Oakland's gun buyback didn't work out quite as planned: "Fortunately the buyback did manage to get some guns off the street, too bad they were turned in by a bunch of senior citizens from an assisted living facility. "
Copyright © 2009 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All rights reserved.
MM,
way to cover the, entirely, useless..
why not, if you're allowed, delve into:
"It is obvious that The Israel Lobby, both the article and the book, would be extremely unwelcome to those pleased with the status quo. Under the current arrangement, the United States gives Israel $3-4 billion in aid and grants a year—about $500 per Israeli and several orders of magnitude more than aid to citizens of any other country. Israel is the only American aid recipient not required to account for how the money is spent. Washington uses its Security Council veto to shield Israel from critical UN resolutions and periodically issues bland statements lamenting the continued expansion of Israeli settlements on the Palestinian land the Jewish state has occupied since 1967. When Israel violates U.S. law, as it did in Lebanon by using American-made cluster bombs against civilian targets, a low-level official may issue a mild complaint. These fundamentals of the relationship go unchallenged by 95 percent of American politicians holding or running for national office.
Walt and Mearsheimer’s goal was to ignite a conversation about the lobby—which they define expansively as an amorphous array of individuals, think tanks, and congressional lobbying groups that advocate Israeli perspectives—and its consequences, which they believe are damaging to America’s core strategic interests in the Middle East. They support Israel’s existence as a Jewish state, and while they readily summarize Israeli blemishes, drawing on Israeli sources and the arguments of the country’s revisionist “new historians,” they are fully aware that no modern state has been built without injustices. They seek a more normal United States relationship with Israel, rather like we have with France or Spain, and an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement that can start to drain the poison out of American relations with the Arab world.
At least in a preliminary sense, they have started a discussion. The initial working paper on the Kennedy School website was downloaded 275,000 times, throwing Israel’s most ferocious partisans into a panic. Deploying a McCarthyite tactic, the New York Sun quickly sought to link the authors to white supremacist David Duke. The New Republic published a basketful of hostile pieces. Several pro-Israel congressmen initiated an embarrassing effort—ignored by the institution’s president—to get the Naval War College to cancel scheduled lectures by the two. In a column about “the Mearsheimer-Walt fiasco,” neoconservative writer Daniel Pipes summed up his dilemma: it would have been better, Pipes said, to have ignored the essay by “two obscure academics” so that it disappeared “down the memory hole” instead of becoming “the monument that it now is.” Pipes was wrong about this. Hostile reaction to the piece hadn’t inspired a quarter of a million downloads. With the United States mired in a quagmire in Iraq, increasingly detested in the Muslim world, and wedded to an Israel policy that, beyond America’s borders, seems bizarre to friend and foe alike, Walt and Mearsheimer had touched a topic that was crying out for serious analysis."
http://www.amconmag.com/2007/2007_12_03/cover.html
"Walt and Mearsheimer had touched a topic that was crying out for serious analysis."
MEH, why not just a brief comment with a link to your own blog? While that would still be a little spam-my, I think it would be better form.
And clearly you enjoy writing enough to justify your own blog.
jens,
I think you answered your own Q...
Plus, it wouldn't answer the riddle of why she covered the topic @ Asymetrical Info, but since being employed by the ATLantic--it's, seemingly, off-limits..
Much in the same way that the Article, that I linked to, points out..
Actually, she has covered the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, and in fact was accused by many here of being insufficiently down for the Israeli caused.
I, for one, always cross to the other side of the street when I see the elderly walking towards me, even if they are alone.
And when faced with the slot machines or the buffet lines at Foxwoods- I am literally petrified with fear.
Why not have Megan delete the flagrantly off-topic first comment by MEH? Then those of us (if any) who want to discuss the original post can do so w/o distraction.
No, no Kirk,
Think of it as intellectual vaccination. It reminds us all why we ignore (or mock, anyway) trolls, spammers and fools. The boost to our mental immune system is well worth the distraction.
The continued popularity of gun buy-backs is vexing. (I'd say puzzling, but it's not really puzzling.)
They do almost exactly nothing to stop criminal use of firearms. (I'd say nothing, but there's some slight chance that the old guns the seniors turned in might be stolen and used by criminals.)
