bad, and that all change entails costs - often many times larger than the putative benefits - which remain more or less invisible until change has taken place. At which point two facts invariably emerge:
* there are real, unintended and unimagined, costs in the change which has been made
* these costs are partly if not wholly borne by people who had had little or no say in the decisionmaking process
A better democracy than either we or the Americans have now would invest even more than we and they do in processes which seek to ensure that, so far as possible, the consquences of change are fully understood, and that everyone who is likely to be involved has a say - in proportion to the likely impact on them.
Across the road from my home in suburban Wellington, hundreds of miles from the place where the first gorse bush was planted in New Zealand, 150 or so years ago, a mass of gorse covers a steep bank. Many efforts have been made to kill, or merely suppress, this gorse but it springs back anew, seemingly refreshed after every attempt to exterminate it. Did you know that gorse seeds can survive for up to twenty years in the ground before they spring to life again?
Which leads me to the despised Resource Management Act. However much of a brake on progress the RMA may have been, the fact remains that had such legislation been in place in the 1960s the destruction of the Bolton Street Cemetery to make way for a motorway would not have been possible. There are probably worse examples of government vandalism in New Zealand, but I can't think of any.
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rupert-bear
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Posted: 22 Apr 2007 10:26 am |
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Grafton Cemetery in Auckland suffered the same fate in the late 60's. Reminds me of Joni Mitchell's song Big Yellow Taxi:
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique
And a swinging hot spot
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They took all the trees
Put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people
A dollar and a half just to see 'em
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Hey farmer farmer
Put away the D.D.T. now
Give me spots on my apples
But leave me the birds and the bees
Please!
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
Late last night
I heard my screen door slam
and a big yellow taxi
Took away my old man
Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
I said don't it always seem to go
that you dont know what you've got
Till it's gone
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
They paved paradise
And put up a parking lot
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David Harcourt
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Posted: 22 Mar 2008 09:44 pm |
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I see that I was wrong in one thing in this thread. It appears that a majority of New Zealanders - especially women - are happy to see existing restrictions on shop trading hours over the Easter weekend and at Christmas maintained into perpetuity.
How very odd this is.
No-one is compelling anyone else to shop, at Easter, on Christmas Day, or or any other day of the year.
Every proposal made to change the law includes a provision that the employees of enterprises which propose to open on these days may not be compelled to work on those days.
So where's the beef?
I am continually amazed at the extent to which irrational behaviour and views are not merely tolerated but venerated, as if it is everyone's right not merely to be dumb, but to have us participate in their dumbness with a smile on our face and a song in our heart.
Here's another example of this:
You can buy nothing in the United States for one cent. You can in fact buy very little in the United States for a dollar, but still the US Government still mints between seven and ten billion one cent coins every year. *
Frequent attempts have been made to get rid of the one cent coin. US Senator Jim Kolbe, a Republican from Arizona, tried to do this in 2001 with his "Legal Tender Modernization Act" and in 2006 with his Currency Overhaul for an Industrious Nation [COIN - geddit?] Act" but failed miserably on both occasions.
As Wikipedia notes:
Various commentators have suggested that the cent should be eliminated as a unit of currency for several reasons including that many Americans do not actually spend them, but rather only receive them in change at stores and proceed to return them to a bank for higher denomination currencies. Most modern vending machines do not accept cents, further diminishing their utility, and the production cost now exceeds the face value of the coin due to increasing metal prices. As of February 22, 2008, the price of copper is $3.7741 per pound and zinc is $1.1188 per pound. At these prices, the pre-1982 copper cent contains 2.49 US cents which makes them an attractive target for melting by people wanting to sell the metal at a profit. However, the United States Mint, in anticipation of this practice, implemented new regulations on December 14, 2006 which criminalize the melting of cents and nickels and place limits on export of the coins. Violators can be punished with a fine of up to $10,000 and/or imprisoned for a maximum of five years.
Reckoning the cost of the cent - or "penny", as many Americans prefer to call it - is extremely difficult. One economist has reckoned the cost to the economy as being roughly - very roughly - one billion dollars a year. **
That's one billion dollars a year that is not being spent on - well, you name it. Poverty relief. Health care. Foreign aid.
Only in America.
I reverence the small, insignicant things we all love, and old coins with personality are one of these things. As I'm sure I've related here before, when I was a child every handful of change was a potential adventure. Mixed in with the copper coins in one's change were halfpennies and pennies from Australia, Britain...sometimes even South Africa. And some of these coins were incredibly old - incredibly old to a child of ten or eleven, that is. When I was about that age I collected - from change received in the ordinary course of events - a set of pennies from 1860 to 1937. 1860! A coin nearly a hundred years old! And I got it in my change at the dairy!
But such intense aesthetic pleasures are not the whole story. The one and two cent coins had to go. Their purchasing power was effectively nil, just as the five cent coin's was, and the ten cent coin's is now. People are already declining to accept ten cent coins in change from me. "You keep it," they say, as if there's anything I can do with a ten cent coin beyond bundling them up every week or so and taking them into the bank.
And so it is with the US one cent coin, only there the problem is one with a different magnitude altogether, wouldn't you say?
Wikipedia has an article headed Efforts to eliminate the penny in the United States which is definitely worth a read. *** It notes that the only countries in the world which continue to issue one cent coins, or coins of equivalent or lower value, are Canada (!), the East Caribbean Dollar Board, Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Cayman Islands, Belize, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Namibia.
This reminds me of the group I belonged to when I went on a 17-week, USIS-sponsored tour of the United States twenty years ago. We called ourselves representatives of the "TPLCs" - the tin pot little countries. Only tin pot little countries should have one cent coins.
* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Mint_coin_production
** See http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2006/09/how-to-make-1-billion.html
*** See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_eliminate_the_penny_in_the_United_States
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