If the reward is high enough, in fact, they simply cause people to buy all the cheap or broken guns they can to turn them in for a direct profit (and since those doing so are often, in my reading, gun enthusiasts who know where to get the good deals, the profit is thus likely to be spent on acquiring new, functional guns - if one's goal is to "reduce gun ownership", this is a negative effect. In practical terms, such owners are the least problematic ones possible, as they're unlikely to store or use their firearms dangerously.
The alternative, a "no questions asked, no ID" buyback, is worse, in that it lets actual criminals remove evidence with the complicity of the police. Oakland was paying $250 a gun in their scheme of that nature, which might well let the criminal acquire a new firearm on the grey* market that was not associated with any crime.).
(* I say "grey" market, because the gun itself would not necessarily be stolen, but the act of selling it to a felon or someone one knows to be intending to use it for criminal purposes is itself illegal.)
The only plausible reasons I can come up with for the popularity of gun buy-backs are:
1) Ignorance; those proposing them really think they do "good".
2) Cynicism; those proposing them know they're useless, but do them To Be Seen To Be Doing Something, at significant expense that would be better spent on less showy and far more effective forms of crime control.
heedless wrote: It reminds us all why we ignore (or mock, anyway) trolls, spammers and fools.
Mark Hoffer isn't a troll or a spammer, he just gets off his meds on a semi-regular basis.
Sivigald wrote: The only plausible reasons I can come up with for the popularity of gun buy-backs are: 1) Ignorance; those proposing them really think they do "good". 2) Cynicism; those proposing them know they're useless, but do them To Be Seen To Be Doing Something, at significant expense that would be better spent on less showy and far more effective forms of crime control.
Take a basic 80/20 here -- i.e. 80% of do-gooder ignorance and 20% of political preening -- and I daresay you have successfully described not only buyback programs, but a majority of all gun-control regulation.
A more cynical interpretation is that the buy-backs are the one anti-gun program that gun enthusiasts support, since they can make a profit off of them...
anony-mous
a·non·y·mous (-nn-ms)
adj.
1. Having an unknown or unacknowledged name: an anonymous author.
2. Having an unknown or withheld authorship or agency: an anonymous letter; an anonymous phone call.
3. Having no distinctive character or recognition factor: "a very great, almost anonymous center of people who just want peace" Alan Paton.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[From Late Latin annymus, from Greek annumos, nameless : an-, without; see a-1 + onuma, name (influenced by earlier nnumnos, nameless); see n-men- in Indo-European roots.]
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
a·nony·mous·ly adv.
a·nony·mous·ness n.
The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition copyright ©2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Updated in 2003. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
ThesaurusLegend: Synonyms Related Words AntonymsAdj. 1. anonymous - having no known name or identity or known source; "anonymous authors"; "anonymous donors"; "an anonymous gift"
anon.
onymous - bearing a name; "articles in magazines are usually onymous"
2. anonymous - not known or lacking marked individuality; "brown anonymous houses"; "anonymous bureaucrats in the Civil Service"
faceless - without a face or identity; "a faceless apparition"; "the faceless accusers of the police state"
heedless wrote: It reminds us all why we ignore (or mock, anyway) trolls, spammers and fools.
Mark Hoffer isn't a troll or a spammer, he just gets off his meds on a semi-regular basis.
Sivigald wrote: The only plausible reasons I can come up with for the popularity of gun buy-backs are: 1) Ignorance; those proposing them really think they do "good". 2) Cynicism; those proposing them know they're useless, but do them To Be Seen To Be Doing Something, at significant expense that would be better spent on less showy and far more effective forms of crime control.
Take a basic 80/20 here -- i.e. 80% of do-gooder ignorance and 20% of political preening -- and I daresay you have successfully described not only buyback programs, but a majority of all gun-control regulation.
Posted by anony-mouse | February 25, 2008 1:58 PM
to my point of the question: "way to cover the, entirely, useless..
why not, if you're allowed, delve into..."
these programs, as Sigivald, and yourself plainly show, have been executed, to poor result, many times previously. I could have chosen a random cloud of text as subject, though chose that which I did, because I thought it to be a worthwhile question to our Hostess, and a topic worth, at least, reading about..
Actually, I thought it was in keeping with:
"By using this service you agree not to post material that is obscene, harassing, defamatory, or otherwise objectionable. Although The Atlantic does not monitor comments posted to this site (and has no obligation to), it reserves the right to delete, edit, or move any material that it deems to be in violation of this rule."--found above the Preview/Post option..
Mark, if it helps, I will buy a refill for you. What is the phone number of your pharmacist?